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Her dad has a love of maths and is a lecturer in a local university maths department. She writes about how he encouraged her interest in maths at a young age and about her own research.
In Code: A Mathematical Journey
by Sarah Flannery
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

Ah, you should have mentioned that your name is Humpty Dumpty.

When you resort to name calling, it means you lost the argument.

Do you not get the reference? That wasn't name-calling, it was a characterization of your decision to redefine common words. Here's the reference, if you need it: http://www.goodreads.com/quote...

Also consider that they were willing to move to another state. They may be more likely to vote, speak out, donate to political groups, and run for office. Half the problem in the US is that almost no decent normal human being will dare run for office. (Obligatory Douglas Adams quote)

I'm hoping that 2016 is the year Doors Of Stone will finally get released. http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

I strongly suggest you read Stephen Baxter's short story Mayflower II

You'll enjoy it, I promise.

Ah. So we are all stupid.

No, not all, just you and people like you.

they are an unstructured group with no leadership hierarchy

You don't get it. Anonymous isn't just a group, it's an individual, it's a group, it's multiple groups, it's groups of groups, etc, etc. It's any individual or any collective in any numbers and any order that is standing up for anything.

...

Ok, Humpty Dumpty.

“Begin at the beginning ... "

Yes, but a lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns...

Read the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks It is a true story about the same thing.

I don't know about you, but 90% of the things I buy to live (Food, Toiletries, shelter) are owned and made by 13 companies. Unless you can afford really expensive boutique goods how the hell do you boycott? And if you can afford that TPP is good for you...

For food, you can go to local markets and buy it directly from farmers. At least here in Europe you can.

There are also local products in many categories, but they are often more expensive and sometimes only available in select shops (look for eco shops and sustainable products, that's a first pointer). But again, in this area there is so much scamming from big companies that you have to do research to be sure.

And that's the problem. We don't want to do that. We don't give enough of a fuck about the stuff we eat or use to care where it actually comes from.

Tell me how the hell to fix our politics...

Give back your nerd card. Robert Heinlein wrote a little book in fucking 1946 about this very problem, and little has changed since then:

https://www.goodreads.com/book...

> I would like the ability to share (or NOT share) my driving history with my insurance company to get a lower premium
> Many people install company specific devices in their cars to do just that

--See, that attitude right there? THAT'S PART OF THE PROBLEM. Benjamin Franklin had a quote or two for you.

" Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. "

--In this case, you are WILLING to give up a FREEDOM that you should have, just to save a little money. You should be able to drive where you want, when you want, without some insurance app SPYING on you! Being willing to be spied on EVEN MORE than we already are, is actively contributing to eroding the very concept of the USA being a "Free" country!

" I don't mind a camera in my phone... "
" I don't mind my insurance company installing a data-collection device in my car... "

' I don't mind a camera in my bedroom... '
' I don't mind a camera in my bathroom... '
' I don't mind a camera in my always-on TV... '
' We have always been at war with Eurasia... '

" Big Brother is Watching You. "
https://www.goodreads.com/work...

...That is where it will end up going. It's called "boiling the frog."

--As long as you haven't had an accident or ticket in $YEARS, the insurance company already knows you're a safe(r) driver. They don't *need* ever-more invasive looks into your private life to give you decent premium rates! Don't buy into the hype and marketing, and don't make it easier for them to take away your freedoms and liberty.

--Jesus, to think our forefathers died in the wars to protect our freedom, and now the sheeple are voluntarily willing to give it up for crumbs. Nobody learns...

--Truly, Sorry for the rant, I don't want you to feel like I'm going off on you... But my God I wish people would wake the hell up and realize that the East German regime would have KILLED for some of the stuff that people are **voluntarily willing to allow** into their lives these days, just by not being willing to protect what brave and heroic people already fought and died for. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

Yeah, you can always scrape the bottom of the barrel, ....

And the age for cyber-war?
Most interesting cyber abuses are at both ends of the boot chain.
A generalization is that the old guys understand boot code and drivers better
than the kids. Old guys have seem stuff fail more than any new kid so
the old guys might be more defensive programmers.

