You mean like mass produced electric cars? Or maybe reusable rockets :-/

Elon Musk does his homework.

Ward Churchill did lose his job, but there is no Constitutional right to have a particular job. If you say McDonald's meat sucks, that's your constitutional right, but if McDonald's fires you over it, you can't really do anything about it.

You can't be arrested for saying you thought 9/11 was a good idea. Fred Phelps claims 9/11 was God's punishment that America deserved because of its embrace of homosexuality, and he's within his rights to express that opinion.

Electric outage frequency really depends on your local weather and infrastructure. Neighborhoods with buried lines have a lot fewer outages than those with above-ground lines, for example.

Where I currently live, there hasn't been an outage in several years.

An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful.

A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.

Novella-sized, perhaps. If you want a Tolstoy-esque novel by someone who committed suicide, check out Mitchell Heisman's suicidenote.info.

Bonus: check out the chapter titles.

Generally tribal land is administered separately, due to its quasi-autonomous status, so they wouldn't be covered under the "regular" rural-broadband programs. However the federal government could choose to give them equivalent subsidies via the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage themselves, which seems like what's happening here.

It's a kind of zombie that never dies. Charles Fourier, utopian socialist, proposed in the 1850s that in the future, productive play could replace work. Vladimir Lenin, glorious leader of the revolution, thought in the 1920s that internal competitions were a good way of motivating production. Since then a dozen hack management consultants have been reinventing the ideas of work-as-play, productive play, etc every 10 years or so. Someone coined the word "playbour", if "gamification" wasn't obscene enough for you.

I'm a CS professor in my day-job. I've met lots of med-school students, and I'm not all that impressed. Some are smart, some aren't. Some are good at memorizing piles of things, some aren't. I will grant you that med school students do think spending a lot of hours in class and studying a lot for exams is some kind of virtue in itself.

But if you look at working doctors some decades out of med school, they make heavy use of simple, standard references. This is not a criticism of them, because doing so is reasonable. Much of medicine is now standardized. Following flow-chart procedures produces measurably better patient outcomes than using ad-hoc doctors' judgment does. Evidence-based medicine is transforming the field, though it's not done doing so yet.

In fact the two main operators of employees-only bus networks in San Francisco are:

1. Google [discussed here]

2. UC San Francisco

It would be better if there were at least more labor-market mobility. Countries could still run their own domestic economies, but someone who didn't like the economic policies of country A could just move to country B and choose theirs instead.

That is legally possible today but in practice done much less than e.g. state-to-state movement in the U.S., for many reasons. Some of them are legal barriers to recognizing credentials, although those are slowly being harmonized (e.g. medical licenses are now harmonized). Language barriers are one major one, though very asymmetric: an engineer who speaks English can easily get a job in Copenhagen, even if they speak no Danish, but an engineer who speaks no French will have a harder time being hired in Paris.

The EU is getting more integrated, but is still nowhere near one economy that moves in unison. So the answer to the headline question is: yes in some places, no in others. Germany's GDP is growing; Spain's is shrinking.

As usual, the paper makes more sense than the press release, but is less grandiose in its claims.

It's a fairly technical result that finds some appeals to the asymptotic equipartition property lead to too-strong claims, compared to a more precise analysis.

If I recall my History Channel correctly, when the Grand Imam of Al Azhar and the Coptic Pope get together and formally agree on something, strange events start taking place.

Yeah, the worry is "one man, one vote, one time", i.e. a party wins free and fair elections and then promptly abolishes democracy and installs themselves permanently in power. Or until someone overthrows them.

In the Muslim Brotherhood's case, that worry looked more than hypothetical, since Morsi attempted several times to rule by decree, and sort of succeeded at least once. It was not hard to guess what his plan was.