Arresting? Putting a 12 year old in FUCKING PRISON? Have you all lost your goddamned minds??? You have, haven't you?

the Captain has to sign a fuel-consumption report every shift.

That doesn't matter. In fact, it's anti-matter.

Sew, knot to be weft out of the warped logic taken so lightly here, and to tie up loose ends, the ships often shuttle at sub-warp speed when they weave interstellar space and to weave through a solar system.

Good point though. :)

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?

• Gravity intends to be accurate about our world. LOTR is somewhere else.
• Gravity explores real-world possibilities. LOTR explores fantasy worlds.

"My pet peeve is inertia," says Trollope. "There are many good reasons for keeping your engines on in space, but 'maintaining speed' is not one of them. If you turn your engines off, you don't stop."

I have *years* of experience watching Star Trek to know that isn't true. Indeed, the only thing inertia can do for space travel is keeping horrid shows about it from being cancelled.

That is, of course, without sending them into space for the duration of the film.

That doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Those that do adapt, by say ignoring it, will mostly do fine. A small minority will find that they can't be troublemakers anymore when the hammer falls - the Occupy protesters a couple years back in Chicago who were disappeared for three days by Chicago cops are a good example. They were disappeared - not arrested - in the middle of the night from an apartment even before they got to a protest. The FBI/NSA/cops/whatever were cooperating in unprecedented fashion to track protesters. Remember that protest isn't illegal - and remember that no one cared that it happened when they went poof. Privacy is necessary if you ever want to challenge power. Without it, you're helpless.

Think of the personal profile tracking they could do from birth, esp if students are made to use ebooks instead of paper. In time, every ebook that passes a person's eyes since birth could be tracked, every page turn, hell, every eye movement, probably, if they wanted. Every email, every convo, every web page view, every association. They could know who you are better than you do. And it could be done without human oversight - automated analyses. I thought this nonsense for the time being, until last week it turned up that the NSA does indeed run automated analyses on people, with purdy graphs. How the hell do you rebel or even plan opposition when total life surveillance is a reality?

A story came out last week that made it clear the NSA was looking for private commercial partners to help analyze all that shiny data they will be collecting - Because Terrorism, and because they can't do it themselves. Hence my "they will use companies" screed about third parties.

When this thing becomes real, nothing will stop people from getting access to that giant black box. It's worth a fortune, commercially, politically. It's Power with a giant gothic capital P.

Even if it doesn't happen immediately - how will we ever know when future administrations won't quietly change the rules regarding access? Or the spooks that really run the show decide it themselves, as they always have done. They're f-ing secret - Congress doesn't know what they really do, and neither does the President.

They are a representative nutjob set. They will, if this thing flies, make it job one for their organization to get access to that data. I know those suckers from way back. It's their dream, the ability to run a timeline on their enemies.

They'll beg, bribe, steal, get people on the inside, buy a company that *does* have access to the thing. They won't stop until they get it, and then game over for any schmuck who screws with them. You think they were bad when they just had PIs, loony members and lawyers? Wait for when they get total power over personal information. That little rebellion we had against them in the 90s - that ended with South Park and Seth McFarlane getting info they then made accessible to all in a way people would remember - that sort of thing would not have happened had the CoS had the NSA dbases to find out dirt on people who faced them down. Hell, they broke Minton and put another poor bastard into prison for making a Tom Cruise missile joke, without total surveillance. It'll be like what happened to Occupy - they'll nail you as soon as you speak up.

And they are just the fringe of would-be spies. This is god-like power, the ability to timeline any human. There are far more serious bastards in the world.

Inflation doesn't exist, other than oil prices rising in 2006 and then staying risen. The rest is greed.

That, and we spent (tens at least) of trillions in adjusted dollars waging war against any communistic, or hell, socialistic country until they failed from sheer economic exhaustion. We're still embargoing Cuba. The Soviet Union fell, not because it wasn't feeding people (Russia today has far worse economic conditions for its people), but because the oil market collapsed for OPEC around 1980-1982. Russia makes most of its overseas cash selling oil. They didn't have enough to buy foreign goods, and they were spending ridiculous amounts on their military in our war on them. Was easier to sell everything and make commissars into billionaires with golden toilets. The people went to hell, though.

Great post.

Here's another bit for the pile. If everyone in the world had talent, drive and opportunity to become a doctor, developer or financier, and became such, would everyone be well off at a 60K+ salary in the free market of labor?

Another way of stating it is: if everyone had a ton of gold, would everyone be rich?

Wouldn't work, would it? If everyone is Tony Stark, doesn't mean everyone gets a skyscraper. Developers or doctors would be as cheap to hire, and as desperate, as any burger flipper. Scarcity drives value, not abundance.

We call it "Congress", where we used to pass "laws" that made people middle class instead of insurance-free serfs. Left to the "free market's" mercy, most people would live in animal-skin tents and drink acidic rainwater. There ain't no such thing as a free market. Rich people shut down free markets for labor as fast as they can manage it.

The commies-are-coming crap should have died with the Birchers. Sadly, we consider Birchers liberal nowadays.