I want Gigabit symmetrical with 1 TB of transfer for $50/mo.. This is absolutely 100% possible with current technology.

Then why don't you start a company that offers that service?

If you can do it profitably, you'll have investors falling all over themselves to give you money, since pretty much everyone will want your service....

No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart)

Irrelevant. You roll out of your rack, go to your watchstation for six hours. Then you do PMS/training/whatever for six hours. Then you sleep for six hours. Repeat till you get back in port.

In other words, you live on an 18-hour day for the period of your patrol.

As I recall, it took two to five days to adjust at each end of the patrol.

Just curous - how did you do your first post? I don't have a "post" button, and can only "reply to this".

Though I suppose that could be intentional. Maybe you have to meet certain preconditions to be allowed to get "post" privileges.

What he means to say is what most of have known in our darkest heart of hearts since the first help ticket: The vast majority of users are technically illiterate idiots, and you can't fix stupid.

Note that there is a difference between "stupid" and "ignorant".

Note that being "technically illiterate" puts you into the "ignorant" category, but that claiming that "technically illiterate" is the same as "idiot" puts you well into the "stupid" category.

Now, arguably you can claim that the vast majority of users really don't care very much about the subject at hand, which might very well move them into the "stupid" group. But being technically illiterate, in and of itself, is not a sign of "stupid"....

SO, they're only investigating the funding sources of people who disagree with their position.

Well, that couldn't be biased at all, now could it?

This sounds like the LRF from Heinlein's Time for the Stars.

They were required to spend their money researching things whose payback was so far in the future that no-one else would touch it.

And they kept making embarrassing amounts of money as a result of the products of their research. wonder if this lot will do the same?

Says the anonymous coward while an Ebola pandemic ravages Africa.

Pandemic???

Africa has 1.1 billion people. With an average life expectancy of 71 years. Which means about 15 million deaths per year.

Ebola has killed about 8000 people in the last 15 months.

Which means that ebola has accounted for ~0.04% of African deaths since the end of 2013.

Sorry, 0.04% of your deathrate does not a pandemic make....

Note, by the by, that there were more traffic deaths in each of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and the United Republic of Tanzania then there were ebola deaths in all of Africa over the last 15 months.

So, if Betelgeuse is going to explode in about 100,000 years, won't its distance to Sol have changed by then?

Yes.

But not by much. It's nearly 200 parsecs away now, and it's moving at about 30 parsecs per million years. So it'll be less than 2% farther away when it booms. Much less, since its relative motion is such that most of those three parsecs will be lateral motion instead of motion away from us.

nope. The constitution doesn't apply to citizens of other countries.

This is incorrect. More properly, the Constitution doesn't apply to people IN other countries.

That is to say, if a German comes to the USA, the Constitutional protections apply to him while he is here. But they don't apply while he's in Germany.

The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

Hmm, that sounds familiar....

The counter to that is to steal registered cards. The counter to that is to report the cards as stolen. Counter: kill the card-owners, so they can't report the cards. Counter: police de-registers cards belonging to dead people. Counter: kidnap/disappear the card-owners. Only works until the authorities catch on in each individual case. Mitigation: keep kill/stealing. That's what terrorists do anyway, so no problem there. Problem: you're now switching numbers often. Gonna be difficult to keep your address book up-to-date.

Nah, you (the terrorist) get a perfectly normal cellphone for most business (chatting up girls, planning things, that sort).

Then, when you're ready to do an operation, you (as you point out above) kill a few people & take their phones. Then you IMMEDIATELY use them on your op. And toss them into a dumpster as you leave the op (assuming, of course, that this op is of the subset of terrorist ops that is "survivable") and go back home and get your regular phone....

You mean the standards set by the politicians who are paid by the private prison lobby? That's the situation we have today.

You'd think that privately run prisons are so pervasive in this country as to dominate the criminal justice (punishment) system.

Alas, fewer than 10% of the convicts in the USA are held in "private prisons"....

People especially Americans, do not like the government telling them what they can and can't do to their own property. Also the small local governments have limited funds, such actions will mean that the local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.

Local governments can change local building codes to require all new construction to fit the guidelines for albedo modification. Done.

Yeah, it won't affect existing infrastructure, but in the long term (and with AGW we're talking long term, or should be), it'll have the desired effect.

Assuming, of course, that the albedo-modification theories are correct in the first place.

Yes, I know that modifying the albedo will do what we want. What I wonder about is whether we can effectively modify the albedo in a controlled fashion.