I had to buy a kindle because small fonts gave me headaches and eye pain.

Whole cultures are based on that. The Spanish speaking world, my own, goes by this rule: one thing is what is said and faked and other what is thought and done. And what they hate the most from immigrants and visitors from other cultures is that they take what is said in its strict meaning. Believe it or not.

If every kilometer of it's tracks is about as costly as the German's maglev, what is the economic justification? China balked at the cost of a Shanghai-Beijing maglev line and built a wheeled system instead. And nobody has built a maglev after the Shanghai's airport to city center line.

As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?

Societies are prey of people ignorant of science. They believe that any arbitrary model can be applied to a society, and they blame the common citizens if it fails. Look at the catastrophes that marxism and monetarism had produced. If you had taught physics to freshmen, you have found that most of them have a hard time grasping the mater and energy conservation principles. How much science economists and politicians know? That explains a lot of what is going wrong in this world.

A german saying:
"Wer will bauen an der Straßen, muß die Leute reden lassen."
Who builds on the street, must let people talk.

I absolutely agree with you. But until someone young with a new paradigm for translating human intentions to machine code comes around, we must stick to all that context free grammar stuff. That's the origin of all the mess. We need a fresh start in programming languages.

As a Venezuelan, and descendant of Spaniard republican refugees, I can not agree more with you. But Pinochet was Chilean. As a child I had to suffer Chile's madness and as a grown up Venezuela's dive in to social schizophrenia. So, IMHO, what happens with HP's board of directors, is a small version of the group irrationality and a consequence of still unknown forces (chaos?). As you say, we have good descriptions but we don't know what is really going on.

In the future when we get used to robots and go over the uncanny valley, if grand ma dies, we skin her corpse and wrap a robot with it. So family remains united.

In poor countries the salaries are so low that people can not afford all the software they want. When you make 6000 US$ a year and only one of the application you need costs 2000 US$ , you resort to piracy. There are many cracked applications available in the WEB and most of them insert backdoor traps, trojans and worms.

So if the study goes in line with my beliefs, then it's ok. No? The point really is that this days anyone has a study that fits his (her) agenda. That the temperatures are going up is a fact. But no interpretation or hypothesis is a fact yet. In any case, ask a geologist when the earth has been a isothermal process. And I don't buy that a pre-human nirvana was harmed by the evil industrial civilization, like some luddist and gnostics preach us.

Norwegian study vale + French study value + German study value + Australian study value + .....
Then divide by N and you have the "truth".

It's a funny embargo. Cuba buys the USA food whenever they have some cash. An the Americans sell them eagerly whatever they can... By the way, the rest of the world have normal commercial relations with Cuba. But the Cuban regime speaks as if they where under a blockade like in the missiles crisis, because it's good propaganda. Specially with those ignorant campus leftist.

Regarding all the ignorance about “perception” above 30Hz, I can give you a counter proof. In the CRT times, the Swedish health standards called for refresh rates of 25Hz above the electric facility frequency (60Hz in the USA) , so that the peripheral retina, which is it's fastest part, could not notice it. That prevented eyestrain. From the other posts that talk about the “myth” that you can notice something above 100Hz or cite friends that have the “impression that” , it can be inferred that a greater background in sciences is needed.

You sound funny and even amusing because you sound so much like those turbopascal and eclipse programmers that we, the C/C++ bunch, left in the dust decades ago. Keep on programming in your favorite "fashionscript". See later your carcass at a side of the road. That's going to be funny.