I can't decide if I should be thrilled that we have achieved some kind of intellectual enlightened society evidenced by our capacity to be pedantic in a globally connected ecosystem of information, or appalled that people don't have better things to do with their time.

Perhaps we should have a discussion about this. On-line.

Canada Post already has something called ePost, which makes most regular postal mail obsolete now. It sounds to me like they're helping to put traditional postal mail out of business anyway.

I'd like to have no mailbox altogether. The notion that I have a "postal" address (which everybody wants for some reason) that a human being drives a car to so they can fill it with unwanted matter printed on processed dead trees is completely ridiculous. Give me ePost for bills and a local post office for packages and I'm good.

What's your address? 127.0.0.1. Same as yours.

This is fascinating, but what I find even more interesting is why they couldn't use a similar technique to make the need for the attitude control wheels obsolete? It would require a spacecraft much different than Kepler, but would it not be possible to use sails to orient a similar craft no matter what area of the sky it wanted to point to?

My personal favourite was the recall of 3.4 million airbags last year in Toyota and Nissan vehicles because the ones in the seats may catch fire in the event of an accident:

"In an accident, the airbag for the front passenger seat may not inflate correctly because of a manufacturing defect in the propellant used in the airbag inflator, the companies said. As a result, there is a risk of fires starting or of passengers being injured."

You survive the accident, but then your seat catches on fire...and your door won't open... Just imagine. Good thing the media is informing us all about how dangerous a Tesla is.

I read this as "Female Software Engineers may be even Scarier Than we Thought" and I couldn't wait to find out how in the world that was going to be quantified and/or justified.

I love geeks, scary or not.

My call went something like this:

Scammer: "Hi Sir. I am calling you on behalf of Microsoft. It has come to our attention that your computer has been infected with viruses and trojans."
Me: "Does your mom know that you scam people for a living?"
-click-
Me: "Hello?"

"But the technology has thus far failed to become ubiquitous in the consumer realm, and it remains to be seen whether the new iPhone — which is all but guaranteed to sell millions of units — can popularize something that consumers don't seem to want."

This is not how Apple thinks of design. Instead of asking people "Do you want a fingerprint scanner?" the question they ask themselves is "How do we make security easier if not completely transparent to the end user?" If you asked people if they wanted to be secure without having to do anything at all, your answer would be different. The fingerprint scanner just happens to be the right solution to the problem (in Apple's opinion).

I'm with you. The iPhone is just getting too damn small for my 2000 year-old eyes to see anymore. Make it bigger FFS! Stupid kids...

Can we please at least spell check the title? Thanks.

Now please start working on a replacement for my liver.

Seriously though, I wonder how long it will be before brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Pick's disease and the like are considered the most catastrophic things that can happen to you as other body parts become easier to grow and replace.

SpaceX has nothing to do with space exploration - the business model is making money with commercial space flight.

I respectfully disagree. Saying the above is like saying that ship building in the 1700s had nothing to do with world exploration. The reasons for building them were pretty much the same - commerce and defence. But doing so leads to a foundation upon which "economical" exploration can be achieved.

That said, I used the term exploration to encompass the pursuit of commerce in an environment that is very much still exploratory, but your point is well taken (and completely valid). I should have said "...dismissing space innovation..." and that would have been more accurate.

Look up some of the speeches Elon has given about re-thinking spaceflight and you may agree that SpaceX is very much exploratory in nature (still). Fascinating stuff.

Cheers!

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
--Robert A. Heinlein.

I understand what you are saying, but I just don't agree. Despite what Hollywood tells you, when that asteroid is on its way Bruce Willis will not be able to save you. We need options, and the sooner the better. "A footnote of history" will be a meaningless phrase (though apropos) if there is nobody to write or read it.

Although somehow it would be fitting if the only thing to survive were the space robots...

"I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into."

Sounds like he has no more vision now than he did when he was running Microsoft. I am totally in favour of his philanthropic work, and I agree with him that we should solve the difficult people problems first, but dismissing space exploration or the benefits of connectivity for the purposes of educating the third world out of poverty is short sighted.

Yes, all completely true. One year college course in jewellery, moved to a small town to take a full-time job in the business, and she moves into her new house tomorrow. Mind you the house needs a lot of work, but that's really the point isn't it? She could be sitting in an apartment handing her money over to someone else and complaining about how the house of her dreams is out of reach and the people with all the money just keep getting richer. Instead she is building equity and settling for what she can afford.

And she doesn't have a car. She walks to work, though it takes her about 30 minutes to do so. No public transit in the small town.

You sound angry.

As it turns out, I completely agree with you with respect to growing up in a system complete with a free market economy, a social safety net, and a democratically elected system of government. And I have posted as much in this thread. That I left that out in my first post was about TFA which was about US workers in a US warehouse owned by a US company and an American president.

And while it was fun to read your lengthy assessment of my character after reading a few sentences of mine, you are completely off the mark with respect to how I feel about the less fortunate. Again, TFA was about EMPLOYED workers in the US and the middle class.

But you have a big dick. You win. Go you.