So what you're saying is this may be a good time to invest in companies that make bottled water or purification systems.

I'll get rated down for this, but I agree with you. People don't want to look at a lot of hard facts. We currently have about 7.046 billion people alive (based on 2012 numbers). Our global human population is increasing by approximately 1.1% annually, which means we will double to 14 billion people in 63 years (following the rule of 72). Nearly about 870 million people are currently suffering from chronic malnourishment. 780 million lack ready access to water. Realistically, do we think logistical changes to provide food and water for another 7 billion people are possible in the next 63 years? Another 14 billion in 128 years? Another 28 billion in 193 years? Worse, some countries see growth rates as high as 1.8%, which would shorten that doubling rate to about 40 years. Exponential growth is a bitch. While ebola is no where near a nice way to go, a pandemic that wipes out a significant portion of the world may be preferable to experiencing water and food wars that will occur if we aren't able to institute logistics to provide for the constant influx of mouths to feed. Otherwise, we are going to be looking at global population controls within our childrens' or our grandchildrens' lifetimes.

Madagascar has closed their ports.

FYI, I'm a Comcast engineer. All CPE management interfaces (the interface between the CMTS and the CM) are moving to IPv6 and should be transitioned by the end of the summer. The only remaining devices with the CMM interface still running on IPv4 are a handful of business class devices which should be converted by september. Beyond that, any modem which runs DHCP on LAN interfaces is running in either IPv4 or dual stack mode, though the ultimate plan is to move everything to IPv6 eventually.

How did that work out for you?

That's great, but it doesn't really tell you anything about how the parts work :)

Sadly that's not going to happen until people put more priority on other people than they do on invisible lines that old dead people drew that really have no purpose other than making us hate each other.

Really, that's all they need to do to secure funding. "We have reliable intelligence saying that somewhere, some how, space terrorists will act terroristly."

What about my welcome?

People don't understand how important GPS is these days. Loran has been more or less shuttered, so there's no real backup. The part that really scares me is that oil rigs are held stationary by massive rotors. Those rotors are controlled by GPS. If they lose signal, imagine every oil rig on earth suddenly snapping off the top of the oil pipelines that are below them. Imagine hundreds of deepwater horizon style events across the entire world.

I'm not a fan of that thinking. A military space race will essentially lead to a new cold war. The last one wasn't very fun. Scientific progress doesn't get the praise it deserves when half the world thinks it will lead to their imminent destruction. Hell, Sputnik had kids hiding under school desks when they should have been celebrating a landmark for our species.

I always wondered about this. How do they define outer space? Above N miles? Outside of the Earth's gravitational pull?

Wave motion gun, obviously.

To this day I have the schematic for an apple 1, but I just can't quite bring myself to attempt it. Plus the fact that a lot of the IC's don't exist anymore could lead to some real headaches. Still, I think it would be a good adventure in learning how to fabricate digital equipment.

I can't speak for programmers as I'm more on the sysadmin side of things but joined initially when I came across some really interesting articles on virtualization from their magazine. Then I started to get the magazine regularly and it was a horrible, horrible read. It's not designed for effective data transmission. It just felt like a way to allow fellow-nerds to get published. I'm able to gain more information from an issue of Wired than I was from an ACM mag. But that could just be me and my background. Their digital library, however, is a little easier to digest since you're only looking for specific things and was nice to have when writing academic papers. But again, if you're casually browsing - it's awful.