Daimler sold Chrysler to some US-based conglomerate. Here's the first link out of Google: Cerberus Capital Management. Ok, so I guess they're an "equity management company" rather than a conglomerate.
In any case, they're completely US again. Not that that's something to brag about considering how the US auto industry is going currently.
Hijacker tries to hijack plane. 60 people get up and shoot at him, miss, and the plane explodes.
Well, that whole "plane explodes" bit might actually encourage the hijackers. If the whole goal was "plane explodes" then they'd say to themselves, "Heck, we don't even really have to be able to fly the plane or anything, we can just piss off the passengers and they'll blow up the plane for us. Much less work on our part."
The parent actually mentioned 911, who's whole point was to kill people, not steal an airplane. Having the passengers blow themselves up is really much, much easier than having to take over the cockpit, make sure the passengers are well controlled, etc. In the case of 911, they probably would've been able to hijack many more planes with far less manpower. One guy stands up saying he's taking over the airplane, plane explodes.
No, the relevant question is "How much more financial or environmental damage could you really do to a state already home to Detroit and Flint?"
So says the poster with no ability to read a map. Detroit actually connects more closely to Lake Huron (that's the one on the right side of Michigan on a map, which borders it and Canada) and Lake Erie (that's the one that runs from Buffalo, NY over the length of Ohio with Canada to its north). Flint is land-locked and also on the east side of the state (that's the right side on a map).
Lake Michigan is on the west side of Michigan (the state). It actually is the only Great Lake which is completely contained in the US, so I guess we can fuck it up, since it's all ours, right? Truthfully, for this problem I'd be more worried about Chicago (that's in Illinois), since they get their drinking water from it and they're a pretty large population center near Indiana. As for Michigan, there really isn't a whole lot right on the west coast near Indiana. A few small towns, but that's about it.
Frankly, Michigan is one of the easier states to find on a map of the US. It looks like a mitten, it's got a lot of water around it. Heck, it's probably one of the most recognizable next to Florida.
In the future, this might help: Great Lakes They've even got the various lakes highlighted.
Yes, standardized testing has been around for far longer than NCLB, but has your school district's funding ever universally been based on the scores of the students?
I know that the district that my parents taught in (they've recently retired) basically give up federal money so that they could actually give their students an education rather than just teach to a test.
Wow, a chance to use my minor in telecommunications. The reason that Clearchannel or its brethren don't own those two college stations that you mentioned is simple: it's illegal for them to do so. There's a section of spectrum, something like 92.1 and below, that's reserved for educational use. If I remember right, they also have to be local, so low power, stations, so it's not like they'll be taking over the world.
I'm pretty sure that this area of the spectrum was meant for actual educational use, like broadcast classes, etc., but basically it all seems to have ended up as normal radio stations run as part of the school. Hell, my high school even had one: 88.1 "The Bottom Line".
Generally, AP credits remove electives. They're the ones that cover your basic English, math, science, and history courses. I doubt he took anything except courses required for his majors.
I always love the "foreign insurgent" argument. If the Iraqis love our presence on their soil so much, why aren't they turning these obviously-dangerous foreign insurgents over to us? I'd also love to see some proof that every person that has attacked US troops in "insurgent" attacks was not Iraqi.
Frankly, in their position, I'd be pissed too. This huge, overwhelming army came into my country, gutted my military and police forces (knocking out my basic services in the process), and overthrew my government. Now, I don't mind that government bit because the last guy in charge was a really bad guy, but then they've basically taken over the whole process of creating a new government. And these troops won't leave. They've been here for years!
Even if the Iraqi people weren't pissed enough to actually attack the troops, I can't imagine that they're happy overall.
I'd really like to believe that, but the Republican "victims" seem to keep voting for the neocons, which, in my eyes, makes the neocons Republicans. They seem to have been accepted whole-heartedly into the party.