And then there is SciFi stuff that is perhaps to be true next week.
https://www.goodreads.com/seri...

In a previous life I worked on the SIOP and helped evaluate various (mostly counterforce) strategies. I highly recommend the books, Prisoners Dilemma (Poundstone) and Command and Control (Schlosser, don't get sidetracked by the Damascus incident story). If you have not read these sources, even if you worked on strategy and tactics at SAC (like I did), even if you taught Strategic and Tactical Sciences at the Air Force Institute of Technology (like I did), you are probably not as informed as you should be on these topics. I certainly was not then, but with maturation comes some ability to see the past for what it was.

People talk about the Government saddling our children with debts, when in reality it's the private sector doing so.
Management and financial types pull all the value out of company and saddle the company with debt that will take decades to pay off. When there is extra money, they play tricks to pump up stock values instead of investing in the company, the workers, or passing the savings onto consumers.
This has been going on for over a century now. Here's a great reference,
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

There's been a long term conspiracy to degrade labor unions since the 1950s.

This has been happening since at least the very early 1900's. reference Fredrick Lewis Allen's excellent book, The Lords of Creation. The capitalist have succeeded in making every generation think this is a new struggle and their ways are "conservative" not cutting edge exploitation.
Further reference for free courtesy of what appears to be Australia's slightly more sane copyright laws.
Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lews Allen

Greed is one thing that can impact others negatively including the push for big government.

"Greed" can't impact others. Greed is an implication and/or a motive. Motives without actions impact self only.

An action may impact others. But an action motivated by greed has the same impact on others as the same action motivated by love or unmotated at all, by accident.

In fact, a greedy tormentor can be bribed or bought, whereas do-gooders who'd cause you the same harm are much more dangerous.

C.S. Lewis said it best:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals

I don't completely agree with George Carlin's take on this but I still find it entertaining.

page.20: "Originally, much of the United States of America was covered with primeval forest: great areas in the western half and a vast area in the eastern half. In the eastern half, this primitive forest stretched westwards from Maine, around the Great Lakes, to about halfway through Minnesota; ..."

page.21: "It was not until the 1830s, however, that really large-scale lumbering operations commenced, turning lumbering into a major industry of an importance and status equal to that of the railroad and iron industries.
By 1850, as can be seen from Map.1, quite substantial inroads had been made into the virgin timber of the vast forest area in the eastern half ..."

page.23: "As Map.2 vividly shows, by 1942 there was not a great deal left of the vast virgin forest which originally covered all the eastern part of the United States ..."

[I've read the book at least twice, but I can't find my copy: the above is all I can get from Google Books.]

In short, USA citizens removed a lot of those lost 3 trillion trees!

The golden transcendence

http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

Good reads gives it 4.13 out of 5 stars probably be 4.5+ if it weren't for some outlier ratings from post puppy raters.

Care to be wrong again ?

First volume is "Inherit the Stars"

(The first book in the series stands by itself, the sequels are good, but not as good and not really needed for the core ideas.)

"Within a fraction of second, the bubble would then expand to consume the entire visible universe."

So, we can now communicate faster the light by modulating Higgs field, instead of torturing kings.
http://www.goodreads.com/quote...

Some folks believe the key to Electric car adoption is better batteries. The Powerhouse by Steve Levine follows the quest for better battery technology. It's not written as well as it might be, but it's still an interesting read...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

Alvin Toffler thought human personalities could be split between those who welcome change and those who avoid it. First published in mid-20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.amazon.com/Future-S...
https://www.goodreads.com/book...

Anyone undertaking these courses knows what they're signing up for (pseudo-science)

The people signing up for a course in homeopathy 'know' jack shit, they honestly cannot distinguish science from pseudoscience. These are the people that the education system failed to educate and now they are being misled at the university level. It may not be as violent as scientology but it is on the same level of intellectual immaturity and has no place in a modern university.

The problem with this kind of crap is two-fold, first it is downright dangerous to the patients health to encourage them to shun modern medicine, as many "alternative' practitioners explicitly and implicitly do. Secondly there is absolutely no doubt that evidence based meditation techniques such as mindfulness are good for your mental health but the utter nonsense surrounding such practices deters many of our best minds from investigating the subject. And where science fears to tread, superstition, mysticism, and the irrational behaviours they advocate will take hold.

