Why is that the elephant in the room? How many people need 64 gigs of RAM? 8 to 16 gigs is currently plenty for most applications. Yes, there are instances where more is needed, but these instances are rare. Usually people who need more than 16 gigs are requiring this for work-related reasons, where the $700 takes a different perspective.

Over twenty years in the hobby here and I can't say I've found this to be true for me. I can star hop just fine with a Dob and a star chart. Actually, most of the time I don't even need to star hop through the eyepiece. I just do it naked eye with a Telrad.

On 90% of nights in most places, you can take an 8" Dob to the seeing limit and hand-track planets by hand with no problems. For many objects you're not approaching higher powers anyway, because they're larger and don't require the magnification. Hand-tracking is zero problem under these conditions. I've seen lots of beginners take the hobby because of Dob. You're simply wrong in your assessment of them.

Ermm... The Higgs was confirmed to exist at the LHC. That needed to be done. Pinning down the exact mass matters more than you suggest it does.

I know this is the popular stance on this site, but the reason is obviously to promote risk-taking. Many (most) creations never see the light of day. The patent system has some inherent usefulness, however it's somewhat corrupt and the terms under which patents are granted do indeed discourage innovation. I don't even think the system works very well for promoting inventions from small entities. I saw a talk by a researcher who invented sticky material based on gecko feet. The material is interesting because it's not "glue-like" and doesn't get less sticky over time. To manufacture it, he contacted a bunch of companies (big ones). I presume he had a patent, but I'm not certain of this. The best offer he got was in the low tens of thousands. They more or less told him that he wouldn't get a better off and if he asked for more they would go ahead without him.

If he's like me, he's lost the freedom to have no responsibilities. i.e. that which you crudely brush off as a "mom and dad don't want to feed you any more" Having no responsibilities is a very liberating feeling. I rate it much higher than freedom to drink large-size soft drinks, which apparently some people consider to be crucially important.

In Switzerland the slowest speeds you commonly get are about 15 Mbits/s, but one thing I really like is that UPC Cablecom offer 2 Mbits/s down for *free* so if you're unemployed or in financial straights you still have access to the internet that's sufficient for doing things like looking for a job, paying your bills, etc. In England, on the other hand, if they think you're not doing enough to search for work they cut you off unemployment benefits. They in effect killed someone this way recently.

Topaz.

Not fair: e-books were the one thing they didn't fuck with. Everything was e-pub, whereas Amazon was pushing their own weird formats. Can easily get content from different sources onto a Sony reader.

I Googled around and made the changes I wanted using boilerplate code. Just stuff like colors, fonts, adding some syntax highlight files that weren't standard. So yes, I modified it as much as I needed to. In addition, I learned the key combos so stuck with Emacs. You become very addicted to key combos.

I agree with you, although in many places in the US there is an over-abundance of stop signs. Many stop signs should actually be a yield. It's also damn stupid placing a 4-way stop sign on a larger road, where it crosses with a more minor road. The more minor road should always yield to the larger road. Either that or add a roundabout. Other countries do this and it works much better: traffic flows faster, everyone knows who has the right of way, and people on the more major road don't have to be on the look out for randomly placed stop signs.

I'm a long time Emacs user, but I don't see things this way. I'm now transitioning to Sublime Text. Emacs keybindings, a regular expression search and replace that is actually useful (the Emacs one is horrible), an easy to use package manager, easy to modify (I never learned Lisp), non-free but with very reasonable licence model, looks nice (although that's subjective, of course). Other than the learning curve in figuring out how to get the most out of it, there's little reason for me to go back to Emacs. Sublime does more of the things I need and it does them better.

You would probably need additional infrastructure to move goods on a large scale by rail. Right now trucks go directly from pick up location to drop-off location. With rail that likely wouldn't be possible. So you would either need trucks to get goods on and off the train, doubling the number of times items must be loaded/unloaded, or you need to move goods processing depots next to the tracks or send track to depots. Furthermore, if rail is adopted on a large scale as a distribution network then you will likely need more track and more switches. Thus, I can see various reasons why the initiatives have failed. It may not be just vested interests that are holding things back. Quite possible it's also more complicated than just "using the existing rail system."

Let me know when you find a solution. I've just moved to Switzerland and would love a good app to learn a little German. I doubt I'll be learning Swiss German from an app, though...

Yes, I know it still does that but it doesn't have the 2D grid and that was key to the way I used spaces. I don't want to use the mouse and click on an application and have it take me to whatever space had that application. I want to navigate right away to my chosen space with the keyboard and just keep working. The new implementation just got in the way, because it was a single row only. I have 6 spaces and takes too much paging back and forth to go between them when there are 6 in a row. It's also harder to remember what's where on a 1x6 than a 2x3.