"We need guns. Lots of guns."

When those in authority are allowed to break the law, there isn't any law — just a fight for survival.

Close. According to MapFight, it's at 31%.

I'm leaning toward the lack of uniqueness about our placement being a significant factor in explaining our isolation. Historically, the more we understood about our outermost surroundings, the less important our position progressively became. Assuming we're nothing special in the grand scheme of things, as has happened before, could that positioning also extrapolate into our biological and technological development?

Perhaps the development of our kind (types of species we're capable of understanding) is nothing special and happens throughout the universe around the same time — plus or minus a few millenniums. If that were the case, in terms of light years, all of our event horizons are still isolated from one another. If we're in the middle of the statistical bell curve, away from being the "luckier" exceptions with well timed positioning near one another, it might explain why none of us know about each others existence.

If true, sometime (maybe someone can come up with a probable calculation when) in the near or distant future, things will start to get interesting.

Well then, it appears something needs to be done to prevent homicidal acts from the likes of JohnnyCab or anyone else from programming an autonomous car to intentionally kill someone. Maybe the time has come to try to figure out a way to effectively embed in the vehicle's operational core a tamper proof set of laws.

The Three Laws of Autonomous Vehicles:

First Law: An autonomous vehicle may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: An autonomous vehicle must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: An autonomous vehicle must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Questions turn presentations into a living hell. Regardless of the quality of the speaker, improperly handling of the constant interruptions makes the event useless. Proper handling, which rarely happens, is a skill that will endear any audience. It's only because of the free cookies, that allows me to let it slide — I'll bite my tongue and think to myself: It's all good.

Fwiw: Cabana (not Canaba).

Additionally, a lot of people have mistakenly embraced these "IQ" tests to calculate a physical property in thinking the way a scale measures one's weight.. They're only a study indicating a comparative awareness of others within the same environment -- something the French social scientist that created it originally stressed when Americans were redefining its use.

The article written by Bruce Goldman of the Stanford University School of Medicine is a closer source to the original research without being paywalled. It's better than the Wall Street's version; there's less fluff with a little more depth in the explanation and also includes additional links to related sources.

Ineterestingly noted was that this is considered an unsophisticated critical experiment; unsophisticated in that anyone could have done this decades ago without any real knowledge on the workings of the brain itself; critical because of the type results that could be acquired based on the experiment's simplicity in design — it hadn't occurred to anyone to try.

It seems surprisingly close in detail to The Hunger, 1983, Starring: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon.

Available for download: This is the location for the original raw ".ts" file. A second link is also given to a repaired raw ".ts" file showing the results of their efforts. If preferred, you can also get the original ".ts" files at the spacex website near the bottom of that webpage.

First rule of Corporate Club: If you teach a man to fish, you've lost a customer.

With axial obliquity, axial precession, apsidal precession and two orbital Inclinations, maybe someone capable of handling the multitude cyclical combinations affecting weather can come up with an exact answer. It appears one or both of the orbital inclinations are the ones seriously considered responsible for the ice ages.

Summarizing:

Axial Obliquity:
~ Every 41,000 years ~ Presently at 23.5 degrees and decreasing toward its minimum of 22 degrees (22 to 24.5).
Axial Precession:
~ Every 26,000 years ~ The average cycle fluctuates depending on the axial tilt — shorter at 22 degrees; longer at 24.5 degrees.
Apsidal Precession:
~ Every 21,000 to 25,000 years ~ The eccentricity of the Earth's elliptical orbit with the expansion and contraction of the eccentricity's perihelion to the Sun (3,000,000 miles).
Orbital Inclinations:
~ Every 70,000 years ~ The inclination of the Earth's fixed orbital plane rising and lowering.
~ Every 100,000 years ~ The Earth's orbital plane taken as a whole, also rises and lowers to the Solar System's monumental plane.

Then there are the Sun cycles, whatever that might be. (Or the speculation of a very large heat absorbing dust cloud in a higher orbital inclination.)

Also worth considering are continual non-cyclical events occurring over several millennia: The continental drift changing the location of land masses or the Moon's distancing slowing the daily rotation and weakening the tidal effects — It seems in the end that past circumstances may not always be indicative of future events.