After seeing what lack of control of your own currency did to Greece, Italy, and Spain I've come to the conclusion the tight economic binding which is the EU is a bad idea.

Yeah, because insane regulation and widespread corruption can be easily solved with inflation.

Italy: Despite repeated reform attempts, short-term legislative reforms have not been implemented effectively, and the economy remains burdened by political interference, corruption, high levels of taxation, and a rigid labor market. Due to the complexity of the regulatory framework and the high cost of conducting business, a considerable amount of economic activity remains in the informal sector.

Spain: Spain continues to score below the world averages in fiscal freedom, government spending, and labor freedom.

Greece: Over the 20-year history of the Index, Greece's economic freedom score has declined by over 5 points. Despite improvements in five of the 10 economic freedoms, large declines in property rights, freedom from corruption, government spending, and investment freedom have more than offset any gains.

Form 2014 Index of Economic Freedom.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands has 5.3% unemployment, and GDP per capita of $42,194. Open to global commerce, the Netherlands has long benefited from a high degree of regulatory efficiency that facilitates entrepreneurial activity. The judicial system provides strong protection for property rights.

or a world where any person would be equally likely to have biological children and grandchildren.

They would have to have precisely the same number of children (i.e. not die to due accident or stillbirth before reproduction), and reproductive assignment between sexual partners would have to be completely random, not sexually selected as it is today (even in countries where sexual partners are determined by parents, the parents are still performing a kind of sexual selection).

But with sexual reproduction, even in such a completely "fair" and "random" mating situation, genetic drift would still occur because although at a single locus each parent passes on one or other allele with a 50% probability of each, that 50% is a statistical average. Out of a ten thousand reproductions, you might find one reproduction where an allele is over-represented or under-represented. So across the population, genetic change will happen.

Evolutionary selection pressures never stop. Even within a dominant species, if there is any level of genetic difference, there will be both genetic drift and evolution. Other species also apply selection pressures (think of evolving viruses, for instance).

I have heard that two 720p channels can coexist on one carrier.

Not two "good quality" 720p channels! MPEG-2 encoder technology (of the highest quality pro encoders) continues to get better, but we're not quite able to fit two good 720p's into 19 Mbps. Give it a year or two.

Of course you can jam in as many video channels as you want if you don't mind it looking like crap in high-motion scenes (like sports for instance).

the US DoED has almost nothing to do with curriculum

That has been true in the past, however through Race to the Top Fund, the Race to the Top Assessment Program, and conditional NCLB waiver guidance (the âoeConditional NCLB Waiver Planâ), US DoE has created a system of discretionary grants and waivers that herds state education authorities into accepting elementary and secondary school standards and assessments favored by the Department.

The transition time from the computer giving up to the user having to take control is always going to mean this is impossible.

I can think of several recent airplane crashes that occurred because pilots tried to take back control from the auto-pilot or auto-landing system without full situational awareness.

Just FYI Fire deaths in New York City hit lowest number on record.

The question is what is the typical "working set" of Internet prefixes for Internet routers at any time? Is it 100% of the Internet? Is it 50%? Is it 10%? I suspect it is something like 10% (but don't have any numbers).

When an unmatched prefix is seen by the router, it sends the packet to the SDN controller for inspection, the SDN controller sets up the flows for that prefix on the router TCAM. It is like a cache, and only needs to happen once per flow. SDN flow setups take on the order of 1ms.

BTW, tell me that BGP doesn't have problems?

There already is an SDN-enabled Internet Exchange Point.

SDN-based routing systems would be even easier to defend against DDoS because of the ability for SDN controllers to rapidly set up firewall rules on the Internet router (which might actually be a switch, or a fabric of switches, or a set of distributed switches).

With SDN, an infinite number of prefixes can be stored on the SDN controller, and the Internet router only needs to load prefixes into the router TCAM when there is actually a flow needed for that prefix.

I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.

Uh, was Chernobyl run for profit?

You can drive from Baltimore to DC and back without noticing that you have a flat tire?

Actually I have done precisely that, but it was a rear tire on a front-wheel drive. Only noticed a problem when listening to AM radio and hearing a "click-click-click" when going at low speeds. That was the nail in my tire hitting the road and shorting out the static building up from the tire rubbing.

Indian Constitution Article 21: "Protection of life and personal liberty. No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."

Note that the phrase "due process" is not in the Indian Constitution. For more information on why it was replaced with "according to procedure", see this reference.

In what way? Is private enterprise disallowed? Do workers own the means of production?

There is a big difference between France which rates "Moderately Unfree" on the Index of Economic Freedom and say Denmark which ranks "Mostly Free".

In France there is far more labor regulation and price controls. France also puts far more regulation on mergers & acquisitions, especially foreign ones. France also maintains a large number of state owned enterprises with stakes in telecommunications, media, aerospace, automobile, and other industries.

Of course France is also nothing like Belarus with Soviet-era state ownership of land and government-controlled collective farming.