If I had written the bill, I would have named it "USA #1 Freedom Bald Eagle Star Spangled Flag Waving Democracy Rah Rah Rah Act"

There is a huge difference between "limited by physical laws to the best of humankind's understanding of them" and "limited by policy". Your implication that Verizon has been portraying "unlimited" to mean "any amount of data in any arbitrarily small amount of time regardless of physics" is utter drivel... bullshit of the most asinine form.

I hope they eventually come out with a model they dub "Kwijibo", thereby validating Bart's scrabble gambit.

If wiki is to believed this system will be able to launch heavier payloads to LEO then the Falcon 9 Heavy. However, SpaceX is currently building a reliable track record with the Falcon9. If the Merlin 2 engine concepts were to come to fruition and the Falcon XX was to become a real launch vehicle, Space X would have a system that would completely eclipse the SLS. The original posters argument is incoherent. There's no "deep space." Once in orbit you either have the capacity to increase your velocity to raise your orbit or escape orbit or you don't.

following the convention for naming stars that are not dense enough to ignite "brown dwarfs", we could name these new, less dense, singularities... "brown holes".

when everyone is on the list.

The probable good news is that, given the incredible computing power at play, this should not take a very long time, since the reasonable suspicion criterion make it easy to add names.

I'm still trying to understand whose going to grow all the food once all these rural peasants (you know the ones who've been on their land for generations farming) get moved into the city.

Honestly, I have no doubt that China can pull this off, but at what cost?

Frankly, I think NASA should be working with SpaceX to get the DragonRider off the ground as fast as possible and work on the Falcon Heavylift. This is basically a pork project to keep the people who where making the solid rocket boosters in business.

The problem is that it's not clear what happens when the minimum wage increases. It's also not clear whether something different happens when a city or state does it versus a national change.

Case in point: thirteen states increase the minimum wage and employment increases faster (on average) in those states than in those that do not increase the minimum wage. The presumption in the post is that the causality is that increasing the minimum wage causes employment increases. What if the causality goes the other way? Increasing employment could make states more willing to raise the minimum wage. Correlation does not indicate causality, so economists can't differentiate between the two explanations.

There's actually been quite a bit of study of the effects of raising the minimum wage. The problem is that it's impossible to produce a real double blind study. Without that, there will always be reasonable doubt. In one study, they won't be able to eliminate the possibility that employment would have gone up faster without the change. In another study, they won't be able to tell if people are moving from the comparison area to the change area for the higher wage jobs. In another study, perhaps employment increases occur because kids drop out of school to take jobs.

Economics isn't anywhere near as mature a science as physics or chemistry. It doesn't lend itself to repeatable experiments. Without objective data, subjective opinions take a far greater role.

Really liked reading your entry... I'm same-minded about exercise and what I eat, for largely the same reasons. Thought I'd put in a plug for xylitol; exactly as sweet as sugar gram for gram, no bitterness/weirdness in taste, natural, long long history of usage in Europe, *is safe for diabetics* because it doesn't cause the same insulin reaction that sugar does, and even helps prevent tooth decay (because it looks enough like sugar to mouth bacteria that they try to digest it, but fail/die). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X...

I can see this tech also being used on Europa (and bombing doesn't count as "landing").

making another Weekend at Bernie's sequel? This time, Bernie "drives himself" around!

Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):

1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?

2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)

All you have to do is change the legal definition of "ordnance" to that of "fireworks"

But those phones that do make it to a person in jail is shockful of bacteria, and not all of it from the final user.