I wonder if any of these plans are still being updated, even if it's only by some guy in a basement office someplace.

Obviously China is still of interest, but most of them are extremely unlikely, although you wonder if there are times where it gets thought about. France after the attempt on De Gaulle or the possibility of a left-wing revolution in 1968, maybe even about Marine LePen. Mexico might warrant some kind of what-ifs around a failed state status. Germany and Japan are occupied by US forces now, but maybe there's some political theorizing about a populist/nativist Japanese party gaining power. Germany seems like the worst candidate, with the only situations I can imagine revolving around a collapse of the Euro and some kind of German administration of European economies, which seems unlikely.

Yes you can see shooting stars nearly every night but this flyby is maybe worth missing a little sleep if you have the gear and diligence to be able to see it.

Call me a cynic, but if you can't see it with the naked eye, is it really that interesting?

I'm sure it's maybe a big deal for people with telescopes and greater than average interest in astronomy, but for people not in that category it seems like it would just be one more flash of light through a telescope.

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

Milking aging infrastructure for maximum profit, desperately defending old business models.

Now get off my lawn before I take my buggy whip to you.

Ha! That's an old one. After you find the golden rivet you can hop in your F-35 for a little snipe hunting.

Bell had talked to Watson on the first ever phone call, in Boston, just after Bell had patented the telephone.

really? He patented it before ever testing it? Same shit, different millennium, eh?

It's a good thing Americans don't have tails or they'd usually be seen with them tucked between their legs, anytime air security is involved.

So they're buying a GPL test case in order to try to invalidate it with their army of lawyers and lobbyists to scuttle the Android alliance so they can FUD their way in with WinPhone 10, all while looking like an OLAP services enhancement?

"Surprises" get papers and Slashdot stories accepted. "We found some fish, pretty much as we expected" gets filed in the dustbin of history. Same scientific results either way.

Maybe if the rights weren't such a cluster fuck, we would have offline Netflix where the movie could be stored locally for offline viewing.

Unfortunately the rights holders and the wireless internet providers seem to be in some kind of Mexican standoff over who is the greediest asshole.

If LTE data was 10x cheaper (ie, my 10G plan was 100G), it would solve most of the stream only issues. There would still be some corner cases like long aircraft trips or weird rural areas.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

All the mice I've taken apart have one of several setups:
1. click pressure is controlled by a 'spring' inside a microswitch
2. click pressure is controlled by a tactile switch that is soldered to the PCB
3. click pressure is controlled by a spring that supports the scroll wheel axis or the full assembly

As best as I can tell, your G700s' scroll wheel has... 2 and 3.
You can see it here at 6 minutes into the video.
The tactile switch is the gold disk on the left of the screen, with two springs on each side of it.

You could try replacing those springs with weaker ones.
And/or you could desolder the tactile switch and replace it with one that requires less force to operate.

If it's hardware, there's no reason you should be permanently stuck with some focus group's middle of the road choice.
/tactile switches cost pocket change
//microswitches are expensive when ordered as single pieces, so find a place that already has a thousand of them.

Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).

But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.

Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.

I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.

While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.

It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.