I would submit that whatever gets people talking about the company or brand or candidate is all good, whether it's positive or negative.

No one reads through all the actual buzz. They just see "instances of #hashtag is TRENDING!"

What's more, the group's Facebook page is almost guaranteed to be a honeypot for all of the trolls against it. And if they're all happily trolling away at the group's Facebook or Twitter page, then they're likely sitting back smug thinking they've made a "difference" by airing their opinions and not actually out there harassing the group's actual customers or fanbase. Just paw through at any politician's Facebook page or comments on their posts, it's an endless stream of vile drivel. Does anyone who actually likes the candidate care or bother to read any of that? No!

My first-hand experience reading through that kind of thing occurred while contracting for MS Flight. "The killers of MSFS!", the fanboys would proudly proclaim, making personal threats against the manager in charge for trying to figure out how to get one of MS's first free-to-play model games to work (and also one of the first to transition from GfW Live to Steam). Meanwhile, the people who actually bothered to play the game for what is was... a gentle, accessible reboot of GA flight sims circa 1994, really seemed to enjoy the (limited) experiences it provided managed to play online mostly unharassed by any of the crowd spouting vitriol in the public forums. So it worked out pretty well (well, except for the part where the dev team got axed for the second time because they weren't making enough money from DLC). But it could have been worse! :P

Walmart and McDonalds are most certainly hated for the products they provide. They're just big enough that they don't need to care. They can be viewed as crap by a large chunk of the population and still make money on what's left.

There are plenty of mindless bargain hunters and people with no taste.

All IPCC group reports are finalised via political negotiation except for one group. WG1 is the scientific group, all the others refer back to the WG1 report for factual information, the other groups argue about how to present those facts in their own working group(WG). In 25yrs of incredibly intense scrutiny, nobody has ever found a factual error in the final versions of a WG1 report. That really is a very robust outcome and a credit to the scientists involved.

Only nations that donate to the IPCC budget get a vote on the other reports, last I checked there were ~135 nations who together represent pretty much every political view in the rainbow, it takes a long time for them to agree. The IPCC budget is $5-6M/yr, nobody who actually works on the reports is paid a dime by the IPCC, all of the scientists involved DONATE their time. Their financial accounts are on their web site. Try finding the accounts for an anti-science no-think-tank such Senator Inhofe's barking dog - the heartland institute.

Yes, and Ghenkis Khan also had a measurable effect on the environment, as forests regrew in the wake of his conquests:
http://carnegiescience.edu/new...

But really, liberals and conservatives really want the same thing... more wealth by reducing the competition for resources. One proposes using economic market forces, the other proposes reducing the competition with military forces. Either way, we win. Unless you lose. But then, you're dead, so you're part of the solution, so... yay?!

Ugh, people keep wanting to talk about how drones are soooo much more inefficient than hauling tons of truck up and down hills. Yes, trucks and trains have their place for long haul efficiencies. At some point that breaks down once you start hauling more truck cargo to the final delivery point.

Also, if we had drone delivery systems, we wouldn't need such large refrigerators. But what little refrigerators I did have I wouldn't deliver by air. Unless I lived on top of an inaccessible mountain. Like some sort of rich moron.

Just use the best tool for the job. If the best tool for the job is always a F150 pickup, you might be a redneck.

I also mulled laying off gambling before I went broke.

Therefore I am, morally speaking, thin and rich.

Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.

The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.

When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.

In fact all forces should get weaker with distance faster in an expanding space than in flat space.

That seems like quite an assumption on your part, if I'm understanding you correctly. We can't just assume that all properties of spacetime are scaling evenly - if they did, then we'd perceive no effect at all.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

Some pilots would probably still want the ability to override the limits in an emergency if they feel that they can handle the situation better than the autopilot (for example, if the plane is crashing and the pilot wants better control over where/how to bring it down). If so, then you should make it a possibility to disable the limits, have it such that only *ground* can disable the limits. This would of course impose a delay, but at least overriding the limits would remain a possibility.

