As is so often the case, context is quite relevant. His statement is ridiculous today, but when it was made, quite reasonable.

This is a great philosophy, but it relies on the assumption that everyone behaves rationally. We have thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, though. And what do you do to stop someone who is willing to commit atrocities and is unwilling to listen to reasonable arguments? I suspect that coercion of one degree or another will often be the only option.

The difference is, this isn't a mailbox on your house. It's more like a post office box from Mailboxes Etc. So going to the person who controls the mailbox is a reasonable attempt to stop the mail from being delivered, as long as the person hasn't already removed the mail from their box. It would also be akin to going to the postal service if there is a letter in the mail that hasn't yet left their care and been delivered to the recipient (the single biggest difference being that it takes email seconds vs. the days for snail mail).

He intended to sent the email to someone. He clearly didn't intend to send it to the ultimate recipient, else he wouldn't have spent thousands of dollars to undo that act. Perhaps he sent it to ndielmann@foo.bar instead of mdielmann@foo.bar. Fortunately, you obviously never make typos. And people have never accidentally called the wrong number before, either.

Clearly the recipient isn't in the wrong if he reads it - he got an email in good faith. This is why they want to get it removed before it's read.

And how is this different from communism, global warming, smartphone OS, etc.? What you're forgetting is, there will be rubes falling for whatever gimmick someone uses. And there will also be loonies, from a variety of socio-political groups. Getting rid of one of the irrational beliefs isn't going to change the existence of either group, just which varieties are running around.

The interesting thing is, 99.999% of the time, you would have been right, assuming we're only talking about Americans. Sounds "not likely" to me...

I think there are vastly more areas that aren't promised Google fiber (or any other version of fiber) than are. Also, more places will be adjacent to places that recently got fiber than there are places that have Google fiber. This works for any region that you create a zone in (until the majority of the zones are occupied). The lines for any given zone have to be drawn somewhere, and it will suck for people on the wrong side of the line. Or were you hoping for a single nation-wide rollout?

Read up on Amazon circa 2000. Interesting times. Maybe a lack of profit isn't the only thing investors worry about.

"I've noticed that people tend to not pay attention to the other drivers. I'm going to randomly apply the brakes, speed up, and change lanes. The drivers around me will pay a lot more attention!" While all that is true, it's still a bad idea. And while it won't cause much difficulty for the attentive drivers, it will probably exacerbate the poor driving habits of other drivers around him. Why do you think this will not have similar results, if at a lower degree.

It would be easier if we followed the same principle as captains of ships used to have. Have an administrator, who is responsible for the running of the plant and the following of the regulations that pertain to that plant have to be on site during any emergencies. If he makes sure that people who know what they're doing are in charge of the right things, and he doesn't try to cut any corners, this won't be an overly onerous requirement. If he doesn't, well, he will get his termination notice from a doctor.

Ah yes, just like Newton, that idle wealthy person. Given the opportunity, he just sat under apple trees and watched the world...

Almost right.

Having read the article, the reservoir had been recently cleaned before the 3ppb contamination occurred. 3 weeks, I think.

I think perhaps he's considering the repeated devastations of Earth's ecology for poorly understood reasons, the over-use of resources being only one possible cause. Until we can deal with a little thing like 100,000 years of winter, our future is pretty limited on this planet.

Most dogs that can take the cold can't survive high heat. Likewise, dogs that can handle high heat usually do very poorly in the cold. With proper knowledge and acclimatization, a person can survive almost the same range as most dogs, and still a greater range than cold-adapted dogs. As for cold, I've heard stories about the Inuit. Some have come south for work, and found a few degrees C above freezing to be t-shirt weather and 10 degrees C above freezing is uncomfortably warm. Likewise, I've met people from the Caribbean who find a few degrees C above freezing to be winter jacket weather. With acclimatization, this doesn't matter. But I doubt your dog will do well in the Caribbean without some human assistance.

Which is pretty much exactly what he said:

Also, I don't think your dog is capable of boiling water, something we learned to do millenia ago thanks to our big brains. Evolution has given us a simple method to mitigate this problem.

Fact of the matter is, there are very few multi-celled organisms that can survive the temperature range that humans can stark naked. Add in clothing, and nothing at all matches our climate range. Yes, there are creatures that have greater extremes at either end, but they don't have the range we do, either.

The tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating the fruit was the act of doing wrong, which bestowed the knowledge of good and evil. But before a choice to do wrong is put before you, you can't do wrong. A modern corollary is that a guilty mind is required to commit a crime. If you can't conceive that what you're doing is wrong, you're criminally insane.