"That's why there aren't any really old civilizations"

The GRBs don''t really explain anything. Because it leads to the question why any civilization would need 1 BILLION years to develop the technology ot withstand a GRB. Maybe it would explain why life hasn't evolved beyond the microbial level. But once a civilization has achieved the Iron Age of technology, such a civilization is likely to achieve space faring status within a thousand years, unless of course they wipe themselves out or get struck by a far more common local extinction level event.

I say an asteroid impact wiping out a nascent civilization is far more likely than a GRB wiping out a civilization just a few hundre years more advanced than ours.

One thing NZ has going for it is a low populatin density in a fairly isolated location (the US also has a low population density but is easily reachable by rampaging zombie looters). If things go hungry, you can always butcher, I mean cull the sheep, which outnumber people 10 to one. Better than NZ but more practicable than Elysium? Antarctica.

"Well, the way I see it, I'll trust a random XDA developer pushing closed-source hacks way more than I trust my carrier and/or handset manufacturer."

That's just plain silly.

Unless your random XDA developer also manufactured the phone and supplied the stock firmware, then you need to trust two parties: that random XDA developer AND your carrier. Remember just because the phone is rooted doesn't mean it also isn't running the manufacturer's (if any) malware.

So a phone which can be unlocked using a manufactured supplied tool is still safer than a phone that needs to be rooted. Safest of course is the phone you assembled yourself, right down to the circuit board level.

"By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages."

In the past that would have been norm. But unless we descend into a Mad Max dystopia where technology retreats into a permanent dark age, the differences between cultures are more likely going to be sandpapered over until only the most significant ones remain. Why? Blame it on the Internet, what with people all over the world consuming more and more the same bland YouTube, Twitter and Facebook culture. Chinese is likely to remain Chinese (hell, they even have their own versions of YouTube and Twitter), but we'll gradually see the evaporation of the distinctions between British and American English.

I wouldn't go so far as to tar Microsoft as being a company that invented nothing of value. However, I don't think Bill Gates himself would qualify as an inventor of note. I mean, we generally don't say the microchip was invented by the stockholders of Texas Instruments?

Who says that money will still be THE most important thing. Money, for what it's worth is simply a symbolic representation of wealth. And what is wealth but goods or natural resources that are in the disposal or control of certain individuals. You don't normally call air wealth because nobody controls the air we breathe (maybe in a highly polluted dystopian future it could become wealth). So the problem isn't in the concentration of wealth but the concentration of power. The danger is the only a few individual will control those army of robots and automatons that would be used in the production of wealth.

I'm more of a Trekkie than a Jedi master, so just wondering if you'd enlighten me about the title. The Force Awakens? Doesn't that make this a prequel? Now if knowledge of the Force was lost after Return of the Jedi (along with the smarts on howto build a proper light saber), then we're talking about a RE-awakening of the Force. Of course The Force Reawakens sounds quite awful, but hey the Wachowskis did come up with a rather clever title for their Matrix sequel, even if the actual move left much to be desired.

Well yeah copying isn't stealing ...

But I've heard rumors of really big time players in the bitcoin "market" who sell large volumes of bitcoin to THEMSELVES, a very real possibility given the anonymous nature of bitcoin addresses. This causes the value of bitcoin to rise, which then attracts the attention of the smaller players, who buy into the hype thinking, "OMG, bitcoin's going to rise to $$$$ again!". Which of course isn't likely since only a few people are buying and selling bitcoins, each through multiple addresses that artificially inflate the number of people apparently buying and selling bitcoins. When these big time players decide to bail out, the price of bitcoins sinks back to its normal market level (whatever that is).

"Any claim that this "saved lives" is complete fabrication. It was the murder of 250,000 people that people try and justify with a false claim. We happened to win the war which means our side did not face a tribunal for war crimes. Numerous Germans were put to death for killing far fewer people."

I wouldn't go so far as to call it complete fabrication. Could a better way have been found? Most probably. But think of it this way. This was the nation that invented the concept of "kamikaze". You conveniently forget that the death and destruction that Imperial Japan inflicted across Asia and the Pacific. This isn't the infantilised Japan of Sailor Moon and Hello Kitty. Google Rape of Nanking or Bataan Death March.

The news report just confirms what Ray Kurzweil has been say all along about the hierarchical structure of the mind. What makes for thought happens at both lower and higher levels of the mind. Basically, if something gets recognized at the higher level, the lower levels don't kick in. If something is difficult to recognized at a higher level, then the lower levels start working until some pattern or part of a pattern emerges.

A rough example of how this works: suppose you see the back of a curly haired woman at a supermarket near your house. Your wife is curly haired. Mistaken identity occurs when you assume that the curly haired woman is your wife because:

(1) The woman you saw was curly haired.
(2) You saw the woman in a place your wife is likely to frequent.

You'd be less likely to instantly presume the curly haired woman is your wife if you happened to see her, say, in a topless bar (if you know your wife doesn't visit or work at such places). Now if you see a curly woman in an unfamiliar place, your mind works harder at trying to recognize the woman, until maybe you figure out the woman isn't your wife but a drag queen wearing a curly wig.

If systemd is going to be the default init system on steroids, where will that leave the non-Linux ports of Debian, which prides itself in being THE "universal operating sytem" (go ahead Google for the phrase, first hit is Debian)? Insisting on hard dependency on systemd is going to creat problems for Debian Hurd and kFreeBSD, unless systemd has already been ported to those systems? https://www.debian.org/ports/h... http://www.debian.org/ports/kf...

From the linked article before Reuters edits/corrects it: "U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, but they have large fusion reactors on board that have to be replaced on a regular cycle."

WTF Are the conspiracy theorists correct? The US military already has secret fusion reactors. Makes me wonder whether the article is just a poorly edited press release. Otherwise, why is there a need to spend Billion$ on ITER. Compared to ITER, the Lockheed project, if true, would be peanuts.

"Not in my lifetime or yours."

Don't jinx it, man.

The problem isn't human pickers being replaced by robot pickers. I see that as progress. The problem is if, like in most fiction/movies/anime about a robotic future, the robots would wind up being controlled by a few gigacorporations or some central administration akin to the military. If every Joe or Jane can own his or her own private robot, great. However, news like this has me worried whether the dystopian future will be a technological divide between those who have robots and those who don't.

I assume you're mainly a Windows user who use Linux only for the non-graphical (server, etc) stuff. Systemd is bad but it's not the Metro of Linux. The Metro of Linux would be either Unity3D (Canonical/Ubuntu) or Gnome Shell (Fedora/Redhat). These are both GUIs analogous to Metro. The rise in the popularity of Ubuntu derivative LinuxMint can be attributed to its use of its own more traditional looking desktop environments (either Cinnamon or Mate) in place of Unity. So there's clearly been a an anti-Metro-like pushback in that area.

Systemd is something else. Most desktop users probably won't notice it. And that's what makes it worse. A Systemd bug is going to be way nastier than Shellshock.