This is insightful? The FAA has no ability to stop another 9/11. They can't reach out from their radar facilities and stop a nut in a plane from flying into a building. They can issue instructions, but have no way of forcing them to be followed. The controllers who had the flights of 9/11 on radar didn't "let" it happen, they watched it unfold without a way of stopping it.

What DOES happen now is that anything that is deviating in a significant way from ATC instructions is handed to the Air Force for an intercept mission. The Air Force has the authority to shoot down threats, and they practice this mission on a regular basis. But actually doing that means shooting down a planeload of mostly innocent civilians -- an act that cannot be taken lightly.

And browsing the web.

And where do I get in line for it because this sounds like the easiest job ever.

I think I'll make a virtual reality woman that you need to talk to... and then track people's eye movements based on breast size.

You can make the check out to cash.

That's just factually incorrect. Take for example Obama's special hot-rodded Blackberry, which he apparently uses for all sorts of direct personal e-communication. And of course there's the issue at hand (Hillary's email) which numbered in the tens of thousands ... but those are just the ones that her staff, after the fact, had laundered and decided under her direction were OK to pass along to the systems at State so there'd be copies. Thousands and thousands of emails is the opposite of "don't use email at all."

The newer law about such officials having to forward ALL such correspondence to their official mailboxes within 20 days is a direct result of it being apparent just how much government officials DO use email, all day, every day. It's why it's so fascinating to see tens of thousands of them being brought back to life from the abyss after the new director of the IRS swore there were no backups of Lois Lerner's comms during her supervision of the politicized treatment of non-profit applications. People in the bureaucratic food chain AND those at the tops of agencies and branches use email constantly, since they can do that asynchronously (compared to elaborately timed phone calls).

But Obama campaigned on changing every aspect of such things, and said that he would guarantee the most transparent administration in history. And here we have a person that he trusts enough to put in the line of succession to his office (Secretary of State) that - on being nominated - didn't just flub her way through a crappy email backup system (a la the career IT people in the WH during Bush, which were not appointees - these are permanent staffers, which you do understand, right?), but rather she immediately went about setting up a system to prevent her communications from being part of the official record.

Then she went around the world doing things like posing with giant plastic "reset" buttons to make everything wonderful with Russia and whatnot, even as she was soliciting millions in donations from foreign governments for use by her personal family foundation. But we'll never know what those emails looked like, and how such things might have been tied to or tangled up with her official duties, because she shielded all of those messages from FOIA requests by never having an official box. And when pressed, she had her own loyalists go through some of the message, and pass along those that SHE considered appropriate for the public archive.

Completely pre-meditated obfuscation of her communications as a senior official. No Sarah-Palin-style cluelessness about using her Yahoo account, no career IT people in the White House having a lame backup system ... no, the completely planned in advance absence of any records except those that Clinton decided, later, should be present. Today we see reports that the IT people in the State Department warned her that her not having an official State mailbox was going to endanger compliance with record keeping laws, but that her completely casual personal mail server was a huge, huge security risk. So we have not only premeditated law breaking to avoid transparency and accountability, but we also have horrible incompetence in understanding the risks of conducting top-level international diplomacy via a mail server set up by some guy with a fictitious name, paid in cash. One really can't make this stuff up.

The RFCs specifying what is needed before an IANA "designated expert" will accept a new Internet Media Type are a lot of documentation for a new programmer to read and understand, and my attempts to search the web for easier-to-digest introductory information from third parties weren't very fruitful. There's also a week's turnaround for this designated expert to make a decision. And if, say, the development of a new video game produces 20 different internal asset data formats used by the game and by its modding tools, would the designated expert appreciate having to review the registration of each of these formats as an Internet Media Type? I think I'm misunderstanding something very fundamental, and I know there's much I don't know.

Or io.github.some_username.some_projectname.some_type, right? I can get behind that in theory. But it'll take a lot of reengineering of container formats such as file systems and archives. Does FAT32, the default file system for removable storage media 32 GB or smaller such as USB flash drives and SDHC cards, support attributes such as content type? Wikipedia says FAT32 does not support extended attributes. Does exFAT, the default file system for larger removable storage media such as SDXC cards? Wikipedia does not say one way or the other. And Zip, a very common archive format, currently doesn't fully support extended attributes either and won't until Info-ZIP Zip 3.1 comes out.

This is another example of your partisanship. Every republican candidate (and democrat candidate, for that matter) in 2008 had a healthcare plan. Obama ended up implementing something that looked a lot like McCain's plan.

Don't forget:
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

2.1 out of 10 on IMDB.

On the other hand, I rather liked the adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven.

His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities

Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001

Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...

He didn't leave entirely... during WWII he worked at the Pentagon with Isaac Asimov, John Campbell, and a couple of other prominent authors on top-secret (at the time) projects involving quite a bit of technology development (including what would eventually become high-altitude pressure suits, if that gives you an idea).

Dude even broke Navy protocol and hired smart women to the team, as he managed the projects under his care.

If I remember right, he retained his rank at the time.

So this Wilfried Laurier character,
, he looks like he was from Vulcan . Live long and here is 5 bucks for you!

IIRC parts of Earth were - notably India (and China?), where the populations were too large to otherwise sustain.

The Lunar colonies began as a ginormous prison, but the expense of sending parolees and ex-cons home was too onerous; so they stayed, formed their own society, and grew on their own.

I think the premise is still quite doable, especially if there were some condition on Earth which prevented agricultural production from reaching its current capacity.

Given that only half of the voting population actually votes in the US, I'm not so sure that suffrage is considered to be a major societal function.

Even in the book, Rico's old man is a successful businessman, and had never enlisted (at least not until way later in the book after shit got real, as you yourself mention), and basic human rights (outside of voting) were allegedly guaranteed to all regardless.

I disagree, but only a little - the military was mostly a vehicle from which to tell the story, and it portrayed quite vividly many of the morals and weltanschauung (for lack of a better term) that military service imparts on those who enter it. More importantly, it explained it in a way that civilians could put to use in their own daily lives.

I'm assuming you're talking about 1. PC games with comparable scope to console disc games, and 2. the first year of sales, as opposed to several years later when a console disc game is likely to have gone out of print. Am I right? If so, I'd love to read a few sources.