Not necessarily. Airliners in which I have flown commonly go no higher than 36,000 feet - occasionally perhaps 40,000 feet. The tops of thunderstorms often reach 55,000 feet and can be even higher. One extreme case reached about 70,000 feet. Moreover, it is necessary to fly well above the tops of the visible clouds, as bad things can happen up to a mile higher. Check out, for instance, http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/152684/

So pilots almost always opt to fly around storms instead.

It's an avoidable business expense. As most airlines are either bankrupt or teetering on the edge, they don't spend a red cent more than they absolutely have to.

The US dollar and the pound sterling have experienced what I would consider seriously harmful inflation. In the last 100 years, each of them has lost almost all its value. It's notoriously hard to arrive at a fair comparison, but if you stick to things like loaves of bread, bottles of wine, horses, clothes, houses, etc. one pound today is worth something like a penny in 1913 - a fall in value of about 99.6 percent. I consider that catastrophic for individuals, and over time for institutions too.

To zoom in on more recent time spans, since I got married in 1976 the value of the pound has fallen by at least 90 percent - a great deal more for some items. This is even worse for people on fixed incomes (such as pensioners) because current government policy is to reduce interests almost to zero. It was in fact Lenin who said, "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation"; yet one could suppose that was the policy of present-day democratic governments in the USA, UK, and many other Western nations.

Of course inflation appeals so much to rulers because it lets them borrow money and pay back only a fraction of it. The great majority of citizens have always remained blithely ignorant of inflation, or grossly underestimated its effects. They are aided in this by official government figures that also grossly underestimate inflation, by a variety of clever tricks.

"Neanderthals may not have been able to coordinate such a large social group as modern humans".

It is quite possible that modern humans are not able to coordinate as large social groups as they now have to. No system of government or economic management has yet been proven over a long enough period to engender confidence. For example, no system of paper money has ever lasted more than a century or so without undergoing catastrophic inflation. We are just about getting to the critical point - and it shows.

Neither have we been able to find a system of government that can handle billions of people fairly, safely, and sustainably. A visiting Martian would perhaps be puzzled by the complete absence of any attempt to research, let alone safeguard, the future security of the human race. Instead, everywhere we see businesspeople frantically enriching themselves while politicians plot their strategies to gain or retain power. Very few, if any, think more than five years ahead.

According to an old story, during Nixon's visit to China in 1972 someone asked Zhou Enlai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he is supposed to have replied, thus giving a fine example of long-term thinking. It's now thought he was referring to the disturbances going on in France at the time, not in 1789, but it's still a nice story. Just so, it's far too early to tell whether modern man has really done much better than the Neanderthals. Indeed, we may turn out to have done much worse, if we pull much of our ecosystem down with us.

Same here - intentionally anyway. Unfortunately, every now and then I discover that I've been using it unintentionally.

It's the main reason I occasionally consider learning to touch type...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".
- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973

If MS did not have a virtual monopoly in PC operating systems, it wouldn't matter very much. Since it does, however, its energetic and long-standing attempts to make the average, non-technical user forget that there are other browsers is culpable.

At one point in United States v. Microsoft, one of MS' highly-paid lawyers told the court with a straight face that IE was an organic part of the Windows operating system, and as such could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.

Simultaneously, I imagine, his colleagues were burning up the lines to Redmond warning the engineering managers to start work on *making* IE an organic part of the Windows operating system that could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.

Precisely! When United States v. Microsoft was decided in 2000, instead of breaking up the company or forcing it to publish its source code - as had widely been speculated - the DoJ was satisfied with Microsoft promising not to do it again.

Imagine if the accused in a murder trial were to propose such an outcome. "Don't punish me for this murder, and I promise I shan't do it again in future (at least I won't murder the same guy again)".

Netscape was *already dead*. Promising not to kill it again was a fairly easy commitment to make.

Aye, you beat me to it!

I doubt most people need a phone at all.

So what?

If you want to have any credibility yourself, you should think through what you write more carefully. To take just one example, celestial mechanics often allows scientists to predict quite accurately millions of years ahead. It's probably possible to predict the future development of a given star for a billion or two years - assuming it has that long to live. Other scientists, more ambitiously still, predict the likely time till the heat death of the universe.

No one "expects to screw up". Medicine and surgery, like all practical skills, are inexact. A doctor or a surgeon studies the patient, and makes his best attempt at a diagnosis. Then he makes his best attempt at treatment. If he is good, he will usually be right. Unless he is God, he will sometimes be wrong.

The attitude that I think I see in the quoted text - "you shouldn't expect to screw up and get away with it" - seems to me to combine unwarranted vengefulness with lack of foresight. Isn't it true that medical services in the USA, for instance, are made far more expensive than they have to be - partly because of the massive insurance all medical professionals need to take out in case they are sued?

Although, come to think of it... would you care to name a country where no insane miscarriages of justice have ever happened?

The law is an ass, no matter which language it speaks.

It's a net made of nurv fibre, obviously.