"I've noticed that people tend to not pay attention to the other drivers. I'm going to randomly apply the brakes, speed up, and change lanes. The drivers around me will pay a lot more attention!" While all that is true, it's still a bad idea. And while it won't cause much difficulty for the attentive drivers, it will probably exacerbate the poor driving habits of other drivers around him. Why do you think this will not have similar results, if at a lower degree.

It would be easier if we followed the same principle as captains of ships used to have. Have an administrator, who is responsible for the running of the plant and the following of the regulations that pertain to that plant have to be on site during any emergencies. If he makes sure that people who know what they're doing are in charge of the right things, and he doesn't try to cut any corners, this won't be an overly onerous requirement. If he doesn't, well, he will get his termination notice from a doctor.

Ah yes, just like Newton, that idle wealthy person. Given the opportunity, he just sat under apple trees and watched the world...

Almost right.

Having read the article, the reservoir had been recently cleaned before the 3ppb contamination occurred. 3 weeks, I think.

I think perhaps he's considering the repeated devastations of Earth's ecology for poorly understood reasons, the over-use of resources being only one possible cause. Until we can deal with a little thing like 100,000 years of winter, our future is pretty limited on this planet.

Most dogs that can take the cold can't survive high heat. Likewise, dogs that can handle high heat usually do very poorly in the cold. With proper knowledge and acclimatization, a person can survive almost the same range as most dogs, and still a greater range than cold-adapted dogs. As for cold, I've heard stories about the Inuit. Some have come south for work, and found a few degrees C above freezing to be t-shirt weather and 10 degrees C above freezing is uncomfortably warm. Likewise, I've met people from the Caribbean who find a few degrees C above freezing to be winter jacket weather. With acclimatization, this doesn't matter. But I doubt your dog will do well in the Caribbean without some human assistance.

Which is pretty much exactly what he said:

Also, I don't think your dog is capable of boiling water, something we learned to do millenia ago thanks to our big brains. Evolution has given us a simple method to mitigate this problem.

Fact of the matter is, there are very few multi-celled organisms that can survive the temperature range that humans can stark naked. Add in clothing, and nothing at all matches our climate range. Yes, there are creatures that have greater extremes at either end, but they don't have the range we do, either.

The tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating the fruit was the act of doing wrong, which bestowed the knowledge of good and evil. But before a choice to do wrong is put before you, you can't do wrong. A modern corollary is that a guilty mind is required to commit a crime. If you can't conceive that what you're doing is wrong, you're criminally insane.

If you're trying to make a quality fleet, you don't just build more ships and crew them with people who "really wanna be a fleet member!" You select for quality. If you want a horde that wins through exhausting your enemy, recruiting anyone who can fog a mirror (or other non-human equivalents) is acceptable. That doesn't explain Wesley, unless they've seen people like this before, and realize they're often more trouble than they're worth unless they're brought down a notch or two first. Hmm...

Colonies can be started for a number of reasons, only one of which is disaffection with the homeworld. Overpopulation, racial security, desire for a challenge, cultural/personal need for space, desire to see new things. If you don't think cultural difference couldn't lead to people not having a problem with the population of a region/planet per se and yet still not wanting to live in certain conditions, compare standing in line in Finland and India.

That's a pretty insightful statement, seeing how he claims to be white and southern (US, I presume). Way to go - your literacy is paying off!

We've been waiting and seeing for 15 years. People were reportedly surprised to hear he'd funded the Prop 8 group. The waiting and seeing part is adequately finished, I'd say. Although his more than a decade of apparently not firing people for their personal beliefs hasn't helped him any.

We also don't all work in a position of authority for 15 years, where he could easily have exerted his political views, and yet didn't to all appearances.

Like clothing. I'm sure there's no valid reason for that one, either.

Most things that have lasted for thousands of years have done so for a good reason. Find that reason, examine the possibility of other ways to meet the requirements, and maybe you will have a way to make it a thing of the past.

The two biggest reasons for marriage are raising children and determining inheritances. We can mitigate one (child-rearing) and set some rules in place of the other based on new technology like DNA testing, but the possibility of guaranteeing where obligations lie has only been around for a generation. Social norms will take a while to catch up.

I personally think marriage is a great idea, and I'm a big fan of freedom. (The two might be opposed to each other...) The trouble comes in when you tie things that aren't obviously interconnected and have to deal with the impact of that. Tax breaks and medical coverage being tied to marriage are just a couple of those. And also when you deal poorly with the things that are obviously linked to (the current idea of) marriage - child-rearing etc. - when the marriage dissolves.

I could see the use on a gaming rig (which is what the GPP mentioned). If the OS can handle it, dump the OS and your games on there, keep all saved data on your HDD/SSD, and have data access at a factor of 10x what you'd get from SSD (about 100x? 1000x? HDD). The only slowdown you'd see is on startup and game saves. Everything else would be now.

Not saying I'd bother doing something like this, but if the game you're playing is disk-intensive, you will see a world of improvement, even over SSD.

Now why games don't have an option of doing this themselves and saving you all the pain is another question. We live in an age where a good many of the serious gamers have more RAM than what is needed just to play the game and could easily have the game allocate a few GB as swap.

Put a camera where the sideview mirrors currently are. This gives you the field of view of the outside edge of the mirror, rather than mostly in the middle. Given the right alignment, it will see everything you can by moving your head around. Put two cameras there, and you can even put a "fish-eye mirror" view in part of the field of view, and have more perspective than you'd ever normally have.

Another option is to put the cameras on the roof, near where the windshield meets the roof. This could be done relatively discreetly, about like what the radio antennas look like now. With a design that incorporates the placement of cameras for this, you will likely have more field of view than you ever could do with mirrors, especially on the passenger side.

None of this negates any possible stereoscopic effect you would get from using mirrors rather than a camera.

This seems to be the attitude of the Roman government for a couple hundred years before the complete collapse of their nation. Then they started thinking that little things like the basic needs of the majority didn't really matter so much, and there was a revolution. America has gotten there a lot faster than Rome did. Maybe they will get to the next couple steps faster, too.