Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are two separate entities. Murdoch is not getting TWC.

However Comcast + TWC is very evil.

TW is a giant media company owning all sorts of properties including CNN and HBO. Having Fox own these is also very evil.

My Aunt had a car back in the '50s that had a speed alert buzzer - she'd set it and teld the kids the car could tell when someone was misbehaving - whenever the kids in the back seat started in on each other she'd speed up so it went off. Spooky car that one...

If you are paranoid change the router MAC address on a regular basis.

About those 'future missions'. They will be conducted by firms in the private sector, so why do we even need NASA, other than a place for research money to go to die.

Not in these countries it isn't. The value of the drug trade for some of these South and Central American countries exceeds their GDP by a factor of 2.

It won't be long before the 12 human beings to walk on the moon are dead. Already we are down 8. Soon there will be no living person who has walked on another world.

I wonder if time will show this period to be the high water mark of the human race. With all the existential threats facing us it could work out this way.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

It's very unlikely that the different crime would be as rewarding financially.

The current situation results in huge flows of money into criminal organizations to the point where it destabilizes governments and funds massive corruption. Particularly in South and Central America.

One of the major items in the current news is the flood of children from central america into the US. What is the root cause of this? The flow of money from the US to drug cartels in their countries of origin.

Fix the drug problem in the United States and the flood of drug money to these criminals will dry up. It's very unlikely they will be able to find anything nearly as lucrative.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

You have to take out the Zerg early. I think we are screwed.

This isn't an either - or. They are doing both.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Oct 2001 the Ukraine shot down an Air Siberia plane killing 78.

Basically check your flight plan. Some area you want to go around.

Is this an Aussie no to Kyoto, then?

No surprise, really...just one of many more to come, I think.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.