Well, there seems to be a lot of information missing, but I'm suspecting that when they talk about twisting the radio signal they don't just mean static circular polarization, they mean that they are dynamically twisting it variable amounts as a way to modulate the data signal onto it. This would be similar to the modulation techniques used back in the last millennium to squeeze far more data down an audio like than the audio bandwidth would imply could be transmitted.

cheap, paperback books to the military for just six cents a copy, at a time when almost all the other books they printed cost more than two dollars

Sounds like a bogus comparison. The paperbacks were sold to the government in huge quantities at six cents each. But I expect that the comparison of "more than two dollars" is being made to hard cover books, likely even at retail rather than in bulk. I'm old enough to remember buying new paperbacks retail as low as thirty cents each in the late fifties and early sixties, I doubt if they were more expensive in the forties. Never saw a paperback go as high as two bucks back then, most or all were well under a buck.

It might be nice to think the publishers were doing their part to help servicemen, but I suspect that when you are buying books in the quantity that the government was, and likely cutting the author out of the equation by selling public domain "classics", six cents was a reasonable wholesale bulk rate.

Screw you Google. I'm not a 17 year old girl and I'm not using something called "Hangouts". And I resent the idea that I should give up any of my privacy by joining a "social network" "service".

It will be interesting to see how this affects me. I'm typing this on a current version of Firefox, but I have an old HP notebook by my bedside that runs 24/7 and that I use, among other things, to check my mail in the morning. The thing is, I dare not keep the Firefox browser current, and I'm using a plug-in that I depend on and is only available for Firefox. I don't keep the browser current because, even though I doubled the memory the laptop had when I got it (to the maximum that the old MB would support), and also replaced the minimal hard drive with a significantly larger hard drive (most of which is sitting empty), the browser drastically slowed down with each Firefox update. While I at first could have dozens of browser tabs open (which I did regularly with no problem), the system has degraded to the point where I can only have two or three tabs open without absurd slow-downs and lock-ups. And on top of that, if I play a video in the browser (intentionally or just by opening a news page that I had no warning included a video), the system will usually crash and reboot. These changes were seen when I accepted new versions of Firefox, so I stopped further browser "upgrades" and have been locked on an old version of Firefox for the last several years.

As I evaluate it, I need the laptop a lot more for the Firefox plug in that I depend on and a few other uses than I need Gmail.

Absolutely NOT. Vi serves a false god.

Actually, got there over 40 years ago, and don't really think that I need one. The question was obviously to show how pointless asking what the best phone apps are. Everyone thinks the ones they use are the "best".

I'm not happy with the religion that I was born into, many of the leaders have turned out to be child molesters and other leaders all the way to the top of the organization have turned out to be doing things that were protecting them from the law. So please post back and tell me what the best religion is.

What a shame. if only he had know that you can cure ALS by dumping a bucket of ice water on your head.

They are too busy complaining about the gender gap.

Heck with the cameras. Corrupt cops will turn them off and come up with excuses as to why they were not working. All police should be required to have a film crew from the "COPS" tv show with them at all times.

If only there were some kind of search website that, with a few key words, would find such lists for you.

Failing that, you could install the Lightbeam plug-in for Firefox and then see the shocking number of sites that get visited in addition to the websites that you want to visit. It is pretty obvious that some of them are providing the advertising. Even for those who are not, do you really need or want the site that you go to to tell other sites about you by simple links in website that force you to fetch stuff from them? I never use Facebook, will never have a Facebook account. Why do so many different websites think that they need me to get traffic from Facebook? (Even websites that show no Facebook link or logo on them often do this.)

However, I'll be nice and get you started. Put two lines in your HOSTS file that read

127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net

127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net

and see how nice things get from just that. I learned to do this over a decade ago when some "adware" that I was using not only was delivering ads from doubleclick (which I would have been fine with) but was providing a back door for doubleclick to install other stuff on my system and it was regularly crashing my system. I blocked downloads from doubleclick and my problems went away. Doubleclick has since been sold to Google, but if Google is going to enrich the weasels who were doing that I see no reason to let doubleclick traffic back into my system. (Guess where a lot of Slashdot ads come from.)

If you create a pool of billions of $230 yearly "contributions" to the people who are trying to milk the Internet now, do you really think that the people looking to make easy money from the Internet that you and I already pay to gain access to will go away, or can you understand that there just might be more people attracted by all of that money and looking for ways to establish themselves as Internet Advertisers so that they can get some of that money?

Yea, all of the spam would just go away. And I wouldn't have any more spam show up in my email, right?

And all of that drive-by malware installing stuff would just go away and people would start being ice to each other, right?

Of course, all of our interactivity would still be there. And we could still have e-comerce on the web, we could still use sites like Amazon rather than having to drive miles to get to a limited selection and pay higher prices at a local "friendly" bookstore. But somehow there would be no advertising. And people would just automatically know where all of the new e-comerce sites were. And there would be no one who wanted to steal your identity and your credit card info and drain your bank account. And best of all, no one would ever see a bunch of fools saying "ad free Internet for $230 a year sounds good to me, where do I sign up?" and try to take advantage of that.

We don't even have ad-free PBS television any more, but some people want to believe they could get ad-free Internet so much that they would OK an additional yearly charge?

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You're not going to get ad-free Internet. But if you really care about it at all you can get greatly ad-reduced Internet. And it doesn't involve a yearly fee, just a small expenditure of effort. Block the major ad sources in your Hosts file (or, even better for the more advanced user, set up a network wide block in your router). But be aware, this has the side effect of making your browsing a lot faster, since you cut out a lot of unwanted traffic.

Of course it is really plankton. The real issue is is it Sea Plankton as claimed. Or are our oceans full of Space Plankton?

I loved B5. I hate reboots, at least as I understand the word. I have no problem with replacing the actors. That happens frequently in movie franchises. James Bond has been played by a number of actors, and even the gender of a major supporting character was changed in that franchise without calling it a reboot. In my mind a reboot is when the producers and/or director want to take advantage of the name and existing fan base, but decide to do two other distasteful things: First, change key story concepts that have already been established, and second, they usually want to retell yet another origin story. Why is this being called a reboot, and is JMS calling it a reboot himself or are others just misusing the term? I'll gladly go see a new B5 movie (and I really don't go to many movies), but I'll avoid a B5 reboot like I would avoid an Ebola infected missionary. If JMS wants to tell a completely different Sci-fi story then I would welcome that too, but he should not reuse the B5 name, If he wants to pick back up story telling in the B5 universe then he shouldn't try to tear down what has already been done.

On a side note, the list of lost actors from the B5 production should include Tim Choate who played my favorite character, Zathras.