As for the historical role of religion, it was once everything rolled into one, there was no such thing as science, law, and philosophy, these things were all under the umbrella of religion. Newton founded the chair of mathematics at cambridge, would you deny Newton's scientific credentials because he was first and foremost a respected theologian in his own lifetime? We've moved on, religion is dying all over the western world, but when people don't have a functioning bullshit detection kit they still 'know' jack shit and will behave irrationally and often against their own best interests.

Bullshit detection is the one skill that a modern education system should provide above all other skills, yet it consistently fails to do that for the majority of HS graduates. A good start to correcting this oversight would be to make Sagan's book compulsory reading for HS students, dissect and discuss the material with the same institutional enthusiasm shown for Shakespeare and Dickens.

The essence of being a politician (in a representative democracy) is representing the interests of those who voted for you.

That is an interesting starting point, but it is based on the assumption that everyone who voted for you agrees with each other 100% of the time. I often find myself in the voting booth trying to decide which is the less smelly of two bowls of shit. I'm not sure I have ever seen a candidate who I agreed with on every single issue; and amongst my closest friends I don't know that I agree with any of them on 100% of the issues that come up in a typical congressional session.

In other words, I would say it is impossible for a politician to always represent the interests of everyone who voted for them. Furthermore, they are supposed to represent the interests of everyone from their jurisdiction, regardless of who voted for them.

In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.

This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming, too: Work for money with little formal relationship with the source of the contracts ("Mr Johnson") and a very simple professional code of ethics.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wik...

Doomo chums!

I recently read this book this documentary is based on. The doctor who wrote it harps on this point to the degree it sounds preachy and fear mongery in the text.

The most interesting parts of the book were the stories which were ostensibly from cases with the names changed.

5. In order to have a chance to regulate the temperature well - and not keep cycling through blasts of heat and cooling - they'll need multiple temp probes, and an awareness of the outside temp and humidity as well, since ceramic insulation or no, the external environment will play a huge factor.

If your PID controller is cycling like that something is seriously wrong. Even a poorly tuned controller should eventually stabilize, unless the gains are way out from where they should be. The controller should be easily capable of overcoming fluctuations in ambient temperature, even in New England.

Which sucks but it's true. The worst bit is that the long-term cost of ownership of an EV is probably lower then a much cheaper gasoline vehicle, because the $1,500 gasoline car you buy is probably hellishly expensive to keep roadworthy, with shitty gas mileage (and subsequent $10-15k a year fuel costs), and forces you to burn your personal days at work quite regularly when said roadworthiness issues crop up. My $5k '99 Taurus was great from roughly '05 until '11, but at that point it refused to start and took hundreds from the ghetto mechanic and pull-apart to get back working, and then three months later it refuse to start again. So I switched to the bus. My social life sucks, but my bank account has a comma in it.

It reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote:[quote]“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”[/quote]

So providing education for poor people and recognising gay marriage lead inevitably to the Khmer Rouge?

First of all, corrections:

• Not "providing education for poor people", but "forcing taxpayers to provide education for poor people". Tax-collection happens at gun-point — using thus-collected monies for benevolence is tyranny — and decidedly against the intent of Constitution-framers.
• Not "recognizing gay marriage", but "forcing people to consider gay unions equivalent to married couples".

And now, yes, the above are made possible by the Collectivist sentiment — that the Individual's interests and desires are inferior to those of the Collective. Once that sentiment is adopted, there is no longer a legal barrier to prevent some future Khmer Rouge from killing millions. All they have to be able to claim is, it is done for "General Welfare".

If millions of victims is too stunning for you to be believable, try to think, how is Lynching somebody not a manifestation of "the will of the people"?

"COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD" — sounds familiar? Godwin's Law my tail — you aren't the first Collectivist in history...

ultra right wing paranoid stupid

Please, don't hate.

