At this point, while there might be some sort of MOND out there to describe what is going on, currently it would be such a bizarre and complicated theory that nobody can come up with a theoretical set of equations that fits current observational data, let alone could be otherwise tested. And trust me, there are plenty of grad students and other people working on the issue, that would love to find such and get their Nobel if not just playing with it as a mental exercise.

In one of Stross's novels, it's computonium, a material that absorbs energy and uses it as computational power. The sun is surrounded by successive layers of Dyson spheres with each outer layer absorbing the waste heat of the layer inside of it and radiates off increasing wavelengths of radiation. Subsequently, each outer layer runs at a slower rate than those father towards the interior and are the slums of the virtual society that exists inside all those layers of computonium.

I have college professor friends that have discussed things like this because we also have Evergreen College in the area where all their degrees are like this, all coursework is worked out as the student basically designs their own degree. Yes, it has the reputation for being a useless degree and lots of hippies and similar people go there and end up with underwater basket weaving degrees. The funny thing is that they highly recommend it for the exact opposite type of people, namely those like police officers and military personnel that have self discipline and are taking continuing education for their career path. In such cases, a college where professors help you to form you own course work to fine tune it to exactly what you want and need would be perfect. Meanwhile, they are trying to direct pot smoking teenagers into the normal colleges because they need to learn some discipline and structure before hoping to actually achieve a degree.

What they are talking about wouldn't get you out of such requirements. What they are discussing is breaking up courses into more and smaller courses. You'd still need 3 credit hours of humanities that you filled by taking sociology, but now, instead of one course worth three credit hours, you'd take three courses of 1 credit hour. That way you could hopefully at least take something dealing with sociology that you might use or at least find interesting.

Yes, but if you read TFA, you'll see that what they are really discussing is if courses would better serve people and education as a whole if they were further broken up into several smaller courses. Instead of a course lasting a semester or quarter, a course would basically be a month. The former course being broken up into several separate sections that still might have pre-reqs for each other but would otherwise stand seperately.

Now, now. They're probably not bashing America, but probably are American and just dumb.

No. If hidden by dust, we'd see more infrared heat in space as light emitted by stars has to go someplace. If hidden directly behind other solid objects (besides being so astronomically against the odds that things are only hidden from us), it wouldn't account for observations of galaxies rotations speeds that we see along the axis of rotation rather than against the edge. Even for the galaxies we see on edge, if they were all weighted with the mass on the other side of where we are, the rotations speeds, lensing, and other observational data would be different than what we see.

Don't think that dark matter is some quick answer to explain things away. All the obvious choices such as "it's all normal matter behind other normal matter", "it's just non-radiating normal matter", or "the laws of gravity might be different on the galactic scale" have all been suggested, tested, and found not to hold up first. Dark matter is the only real solution left standing at this point and the astronomers and scientists of the world had to be drug to that conclusion, kicking and screaming, over the decades, long before the public started hearing about it.

I have. I'd been having issues with my internet service going up and down and getting worse over a period of months. I finally called. I got a woman who listened to my problem, my troubleshooting steps and advised me to go to the connect, follow it back and see if there was a splitter. There was. Asked me to remove it and connect it directly to the internet box and everything worked perfectly. She then explained the various ways of how to get a new splitter, but as I only really use my Comcast for internet, didn't need one considered everything fixed. Listening to how I described the problem, she was able to get it fixed in the first troubleshooting step.

That being said. Having worked those type of phone technical support jobs before (at Adobe), it sounded like she'd been there a while and had seen this issue a lot. No doubt, she has gone off to a better job by now because those tech support jobs don't pay enough to keep around smart people who know what they are doing, and has been replaced by somebody who has to follow the script because they don't know the issues yet.

I disagree. I think he sees the long game and is even perhaps winning at it. He's pushing for all he can get and doing a decent job of it. He may have lost all of the Ukraine, but East Ukraine is still up for grabs and at this point, even if he had to fold, he'd walk away with Crimea. This is probably all about EU sanctions as the US won't do anything without the EU, and as long as the EU isn't going to put up some serious sanctions, they certainly aren't going to flex their military muscles. So he'll probably push up to the serious threat of sanctions and then ease off just enough to keep them from happening.

It's often not so much as the poster being lazy as the readers on a time wasting site just not being worth the effort of doing the fact checking.

given a world that didn't have vast resources of stored energy in coal and oil! I imagine it would begin how ours began! with hydro power. Advancement would probably be slower. Wind and eventually solar added to the mix. Possibly even significant amounts of geothermal. Technology would probably advance in different routes as the ICE and even steam engines would play a minor role in things. They might even have their own ecological disasters by deforestation (or equivalent ) to fuel steam engines. The shift away from ICEs and natural gas based fertilizers would change the ag tech and affect the societies significantly.

It doesn't bother me much. After all, it's how most westerners look at the Middle East And even Asia now, and we're the same species. Even discounting physical and psychological diff fences, aliens will most likely find their culture vastly superior or they wouldn't be living like that. This could be because of racial preferences or because of the demands of future society or tech that we couldn't support with our current culture but will required to go beyond what we have now.

I haven't used it for Office 2000, but did have it deployed for years for Office 2003. In general it works, but those new features and changes that require a new year version have their toll. The newer files will open up in compatible versions and the original can't be edited and saved in the new format. Sometimes formatting might change or bigger problems. Typically if you are reading or dealing with occasional later version files , it will get you through in most cases. Sometimes, you might have to ask for a saved back version from the original sender to get all information. However between two groups collaborating, it would typically be a constant pain only resolved by upgrading or saving everything at a lower version.

Hamas is the "someone else" in this case.

At Microsft, it was most likely because of some re-org that cut your projects size if not delete it completely. That being said, Microsoft is huge and divided up into many fiefdoms, and because the Microsoft Bob department has just been axed doesn't mean that x-box or some other part of Windows OS doesn't need more people. So people laid off in the phone app project might not have skills needed anywhere else. The common MS layoff consists of being relieved of all duties (and probably access to everything but email) for a couple of months where your only job is to find another job someplace at Microsoft.

This is Microsoft where such things are common. I was once there when two of my friends who worked for Microsoft first met. Once they found out they had both worked for Microsoft, one joked "How did your last re-org go?" Not sure I understood it but they both laughed and now friends. that being said, Microsoft is a huge place and if you've worked there for long, it's where all your contacts, references, and past coworkers work at. Getting laid off at Microsoft and then making the calls and putting out feelers to get hired I some other part is fairly common if not normal. Given that it seems like a nice place to work, and that you weren't really fired by your department you considered yourself working for ( who are probably smoothing over the hiring process in a new department), but some nameless management, there really isn't that sort of hatred for working for them again.