Christianity: actively turning people against itself since the Inquisition.

The media was playing up the "maybe somebody stole it" aspect from the very start.

If you've ever flown over ocean, out of sight of land, or on a polar crossing route, that feeling that you're really "out there," was true. It's a big world, after all.

I'm thinking if those naval "training exercises" were billed as services, we'd be way past the $50M mark by now.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, and I disagree that it's impossible to cover the world with this level of education- perhaps distasteful in the short term.

What you left out about the spoils of war was that in addition to the post conquest population boom, there's also those wonderful plagues that get spread around, just look at what smallpox did for the population of North America (no clothing required, white skin vs red...)

If the civilized world would stop sending token charity to the third world, there would be quantifiably less misery (when misery is quantified as the product of population X how miserable they are...)

Let's be modern and use the orbit of Neptune as the solar system's diameter: 9,000,000,000 km, and put Alpha Centauri at 4x10^13 km, so, we're looking at a ratio of 4444:1. Diameter of a dime is 18mm, so the equivalent distance to Alpha Centauri would be about 80 meters.

I think his quarter analogy was probably spot-on.

Makes me wonder if the kid is just an attention ploy the dad used...

Sounds like a way to log in to any console, anywhere, at any time... but, the physical presence thing is some measure of containment. At least one five year old can't take down every machine on the planet at once.

This smells more like a forgotten backdoor than an algorithmic flaw.... probably traceable in the commit log to the particular dev who put it in, and all the auditors who should have caught it, but didn't.

Just a day's hike, and you can't even broad-jump the solar system....

Look up "The Graduate" "Plastics" scene.

Now say: "Seeds, my boy, seeds."

Overblown, use a dime to represent our solar system and the next one will be less than 100m away....

Seriously, we "could" attempt to launch starships now, they'd take longer to reach the next star system than homo-sapiens has been present on earth, but it's not impossible....

More likely, we "should" be spending more time and energy on advancing our spacefaring tech, and perhaps a little less on all this other stuff that we do.

What we really need is to bring a complete biosystem with us, enough species diversity to successfully colonize the planet with food producing plants that help maintain some semblence of stability in the O2 / CO2 levels and the temperature.

Or, we can just synthesize TV dinners from algae. Yum.

Having too many people on earth has historically proven solutions.

Generally, you hand out sharp and pointy objects, two or more colors of clothing, and let nature take its course....

Unemployment hovers around 7-8% today, what would it be if taxes were so simple that they "did themselves" with 20 hours a YEAR of effort per business?

If the U.S. wants to become more competitive in the global economy, we might consider streamlining the tax code. Unfortunately, I think we're all more interested in pork projects for our local area than anything as lofty as global competitiveness.

I think it might be slightly _more_ maddening, being on top of the mountain in the crappy thin air, knowing what's just a jeep ride away, but you're not allowed to go....

The thing that makes it a non-comparison is that you eventually will be allowed to, or just break the rules and, go... in the little tin box with nothing but death on the other side of the door and no possible escape.... that's hard to get an accurate psychological simulation of.