Yes, Virginia, the United States government has the Constitutional power to tax and to spend for general welfare

Are you seriously going to argue the legislative intent with the guy, who wrote the very law? I linked to the quote already, but you are too righteous to click on some wingnut's links, aren't you? Well, here it goes by value, rather than reference:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

— James Madison

Or, maybe, you are confusing "general welfare" with the Welfare-check? That must be it, Virginia... Because if Madison says, spending taxes on benevolence is against the Constitution, then it really must be...

That's the advantage of benevolence based on private charities — the mismanaged ones lose donations and disappear. I too stopped donating to Red Cross long ago — my charity money goes to the IRC.

I refuse to give them a single dime.

Try that attitude with public charities — financed by monies taken from you and me at gunpoint (taxes)... Whatever you may feel about their goals and methods, you can not simply stop paying them — your only recourse is to raise awareness hoping for the eventual healing to begin.

Oh, and they are unconstitutional too, but that stopped bothering anybody long ago.

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

Whoever came up with that title had read 1984

Yep, it does appear that 1984 is the manual they're using. That's what that book was for, right? A manual for the government to use?

Whoever came up with that title had read 1984

Perhaps, but I think we could get close for 90% of the world's population.

"Thall shall not kill" is a pretty common one.

"Thall shall not steal" is another, and so on.

Most humans seem to agree on the basics, "be nice to people, don't take things that aren't yours, help your fellow humans when you can, etc.

http://www.goodreads.com/work/...

Well, the army and Robin Hood might take issue with your statements. :) Nobody actually follows those rules rigidly in practice.

It isn't really enough to just have a list of rules like "don't kill." You need some kind of underlying principle that unifies them. Any intelligent being has to make millions of decisions in a day, and almost none of them are going to be on the lookup table. For example, you probably chose to get out of bed in the morning. How did you decide that doing this wasn't likely to result in somebody getting killed that day, or did you not care? I didn't give it much thought, because if I worried about causal relationships that far out I'd never do anything. But, when should an AI worry about such matters?

We actually make moral decisions all the time, we just don't think about them. When we want to design an AI, suddenly we have to.

That was my whole point. We can't agree on a logical definition of morality. Thus, it is really hard to design an AI that everybody would agree is moral.

Perhaps, but I think we could get close for 90% of the world's population.

"Thall shall not kill" is a pretty common one.

"Thall shall not steal" is another, and so on.

Most humans seem to agree on the basics, "be nice to people, don't take things that aren't yours, help your fellow humans when you can, etc.

http://www.goodreads.com/work/...

Reminds me of the plot to this book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

A strange plague called the ’Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget—small things at first, like where they left their keysthen the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily and there is no cure. But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Marianas Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered—a universal healer, from initial reports. It may just be the key to a universal cure. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab, the Trieste, has been built eight miles under the sea’s surface. But now the station is incommunicado, and it’s up to a brave few to descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depthsand perhaps to encounter an evil blacker than anything one could possibly imagine.

But you know what? Every article, every boycott and every protest is pushing them back. Similar bills are stalling or failing. The outrage at actions like these are causing more and more Americans to leave their religion in disgust. The more we drag this bullshit into the light, the more the theocrats feel the heat.

Fair enough, but what scares me is how many extremists are already in power, in Congress and in the Senate. And on the road to the White House. We as a society really do need to take a close look at what is known as the "christian dominionist movement". This movement seeks to establish an American theocracy with the rule of law given by the bible. We should think about what these people are actually proposing: the death penalty for abortion, both for doctor and mother. The death penalty for homosexuality. Here is an article to give you an idea of what I am talking about. A very good read on this subject is American Fascists.

It is easy to dismiss these people as being a crazy fringe. Indeed every society has its own lunatics. What is concerning is how this extreme form of christianity has infiltrated the main stream of christianity and what we commonly know as the christian right. What is extremely concerning is how many mainstream politicians share similar modes of thought to this movement. When I hear about laws such as what Tim Cook is writing about, I hear the clicking of a ratchet, bringing us a small step towards an American version of the taliban government.

Those of us with a sense of what is actually going on must work towards steering our society away from this cliff. Above all, we should promote the idea that although we live in a tolerant nation, we should never tolerate intolerance. The bastards who bring in laws like this should be run out of town.

Read Diaspora by Greg Egan. http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora...

