Your post indicates you don't understand the meaning of the word "profit." I chose that term carefully, and note that it anticipates your "25 cents to cover the cost of the blank media." Perhaps you should spend a few minutes on Wikipedia and then come back with something less superficial?

The problem isn't with a drone that flies to a set of GPS coordinates, drops a bomb, and flies back. It's with a drone that flies to a set of GPS coordinates, waits around until it sees something in the general vicinity it wants to blow up, drops it's bomb and flies back. The issue is with the "something it wants to blow up" part.

A nuanced response to piracy seems to me to be a very good thing. Individuals sharing your stuff? That's free advertising and lots of companies would kill for it. Somebody you trusted with a screener leaking it? That's a breach of trust and you shouldn't feel any qualms about going after them. Professional pirate pressing thousands of copies and profiting from selling them? Again, no problems going after that.

I had the same thought. The only surprises in the show are what they left out, and major events like deaths aren't going to be among those.

Has working illiteracy reached the point where this is actually a big deal?

As a sailor, I can assure you that once you run out of ice you switch to rum, and it's all good until you make port and can run the freezer off shore power again.

Don't forget that Microsoft Azure Web Services will be a clearinghouse for all your commercially valuable information!

Because we can't ever observe or in any way interact with anything beyond our visual horizon. You can tell stories about what's "outside" all you want, but they're just stories. Until they have some impact, even just in principle, on the universe we can interact on, they're completely irrelevant.

Quantum field theory proposes all-pervading fields that give rise to all observed phenomenon. The Higgs field even has nonzero energy everywhere, and light is a disturbance that propagates through the electromagnetic field. That hits all of the common points for the turn of the century aether theories.

Einstein's relativity itself is a very aether-like theory in that one of the most popular interpretations is a geometric description of curvature in all-pervading space.

You've clearly bought into the "silly aether" folk mythology. There were many theories of aether, some of which were quite compatible with the Michelson-Morley results.

Smoked pot in school?

5% was the magnitude of the effect. The statistical significance is determined (roughly) by taking the magnitude of the effect and dividing it by the standard error, then applying the appropriate scaling factor.

Have you heard of the term "average?"

I guess that's why he suggested Google ask Apple how they handle it. The article is specifically talking about Google branded phones (which are only available from Google, not through carriers, no?), not Samsungs running Android or something. If you get an iPhone from AT&T, Vodaphone or Ethiopia Tel, Apple takes responsibility for updates to that phone. They absolutely can "go on to the Verizon/T-mobile/AT&T/Sprint network and update your phone. It's called the Internet. It's a good system that works well.

Solar is also doomed because eventually it will have to scale up to the point where enclosing the entire sun simply isn't enough.

Wind would buy as a bit of breathing room before we'd have to worry about significantly affecting weather patterns.

The research backs up your impression, although nobody really seems to like to talk about it. In simulated hiring situations men are sexist, awarding men somewhat higher salaries or judging them better for the job. Women are more sexist, favouring men over women by a greater margin.

Sounds like bad loans to me. It most definitely was people buying houses they couldn't afford, although you can make the argument the the average person is too dumb to know if they can afford a house or not so the size of the loan they can take out should be limited.

The banks that issued those loans played some games, but other banks and insurance companies bought it. They should have known better. If I tell you I've got a AAA bridge to sell, do you buy it without doing a little checking? Either way, everyone involved should have lost their money so that they'd be a little less trusting in the future. If you're investing money you should know what it's invested in, what the risks are, and who's managing it if it's not you.

That wasn't high frequency trading, it was bad loans. Bad loans to people who wanted to buy houses. So the greedy children who just had to have that house they couldn't afford caused an economic crash. The clowns just let them do it.

The unfortunate thing about the whole scenario is that the clowns got bailed out so everyone who invested their money with them didn't get burned. If some idiot loses your money it's supposed to hurt so that you don't give that same idiot more money to play with.