End goal: change the constitution. We need a start. It's easy to see how hard this will be and to give up early, but some of us feel the imperative to fight for it. We can change things. The vast will of the masses (corporation political donations are not equivalent to the free speech we enjoy as individuals) needs to be strategically gathered. Critical mass could take decades, as with things like gay marriage.

Spammers or hackers could get your IP turned off. But I'd do it anyway to be helpful.

Thanks. I understand and appreciate where you are coming from.

As a founder of the EFF, I do stand up for the small consumers vs. the wealthy and powerful. There is no perfect solution.

When you make the rules, you are right when you're wrong.

A hobbit. They can be trusted. Don't you know nothin'?

No. Then it'd have to be a whole key ring.

Cuba.

A launch from Florida (in an easterly direction) doesn't look like it might be an attack on Cuba; a launch from south Texas does (or could). The political and technical situations are a bit different today.

Also, spreading the pork around to multiple states/congressional districts. Texas got the facility in Houston.

Oh, and what open water is to the west of Brownsville? ;-)

As the saying goes, no (battle) plan survives contact with the enemy. That doesn't mean such a plan has no use whatsoever.

An 'Integrated America Plan' or an 'Integrated Computing Plan' would of course be ludicrous in hindsight. (Just as is the original Integrated Space Plan). But such plans have the power to inspire people. To make people think "hey, I see a better option over here". To encourage people to make it so. To dream things that never were and say "why not?"

Sure, if we had cheap access to space there'd be a lot more people making their own plans and going out and doing it. Maybe this plan will help inspire the next generation's Gary Hudson, Elon Musk or a non-fictional Delos D. Harriman.

(Disclaimer: I've probably still got a small stack of the original ISP poster in my basement. My ex used to sell them through her (long defunct) Space Pioneers business.)

If the car has a way to let the passenger take manual control and override the autopilot, then the passenger has become a driver and should be properly licensed.

While I don't discuss the licensing issues, my book The Reticuli Deception (set about 100 years from now) has several scenes involving both completely autonomous (sole occupant darkens the windows and takes a nap) and not (driver overrides the computer to deliberately cause a collision with the guy tailing someone, then escapes by having arranged for a rental car to drive itself to the next block and be waiting for him). (That's only a minor spoiler, most of the book takes place off-Earth. Caveat, it's a sequel to The Chara Talisman, which come to think of it has one scene with an autonomous taxi.) </blatantplug>

>40 hz of current?

Sure, at a frequency of 30 mA for about 0.5 volt-hours.

Who says memory retrieval is non-lossy? It's an organic process, of course it's lossy. Our brains just make shit up to fill in the gaps.

The stuff we retrieve frequently is slightly less lossy because it gets refreshed (somewhat) when we remember it (sort of remembering that we remembered it).

And our brains are very good at making shit up to fill in the gaps, almost too good.

As the legendary Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

Clearly the folks behind systemd do not understand Unix.

If there are things you don't like about systemd, you should write up coherent bug reports or feature requests,

That doesn't work if it's the whole design philosophy you don't like. Whatever happened to the Unix philosophy that tools should do one thing, and do it well, and be easy to integrate with (not assimilate, borg-like) other components?

Me, I'll keep SysV init. How often do you need to reboot a unix or linux box anyway?

+1 nostalgia if I had the mod points. Heck, there was a time (about 3 decades back) when I was being paid to teach APL (or APL, as properly rendered).

Mind, the bit-arrays used in ElasticSearch filtering strike me as a very APL-like idiom. You never know when something you learned back when will prove useful again.

PCs were surprisingly common in 1983. Consider the Apple II and various CP/M machines had been around for quite a few years at that point.

Sure, they were still struggling to gain entrance to big businesses which were bastions of the mainframe (although more like with 3270 type terminals than card decks by that point), but small businesses loved them. Businesses were buying Apple II's as "Visicalc machines" in huge numbers, let alone the number of Wordstar boxes out there. Sure, it would be another few years before everyone and his dog had one, but by 1983 there were plenty around.

what happens when you have a very long incline for miles, such as found on I-84, I-76, I-80, I-70, etc. and your batteries run down? Granted most of it isn't steep, but very long distances.

Even the long stretches on say I-70 going up to the Eisenhower Tunnel or Vail Pass aren't more than a couple of miles ... and you get an equivalent downhill to recharge those batteries on the other side.

(As for speed, I once had the turbo control cable snap on my (relatively new at the time) Daytona Turbo-Z while climbing from Silverthorne up to the tunnel. 2.2 L just doesn't do a heck of a lot without a turbo assist, especially at altitude. Fortunately traffic was light. BTW, max speed limit in the mountains is usually 65mph.)