Or Smith's Autonomy http://autonomyseries.com/
Or Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series. http://www.goodreads.com/serie...

All excellent novels.

To (miss)quote Mark Twain: Nothing is easier than loosing 70 pounds, I've done it several times ;-).

Original quote: http://www.goodreads.com/quote...

Loosing weight is always easy, not picking it up again is the hard part.

Or Daemon (2006). Each book in the trilogy improves on its predecessor.

Government agencies can by definition be more cost efficient than any private enterprise ever could be. Due to the goals.

A government agency has a specific purpose. A government agency tasked with building roads has its focus on building roads. Whatever money they get goes to the goal of building and maintaining roads. A private enterprise first and foremost goal is to provide revenue, with the stated goal being a necessary evil to accomplish profit.

So, following Ruskin, there is at one point no way to cut costs without compromising quality. Something that is done more readily by a private enterprise than a government agency. We've now arrived at the sorry point where "socialist" government work yields better quality than "capitalist" private enterprise products.

And personally, I prefer quality.

Whatever you do, at the end of the day the private enterprise has to tack on top of cost a revenue. Something a government agency does not have to. Its purpose is not to net a profit, its purpose is the product itself.

Yes, there are limitations to this. But no matter what you could mention that plagues "socialist, government" products, the very same is true for private enterprise. What would you like to cite as a reason for government jobs being worse? Lazy workers? You have that in both, public and private services. Kickbacks and bribes? Please, they're even higher in private enterprise.

Oh, right. "Nobody ever got promoted for saving money". True. In government jobs you rarely get promotions for showing how to create an inferior product more cheaply. But I hardly consider that something worth celebrating.

But to get back to the top of your reply (which, btw, feels a bit like nothing more than empty capitalist slogans slapped together without any explanation whatsoever), what kind of opportunity are you talking about? What opportunity do you still have? Look around you and tell me what opportunities exist, if any still do.

Oh yes, there are a select few that "made it big", right? Zuckerberg and ... uh ... well, there must have been others too. The problem here is perception bias. One makes it, how many million fail? Not because they were lazy or didn't want to put in enough work, they just were at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong idea. The stars were not aligned, so to speak.

Bluntly, by that chance, playing the lottery sounds more like a viable business plan. The chances of "winning" would be equally depending on you.

“I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.” - Hillary Rodham Clinton. I guess that dissent only applies to the Democrats though, eh?

Letting a donkey sleep in a bathtub. http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

Some people like to challenge themselves once in a while. By your logic, we should never move beyond our elementary school readers.

No, that's going by your strawman caricature of my logic.

By my actual logic, you should probably not try to skip directly from little golden books to Ulysses without reading incrementally more difficult things in between.

Gee, there's only one possible "point of reading"? And here I thought that one of the primary "points of reading" was to understand what the author was saying... which you can't very well do if you don't understand the words.

And if you have to look up every other damn word, you'll forget what the first part of the sentence said by the time you get to the end of it.

I have taught graduate-level courses at universities, and one of the things I strongly encourage students to do is look up recurring words that they don't know.

If your students are having to do that so often -- and that's the important word: "often!" -- that using an e-reader with a built-in dictionary provides a significant advantage, then what were they doing during their entire 'education' up to that point? Shouldn't people have already developed a decent vocabulary before becoming grad students? How do they even pass the verbal portion of the GRE?

Yes, that's a great exercise, and if you're in the middle of a fast-paced novel, it's probably a reasonable idea. But if you're actually trying to understand what an author is saying, and there's this word popping up a dozen times that you don't know, simply guessing what it means is missing an opportunity to learn something.

Well shit, if you've already tried figuring the word out from context and failed, and then it keeps coming up over and over again, then of course you should go look it up -- that's fucking common sense! Clearly, from your response, I overestimated Slashdotters' grasp of the obvious.

And recurring words are great for that kind of exercise, because it provides periodic reinforcement, which is one of the keys to learning natural language and recalling new things. Most authors -- even those who write "stories" and fiction -- tend to have "pet words" that aren't part of the standard core vocabulary everyone uses. When you see such a word and look it up [or figure it out from context], each time the author uses it again you'll reinforce that word. Suddenly, by the end of the book, you'll have expanded your vocabulary by a dozen or a few dozen words. (And you're more likely to remember the meaning than if you had just memorized the word for a vocab test or something -- seeing practical usage will aid recall.)

