Internet of Things: Yeah, but the industrial applications will be huge. Imagine a factory where each machine, or every subsystem in every machine, has a health status that updates in real time, based on sensor input (I imagine this is already in place in many factories). With a sufficiently advanced setup a lot of workers could probably be laid off.

Parallel Programming: Already in use by most of those who benefit from it.

3D printing: Already in use, but could have a lot of niche applications.

Web APIs: Massively in use already.

Embedded systems: Massively in use already. Whole classes of consumer-oriented embedded systems have come and gone, including mp3 players and feature phones.

What part of Microsoft in MCP you did not understand? There is no reasoning behind it. Other than, it looked like a great way to screw some competition way back when we could do it. The only other reasoning other than that is, "the newbie code monkey hacked it this way and his/her manager was too stupid to catch it code review. Now it is carved in stone".

In other words, the reasons are either malice or incompetence.

We have all gone through our freshman chemistry, where they first talk about ideal gas, and then say nah, it does not that work that way but there is a slightly better approximation called Perfect gas, and then finally let the cat out of the bag with the Real gas. Most people just muddle their way through that and never worry about it. Except for the aerospace majors who end up memorizing one plus gamma minus one by gamma times mach numbered squared whole raised to gamma minus one by gamma, something seared into memory so hard it would not go away even after twenty five years. Damn you Zucrow !

Same way the ideal gas situation of FCC doing its stuff and the invisible hand of the free market doing its stuff and presto you got fantastic internet speed at the low low price of 9.99$ a month. The real gas situation is, all these companies raking money hand over fist lobby the politicians, the FCC, create misinformation campaign and they continue to exploit their customer base. Pressure builds till some disruptive technology comes in, cherry picks the customers and they leave in droves.

One possibility: It could be cell phone companies stringing up fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, and do the last 100 yards over the air with WiFi or a femto-cell network or something. The only true advantage the cable/phone ISPs have is the actual wire to different parts of the home via cat5 cable. But most homes use a router and use WiFi anyway. Someone could run fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, install a WiFi router per customer and cherry pick lots of customers who don't need more than a few WiFi devices. Wireless in the loop is quite well known and is actually deployed in many parts of India and Africa. My old prof Ashok has been talking about it for a long time.

But there could be other such technologies that peel of some serious segments of the captive market of the cable giants. Cable giants too would not sit idle. They would be the first to spot the threat and possibly buy these companies, or adjust their prices in different markets to keep these dogs chomping at their heels just out of reach. Somehow or the other, where such technologies are viable prices would come down. Where it is not viable, the customers would be at the mercy of these corporations

FedEx and UPS are not serving 80% of the country (by area, probably 10% by population). But at least they get US Postal Service. But the current generation of ISPs are suing to make sure government does not provide an alternative even to the market they don't want to serve.

This thing that you're describing is called sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a state where you are still dreaming, but you are also partially aware of your surroundings (mainly through hearing) and here is the scary part: you are strongly convinced that you are not dreaming and that you are in fact awake. This combination of dreaming while thinking that you are awake can make for some pretty strange and frightening experiences...

Sleep paralysis is often posed as an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of people experiencing nightly visits by evil entities such as witches and (in modern times) aliens.

They could put some sensors to detect electrical activity in the brain and record it during normal activity. If the temporal resolution of the recording is good, they might be able to sense the difference between processing of incoming stimuli and sending out response. Then when the alleged anesthetic is added, they could check to see if only the incoming signals are blocked, or the outgoing response is also blocked.

On the other hand these animals do not have long term memory, and they might never remember the terror like we do.

The first of those videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXgToM8cbBI) shows the smoke trail dispersing and becoming difficult to make out within about half a minute. The missile is launched at 1:20 into the video and the root of the trail is half gone at 1:50. I'd say there's maybe a 90-second window (at most) for anyone with an average smartphone camera who want to gather evidence of a launch with this missile system.

You also have to factor in that an unsuspecting civilian who is standing a couple of miles away will hear the launch about 10 seconds after it has happened and will most likely be confused by sound reflection and refraction against ground objects like houses and trees, which will make it difficult for them to locate the source of the sound quickly enough to get a good picture.

The experiment shows that these octopi lost their ability to respond to touch. It does not mean they lost the ability to feel the touch. It is very much possible their brains felt the touch, sent frantic signals for the muscles and cells to respond, and it would not respond.

Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible. But terror would immediately jolt the adrenal glands and adrenaline would flood the body, wake me up fully with racing heart and profuse sweat. Eventually I went through sleep studies and was diagnosed with very mild apnea and got a CPAP machine that kept my airways inflated with above atmospheric pressure (just 6mm of water, 1 atm= 10.24 meters of water). Then those episodes stopped.

But I will never ever forget the terror I felt when I my muscles would not respond to the commands I was giving them.

It is all right and great for Microsoft to support all these additional devices. But does it have a "strict compliance" mode where it supports the features exactly to spec, and no "new, exciting and enhanced features" in it.

In Windows world, they could add non standard features to the software and support it in the OS making a mockery of standard compliance, lock the developers into their platforms, and force the cost of working with/around the "de factor" standard. It would not be as easy to do in Android and Linux, since they are not under Microsoft's control. But since Android and Linux are open source, they might try to pull a fast one and come up with "extended" linux/android, and probably try to pay other vendors to use it. But I don't think it would as easy to kill the standards as it used to be.

Alright, time for some back of the envelope calculations!

A maglev line between Chicago and Atlanta through Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, would stretch about 1200 km.

Assuming a top speed of 500 km/h and a time penalty of about 10 minutes per station along the route and a 5 minute penalty for the departure and destination stations, the ride would take 1200/500 - (5+10+10+10+10+5)/60 = 3.23 hours, which would be quite competitive with air travel, based on travel time alone.

I'm afraid the numbers would get rather bleak once we start to talk about the financial viability of the project. Generally, you get the most societal benefit from infrastructure projects that offer attractive options for day commuting, so any tax subsidies ought to be focused on such projects and not on projects that merely offer attractive options for weekly commutes or one-off journeys.

Of course you need to undergo gate rape by the blue gloved angels to get the privilege of flying to Atlanta from Chicago in two hours.

Anyway Salad Express delivers fresh produce from California to New York in under 48 hours. In the hey days, Chicago to Miami was 33 hours. Chicago - Atlanta would have been some 18 hours. Instead of hating and decrying America's love for automobiles, if only the trains take advantage of them they could once again compete with the airlines.

Everyone knows by now, trains move a ton of freight 450 miles on a gallon of fuel. If they deliver you and your car from Chicago to Atlanta in 18 hours for a comparable price to airline, they would be very attractive. Don't use the old downtown terminals. Build a terminal where people drive their cars onto flatbed railcars at the I95-I80-I84 interchange south of Chicago and drop off people at a similar interchange near Atlanta. People drive their cars on to the flatbed railcars, and walk over to the passenger cars. Then drive off in the end. The weight of passengers is so small compared to the weight of the train, and the trains so damned fuel efficient, they should be able to do this efficiently. But the only auto-train from Washington DC to Florida is so damned expensive. It is a chicken-egg problem. It can become cheaper only with a good market and a good market will happen only when it is cheap.

America is no longer one nation indivisible any more. Red states have been trying to secede for quite some time now. Only thing stopping it is, some of them realize that it is the taxes paid by the blue states and the large urban pockets that are keeping the red states afloat. So they are threading the needle of "yeah, yeah, it would be great if we could secede" and at the same time sabotaging the secession behind the scenes.

I don't think ESA would ever be cleared to handle plutonium, let alone launch it into space. For starters, I don't know who would have the authority to clear ESA to use plutonium.

For not predicting when and where the lightning is going to strike. 10 year jail sentence if no one dies. Manslaughter otherwise.

One of the biggest scams and the worst type of leeches are the companies that make these medically necessary equipment and sell to the government. Heard annoying commercials about scooters "no paperwork, we bill medicare directly, no cost to you" ads? They are the ones. They are still selling hearing aids at 2000$ apop. Granted, these are not run of the beats head phone or bose noise cancelling ear phones. But do they have to be three times the cost of a iPhone 6? Scooters at 6000$. A sonar for visually impaired people would be a gold mine to these companies. They would easily bilk us the taxpayers out of thousands of dollars for these devices.

Making them non patentable by releasing it, and making them for 60$? Surely they will find a way to add something or patent some critical part and back in the business. Some of the heart devices run into half a million dollars. If they make the money in the free market competing with other companies it is one thing. It is an entirely different thing to lobby AMA and the congress and get a competition free ride.

You are right. i am wrong. I misread the wage.