Of course, a pilot may try to trick ground into disabling limits (such as pretending to be going down or pretending to have a malfunction), so ground would need as much data as possible to assess whether the situation is legit. Might be tricky... best would be to err on the side of caution and only remove limits if everyone is absolutely sure that this is appropriate, if there's any doubt the answer should be "no".

Not today. But maybe in the future. If you can develop a crazy-power-dense energy source and cooling system, you could probably do it with a MPD thruster. The research I've seen on MPD thrusters operating in pulsed mode yields crazy output relative to the mass of the thruster. But you can't run it continuously because it'd overhead and take way too much power. But who knows about the future? There's the potential for extreme heat conductors like isotopically pure diamond, maybe a some kind of fission fragment reactor with a deceleration grid for power...

(of course, if you have a fission fragment reactor, at least when you're in space itd be best just to jet your fragments rather than use them to power a MPD thruster...)

I hope they simulate propane too, not just methane. Propane has some really interesting properties as rocket fuel but have (like methane) never gotten much research. But now there's a big rush to research methane as fuel based on the concept of generating it on Mars - so propane still gets left in the dark.

Methane's ISP is only very slightly better than propane's - 364,6 vs. 368,3 at a 100:1 expansion into vacuum and 20MPa chamber pressure. But propane at around 100K (note: not at its boiling point, 230K) has far higher density (782 kg/m^3), closer to that of room temperature RP-1 (820 kg/m) then that of boiling point methane (423 kg/m^3), which reduces tankage mass and cost. 100K propane's ISP is of course better than RP-1's 354.6 in the same conditions as above. Plus, its temperature is similar enough to your LOX that they can share a common bulkhead, which reduces mass further and simplifies construction.

Hydrogen generally is the easiest fuel to synthesize offworld. Methane is generally second, and propane third. Hydrogen is often rejected as a martian fuel because of the tankage and cooling requirements. Methane can be kept as liquid on Mars with little cooling in properly designed reflective / insulated containers - but so can 100K propane, in similar conditions, but with significantly smaller tankage requirements.

It seriously warrants more research, I tell you what.

Heh, it's funny, I think the exact same things about using a sea of trucks to drive around delivering everything... "imagine the sound, the inevitable crashes, the energy consumption". Every one pound package comes with several tons of vehicle and fuel to deliver it, stringing along a dozen other packages along for the ride.

Sure, trucks and trains make sense for long haul stuff, especially when the route would traverse weather systems. But we could certainly squeeze out a lot of inefficiencies by sending out the last mile via drone network.

Energy usage is actually pretty good... the drones are light relative to their cargo, so less overhead.
Batteries and electric motors have improved tremendously over the past few decades, more than double the energy can be converted into useful work nowadays with brushless motors.
Solar energy keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, down from astronomical a few decades ago (as in, they only made sense for satellites) to "competitive with natural gas" now (and they're practically giving away natural gas for free as a byproduct of fracking.

We'll never get away from the fact that driving tons of trucks around to deliver a few pounds of goods is extremely energy intensive and has some nasty failure modes. What happens when a truck overturns on the expressway and wipes out a few minivans full of kids? We make new trucks and new kids, apparently.

hex drones have enough redundancy to cope with common failures. It will be interesting to see if robotic flying drones or robotic driving drones will come first. I would predict flying drones, since, other than "flying is hard", it's actually less complicated than trying to program driving drones to navigate road hazards. Especially, as you mention, since driving drones will probably need human supervision anyway, so it won't really be cheaper or faster than just making the delivery guy do the lifting.

She can't hear reality over the roar of the hundred million dollars she was paid for halving the shareholder value of HP. Clearly she isn't deluded; she just lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

Not precisely correct from an anatomical standpoint. The rocks in question are superior to the c1 vertebra.