Frankly, I'd love to see these "victims" form a new party. Heck, I'm generally liberal, but at least I could respect for the "old" Republican party, with their views on small government, etc., whether I agreed with it or not.
Do you mean like the Civil War, WWI, & WWII when we lost some of our rights temporarily and then got them back?
Simple counter argument: those wars ended and were expected to end. Even the US government has basically stated that the war on terror is a perpetual, worldwide "war".
I'm not he would been considered liberal, but I'm sure he wouldn't be considered a Republican. The neo-cons started into power under Reagon and they seemed to give up on fiscal responsiblity and small government around that time.
I'm not sure how this "perfect" distro would be any different than a current distro other than disk space and lack of backward compatibility. Let's say you toss all of libraries you mentioned, it'll take up less disk space, but the runtime footprint itself probably won't actually change in any significant way.
Much of java is loaded dynamically at runtime, so if you don't use something, it's not just sitting there, taking up memory. With modern memory management systems, any unused portion of memory is just going to be swapped to disk in any case, so it almost doesn't matter if, say, Swing is memory resident or not.
Personally, I agree that there are a ton of libraries that I'll never use, but that doesn't mean that they're hurting me because they exist. I've never used CORBA, I haven't used RMI in over five years, the only parts of AWT that I use are those subclassed in the Swing libraries. Lately, I work with Servlets, so I barely touch user interface libraries at all. Not to mention that sometimes I need one of those libraries that I generally don't use and at that point I'm glad that it's already there and resident.
As for disk space, Java is pretty insignificant compared to what features it provides. My 1.5 JRE is about 70 megs, but can run just about anything writting in java that's been written since the first release. It's basically the equivalent of a fully internationalized operating system by itself.
If you really need to save size, look into some of the other releases of java, J2ME or whatever it's called now.
What happened to everyone having freedoms and taking personal responsibility for exercising them in an ethical way?
Actually, I think this is simple to answer: as soon as people realized that they can make money by suing, they lost all since of personal responsibility. There are definite problems with the nanny state, I personally can't stand the "What about the children?" argument, but I don't think that's where it started.
Actually, there's a simple answer here that most people on the forum will cheer about: D20 is open source.
Yes, it helps that the system has great consistency and is supported by a large company, but what really made it shine is that WOTC basically gives the D20 system away for free. You can write adventures for use with D&D (or other D20 systems) without paying anyone a licensing fee (unless you count including the D20 license with the product, which is required). You can create new, non-D&D compatible campaign settings that use D20 the same way.
Like you, I've played through a variety of the D&D products (starting with Basic, through 1st and 2nd, and now onto 3rd/3.5 editions). As for campaigns, I've played in Greyhawk, various homebrew, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, and a few more than I really can't remember specifically.
Eberron has some great ideas. It has a 19th century feel of exploration with magic to replace much of the technology of the time. I love the fact that it's so easy to work in playing a "monster" race. In a lot of ways, there are no "monsters" in Eberron, just factions of various sorts, some good, some bad. An argument can be made for just about any race, class, and alignment combination. Heck, there's a whole village of good-aligned yuan-ti. The thing that I like the best is the fact that the vast majority of the population is low level and/or having only NPC classes, which is the parent's second point.
When playing most other major campaigns (homebrews usually excepted), I would regularly find myself wondering: "Why doesn't the guy hiring our 2nd level party just do this himself? He's a 8th level fighter who's only job seems to be to hang around this town as a constable. I'm pretty sure the three other constables, who are only 6th or 7th level, can hold down the fort until he gets back." (Yes, that's an exaggerated example.)
The Forgotten Realms is especially bad about this. You walk into anything resembling a city and you can't spit without hitting a second or third level character, there's a couple of 7th or 8th level spellcasters, every barkeep seems to be a 4th level veteran fighter, and an average member of the local thieves' guild could assassinate your party before having her morning coffee. When you go into a major city, it's even worse. Without really trying, I can think of half a dozen characters, all of them good, who have levels greater than 15th. Three of them are far over 20th. Most of them are spellcasters who can save the world without breaking a sweat. These people can and have taken on dieties and have been around for hundreds of years (potions of longevity seem to be on tap in most bars). There are really evil NPCs too, but they don't seem to be doing so well, since the steady state seems to be that the good guys are in control. They're your allies, but why do they need you?