So you agree with me, then!

just write a virus on your apple powerbook and upload it to their mothership

problem solved

neil degrasse tyson understands:

http://www.goodreads.com/quote...

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

duh! easy as pie

We could have both perhaps. But in general, this is sad, since with a few trillion invested in R&D, we could have fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar, coming anyway, but more slowly) and automated indoor agriculture and near 100% emissions-free recycling of all consumer goods, and so on. And many actions of the wealthy (especially those invested in oil) have essentially blocked these sorts of efforts politically. As Bucky Fuller says, whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Whatever the legality, for those in charge of much of the world's wealth for whatever reason to cut-and-run from the very problems they have helped create is morally irresponsible and very selfish.

And it probably won't end well -- even for them. A private airstrip in New Zealand (or "Elysium" for that matter, even backed by a large force of security robots), will not protect you against nuclear fallout or rogue nano-tech or air-born plagues or a bunch of other things -- including just "drone" cruise missiles with conventional warheads we have had for decades. Those missiles are getting cheaper and easier to make; there way a Slashdot article years ago about a DIY cruise missile for about US$5K. The damage from such things will of course fall mostly on the poor as with all disasters, but cheap drones will be another destabilizing force if we have a social meltdown (which history shows, happens again and again, see Daniel Quinn's book "Beyond Civilization" for example). A better approach is to work to prevent the meltdown in the first place (like Bucky Fuller worked towards), or at least protect everyone you can (Schindler's list).

That is why I have invested all my (potential, mostly never realized) wealth (as far as primarily time) into trying to make the world work for everyone, and also trying to make it possible for everyone to build any scale lifeboats/ships they want.

After all, I did graduate from Princeton with Michelle Obama, and in the next year were Jeff Bezos, the late Phil Goldman, and many others. I could have picked a different path. I also worked for a short time as an undergrad with someone investing the Princeton endowment, who told me the reason a big investor does better than the typical small investor was more information, cheaper trades, and faster trades (enough to discourage me from trying to be an individual investor).

But more than that, I read the book, "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips when I was a teenager. I had gone to the library to read around books on how to become a millionaire. Of about six or seven there on the topic, all but one told me how to do it (the first million is the hardest; start a small business, work hard, be responsive to customers, hope you get lucky -- most small businesses fail in a few years, but keep trying and maybe you'll get lucky when you have enough experience from your failures). But the last book asked me, "Why do you want to be a millionaire?" And that is a very good question to ask yourself...

The basic concepts from that book :
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
http://seeingmoney.org/SevenLa...
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Comm...
"THE SEVEN LAWS OF MONEY
The following laws were published in 1977 in 'Seven laws of Money' by Mike Phillips. Mike, a Bank of America banker, was instrumental in developing Master Charge.
1. Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing. The first law is the hardest for most people to accept and is the source of the most distress. The clearest translation of this in terms of personal advice is "go ahead and do what you want to do." Worry about your ability to do it and competence to do it, but certainly do not worry about the money.
2. Money has its own rules: records, budgets, savings, borrowing. The rules of money are probably Ben Frankli

Fuck, every single time you see a story in your own field and realise its utter bullshit, you realise that ALL stories must be fucking bullshit, its just that you cant check up on stuff youre not involved with so easily

Bingo!

Basics? You mean "exactly what I got but nothing else?

Have you anything other than strawmen? By "basics" Libertarians mean enforcement of laws (civil and criminal) and defense from other countries. Which means, the government should maintain police, courts and the rest of justice system, and military. Nothing else.

no, the US was not founded on libertarian principles.

Said the man after repeatedly demonstrating ignorance of those same principles! Yes, the US was founded on these principles — nothing else is entrusted to government in the Constitution. Certainly not the help for the "needy". John Madison, in fact, is on record being quite explicit about it:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

You are entitled to your opinion on whether or not such expenditures would be a good thing. But you are not entitled to your own history — the US was founded on Libertarian principles.