I didn't mind people who had ideas on how we should raise our child. It wasn't like anybody had a lot of experience in these mother/father/child roles, and we were able to consider outside input. I got really annoyed with childless people who told us what to do.

Which brings up the question of nature vs. nurture here. You described some children as "spoiled little brats", but nobody is born spoiled. Did your child-rearing style change from oldest to youngest?

I'm not going to tell another parent what's necessary when dealing with his or her child, but it would be interesting to know how many children can be raised the way we raised mine.

It's not just the technical barriers. I own a Nook, which used bog-standard ePub. To buy a book from B&N, I go to the store page and buy a book. It then downloads automatically. To buy a book from elsewhere, I buy it and download it to my computer, plug my Nook into my computer, and copy it over. It's not that big a hassle, but lots of people aren't going to do that, or even realize that it's possible. It's just not as smooth, and I can't just do it anywhere I've got WiFi.

With a really slick process for some stuff, even a mild hassle for the other stuff is going to be a real competitive disadvantage.

That's about the US median household income. The reason it works as means-tested benefits is that we don't allow just everybody to get those benefits. It would probably be cheaper with laxer (cheaper) enforcement and somewhat more cheating, but there's no way we can pay everybody that money.

Concorde was a government project, and that is relevant, since it's unlikely that it would have been produced by private industry. The ban on supersonic overflights was because the sonic booms would do a lot of damage, considered more than would be gained by such overflights. However, supersonic travel is only worth it on long routes, since it won't save much time on short ones. The transatlantic business was pretty much ideal for that (I don't think it had the range for transpacific, which would be an even better use), and it couldn't support itself with that.

Which routes do you think would be more profitable?

Disease, war, and any asteroid strike in the past billion years (maybe 4.5 billion years) would leave Earth much more habitable than anywhere else in the Solar System. In the giant space goat scenario, colonization only works if the colony is completely self-supporting and able to expand with its own resources. That's not happening off-world for a LONG time now. I'd be surprised if it could be done with a colony smaller than 100K people, mining and growing all its raw materials and manufacturing everything it needs.

Usually, efficient businesses have control over what they do and how much they can charge. The USPS doesn't. It's still very efficient within its constraints.

Do not lump C and C++'s memory management together. They're considerably different now. C++ has a uniform resource handling technique (RAII, or perhaps RRID (Resource Release Is Destruction)) which works well. C doesn't have that, last I looked. C# uses garbage collection for memory but (IIRC) IDispose or something like that for other resources.

I'm not going to suggest that you learn modern C++, because that's a lot of work, but C++ has progressed a lot since the original C with Classes.

It may be impossible to find an adequate gap. It frequently is for me when I'm going to the doctor and have to merge two lanes to the right in busy traffic. Given that, do I merge into the best gap I can find, or continue down the road and hope I can get off sometime?

Some red-running is annoying but harmless. If the light turns red and you go through the intersection 0.1 seconds later, you're not going to cause an accident. If you go through at the halfway point of the red cycle, you've got an excellent chance of causing an accident. I'd think that, if the cameras were a little forgiving, people wouldn't slam on their brakes at the last minute.

Having been rear-ended three times with serious back pains after two of the accidents, I may be prejudiced.

Moreover, you're arguing that, if drivers were better, the red-light cameras wouldn't cause accidents. In the absence of a plan to get people driving better, this is completely irrelevant. If we all drove properly, we wouldn't need red-light cameras because nobody would run a red. We want to either make people drive better or design systems to reduce injuries given the drivers we have, not blame bad drivers for accidents that wouldn't have occurred if there hadn't been a red light camera.

I assure you that, when you're semi-incapacitated and in pain, being able to blame somebody else's driving for the injury isn't really much help.

Actually, you just have to get robot labor down to cheaper than a human in all cases. The value of human labor varies, but if we establish some sort of minimum pay then it's likely that robots will eventually get under that. If the minimum wage is $10/hour and the fully amortized cost of robot labor is $5/hour, humans lose. Nor do we have to eliminate all human-occupied jobs to get massive social unrest. If we get 50% of the population as permanently unemployable, I'd expect riots and possible revolution.

Machine-made products are constantly becoming cheaper and/or better. We will probably soon be in a position where we can provide everybody with a reasonable living for free. (There are always going to be premium products that require rare materials, excessively long manufacture time, and/or highly skilled human input.) There are resources that will remain scarce (like land), and there will be a demand for the better locations etc.

The question is what we're going to do about it. The automation is mostly owned by corporations, and they'll need fewer and fewer people, so the wealth produced will mostly go to corporations. People who own large stakes in corporations, or who run them, will do very well indeed. People with some stock holdings are likely to have a decent income, expressed in stuff. People who don't own stock, and rely exclusively on employment, are going to be screwed.

In other words, the free-for-everybody world is going to require an economic revolution coupled with a social revolution.

Most of the 0.01% are pretty well set for anything material for the rest of their lives. What they get out of the rest is points in a game they play with others of the 0.01%, and power over others. I think it's the power over others that is the real problem.

In most creative endeavors, there's stuff that's fun to do, and stuff that isn't, and the stuff that isn't often contributes immensely to the quality of the creative product.

Writing stories is fun. Rewriting them is less fun. Proofreading isn't fun. Playing music is fun, and so is songwriting. Coming up with a high-quality CD takes a lot of work that isn't really fun. Writing code is fun. Quality control isn't as much fun. Writing good documentation is typically not fun. At an extreme, something like the Avengers movie takes a lot of work that isn't really fun.

Without some sort of payment system, we've got to rely on a lot of people working hard to realize somebody else's creative vision out of some motivation I'm not actually coming up with right now.

It's a bit difficult to refute a threat of murder or rape, and complaining about them seems to me entirely justified. The FBI will probably figure out where some of them came from, and some people are likely to be in serious trouble.