Eberron can let you be someone. It's high magic, so basic items are easily available, but any time you get yours hands on something that's even of moderate power, it means something and probably has a history. Alignment isn't set in stone. All of the countries just got over a terrible war and seem to be in a major cold war right now. There are no countries that are "evil", even the one run by a vampire and uses undead as shock troops, and there are no countries that are "good", since even the "best" countries have spy organizations that wouldn't blink before capturing and torturing someone for information.
Of course, like the parent states, there aren't any high-level "set" adventures available, but there is a huge amount of potential to make them. There are at least two eras where extraplanar beings tried to take over (first demons, then aberrations), many of which are trapped in various places across the globe. There's a fallen kingdom of giants (they're the ones who took out the demons), a whole continent that's home to introspective dragons, and another continent where the human population is basically ruled by extraplanar beings through possession and subterfuge.
As campaigns go, it's definitely got more potential than most and the ideas are interesting and work well together.
You need two joysticks? The first external controller I had for a video game was a set of two paddles. Yep, that's one axis each and a button for each one.
I think that his complaint about an improvement to a controller should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. Improvements in controllers definitely can improve game possiblities. No, they don't necessarily improve games, but they do open new vistas.
I remember playing pong just fine against my brother with those paddles; it was a really fun game, but there wasn't a whole lot you could easily play other than that. Of course, it was hell to play Spy Hunter, since one paddle controlled the steering, one controlled the acceleration/braking and each one had a separate weapon switch, one for machine guns and one for oil slick.
It was like some kind of miracle when we got a joystick.
Well, the AI would be just a generic based on class and various items, etc. Yeah, certain skills probably would never get used, others would get used differently than the player intended, etc., but it would at least keep your rogue from acting like a mage.
I'd probably make sure there were some limitations both for and against the player. The AI is going to be reasonably stupid, so I'd probably discount any kind of permanent death or major loss of items, etc. Of course, the NPC could die, it just wouldn't have any effect on the character when the player "returned". Of course to counter this "invulerabilty", the character would gain experience at a reduced rate and wouldn't gain any treasure or wealth because of it. Basically, you couldn't have an army of gold farmers this way.
Also, you'd have to make sure that it only happened when the player was completely offline, not just playing an alt. I'm not sure how you'd handle it when a player logs on and his character is already out running around. Maybe just have him replace the AI? Probably limit this to adventures with the character's guild members in that case, so you'd "wake up" with people you actually knew.
Most of the other posts seem to have covered much of what's wrong with Itanium (I'm especially concerned about compiler improvement myself), but I don't think anyone has said anything about one of your assumptions about NOPs.
Except for the fact that the NOPs will now be in the binary, making the binaries larger. I consider this a moot point given the inexpense of modern storage.
Modern storage, both memory and secondary is incredibly cheap, but we've still got one problem where large binaries pose a problem: memory bus usage. The pipe from the memory to the processor is still the Van Neuman bottleneck and longer instructions make this problem worse. I don't have any numbers, but how often does the Itanium wait for instructions? This is pretty common on branch mispredictions on out-of-order execution processors.
Frankly, when it comes to instruction size efficiency, modern x86 architectures are really excellent. It used to be the RISC held a good edge because, though it's instructions did very little, it's instruction reordering made so many more instructions execute simultaneously that it made up for the low instruction density. Then Intel did the impossible with CISC and made instruction reordering possible, through on-chip CISC to RISC translation. Basically, we're left with high incoming instruction density along with full reordering, which is the best of both worlds, leading to high instruction level parallelism.
