zipwitch

Large, white and fast you say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch

Assuming for a moment that you're serious or even a little accurate, consider for a moment the cost of the infrastructure the human race has built over centuries based on traditional climate patterns. Now imagine build all that again, no not from scratch, but it's still a vast endeavour that we will struggle and suffer to make succeed, if we even can.

Climate change denialism has more in common with Flat Earth Theory than religion of any stripe. (Which makes so many Americans buying into it all the more frighting.)

And here I clicked expecting Bowditch's.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowditch%27s_American_Practi...

I suspect what you are seeing is a reaction, or over-reaction, to how Americans have long censored our own history. Once you figure out the official (accepted, schoolbook, popular) depiction of history edits out the nastiest bits in favor cheerleading, the presumption that anything "left out" should be taken in the worst possible light comes naturally. This is especially true when the information in question ("The US invaded Russia? And we just dont mention it?!) seems so potentially loaded and relevant to current world events.

You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.

Worse, it is teaching a generation (or more) that our justice system is stupid and broken. That in turn erodes ideas like rule of law that a essential to modern civilization.

While not exactly what you're looking for, Torrentfreak does an annual review of VPNs. Here's last year's : https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-anonymous-review-2017-...

SF author Charles Stross has a couple of damning criticisms of He3 mining on the moon, found here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshin...

In short:

Nobody's built any useful (for power generation) fusion reactor yet, much less one running He3.

There isn't actually much He3 on the moon, just more than here on Earth. It's doubtful that mining on the moon would be cheaper than just making it here.

And let us not forget those who ended up working in wildly different fields from their degree or degrees. Such "cross-pollination" between different fields can be very productive.

Several of these remind me of James Nicoll's old quote from Usenet:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

A similiar idea has been around since the 1980s. Put a cloud in retrograde geosync and within a few days there will be nothing functional left, just a mini-asteroid belt.

http://www.jamesoberg.com/pearl.html

Pure anecdote and likely shaded by the Cold War, but I remember my WWII veteran grandfather (European theater) telling me how after the war he had talked to fellow US and British officers responsible for turning POWs over to the Soviets. (I don't recall if he said whether they were the soliders of Axis powers being turned over to the Russians under some agreement, or soldiers from Russia or from Soviet occupied countries.) He recounted how the Soviets made no secret of the fact that the POWs were executed en masse, and the Allied officers responded by helping their own prisoners escape rather than hand them over to certain death.

Install Cthulhoid Overlord?

My memory is that ~20 years ago or so bottom-tier cable networks would get to that point during off-peak hours. I had to be tremendously bored before even contemplating watching them, but it happened a time or two - and I discovered that that much advertising did make pretty much anything unwatchable.

We are currently paying the costs (both monetary and otherwise) for the apparatus you describe, but looking at the last decade, the benefits appear to be absent. Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that an organization like the NSA just isn't worth having?

Because they're not keen on people whose business model is: "having laws is a cost we don't need to pay".

Some procedures are impossible for human beings to follow with high nines levels of accuracy. (Look at attention blindness, for example.) All that is done with harsh punishment in such cases is damage to morale. Or worse, it causes people to think they have "fixed" the problem when they have in fact done no such thing. The solution is to _change the process_ so that it can achieve the desired level of accuracy.

If we want to search Mars for life before we contaminate it then we need to launch a crash program to do so now, because our window is swiftly expiring. Right now a small group with minimal resources (on the to build and launch stuff into space scale) could likely launch a cubesat with some sort of bacterial payload that would eventually get to Mars. Such a stunt is only going to get easier in the next few decades.

Explore Mars, in depth, ASAP, or someone will render the issue moot by starting their own terraforming project on the cheap. (Or the not so cheap. I don't believe Musk's colonization plans -if they ever come to pass- would be able to prevent contamination, no matter how hard they might try.)

I've seen discussion floating around of dazzle camouflage for the face - a sort of blend of WWI meet 80s glam rock.

So, this is a question best resolved by invoking Newton's Lightsaber, at least for now?

I'm not familiar with the intricacies of CPU design. What are the odds the NSA somehow arranged for these vulnerabilities to exist?

I seem to recall another popular science-fiction author who had a very strong answer. He called it the Butlerian Jihad. Whether or not it's a good answer is another question entirely.

We treat them almost exactly the same. As the province of starry-eyed dreamers to whom we pay lip service while only allowing them a pittance in comparison to what we spend on wars, enriching the few at the expense of the many, and indulging our varied desires for swift gratification.

And they then use that leverage to attack the readers/viewers. Speaking for myself, I will see the internet wither and die before I'll accept that as a valid model for anything.

Are you implying this would be a bad thing?

While I think the internet provides amazing and revolutionary communications options to the human race, Facebook is quite clearly not among them.

Why would they want to block a service that will do a ton of intelligence gathering for them, for free?

This would appear to be consistent with what I've personally observed of Uber's approach to, well, pretty much everything.

Their trade with North Korea has been cut in half since last year, and they've repeatedly supported increased sanctions, including yesterday. Here in the United States it's popular to isolate nations on the far side of the planet, where we don't have to directly deal with the horrific consequences. But North Korea borders China, and the Chinese will need to deal with the effects of a full or partial North Korean collapse.

And I don't think it's actually an effective (or humane) was to try to solve problems like this to begin with.