Well when the country best suited to lead technological advance is more concerned about preventing marriages that have zero impact on their own life and think that genetic engineering is "playing god" we might be heading to a pretty significant "disruption". It's up to the rest of the world to pick up our slack.

You missed the part where I said "relatively".

There would be far less complexity if the Ultra Rich decided to purchase something like Australia as well as all the drones that you could stick a shake at to attack anything that came within 500 miles, and then for sport lob a few high yield explosives into population centers that appear to be getting a little too uppity.

Dear would-be Rich Overlord:

I'll see your drones, and raise you one toxic airborn virus (vaccine not included), released as part of a dusting upwind of Australia along one of the prevailing jetstreams.

--(signed) One Uppity Human

Would be Overlord (between hacking coughs, spewing phlem laced with the remnants of his decaying internal organs): the space station idea might have been worth the cost...(more hacking coughs, followed by his final expiry)

It's less the effectiveness than the cost and regional limitations.

And then we can look at how relatively little progress was made during the 1000+ years previous.

It depends on how old the title is. If you are talking public domain then you have thousands available on Project Gutenberg which you can read on your reader.

And I guess you get your internet connection free since you don't believe in paying for non-durable goods.

It's a pro/con balance thing. I can read a new release without lugging around a hardcover. I can finish one book and immediately switch to the next without having to carry two books on the train - or worse several books when flying for 15+hours. I can bookmark a book on one device and pick it up on another (like my phone). I can instantly get more obscure titles that aren't in store without having to have it shipped.

The biggest downside is that right now you can't read them during take off and landing.

I don't find that to be the case - at least with nook. Nooks are almost always cheaper than hardcover and sometimes cheaper than paperbacks. They also sometimes have sales on nooks but not on the paper version.

Windows 8 and Win RT are two very different things. Windows 8 will likely take off with the changes in 8.1. Once you get passed the odd tile layout and go back to the regular desktop it is a brilliant OS. I hate using XP or 7 now.

RT was just a non-starter with its inherent limitations.

The latter was, I think, a reasonable mistake. Summers and Rubin figured that people, especially financial experts, would know better than to invest in an obvious bubble whose leveraged value exceeded the underlying value many times over. It's a company-ending mistake that causes you to lose all of your money.

Except, of course, that the company-ending mistake also takes the rest of the economy with it when it becomes that large. As JP Getty supposedly said, "When you owe the bank $100, it's your problem. When you owe the bank $100m, it's the bank's problem". The same applies to the economy, and the federal government stepped in to protect companies (and the economy as a whole) from the consequences of egregiously, flamingly stupid errors.

Which leaves us trapped between economic libertarians on one side, who chafe at any government regulation, and economic pragmatists on the other, who really hate cutting off their noses to spite their faces by letting too-big-to-fail companies fail and take the rest of the economy down with them. Oh, maybe it reemerges a few years later a little smarter, but meantime a few tens of millions have lost their homes and livelihoods for years.

Rubin and Summers, meanwhile, need to learn that Homo Economicus isn't, and that greed and shortsightedness really do need to be taken into account. Long-term self-interest may in the end benefit both of us, but your short-term self-interest screws me as well as you when foresight fails.

Yes. Extreme weather is evidence towards climate change.

I'll leave the God discussion to you and the other flat-earthers.

Maybe this sounds weird, but this is actually a key question for me about 3D printing. Material matters at least as much as shape.

I cook a fair bit, and I know what I like in a spatula. I have several different kinds of spatula on hand for different purposes. They need the right amount of flexibility for the job. Some are very thin and stiff (but not brittle); others are thick and flexible. Some need to tolerate high heat; some need to be soft enough to avoid scratching Teflon.

That's just for spatulas, a pretty trivial tool. I'd imagine that more complex jobs require more complex combinations of materials. Shape is important, but I haven't seen any indication that they're getting anywhere close to being able to get a machine that does the things that rubber, metal, wood, and a vast array of different plastics yield.

They also like to link to sites like jquery and google and other sites who are hosting basic Javascript features that they depend on. I'd just as soon they download it and serve it from their domain, but that way they get automatic, dynamic upgrades and bug fixes.

Frenemy. Or rather, lots of web sites are my frenemies, scooping up Javascript from dozens of web sites with no clear indication that they're aware of the interactions or trustworthiness of those sites. Slate.com is my particular nemesis here; I once counted two dozen separate sites that would have had to be enabled before the site could run as its designers intended, some of them down 4 and 5 layers of indirection.

NoScript, who treats everybody as an enemy until told otherwise, requires an awful lot of hand-holding before permitting that. NoScript I trust (more or less) to be on my side, but lots of web site designers consider them the enemy, and that makes our mutual encounters... tense.

Thanks a lot for this. Slashdot is full of very smart people who say, "I'm very smart, and I don't understand why it takes you so much time, effort, and money to do the thing that you do. Here, let me teach you your job." It's nice to have the occasional interjection from somebody who actually understands what's going on to explain at least a few of the complications glossed over in the process.