It seems to me that the Itanium went in the completely wrong direction when it comes to instruction density. Sure, it can run a huge number of instructions at the same time, but you're basically forced to ship NOPs along with them. Using your figure of 40%, that means, on average, 40% of your incoming instruction stream is complete fluff. Thus, 40% of your instruction bandwidth is basically lost.
Also, individual EPIC instructions (at least in the Itanium's case) have a fixed width, so, like traditional RISC architectures, they're already pretty low in instruction density.
Actually, according to the article, it's because copper is basically not found on Mars. So if they do see copper in what gets tossed into the atmosphere with the impact, they can assume it's from the "slug", not Mars itself. They even mention that Martian iron is plentiful and using iron would just confuse the issue.
Yep, and the machine gun prevented war because it was too horrible for men to use and I've got a flying car parked in my driveway.
More seriously, if you look at the amount of copper used in computing devices, you'll find that it's nothing in comparison to running a huge strand of copper wire to get power to those devices. I'd love to believe that we'll all have nice, cheap, superconducting power distribution by the 22nd century, but it's been thirty years away for the last fifty years or so right along with the fusion-based power that was supposed to be transported by it.
And this is different from the current situation how? Yes, for whatever reason an elevator could be stalled. Currently we just lose that particular shaft for a few minutes. Assuming that this stall isn't because of a failure, you'd just end up waiting in the shaft instead of waiting in a lobby somewhere.
In fact, if we allow elevators to move more freely, say being able to switch shafts at multiple floors, you wouldn't even have that problem. If a car was stopped, other cars would just go around. More like a train switching yard than what we think of as elevator algorithms now.
Actually, it's got nothing to do with how far gravity "stretches" (gravity gets weaker as distance increases by never goes away -- ignoring any other gravity fields, you could have an orbit of any distance). All circular orbits around the Earth have to be centered on the center of the Earth where it's center of gravity is. (Elliptical orbits and odd orbits that need to be continually corrected to be maintained are another story...)
An easy way to visualize this is to tie a weight to the end of a string and spin the weight around your hand in a circle. The weight is the satellite, your hand is the Earth, and the string is the force due to gravity. If you change the length of the string, the speed of the weight changes (it will be faster if it's a short string, slower if it's a long one). Now picture that your hand is also spinning around an axis and you want the same side of your hand to face the weight at all times. So the speed that the weight rotates around your hand has to be the same as the speed at which your hand rotates, which means the string can only be a certain length to achieve this.
So not only does the satellite have to be over the equator (since otherwise it would "wobble" above and below the equator toward the poles and thus not be geostationary), it has to be a certain distance from the Earth (the proper length of the string) so that it can be over the same point (rotating at the same speed).
You do realize you don't have to date someone in your own field just so that they'll be able to understand you, right? After basically exhausting the potential pool of women in my CS department (yes, CS women can be as emotionally impaired as their male counterparts), I met and marriage a woman who went on to get her PhD in physics. She may not be in my field, but she's more than bright enough to at least get the gist of what I'm talking about.
She can also keep up her end of the conversation when anything science related comes up and our conversations about science aren't limited to just computers and what computer scientists may or may not know about science. Of course, if we start talking about great literature, we tend to bog down since we're both a bit clueless, but I'd prefer that to a blind stare when I bring up the latest digital paper technology.
Stephenson's Diamond Age actually talks a bit about this. There's actually a scene where characters are temporarily distracted by elves or something dancing along a pair of animated chopsticks. The characters just both realize that they'd gotten distracted and continue their conversation because it isn't unusual for something like that to occur in their lives.
Another example from the same source are billboards where animated characters "charge" at passersby since that readily gets their attention. And people thought talking on cell phones was bad for driving...
Slashdot Mirror
Texas: 678,051 km^2
France: 674,843 km^2
That makes France 99.5% the size of Texas. It's odd the things that you learn in French 3 and remember nearly a decade later.
