Unless you're picked as the new Anointed One by Big Puiblisher, you also have to do your own marketing; the only 'marketing' they'll give most writers is putting your book on a book store shelf, if you're lucky enough to get a print run and they don't go straight to ebooks. And few people look for a publisher's logo on a book before they buy it.

Some genres have almost entirely gone self-published these days. Romance used to be one of the few genres where publishers actually had a valuable brand, but today many of the top romance writers appear to be skipping publishers entirely and releasing books themselves now they see how much more money they can make without a publisher to take most of it.

And what happens to those 'thousand small businesses' when the subsidies go away and the subsidized company moves on to some other state that offers them a better deal?

I've seen it in the UK. The first time appeared to be a couple of Americans in a rental car going one way around the roundabout while about twenty other cars were trying to go the opposite direction.

Right. So we'll have people driving along the highway in their self-driving cars, and then suddenly the car will see something it can't handle and... stop in the middle of the highway, where you'll then have to put down your smartphone and figure out where you are and what's going on and drive through it. All before someone slams into the back of you, or the other dozen 'self-driving' cars now stopped in the road.

That'll work.

No, we're just sick of the hype that 'OMG! Self-driving cars will be here tomorrow! Google cars have driven themselves a billion miles without a crash!'

But, yes, they do need to be at 'an insanely advanced stage' before they're ready for use. Automated cruise control is likely to be available in the mass market within ten years, but it's a huge step from there to a car that can drive from A to B through town without human intervention, and anyone who says 'oh, if the car doesn't know what to do, it will just hand control back to the driver' is a moron.

One of my girlfriend's friends had a Windows Phone. As soon as the contract was up, she replaced it with Android.

I've never seen another one out in the wild, so I'm guessing that's why no-one else has never used one.

Helium exists in the atmosphere not because of the helium reserve, but because the planet constantly outgasses it. It's a product of the radioactive decay chains within the planet.

And if it costs $7 a liter, you better believe people will consume it a *lot* slower. Mainly recapture, but also less frivolous usage.

Uh, no.

Sure, in the specific case you cite, that's correct, because grep can easily count the number of lines it outputs. In the general case, however, you'll find a pipe is probably faster, because the two processes can run on different cores.

It's an important difference.

Fox News is a right-wing punditry operation. They spin everything that happens in a light that promotes the viewpoints of US right-wing policy. If right-wingers are in power, they spin to the government's favor, and otherwise spin against the government.

RT is a literal government propaganda outlet. They have a story of what they want to tell people happened (regardless of whether it did or not), and tell people that it happened, to the point of routinely hiring actors as interview subjects. (side note: the Russia media really needs to get a larger acting pool, though... it's funny but sad when the same actor claims to be several different people for different stations in the same week).

If you see something inflamatory claimed on Fox, it's almost certainly spun. Possibly outright false, but unlikely - generally just highly spun. If you see something inflammatory claimed on RT, it's almost certainly false. Possibly just heavily spun, but generally willfully outright false.

Example: Fox News will pick random true stories from around the country, overplay them, and tell you that there's a War on Christmas. RT will hire a woman to play a refugee from Slavyansk to weepingly tell you that the Ukranian army is crucifying children in the town square to torture their mothers before killing them.

Well, I have to say, I've noticed something about Russia, and also about most (but not all) of the other former USSR states: the exact same sort of thing has kept happening under capitalism. Things like injecting a mother of a dead soldier with a tranquilizer on-camera when she spoke up during a press conference on the Kursk disaster, assassinating dissidents with polonium, arresting and outright assassinating journalists, sham trials to sieze assets either for the state or for Putin allies, heavy media censorship and the requirement for all major blogs to register as media outlets, elections so rigged that Chechnya went 99.59% for "The Butcher of Grozny", and on and on. It's no different today.

So, basically, the presence of these things says nothing about communism; it says that Russia has a history of strongmen leaders who confiscate peoples' belongings, outlaw dissent, condemn people without fair trials, and so forth. And when you look at these third world communist states, you usually find that their third world capitalist brethren rarely behave any better.

I think that communism, at least in its pure form, is terrible as economic policy. But one can easily run the risk of over-conflating.

Uh, yeah.

So, now:

1. You need to redesign it to not need a fairing to protect it during launch.
2. Provide an abort motor which can launch it at several gs away from the exploding booster.
3. Build wings strong enough that they won't be torn off when you're boosting away from an exploding booster at Max Q, said booster probably no longer pointing 'into the wind'.
4. Design your launch trajectory so you can now turn around and return to a runway somewhere.

Which will be simple, right?

Hint: you might want to look at the excitement the X-20 guys went through trying to make it abortable.

Says some hippy who has no clue about the real world.

Yeah, maybe we could all go and live in little hippy communes after 99% of the population magically vanish, but, in the real world, we have to get off this rock before some wacko starts spreading the new geneticlaly-engineered super-plague they knocked together in their garage. We'll be lucky if we have decades, let alone centuries.

Completely unable to perform a launch escape, you mean? The shuttle did that, already.

Nope. NASA are building The Precious, sorry, SLS, and no-one else will ever have the money to use it. Heck, NASA probably won't ever have the money to use it, since there are no funded missions that need it.

As I understand it, the Dragon will continue to fly on Falcon 9, and Boeing's Powerpoint Spaceship can theoretically fly on Atlas, Delta or Falcon... if it's ever built.

To be fair, that's less than we were paying for 128MB RAM drives in the 90s.