Your "The sun isn't getting hotter"-article is looking at decades, not millions of years. What the sun has been doing since the 1980s is quite irrelevant to its evolution on larger time-scales. Even your water-vapor article concludes that the oceans could be boiled away if the earth were hotter, in the second to last paragraph.

Do you even read your own references?

Okay, that changes things. Not only has the device a secret backdoor decryption thingy (whatever that might be), the CPU will also send (easily detected) packets over your network, but nobody has detected these packets yet because of... reasons. And the Chinese are *so* interested in you that they would risk getting caught performing something as bizarre as this scheme of yours just to get a glimpse at your facebook friends.

This conspiracy theory of yours sounds rather far-fetched.

Nope, we're going to burn instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Earth.27s_fate

I merely mentioned China because it appears to be the USA's current boogeyman, and yet it has significantly fewer murders (about 1/4th as many, it seems). Regardless, good job on dodging the point and putting the focus on an irrelevant detail. Might I interest you in a meaningful response, or will you further derail the topic by attempting to include death penalty victims in China's homicide statistics? Just forget about China and consider Western Europe and Japan.

> As far as murder rate, the US is relatively far down the list with approximately 4.2 per 100,000. Compare this to ~91 per 100,000 for Honduras.

Are your standards really so low that you would compare yourself to the country with the highest number of homicides in the world? How about you compare your country to some first-world countries instead? Try any of the countries in Western Europe, or Japan, or even China...

> This is a start, and if it keeps ONE kid from being damaged, then imo it is worth it!

Is it, really? How many adults must suffer to prevent harm to one child? Give us an estimate please.

If you ban guns only the children of criminals will be able to accidentally shoot their parents! :p

And who will be the receiver of all these payments? What will they do with the money?

> Why should any individual German imagine that *Germany* apologizing incriminates them?

Because ostensibly the individual Germans are collectively responsible for the current German government, and the German government represents Germany? Governments and states may outlive individual people, but surely they don't outlive generations, as far as culpability is concerned? Surely in a democracy the government of a country represents the people currently living and voting in that country, and not those living and voting 60 years ago?

Do you have a point? Because it sounds like you're fishing (somewhat desperately) for a rather far-fetched doom-scenario just to get a chance to call China irresponsible.

Guess what, asteroids don't make any sudden movements, so there isn't any real danger of crashing into it unless you're completely incompetent, which the Chinese are not (despite many slashdotters baseless assertions to the contrary). Besides, it's a 50000000000000 kg rock, a collision with a small probe won't even make it blink.

> going after airlines because they write apps that ask for your personal information to HELP you keep track of the flights you are on?

Won't somebody think of the poor airlines that require access to your pictures to keep track of your flights? They're just trying to HELP you! Why is California being such a meany! :'(

I do not dispute that such statistics can be useful in a variety of situations, I just disagree (a lot) with tehcyder, who suggests failing to provide accurate information should be a crime.

> The census is supposed to be an accurate snapshot of the state of Britain, if people lie on it, they should be prosecuted.

For what crime? Governments have no business demanding to know a persons religion, and people have no obligation to report their religion to their government. Besides, the 'jedi' option is counted as 'no religion' by the ONS, which is probably accurate in the vast majority of cases, so the statistics are not meaningfully affected.

> You cannot be a Jedi as it is an entirely fictional belief system.

As opposed to other religions? Let's not go there (but if you do, please start with scientology).

> And yes, the company would then have broken the EU directive and would face the courts.

How would the EU courts find out?

Seems to me the military has superior firepower. And the techies aren't allowed to go around shooting people (just like the non-techies), so it doesn't even make a difference even if you ignore the military.

It's likely that most techies could already have superior firepower today even without this technology, as they tend to have above-average income and having more Benjamins presumably buys you bigger guns.