In any case, they're completely US again. Not that that's something to brag about considering how the US auto industry is going currently.
Well, that whole "plane explodes" bit might actually encourage the hijackers. If the whole goal was "plane explodes" then they'd say to themselves, "Heck, we don't even really have to be able to fly the plane or anything, we can just piss off the passengers and they'll blow up the plane for us. Much less work on our part."
The parent actually mentioned 911, who's whole point was to kill people, not steal an airplane. Having the passengers blow themselves up is really much, much easier than having to take over the cockpit, make sure the passengers are well controlled, etc. In the case of 911, they probably would've been able to hijack many more planes with far less manpower. One guy stands up saying he's taking over the airplane, plane explodes.
So says the poster with no ability to read a map. Detroit actually connects more closely to Lake Huron (that's the one on the right side of Michigan on a map, which borders it and Canada) and Lake Erie (that's the one that runs from Buffalo, NY over the length of Ohio with Canada to its north). Flint is land-locked and also on the east side of the state (that's the right side on a map).
Lake Michigan is on the west side of Michigan (the state). It actually is the only Great Lake which is completely contained in the US, so I guess we can fuck it up, since it's all ours, right? Truthfully, for this problem I'd be more worried about Chicago (that's in Illinois), since they get their drinking water from it and they're a pretty large population center near Indiana. As for Michigan, there really isn't a whole lot right on the west coast near Indiana. A few small towns, but that's about it.
Frankly, Michigan is one of the easier states to find on a map of the US. It looks like a mitten, it's got a lot of water around it. Heck, it's probably one of the most recognizable next to Florida.
In the future, this might help: Great Lakes They've even got the various lakes highlighted.
I know that the district that my parents taught in (they've recently retired) basically give up federal money so that they could actually give their students an education rather than just teach to a test.
I'm pretty sure that this area of the spectrum was meant for actual educational use, like broadcast classes, etc., but basically it all seems to have ended up as normal radio stations run as part of the school. Hell, my high school even had one: 88.1 "The Bottom Line".
Generally, AP credits remove electives. They're the ones that cover your basic English, math, science, and history courses. I doubt he took anything except courses required for his majors.
Frankly, in their position, I'd be pissed too. This huge, overwhelming army came into my country, gutted my military and police forces (knocking out my basic services in the process), and overthrew my government. Now, I don't mind that government bit because the last guy in charge was a really bad guy, but then they've basically taken over the whole process of creating a new government. And these troops won't leave. They've been here for years!
Even if the Iraqi people weren't pissed enough to actually attack the troops, I can't imagine that they're happy overall.
Frankly, I'd love to see these "victims" form a new party. Heck, I'm generally liberal, but at least I could respect for the "old" Republican party, with their views on small government, etc., whether I agreed with it or not.
This might help: Jon Swift
Simple counter argument: those wars ended and were expected to end. Even the US government has basically stated that the war on terror is a perpetual, worldwide "war".
I'm not he would been considered liberal, but I'm sure he wouldn't be considered a Republican. The neo-cons started into power under Reagon and they seemed to give up on fiscal responsiblity and small government around that time.
Much of java is loaded dynamically at runtime, so if you don't use something, it's not just sitting there, taking up memory. With modern memory management systems, any unused portion of memory is just going to be swapped to disk in any case, so it almost doesn't matter if, say, Swing is memory resident or not.
Personally, I agree that there are a ton of libraries that I'll never use, but that doesn't mean that they're hurting me because they exist. I've never used CORBA, I haven't used RMI in over five years, the only parts of AWT that I use are those subclassed in the Swing libraries. Lately, I work with Servlets, so I barely touch user interface libraries at all. Not to mention that sometimes I need one of those libraries that I generally don't use and at that point I'm glad that it's already there and resident.
As for disk space, Java is pretty insignificant compared to what features it provides. My 1.5 JRE is about 70 megs, but can run just about anything writting in java that's been written since the first release. It's basically the equivalent of a fully internationalized operating system by itself.
