And Ericsson, whose research Gladwell misrepresented, most definitely didn't.

Actually there's at least two potential plot lines in the books already to make that... ambiguous. Heck, half the plot is taking seemingly irreplaceable characters and kill them, the world keeps on twisting and turning. But yes, I don't see it happening until after they've sailed for Westeros.

You'll still be vulnerable to any script that specifies #!/bin/bash - not uncommon

Good. Let the dinosaurs die in peace.

Yeah, but if you give away more free stuff than you ever get back in revenue you will be losing money. This is what Ireland did. They got less than a thousand jobs out of it, and would lose them in an instant if they ever tried to make Apple or Google pay for what they actually use of public resources. Selling for less than cost is BAD BUSINESS.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, it started as one book that outgrew itself and was divided geographically but the timelines eventually merge again in Dance of Dragons with characters from the south appearing after the events of the fourth book. So it will be highly biased towards characters based in the north/east since they're in the entire book, followed by characters travelling north while those staying in the south aren't in the fifth book at all, but who will certainly return to finish up their arcs.

I made no comment on social justice. I said it was bad business. A race to the bottom leaves you at the bottom, and since the rest of the EU was not racing against Ireland, they just raced themselves to the bottom. It was bad business and economically idiotic.

Pretty much nobody argues with the kind of science you can conduct in a lab like physics, chemistry, optics, mechanics, electronics and such, if you can put it in a lab and reproduce it then it's generally not controversial at all. Even when CERN finds some exotic new particle. All the controversy usually revolves around systems that are either so complex we can't meaningfully reproduce it all in a lab so basically parallel world theories or where the results come from a thought process, not compelled by any law of nature.

In the first case we do some partial models that are only approximately right, like for example weather forecasts. And lots of people claiming that flapping your wings this way or that will set off a butterfly effect. In the second case you'll never settle the discussion on applicability because these people might react different than those people based on culture, age, sex, education, experience, history or simply understanding the purpose or confines of the experiment and how applicable it really is to any real world situation.

For example, I suspect you can take pretty much all literature and studies done on airplane hijackings done before 9/11 and throw them in the trash bin, or at the very least put them in a museum. Not because they were in any way scientifically invalid, but because nobody will react in the same way anymore. Granted, that's probably a rather extreme example but there's lots of example to prove those kinds of scientific truths are fluid and change over time. It's a process, not a set of answers and it'll always be noisy.

Yeah, all that win for Ireland was why they went near bankcrupt and had to bailed out by the rest of the EU?

Ireland sold out, but sold out so cheap they didn't even get rich from selling out. Hopefully they have learned their lesson, though it seemed some people like you haven't.

Well, the company itself is only one piece of the puzzle. They're also connected to vendors, customers, competitors, their particular market and the general economy. All of those give a lot of impulses into the system, if your competitor launches a great new product that's bad for you. If your vendor's got supply problems, that's bad for you. If your customers for some reason get mad at you that's bad for you. If they suddenly want something else like tablets instead of your laptops that's bad for you. Growth and recession drags the entire economy up and down. The effects ripple through like waves in a pond and it's never still. Just because there's waves on the surface doesn't mean the tide stops coming in, but if you measure from the bottom of one wave to the top of the next then it might go against the fundamentals. They exist if you're investing in a far longer horizon where today's waves are of no real significance, in the long term the companies that make money go up and the ones who lose money go down.

That said, belief is often more powerful than the fundamentals until the illusion cracks. For example take the dotcom boom, as long as everyone thinks it's a boom they hold on to their stocks. If it dips, they think now they're getting value and buy more. That happens until the bad news overwhelm the value buyers and the stock really start tanking, which again leads to a stampede out. At every step of the way there's people trying to be ahead of the market, but the day traders don't really influence the long term stock price. They're just there trying to make a margin on the market over-reacting/under-reacting or not grasping all the interrelations at play.

And the space station would do what exactly, pull materials out of a magician's hat? If all the raw materials are eventually going to come from earth anyway, you're just adding intermediary steps to increase costs. Here's a number of reasons why you might want to have a space station, but practically doesn't apply today:

1) We can gather and refine materials and produce parts/fuel with the required tolerances/quality from a lower/zero-g gravity well like the moon or asteroids at a lower cost than shipping it from earth. For example say you discover an asteroid full of bauxite ore. You still have to create a mining ship, send it to the asteroid belt, extract the bauxite through mining, ship it to the space station, capture it, smelt it, roll it to sheet metal and cut it with extreme precision. While launching it from earth is expensive both the setup costs and production costs of doing it in space dwarfs the savings.

2) You can likewise gather energy by for example setting up gigantic solar panels that can charge a space craft. However, none of our current rockets run on electricity and the energy costs of orbiting/deorbiting a space ship probably dwarf the energy gains.

3) You can refuel/repair/retrofit/repurpose incoming spaceships without going down into the gravity well, however we generally don't do return missions because of the costs involved in sending them back to earth. It may be useful if we have big reusable "ferry" ships between say Earth orbit and Mars orbit, though even then it's questionable if we shouldn't just launch resupply rockets directly rather than going through a space station.

4) We could build ships that aren't hampered by the launch forces and are designed for zero-g only, but practically we're pretty good at various forms of fold-out designs that'll survive launch and transform into a more fragile shape in space. Same with the rovers, they hit the ground curled up like a ball then deploy.

5) We could build bigger ships than could be launched through a single launch, however the total launch costs would be the same. Practically we'd probably build it like the ISS though through interlocking modules, with large interlocking sections it should be almost as structurally sound as building it in one single piece in space.

6) If we have a lot of cargo going between many different systems then a hub-and-spoke system is more efficient than direct peering. In the foreseeable future though, everything will either come from Earth or go to Earth so this isn't relevant until we've got major off-world colonies.

The TL;DR version: Nothing a space station could do would lower space exploration costs today, only increase them.

Well, you can make a similar graph for "Death by nuclear weapon by year" but I doubt anyone think that despite the peak in 1945 we've lost our capability or technology to do it again. It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive. All it would do is inch the bar higher to "The universe is probably littered with the one-solar system graves of cultures..." while not bringing us significantly closer to interstellar travel. And I think it's also undervaluing the progress we're actually making:

1) We're making great strides in discovering exo-planets that may be possible targets for colonization
2) SpaceX and others are making huge progress in getting the $/kg to orbit price down.
3) For reasons entirely unrelated to space, we're making huge strides in semi-autonomous and autonomous robots.
4) What used to be a two way race now includes space programs from Europe, Japan, China and India in addition to US and Russia.
5) From 3) and 4) there are several plans for "dry-run" base deployment missions to create the necessary human environment.

I think the last one really indicates where the future of manned missions is going though, the base doesn't need you to function because we're not going to send you there until it's already functioning without you. At least under normal circumstances, obviously if there's a malfunction you'll be the impromptu on-site repairman. Granted it won't be quite like checking into a hotel but you expect it to have air pressure, right oxygen/CO2 levels (scrubbing easily tested with oxygen-eating bacteria), habitable temperature, electricity (lights, power through solar cells) and communications (satellite dish). Perhaps even stores of food, water and other supplies if it's cheaper to send them some other way rather than with the astronauts.