I'm all for this plan, provided that Newt Gingrich are on the first flight. Just remember the immortal words of John Glenn: "I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract"

The second biggest issue with USB is the small size of micro-USB connectors that are soldered into equipment (especially wireless headphones) and eventually work themselves loose,resulting in the failure of an otherwise useful device. I went through several sets of nice bluetooth headphones due to this issue. Using a larger connector would allow it to be more mechanically stable.

What I don't get is, who is going to buy the goods and services that the AIs create? If the 99% of the population is unemployed, and the only people with money to buy stuff are the 1% who own all the machines/factories/AIs, the only customers are going to the the other 1%. Sounds like a recipe for collapse.

Perhaps this is a dumb question. If the probe can attain speeds of 0.2C, just how do they plan on slowing it down once you arrive? Seems like a lot of effort to spend for a visit that is likely to last at most a day or two.

What is really going to drive the reality of climate change home will be disaster insurance premiums. People and companies in danger of coastal flooding as sea levels rise will have to pay higher and higher premiums or just give up and move to higher ground. Property values will decline or coastal cities will have to build infastructure at great expense (turn the Golden Gate Bridge into the Golden Gate Dam anyone?). And that is not to mention other effects of climate change, such as prolonged droughts.

I just want to chime in on the side of those who are making the distinction between Software Engineering and programming. If you really want demonstrate what Software Engineering is about here is what I would do:

• In teams of 3-4 students each implement a program to solve some problem that might take the teams at least several days. They need to work out an approach to the problem, divide up the work among themselves and actually implement and debug their solution.
• Next, have the groups exchange programs and try to break the other teams implementation. Perhaps have them try to fix any bugs that they can without communicating with the other team.
• Finally, scramble the groups again and add some new requirement and have the new teams implement the new requirement on top of code they have never seen.

One of my favorite books address exactly this topic, "The Encyclopedia of Ignorance": http://www.amazon.com/Encyclop...

I would add any voting software for electronic voting machines MUST be open source. Voting is too important to leave in the hands of private companies that may have a stake in the outcome of the election. Even if the company does not intentionally create dishonest voting software, there is the possibility that a rogue employee might insert extra "features" which might escape testing. Open source allows all sides to audit and test the software and agree that it is not compromised or vulnerable to systematic attacks that might affect the outcome of the election.

And how many allocations does that do? You should be able to do that operation without creating any new objects at all. In C, the worst simple solution I can think of would loop no more than the number of bits in a word (i.e. 32 or 64). I'm pretty sure there are some more advanced bit-twiddle tricks that can bring it down substantially but I haven't done that kind of bit-bashing in years.

What if we turn the idea around and say that all gun owners are automatically members of the militia and are required to spend 2 weeks/year training with their fellow militia members (at their own expense). They should also be first in line if and when it ever becomes necessary to activate the draft.

Rather than send actual live beings, wouldn't it be easier to set up a system that is constantly transmitting human genetic sequences into the cosmos, along with instructions for taking that data and turning it into live humans at the other end. This approach expends minimum energy and could result in the widest possible distribution of human descendants. Of course it relies on the existence of intelligent beings that would be willing to synthesize real humans from the data we provide them. But the odds of that happening are probably better than the survival of a generational starship to even the nearest habitable planet. Such a system could be built to transmit autonomously for thousands of years, and could even outlast our species.

This all raises an interesting question: Imagine that I need to purchase something for work. If I don't have a company credit card, and if it is allowed by company policy, I might purchase such an item using a personal credit card using my work computer and ask for reimbursement later. Now imagine that there is a data breach in the IT department with the result that the proxy server log falls into the wrong hands and the black hats have my credit card information. Imagine they use that information to make a much larger purchase. Would my company be liable to the credit card company because their interception of the communication resulted in a tangible loss to the credit card company? Or should they be made to eat the loss. I think Visa would have a very good case against such a company since their negligence in protected the intercepted data exposed Visa to a loss it had seemingly defended against by using https.