If you really need to save size, look into some of the other releases of java, J2ME or whatever it's called now.
Actually, I think this is simple to answer: as soon as people realized that they can make money by suing, they lost all since of personal responsibility. There are definite problems with the nanny state, I personally can't stand the "What about the children?" argument, but I don't think that's where it started.
Yes, it helps that the system has great consistency and is supported by a large company, but what really made it shine is that WOTC basically gives the D20 system away for free. You can write adventures for use with D&D (or other D20 systems) without paying anyone a licensing fee (unless you count including the D20 license with the product, which is required). You can create new, non-D&D compatible campaign settings that use D20 the same way.
Eberron has some great ideas. It has a 19th century feel of exploration with magic to replace much of the technology of the time. I love the fact that it's so easy to work in playing a "monster" race. In a lot of ways, there are no "monsters" in Eberron, just factions of various sorts, some good, some bad. An argument can be made for just about any race, class, and alignment combination. Heck, there's a whole village of good-aligned yuan-ti. The thing that I like the best is the fact that the vast majority of the population is low level and/or having only NPC classes, which is the parent's second point.
When playing most other major campaigns (homebrews usually excepted), I would regularly find myself wondering: "Why doesn't the guy hiring our 2nd level party just do this himself? He's a 8th level fighter who's only job seems to be to hang around this town as a constable. I'm pretty sure the three other constables, who are only 6th or 7th level, can hold down the fort until he gets back." (Yes, that's an exaggerated example.)
The Forgotten Realms is especially bad about this. You walk into anything resembling a city and you can't spit without hitting a second or third level character, there's a couple of 7th or 8th level spellcasters, every barkeep seems to be a 4th level veteran fighter, and an average member of the local thieves' guild could assassinate your party before having her morning coffee. When you go into a major city, it's even worse. Without really trying, I can think of half a dozen characters, all of them good, who have levels greater than 15th. Three of them are far over 20th. Most of them are spellcasters who can save the world without breaking a sweat. These people can and have taken on dieties and have been around for hundreds of years (potions of longevity seem to be on tap in most bars). There are really evil NPCs too, but they don't seem to be doing so well, since the steady state seems to be that the good guys are in control. They're your allies, but why do they need you?
Eberron can let you be someone. It's high magic, so basic items are easily available, but any time you get yours hands on something that's even of moderate power, it means something and probably has a history. Alignment isn't set in stone. All of the countries just got over a terrible war and seem to be in a major cold war right now. There are no countries that are "evil", even the one run by a vampire and uses undead as shock troops, and there are no countries that are "good", since even the "best" countries have spy organizations that wouldn't blink before capturing and torturing someone for information.
Of course, like the parent states, there aren't any high-level "set" adventures available, but there is a huge amount of potential to make them. There are at least two eras where extraplanar beings tried to take over (first demons, then aberrations), many of which are trapped in various places across the globe. There's a fallen kingdom of giants (they're the ones who took out the demons), a whole continent that's home to introspective dragons, and another continent where the human population is basically ruled by extraplanar beings through possession and subterfuge.
As campaigns go, it's definitely got more potential than most and the ideas are interesting and work well together.
I think that his complaint about an improvement to a controller should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. Improvements in controllers definitely can improve game possiblities. No, they don't necessarily improve games, but they do open new vistas.
I remember playing pong just fine against my brother with those paddles; it was a really fun game, but there wasn't a whole lot you could easily play other than that. Of course, it was hell to play Spy Hunter, since one paddle controlled the steering, one controlled the acceleration/braking and each one had a separate weapon switch, one for machine guns and one for oil slick.
It was like some kind of miracle when we got a joystick.
I'd probably make sure there were some limitations both for and against the player. The AI is going to be reasonably stupid, so I'd probably discount any kind of permanent death or major loss of items, etc. Of course, the NPC could die, it just wouldn't have any effect on the character when the player "returned". Of course to counter this "invulerabilty", the character would gain experience at a reduced rate and wouldn't gain any treasure or wealth because of it. Basically, you couldn't have an army of gold farmers this way.
