In Live Free of Die, humanity buys a replication device and some older weapon plans from some advanced aliens for war against other, less-advanced aliens.

They divide its time between producing cool stuff and cloning itself. Very RTS-like strategizing.

Of course with enough replications, you can have an army of replicators spitting out ships like the Starforge, no Force assist needed.

One needs to "starve the beast" the beast being our own tendencies to vote to lavish on ourselves, with disproportionately wasteful government super-markup.

It is voracious, and always spends as much as it can get, and is always chronically short, needing to borrow. Actually, most borrowing is viewed as income to spend -- they can get away with borrowing X percent of GDP. It has nothing to do with need and everything to do with more money to spend.

Starve that beast. Shut off new inventions of income.

Is it educational? "Go visit here and get points!"

I'd also be proactive about Mecca.

A few years back, we were borrowing $1.3 trillion a year -- you could have cancelled the entire military AND taxed 100% of the income of the rich and (assuming they continued to work for $0 a year) still would have needed to borrow $150 billion a year.

A better question is is Apple the new Microsoft? Or the old Apple, for that matter. Of course Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

Now that The Man is gone, and forever this time, upper management will move back to the non-innovating, don't shake the tree types waiting for their stock options or golden parachutes to kick in. A Confederacy of Do-Nothings.

Trying to effect change, eh?

I thought it was separating a stage, though it looked a little "big", but the announcer wasn't announcing it. Then a "second stage" separation seemed to occur, and that was wrong because there was only supposed to be one. Then a thousand shards started falling.

:(

I was unable to watch the video as an ad started playing first. Then, a second advertisement video overlayed that video and started playing, too, covering the entire screen.

I'm going to assume the reason is nasty teens are trying to shove the sticks up the Mickey Mouse costume guy's rear end?

But they're not adverse to banging on the doors of apartments with guiris staying in them and demanding to see tourist licences, which the tourists don't have (the flat owner has the licence, not the guest). This happened to a young German woman I know, who was staying in a completely legal tourist apartment. They could have just looked up the address on the Catalan government website, but it's a lot more fun for two armed goons from the Mossos d'Esquadra to scare the shit out of a young woman travelling alone in a strange city, threatening to chuck her out onto the street if she couldn't produce the licence in 24 hours (of course they don't have the power to do this).

The correct course of action is for the government of where these tourists are mostly from to issue travel advisories to that area, making sure the papers in that area get word of it. Then the powers that be there, who profit from tourism, will "have a chat" with these enforcers, some of whom may work for them anyway.

None of this matters. Bag it and tag it's DNA. In 100 years or 200, none of this will matter.

We are like people in 1900 arguing about how to best shoe a horse to not grind up horse poop into dust the best way possible, so as to give those people in 2015 nice air to breath.

Except the difference in tech will be even worse 100 years from now.

An honest question: Is there anybody out there who reads this, of any race, who sees:

FB Reveals Woeful Diversity Numbers

And thinks, "Gosh! They're missing out on all the benefits of diversity! Poor Facebook!"

Or do they think, "They are being racist and need to do more."

Which is not what diversity is about. That's what Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action are about.

As with any theory, a Doubting Thomas' theory someone is wrong, that proves to itself be wrong most of the time, just implicates himself as the clown.

Your doubt less controls reality than the OP's un-sourced assertion. Request more info, or go look it up. Do not declare it should be considered false without additional info. Your judgment is proven wrong, and should scare you.

> but about 10 seconds before landing, a valve controlling the rocket's engine
> power (thrust) temporarily stopped responding to commands as quickly as it should have.

"The OS support engineers at Microsoft still maintain we are not one of the very few applications that really need true real time."