Or not reproducing, as the case may be.

So you accelerate half-way there, turn around, and accelerate in the opposite direction for the remaining half. The engine never needs to shut down and bam! you're parked right where you need to be.

I don't think the moon stretched our technological limits by any means. All the basic technology required for a moon landing existed before the goal was announced - no new and revolution computer or rocket design required. It was more of a project-management problem - how to engineer rockets powerful enough, how to ensure reliablity, how to guarantee the trip went off without a hitch. The decade from announcment to landing was spent training people and figuring out how to build bigger.

Well, it was good enough for Microsoft...

You're forgetting that, under the current system in the US, no one owes you a job. If you have a job, no one owes you more than minimum wage.

So what if you have a mortgage and bills to pay? That's your problem, not your employer's.

Pot, meet kettle.

Huh?

I'm not a statistician, but >95% seems like a majority of people to me. How does it make the GP's claim ("significant portion") less extraordinary?

Source, please? Your claim is rather extrordinary. Pretty much every person I know owns at least one television, and almost all of them have cable (as much as they complain about the cost).

It's not the job of the DNS server or protocol to check the source ip; that job belongs to the firewall.

Its a little like when your mom kept your old school work. As an adult, are you really interested in your own child-like scribblings? Is anybody else?

I like history. I'm even a little curious about my own, but the novelty of seeing my childhood photos wears off quickly. The novelty of seeing my wife's, or my own childrens' photos, wears off quickly too. I study history to understand how the world got to the way it is now, perhaps to help predict the future but certainly to put current events into perspective. Personal history is generally less useful, especially when viewed from a personal perspective.

I'm more interested in what's going on now - what are my kids are doing now, what my spouse and friends are thinking about now, what I'm capable of now. It's generally greater than before. The past is a less polished version of today.

Actually, iPhones ARE assembled by hand.

The US government continues to support all kinds of things that don't make sense. The so-called War On Drugs springs to mind as well.

Another example: Catalytic converters (required equipment on new cars since the '80s) don't make sense either: why prescribe a speific solution when you could specify a desired outcome instead? My first car, an '82 Honda Civic had a CVCC engine which was cleaner than a car equipped with a catalytic converter, but production ceased because the technologies were incompatible and the converter was required. Kind if defeats the purpose of the law, if the purpose was to reduce smog.

I think the heaviest driver in converting to LEDs isn't the electrical savings, but the savings in repair calls. When an incandesent bulb burns out, you have to head out and replace it pronto or else you have a non-working traffic light. When one LED in a matrix burns out, meh, you'll go check it out when 40-50% are dead.

I'm not clear on how changing the culture via things like "strengthening of marriage" (whatever that means) will curtail mass violence. Are you suggesting that seriously disturbed individuals, people with severe mental defect, will cease to exist just by removing some movies and books?

Making ethanol from the corn is more energy intensive than distillation of oil into gasoline. For every gallon of ethanol you produce, energy equivalent to more than one gallon is burned just to distill it (never mind farming, ferilization, and transportation). Distillation is done with, yup, petroleum products.

Ethanol is nowhere near cabon neutral, given the way we produce it. We'd be closer if we used cane sugar, but tarrifs are so high that it's not economically viable. That's also the work of the corn lobby.