Also, you'd have to make sure that it only happened when the player was completely offline, not just playing an alt. I'm not sure how you'd handle it when a player logs on and his character is already out running around. Maybe just have him replace the AI? Probably limit this to adventures with the character's guild members in that case, so you'd "wake up" with people you actually knew.
Except for the fact that the NOPs will now be in the binary, making the binaries larger. I consider this a moot point given the inexpense of modern storage.
Modern storage, both memory and secondary is incredibly cheap, but we've still got one problem where large binaries pose a problem: memory bus usage. The pipe from the memory to the processor is still the Van Neuman bottleneck and longer instructions make this problem worse. I don't have any numbers, but how often does the Itanium wait for instructions? This is pretty common on branch mispredictions on out-of-order execution processors.
Frankly, when it comes to instruction size efficiency, modern x86 architectures are really excellent. It used to be the RISC held a good edge because, though it's instructions did very little, it's instruction reordering made so many more instructions execute simultaneously that it made up for the low instruction density. Then Intel did the impossible with CISC and made instruction reordering possible, through on-chip CISC to RISC translation. Basically, we're left with high incoming instruction density along with full reordering, which is the best of both worlds, leading to high instruction level parallelism.
It seems to me that the Itanium went in the completely wrong direction when it comes to instruction density. Sure, it can run a huge number of instructions at the same time, but you're basically forced to ship NOPs along with them. Using your figure of 40%, that means, on average, 40% of your incoming instruction stream is complete fluff. Thus, 40% of your instruction bandwidth is basically lost.
Also, individual EPIC instructions (at least in the Itanium's case) have a fixed width, so, like traditional RISC architectures, they're already pretty low in instruction density.
Actually, according to the article, it's because copper is basically not found on Mars. So if they do see copper in what gets tossed into the atmosphere with the impact, they can assume it's from the "slug", not Mars itself. They even mention that Martian iron is plentiful and using iron would just confuse the issue.
Yep, and the machine gun prevented war because it was too horrible for men to use and I've got a flying car parked in my driveway.
More seriously, if you look at the amount of copper used in computing devices, you'll find that it's nothing in comparison to running a huge strand of copper wire to get power to those devices. I'd love to believe that we'll all have nice, cheap, superconducting power distribution by the 22nd century, but it's been thirty years away for the last fifty years or so right along with the fusion-based power that was supposed to be transported by it.
In fact, if we allow elevators to move more freely, say being able to switch shafts at multiple floors, you wouldn't even have that problem. If a car was stopped, other cars would just go around. More like a train switching yard than what we think of as elevator algorithms now.
An easy way to visualize this is to tie a weight to the end of a string and spin the weight around your hand in a circle. The weight is the satellite, your hand is the Earth, and the string is the force due to gravity. If you change the length of the string, the speed of the weight changes (it will be faster if it's a short string, slower if it's a long one). Now picture that your hand is also spinning around an axis and you want the same side of your hand to face the weight at all times. So the speed that the weight rotates around your hand has to be the same as the speed at which your hand rotates, which means the string can only be a certain length to achieve this.
So not only does the satellite have to be over the equator (since otherwise it would "wobble" above and below the equator toward the poles and thus not be geostationary), it has to be a certain distance from the Earth (the proper length of the string) so that it can be over the same point (rotating at the same speed).
She can also keep up her end of the conversation when anything science related comes up and our conversations about science aren't limited to just computers and what computer scientists may or may not know about science. Of course, if we start talking about great literature, we tend to bog down since we're both a bit clueless, but I'd prefer that to a blind stare when I bring up the latest digital paper technology.
Another example from the same source are billboards where animated characters "charge" at passersby since that readily gets their attention. And people thought talking on cell phones was bad for driving...