Means for a government to systemtically supress or harass certain people or groups of people are worrisome to me.

Wasn't 3 Mbps "high-speed" ten years ago?

The interplanetary medium can carry sound waves. Of course, it is moving faster than the local speed of sound outward from the sun (the solar wind). So if you shouted really loud from the ISS, someone in the asteroid belt might be able to hear you. But not the other way around.

It was pretty much one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator

eq?, eqv?, or equal? ?

Possible, although unlikely. The -CDM model does an astonishingly good job of modeling the observed universe. But, that doesn't mean it is right.

In the case of aether, people didn't stop investigating it until a) experiments that should have observed no matter what saw no evidence of it and b) another theory that agreed with this new data came along.

People who trot out the tired old "dark matter is just like aether!" line typically do so while patting themselves on the back for their cleverness, while neglecting the above.

If there isn't WIMP dark matter, or even isn't dark matter at all, then we'll find out. That's how science works.

Weak.

You sound like Ebenezer Scrooge: http://youtu.be/QIcoa0oI5Cc?t=10s

It's not a favorable comparison.

This is exactly the right answer. Never write code that someone else has already written. If you can compose standard operations to do your calculations, then do so in a high-level language. Spend more time thinking and less time coding. OTOH, if you need to code up something custom and you're REALLY sure that you can't use standard operations to do it, then think again about whether or not you can do it with standard operations. You probably can. But, if you can't, then go with FORTRAN. Or maybe C or even C++. But probably FORTRAN. But even then, code as little as you can in FORTRAN. Don't write the whole thing in FORTRAN. Create small operations, and compose them in a high-level language as if they were the standard operations.

LaTeX is a great thing to learn, but it is most emphatically NOT a remotely reasonable choice for writing number crunching code...

Effing furries.

Basic precautions like not being that close to freaking helicopter blades. It's *remote* control for a reason.

Use Tor. Give a randomly generated name, birthday, SSN 4, everything. Script it. Run many times.

What do you do with all the excess chlorine?

But open-source projects routinely provide service for a fee. And even if the projects in question didn't provide any direct service to the donating company, just having *written* the software in the first place could easily be considered to be a provision of service.