And one of the ten words always seems to be "meh".

By the time the drone has enough collision-avoidance to keep from crashing into everyone else's drones (probably using some kind of identifying beacon), it will be better to have the drones form a mesh network to transmit views from different places, than to have each drone fly to a point of interest to get their own (redundant) view.

It's not "them" that causes such a guilt-ridden and indecisive state. Settle down, boy!

> ... scripting isn't programming.

Well, it *could* be.

Your story shows how strongly our beliefs grip us, no matter how strong evidence to the contrary.

If Moscow was at the same lat/long as Minneapolis, it would be the same city. Moscow's latitude is almost 56 degrees, whereas Minneapolis is at 45 degrees. But your main point is correct in that Moscow and Minneapolis have similar average January low temperatures, around 14 degrees Farenheit.

Looks like 200 Wh/kg is industry leading for widely used technology.
http://bioage.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4fbe53ef019b0033dc98970d-800wi

To see free markets in action, go to a country where there is one, such as Kenya. Watch people bleed to death in the ER as they wait for their relatives to get there with money. Then tell me about free markets.

In the USA, with anything less than single-payer, you could die just from losing your insurance card. Such cases have been documented. Promises ain't cash, buddy.

I really enjoyed Cryptography Decrypted which takes a similar history-based approach. It's shorter and written in an entertaining way.

Now, just like medical diagnosis, most law and software development can be automated too. Other things, like teaching, can be massively leveraged. Still other things, like minor video production, can be handled by the consumer herself.

In the end we'll consume more services and less goods not because the services are so valuable, but because they're so cheap. People won't be able to get jobs making/distributing/selling goods, so they'll enter the service economy by default. For examples of this look at poor countries, where people making $10K/year can have a housekeeper/cook and a gardener.

Severing the employment/health insurance link once and for all is the only way the USA will get the business fluidity needed to compete in the modern world. Why should the executive of a startup, or any other company, have to waste bandwidth thinking about employee health care, or child care, or transportation, or retirement plans? Those are issues for society at large and should be resolved by society at large, not the business exec (who BTW is imminently under-qualified to make such decisions). He/She has a business to run, right? with enough product/marketing/financing decisions to fill the day.

Damn those mass delusions!

"Engineers are now starting to get paid for their true value, which arguably has not been case for a long time, but it is now, and Google is at heart of this. Google discovered an algorithm change can generate another $100 million in revenue. So now companies are more willing to have superstars, and there are engineers at Goggle making tens of millions of dollars."

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319417

Maybe the genes didn't mutate but were somehow forced into commonality by similar ancestral proto-ecolocation behavior.

Car dealers already take in skimpy profits on new-car sales, as consumers are able to use the internet to find out what dealers pay for a car, plus the sales-based quarterly/yearly bonus money that the manufacturer gives them. So increasingly the negotiations are up-from-cost rather than down-from-sticker.

So the parts and service departments are where most of the money is made. But guess what? New cars don't need much service, used ones last a long time too, and parts are also available over the internet. A future with many electric cars also suggests that parts & service will see declining revenues.

Younger generations aren't into cars the way older ones were, so the "superconsumers" are going away. Add all this up and I just don't see how the industry will support anywhere near the number of car dealers that it did in decades past. Getting rid of Pontiac, Hummer, etc. removed some capacity but there's still a long way to shrink.