Yeah, but each of those 6 books was the length of half a dozen Pratchett novels, so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, is it?

I think some forget, or never knew, that his first book was published 1996. This guy is not a fast writer.

If you look at pages of output per year, he's actually one of the fastest writers ever. It's just the book are so big that it's still a long wait from one ot the next.

Even if they want resources, there's plenty of unihabited planets to exploit; it makes no sense to waste resources fighting humans for control of earth when you can strip mine mars uncontested.

Alien bacteria would most likely be completely harmless as Earth organisms as they would be evolved to exploit weaknesses in a completely different eco system. It would be like sticking x86 Windows Malware on a Sparc Solaris computer. It wouldn't be able to run.

Best part of the Novikov self-consitency princple is that if it's true, it means that Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is the most scientifically accurate time travel movie ever.

The largest virutal psychology lab. The scientists have just been conditioned to think it is.

Don't forget January 2014 when Atlanta's mayor took a wait and see approach to a storm and when it turned out worse than expected, he was excoriated for not taking it seriously enough.

She left the business 30 years ago.

It was the result of his divorce. Lucas's ex-wife was the editor on all his earlier movies, and his work went to crap as soon as they divorced.

I'm convinced that Lucas was always terrible and she was just able to edit around his terrible directing.

Yes, yes, no true scotsman...

"Well, app developer has no obligation to Blackberry. But it does have an obligation to its purchasers to provide access to the app. If its customers can't access app because of a deficiency in the app developer architecture and its connections to the mobile OSs, it should be app developer's responsibility to remedy. This is the net neutrality argument, and has generally been the status quo."

Comcast gets Netflix and other traffic from Cogent, and there would be no legal obligation to build out their capacity.

The problem is that whenever saturation issues come up (e.g. http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/s... ), you get tons of people saying net neutrality does include that sort of obligation.

Net Neutrality isn't just inaction anymore. The term has now been expanded to include things like, if the Netflix-Comcast interchange is getting saturated, Comcast has a positive duty build out more capacity to handle the full flow.

The Blackberry guy is now expanding it again. People who work in development and realize what this would mean for small developers are rightly horrified, but the thing is, that's how government regulation works. If net neutrality becomes law, it will end up getting used to cover things that aren't strictly related because it's going to be interpreted by lawyers, legislators, and judges that don't understand technology.

This is just another False flag story!

It seems like they can only lose if there is a big spike in claims, such as a natural disaster or possibly war/terrorism.

Nope, that's what reinsurance is for:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

There's basically a second set of truly massive companies out there that exist to insure the insurance companies you think of from excessive claims.