Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays!

To get more realistic characters, the author could interview the old folks in Japan who've been volunteering to go fix things up in and around the Fukushima reactor complex! I can only hope that, given the opportunity to help like that after I've raised my kids and made my mark, I would be willing to do something that selfless, knowing it might could take a few years off.

Of course, if it were a dystopian sci-fi novel and the government were forcing us to "volunteer," well, I'd put together a resistance movement just on principle. Unless the aliens were cool and/or hot and green.

Disagree! "Merely" doesn't do justice to the change in algorithm. Search engines were *terrible* before Google came along. Don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember the first time a Google search brought back *amazingly good* results in comparison to others, and pretty much switched then and there. They may not be a perfect company, but but they've had a good 10-14-year run creating hundreds of billions of dollars in efficiencies for thousands of industries. Now search has gotten so good, I don't even see many people using bookmarks anymore.

LOL! My kingdom for some mod points!

Yes, that's when a lot of people have kids and suddenly realize their parents were right. Now that's a boost in comprehension!

Then there are the others who look at their former friends who are now newly minted parents and suddenly comprehend that you've got to be crazy to go that route. Big boost!

1.6 meters tall... 55 kilos in weight... impassive facial expressions and unfashionable Chinese jackets... playing mediocre table tennis... my god, they've invented San Jose State!

That is the exact reason this claim, and miracles in general, are incompatible with science.

If I drop a basketball, the "accident" part of the ball (the orange part we can see and weigh) falls to the earth. However, I insist there is also a "substance" part of the ball that flies upward when I drop it. The "substance" rises to geosynchronous orbit, takes on the shape of a beehive hairdo, and stays there forever. However, this "substance" is made of something completely unobservable and the orbiting beehives of it will never be detected. I mean, what's the point? If I wrote a journal article on it for Gravity Monthly and said it was "compatible" with the existing science, I'd be laughed out of the field.

OK, it was rarely that bad, though I did see things like empty pallets stacked to within inches of the fire sprinklers, gas cans stored in unventilated stationery rooms, and plenty of other violations of common sense and/or the fire codes.

There was a famous incident we studied in classes where a small fire started in a big warehouse (Kmart I believe). Or at least, it should have remained small and been quickly contained by fire sprinklers. But one of the pallets that caught on fire was a bunch of cans of some pressurized flammable aerosol thing, like WD-40 or hairspray or something. The heated cans exploded and became torches that skittered all over warehouse, lighting everything in their path on fire. Pretty soon the sprinklers were overwhelmed and a cool $100 million was up in smoke. So now, warehouses are required to keep pressurized flammables in a chain link cage so they can't shoot too far (but again, sometimes we'd find them just sitting out, ready for another War of 1812 re-enactment). Fun stuff.

You are spot on about the measuring and the forms. People are busy, and can't take half their entire day just to watch you do paperwork. If you're in the South, just talk huntin' and fishin' for five minutes, and most warehouse guys will be ready to donate you a kidney.

I totally second that. For me, it was a tie and a clipboard, and my (totally true and legit) story that I worked for the building's property insurance company and needed to look everywhere and anywhere for risks (blocked doors, covered sprinklers, stacks of live ammo pointed at compressed oxygen canisters, that sort of thing). People would let me into the most amazingly sensitive areas, oftentimes with no escort, just a slap on the back and a "give the key fob back to Tina when you're done". Three hours later I would know every corner of the place.

I ain't that charismatic, so I conclude the clipboard is key.

I don't think we're that far off from having the processing power to do this in real time, for simple things at least. I know it's a different technique, but we already have real time line markers painted on the field for (American) football broadcasts, and they even look consistent from multiple camera angles.

I read a sci-fi story a long time ago (early 80s?) in which one of the plot points was hackers (or whatever) hijacking of the outgoing TV signal of a person announcing election results, of some kind of dictator, I think. In this story, way ahead of its time, their software analyzed the person's face and voice patterns on-the-fly from the first few seconds of the broadcast, and then substituted in a fake video signal with the same face and voice announcing different election results nationwide. Hilarity ensues (OK not really, I remember it being kind of dark).

Anyone in this crowd source happen to know what story this was? Again, I think we're not far off from this being very feasible.

Have you ever seen Gaddafi and Tommy Lee Jones in the same room? Throw a fancy hat on him, and they are hard to tell apart. I'm just sayin'.

.. and thus a whole new genre of FanFic was born!

(At least, I hope it's new. Too afraid to search and find out.)

Aha!
Call the 0 phone, let it ring... hang up...
Call the 1 phone, let it ring... hang up...
And so on... See, you can send Woz a binary message which he could re-construct just by looking at the timestamps of the missed calls on his phones! Number of cell-phone minutes used? Zero! The cell phone companies will soon be on to his little scheme!

'Tis nothing of the sort. What's "wrong" with the grid is that demand is higher during the day than at night. This is a well-understood condition that we've had pretty much since air conditioning was invented. We frequently have so much cheap power available at night that the wholesale (hourly or 5-minute) price paid to generators goes negative (i.e. you are charged for burdening the system with your extra energy). On the flip side, we have expensive generators sitting around all year for the peaks, that only get to run for a few hours on hot afternoons. Charging cars (or anything else) at night when it's cheap and paying them to retrieve power during the day (when it's expensive) is simply a way of postponing or eliminating the need for that next super-expensive power plant that you use only at peak times. Sure, you lose some of that power in the round-trip, but if the price difference from night to day is large enough, you come out ahead.

Ruh roh, Raggy, something's wrong in your Rubject line!