The ONLY people in the whole world who really care about this two-bit movie are the North Koreans. They're not going to pull off any real terrorist attacks.

Sony is a Japanese corporation. Japan is, if you glance at a map, within spitting distance of North Korea. North Korea is well known for being collectively batshit insane, and for pulling some bad stuff on Japan with less cause.

I wouldn't be making bets either way on this one...

Unfortunately, many (small) websites are hosted on a shared server with one IP for multiple domains. The name is required in the URL else it simply does not work.

It's required in the HTTP Host header, but close enough.

I'm aware that it won't work for everyone, but in this particular discussion we're talking about sites that nobody in their right mind should ever be sharing a server with, nor do I believe a site like the Pirate Bay would want to get pinned down to a specific server.

In any case, if Sony decides to have a go at a small website, they're pretty much screwed irrespective of web server configuration.

ISDN, so technically not a modem....

Now that Sony has cancelled the premier, if I want to see this movie I'll have to find a pirated copy.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

A huge number of people already barely use DNS. They go to places like "The Pirate Bay" by entering "The Pirate Bay" in the Google Search window, and following the first link or two that they find. So, if Google indexes 194.71.107.27 or there's a Wikipedia link to it (since, you know, that'd be newsworthy), the effect of a DNS ban has little impact on the original discovery of the site URL.

Some (stupid) ISP's already take care of this search mechanism... enter a bad URL, go right to a search page. Most browsers will also be more than happy to help out.

It'll break bookmarks, but once you know something exists, has value to you, and you know how to find it, it's nothing more than an inconvenience.

In other words, delisting doesn't work for longer than it takes a new URL to propagate.

Taking over the hostname would last a little longer, but news travels fast.

the solution looks costly but hardly unmanageable

According to this, the largest plant in the country costs about $1 billion and will be able to handle about 50 million gallons per day.

If you built $21 billion dollars worth of those plants, you get about 1 billion gallons per day of desalination capacity, which would take about 30 years to just to regenerate those 11 trillion gallons, not even considering what's needed to handle existing overconsumption.

Still manageable, but it's not a good short-term fix.

As it was, now and ever shall be.

hrm, for me it was the wildly obscure articles that I thought expanded my horizons the most. I had other subscriptions (e.g. WebTechniques, JDJ) for narrow-focus learning.

he idea of moving the population to local cities where they can use public transportation especially in less dense areas like the United States, just won't happen. If you tell the population that they need to move from their houses which they have put a lot of money in, and live in an area the matches how they want to live and go to a crowed loud crime ridden city, will cause a lot of people to put a gun to your face, whether or not it is legal to have guns.

bah. Worked out well for Stalin, didn't it?

They should issue the VR goggles to the cops an make white people look black.

but blame does not fall squarely on NASA ... Given that there is so much real waste, I don't understand the need to latch on to myths like this.

Your criticisms about precision are valid. There are multiple levels of meaning, though, and for some audiences "is NASA a good mechanism for humans to explore space?" is well answered by less-precise stories like this one.

This story illustrates one example - one Mississippi Senator uses NASA as his personal coke-n-whores vehicle. "Should we be funding public agencies to explore space?" is a valid question and this gives one anecdote about how such good intentions are perverted and abused. Elon Musk doesn't build $400M towers he's not going to use to get coke-n-whores (isn't a Model S good enough for that?)

If you saw an item that should cost $10 priced at $0.01, and you believed the listing erroneous, would you take advantage of the error to get a quick bargain? What if the item should actually cost $1000?

If so, what is your justification?

People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast

Why are there only jobs on the coast?

I think this is the real root of the problem. Everybody wants to cram into (for example) Silicon Valley - because it's where the best paying, most stable jobs are. Why can't these employers employ workers elsewhere. I've actually worked for a company that tried that tactic. Guess what? During hard times, (or mergers), they tend to shut remote sites down, and the workers are laid off or uprooted.

But yeah - a lot of problems would be resolved if employment were more distributed.