Politics is all about having to decide between difficult (and often unpalatable) choices

No, politics is all about selling your own self interest as the public interest. It's about pretending the negative consequences of the choice that benefits you, and your cronies, the most do not exist.

Everything else - events in neither light cone, which means they cannot affect us and we cannot affect them.

It will affect us eventually, when both light cones get large enough to intersect. That is, unless they are far enough away that the expansion of the universe outpaces the growth of the light cone.

Depending on an observer's motion relative to us and such an event, someone might see the event as happening at the same time as the here-and-now, or before, or after.

Wouldn't such an observer be moving faster than the speed of light?

Straight up money laundering no fucking about, be you Dictator, Gangland criminal, Corrupt politician, Bank of America is the bank for you, now with untraceable bitcoins and supercomputers to generate more ;D.

It's unobservable to humans on a whole 'nother dimension anyways - duration. I don't think anything on this scale can change noticeably during our paltry lifetimes.

In the really real world, "refusing to admit a mistake" is not an arrestable offense. Neither is arguing with a cop.

It makes a big difference. In one case you are an honest person who violated the law by mistake. The cop will explain the law to you, and let you go. In another case you are insisting that the law does not apply to you just because, and you are arguing with a cop who knows the law better than you do. In such case the cop will conclude that you violated the law intentionally, or with wanton disregard for rights of others - and then you will get a different treatment. Why would that be unfair? It's exactly how police officers are *supposed* to operate - to protect the innocent and to stop the guilty from doing harm. In this case the responding officer did everything by the book.

What is curious to me is your low user number, indicating a join date some time in, oh, 1997 or so? How did you last this long with such a pro-authoritarian attitude?

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

I do not automatically approve everything that the police does. Far from that. However in this case the EV owner went too far: he plugged his car into someone else's outlet, then insisted that it's his right to use the outlet, and then insisted that the cop damaged his car. If he is not one lying SOB, I don't know who would be. Conservative people value honesty and respect rights of others.

Bitch bitch bitch. I went to High School in Ithaca NY. The sources I can find that have data for both cities put them pretty close. BestPlaces says Seattle has 152 sunny days, and Ithaca has 154 sunny days. HomeFacts says Seattle has 56 clear days, and Ithaca has 53 clear days. They're pretty comparable, but Ithaca has a lot more snow. I think I'd handle Seattle's climate fine.

I remember a math teacher once stopping class to bring our attention to a patch of blue sky that had temporarily appeared. I don't think people were particularly depressed.

Considering the quality of contemporary components, you'll still be upgrading every 2-3 years. Or however long the warranty in your country is.

Erh... no.

As an "old" programmer who happens to know a few languages, ASM for a few different machines among them, I can reassure you that you do NOT want to return to the good ol' days of Assembler hacking. For more than one reason.

The most obvious one is maintenance. I still write ASM for embedded applications where size does matter because you're measuring your available space in Bytes. Not even kBytes. Where it matters that your code takes exactly this or that many cycles, none more, none less. But these are very, very specific routines with a "write once, never touch again" policy in mind. You do not want to be the poor bastard who gets to maintain ASM code. Even less so if it's not your own (which is already anything but trivial). ASM is often a very ugly mess of processor side effects being used for some kind of hack because you simply didn't have the time and/or space to do it "right".

C is probably the closst you should get today to the "metal" anymore. Unless of course you have a VERY good reason to go lower, but I can not really think of anything that doesn't deal with the OS itself.

You know, I'm kinda tempted to see how an ancient version of Windows + Office would run on a contemporary machine.

Provided they do at all, that is...

I think a cartel exam is in order. If someone tries to explain a price hike in a field that is allegedly contested, especially when the reason given is threadbare at best, it's time to watch for price fixing.

Same old, same old. Permanent damage, permanent denial of access. So when it comes to a comparison with a brick and mortar presence. Dumping a load of rubble onto their driveway, well, actually disappearing rubble, as it cleans itself up as soon as it stops. So it temporarily stops access of customers to the store and highlights the reason for the protest. So typically a minor fine, for their specific activity and not for associated activity. So in this case they didn't dump a truck full of self removing rubble, they chucked on another handful, that on it's own wouldn't be noticeable. Why the big who haa, a bunch of asshats want promotions so they have gone into a big promotional show to ramp up the nature of the activity and penalties so they can earn those promotions. Draw focus away from the NSA's by far worse activity, mass computer network attacks across the whole planet. Of course the is also the overall blatant bias in modern justice for major corporations and against the individual, instituted by corporations for their benefit. Overall well intentioned people who participated in a protest who are going to be publicly financially destroyed for daring to go against the profit interests of a major corporation. So no, zip, zero permanent harm to be repaid with total financial and social ruin, hmm, yeah that seems fair and balanced (oh look I made a Fox not-News pun ie when fair and balanced is anything but fair and balanced.)

"Always" is a long time. Is there some reason a Picocell can't be produced for about the same cost as a WiFi access point?

Problem is that my only motivation is to stop you from zapping. That can be accomplished temporarily by doing your bidding or permanently by killing you.

Quite a period for a binary star.

The current governments plan is to obey the order of Fox not-News boss Rupert Murdoch. That is stop broadband. So first step, stop new FTTH services, so they are only carrying out existing contracted services. Next step FTN, well, they are not going to do it, quite simply they are going to spend the next three odd years talking about doing it and then of course just prior to the next election change their minds and go back to FTTH, they really truly promise (After setting is place as many obstructions as possible).

Just to muddy up the waters, they intend to buy the incumbents rotting copper network after renting the conduits in which it resides initial for running fibre optic and no of course for nothing, that purchase is just a quick back hander for, well, no one is telling. A glaring example of the mismanagement the guy they put in charge of the NBN was the douche nozzle who got fired for losing so many customers after raising the monthly charge by $10 and dropping the cap from 20GB to 3GB and then telling his customers he only raised the price by 20% and trying to force the continuation of existing contracts, all under the protection of the same political party that is now killing the NBN.

So FTN will consist of;
Discussing FTN
Designing FTN
Tendering FTN
Discussing the FTN Tenders
Redesigning FTN
Re-Tendering FTN
Next Election - FTN sucks we promise to do FTTH.

As a bonus for Fox not-News corp the current government is also looking to destroy the public broadcaster the ABC http://www.abc.net.au/. Why does Rupert Murdoch hate broadband Fox not-News number one on cable and number 36 on the internet also Myspace as a glaring example of their inability to adapt to the internet. So Australia finally managed to get Fibre Optic Internet going only to have it killed by a corrupt government at the behest of a single corporation and months of the worst examples of biased news political coverage. JFC why haven't you locked up that bastard yet?