PCs could also paid for themselves within a year when they first came out. If you could program, you had to hide not to find countless opportunities to make a buck. Small businessmen who could finally afford a computer needed (or at least wanted to brag about) customized software to help them with alla stuff people had been doing manually/on paper for years.

It'll be the same story here.

You gotta be kidding me -- a b&w vector diagram lifted from some tech website, cheesy drum riffs for 20 seconds over a third-grader title screen, then two greybeards sitting in an ill-miked boxy echo chamber start out "Tell me Doug, what is a slingatron" ?????

Best parody of old-skool production values, or quarter-serious proposal for a $10 kickstarter?

For how many more generations -- in the complete absense of -any- result from -any- gravity-wave detector -- will people continue to hold onto the concept?

We finally let go of instantaneous-action-at-a-distance some time ago. But we continue to make ineffable mystical inferences from our love of simpifying mathematics. Occam-pretty models aside, there is zero evidence that gravity is wavelike or particle-like in any way. Suggesting that it is an emergent quantum property. Whatever we see that appears to "curve space" that photons travel through, the Newtonian "gravity" model has failed utterly. It's just waiting for someone too unorthodox to stay inside the box to sweep aside generations of stubborn clinging.

"as proven by the US Navy and, *gasp* the French..."

I keep hearing that about that French. But when you look into what's gone on in France in the way of leaks and closures you'll discover that there's an untold story. And you'll learn that the story is the same everywhere. Nuclear was not and never was ready for prime time.

"Maybe they shouldnt have been in the nuclear game at all"

Maybe they shouldn't have bought those US-designed nukes after all. May they should have taken advantage of Japan's enormous, untapped supply of offshore windpower. But we had them under our thumb, no? The men who bought from GE were the good buddies of US business, and they did well in Japan. For a few decades. But in hindsight?? A fools' gamble.

"How many wind farms could you build for just 50 billion? How many solar panels would that buy?"

Oh wait, that's not the funny part. The funny part is that the US taxpayer already poured HUNDREDS of billions of dollars into the US nuclear power program. Back in the 50s and 60s when a Billion was very serious money too.

Suppose we'd invested $10 billion in wind and solar research back in the 1950s. And then instead of building all those nukes, we'd built wind plants instead. We'd already have enjoyed a half-century of windpower, with no waste still waiting for a solution, and nothing but perennial maintenance costs - for much MUCH less than a single nuclear plant costs now. We'd have saved so much, we could have been slowly converting to solar since the 1980s and maintenance costs would have been even lower.

But no, we decided to burn OIL and uranium. Now the poles are melting.

Way back a hundred years ago, some very wise men decided to build big hydroelectric dams. Those dams are still producing power, with reserve capacity that isn't even used part of the year. You can't get better electric rates anywhere else. THEY are the power heros in this country. And the jackoffs who decided to go nuclear and burn up all the fossil fuels in three generations??? Their grandchildren will be cursing their names and their graves.

Thanks heros. Too bad so many of us JUST DIDN'T GET IT.

Adult movies with actual stories (and no grotesque killinga, no explosions, no cynicism) might actually start doing well again. Even the kids get tired of the cotton-candy.

The US has increasingly been facing second-world problems for several decades, since Reagan. That suggests that our "superpower" is flowing through a second-world infrastructure. Good luck finding engineers to disagress with that assessment.

Most of the first-world countries are now limited to a small region of northern Europe.

Excellent. I always wondered what gave these M.... F.... the right to do this. The ISPs claim that the riot of traffic to your server would clobber your neighbors' bandwidth. (IE they'd have to actually invest in fiber. Or actually charge you a fair rate for that increased traffic. But it always seemed that the real answer was more sinister.) In this case, that excuse doesn't wash, and so I too wish you good luck.

Google, NSA, what's the difference?

Nicely done. Except that you spread the 20.6 Mkm^3 over the ENTIRE surface area of the earth.

The oceans cover about 70% of the surface, let's call it 75% (for outslop). Then that would be a sea rise of about 20.6/(510*.75) km or about 54 meters.

Comparison: during the last ice age, seas were as much as 130 meters (~400 feet) lower than they are today. When that ice melted, -high- rates were on the order of 500 years for 9 meters. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-geoscientists-trigger-rapid-sea.html

Right on. Phil Dick was right about that part.

I strongly suspect that it will not be AI that solves the n-body problem in a meaningful way. Because artificial "intelligence" is a misnomer commonly applied to non-creative, non-elegant, glorified calculators that not only can't think outside the box, but are still capable of being derailed by a single misplaced decimal point. So while some of us love our fuzzy giant thinkertoys, they are still struggling to work up to gnat level in the intelligence department.

Your location is detectable because your phone has a transmitter inside. Unless it is free to operate, it will not transmit, and your location cannot be calculated. It requires power to operate. (For the optimists out there, it also requires not being in airplane-mode to operate.) It requires being in "free-space" to operate.

You are therefore free to decide when, and when not, you wish your location to be known. Perhaps you know someone who can install a power-off switch in the phone (or convert the ringer switch to one). Or perhaps you have a phone which lets you remove the battery, or know someone who can modify the phone so that the battery can be removed. Or perhaps you wish to carry the phone in a Faraday-cage-style bag or can.

There are options. Of course you'll have to be willing to give up some convenience. They are hoping you'll not be.

"How much memory is available on iOS? It’s hard to say exactly."

Exactly. Because it's an appliance. And you're either willing to take it apart and learn how it works so you can make it do what's needed, or you accept that you're an appliance operator and stop bitching about it.