It could be that we are one of many colonizations purposely insulated from the self-destructive hazards of our home planet, allowing life to propagate regardless of the Great Filter and in the hope that some version of life might emerge to overcome this fate.

Maybe he did the change without a revision number because management made him.

Or maybe someone utilized the Magical Managerial Prestidigitation Kit to flatter, confuse, incentivise, cajole, and inspire the engineer to do what the whole team wanted.

This is how a Mighty Corporate Person jettisons a cell that morphs into a person who morphs into a scapegoat. Shielding shareholders from personal liabilty is not enough. The Mighty Corporate Person needs to be shielded from disrepute. After all, a Mighty Corporate Person is not a grain of human feedstock.

The cable industry has been the primary drag on broadband deployment through the United States because it has one nightmare these days: that the oligarchy of video propragandists once known as the the Television Industry will be rendered obsolete by low-cost video distribution from any point to any point.

This political monopoly is the main asset they trade when the time comes to get what they want from the government. They have sewn up the market for soapboxes and they want to keep it that way.

They have sleazy armies of blurmasters deployed throughout the standards-setting and franchise-granting spheres, and have insinuated to their Blurmaster General, Tom Wheeler, to head the FCC. They make it look like theory, but it's all practice.

Japan, like most of civilization, is not a fuel source, just a fuel depot. A foreign base is an advantage and a disadvantage, an overhead expense, a sore in foreign relations, and a vulnerability requiring additional defense.

As far as supply lines go, this is like taking off the pump-fed diving suit and breathing with gills.

Your point is well taken if this process is just an auxiliary. But if every vessel in an armada can refill from purpose-built reactor-powered saltwater-crackering seaworthy catalytic beds, then it's a much different force, one that can't be stopped at the Solomon Islands.

Whatever you believe is the purpose of higher education, you can't really believe that freshman-level mathematics and sciences are delivered with adequate pedagogy.

Of course schools should not accept students unless they think those students will succeed. The reason only 35% of enrollees successfully complete freshamn calculus has little to do with the abilities or the descipline of the students. High schools have great difficulty finding good calculus teachers, but colleges just assign instruction to the lowest level graduate students who can pass a language-competency test.

I would love to see colleges failing out half their freshman classes

Wouldn't you prefer that they create conditions where students learn a lot more? After all, failure isn't an objective.

You can charge what the market will bear, but you first have to establish a monopoly,

You do not know the differences among Ponzi schemes, speculative investment, and currency.

You lack the elementary comprehension of the matters you so vehemently lecture others about.

You keep describing speculative investment and calling it a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves paying returns to earlier investors from the contributed capital of later investors, while misrepresenting the returns as new funds generated by the successful performance of financial investment. Bitcoin does not pretend to be a performing investment. It holds itself out as a marker in limited supply worth whatever equilibrium of value it holds among the collective traders who independently adopt it as a currency. You might think this scheme mad. You might argue that it could only be a fraud. But it is not remotely a Ponzi scheme.

By pretending to know what you're talking about when describing a Ponzi scheme, you are just shouting down others while you have nothing worthwhile to say on the subject.

You might eventually have something of value to say, but not until you stop polluting your analysis with false claims of superior knowledge.

            The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government

Works fine for highways and truckers.

Or it might be used to discover every cell phone number in the vicinity of a political assembly or protest.

And assuming one phone number per demand.

From the article: "In addition, we received about 3,200 warrants or court orders for “cell tower dumps” last year. In such instances, the warrant or court order compelled us to identify the phone numbers of all phones that connected to a specific cell tower during a given period of time."

Actually, the hyper-focus descriptor is bogus.

Isaac Newton took off lots of time to be Chancellor of Exchequer. It was a hard job. He had to hang people for counterfeiting and all.
Vladimir Nabokov was Russian lepidopterist who happened to be English-language writer. Or was it the other way around?
Which was Benjamin Franklin's hobby -- science, publishing, or statecraft?
And Thomas Jefferson? Architecture or political philosophy or revolution?
Omar Khayyam? Administration? Poetry? Astronomy?

The kind of success-monitoring monomaniac described in the article fits someone like P T. Barnum, one of history's greatest show promoters.

So if hyperfocus is the model of true genius, then all the artists ought to be grateful to be swept into the true genius of such types.

He divided all military personnel into four quadrants.

Slow-minded, lazy -- assigned as footsoldier
Slow-minded, energetic -- dismissed from corps
Quick-minded, energetic -- staff officer
Quick-minded, lazy -- commanding officer

Are we enraged killers? Do we think killing someone repairs something else?

If we kill out out anger or if we kill according to the irrational calculus that one death offsets another, then we share a common indulgence or a common delusion with angry and vengeful murderers.

The death penalty is nothing more than a political appeasement and an opportunistic exercise of our worst impulses.

Ah, but does killing a murderer prevent future deaths? Is the death penalty just a prophylactic extermination, a cost-effective way to save lives? If so, let's put it somewhere on that list of cost-effective ways to save lives by killing a few people -- the one that starts with Attorneys for Tobacco Companies.