Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

Zero billions, because the auto companies' lawyers are quite aware of liability issues, and so they aren't going to allow the sale of any self-driving car to the public until they're damn sure it's smart enough to avoid running over pets and children.

So either the automobiles will reliably detect and avoid pets/children, or they will never be released to customers.

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.

Like all esoteric fields of study, we outsiders can't understand it because we don't have The Right Stuff.

(Presumably that's something they smoke.)

I don't think I've seen anyone argue that the distribution of child porn isn't a problem.

I have seen people argue that the First Amendment permits it, regardless of whether it's problematic or not.

while there were various decent, proprietary, dialects that let you actually write code that did stuff, *standard* Pascal was as much use as a chocolate teapot

And that's still a problem today. There's no standard for OO Pascal, and the ANSI Pascal standards have been moribund since 1990.

That's why I abandoned Pascal (and Modula-2): I didn't want to get locked in to a single vendor.

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.

It is quite possible, if he had an accomplice.

If he was correctly following the procedures that were set up, it's hard to justify firing him because the procedures aren't to your liking. A more rational response would be to change the procedures.

Would you want to be the guy who ignored the bomb threat, after a plane (or two) blew up?

Put it this way: following procedure (when it later turned out it wasn't actually necessary to do so) won't end your career. Failing to follow procedure (when the threat turned out to be valid) almost certainly will. "But the bomb threat didn't really make sense, because (reasons)" will probably not be seen as a valid defense.

Everyone with the normal human number of digits, I would think.

(e.g. for a right-hander: the thumb is next to the mouse, on the left side; the pinky finger is next to the mouse, on the right side, and the central three digits rest on top of the mouse)

My first cynical thought was "shoot them down if they blow up". But one bomber claimed to be on board, so they could have reasonably been concerned that the planes would be hijacked and used as missiles.