The Valley has long had a handful of superrich libertarian types. Thiel is one of the better known, and is really more of a Wall Street type who now makes investments in the Valley. He made his money in hedge funds, not in technology. He's been involved with various Republican and Libertarian causes since the '80s.

Is that still legal?

There's no real reason to use Tor to avoid getting on these lists, just create an account and then your IP is hidden.

You know, we have $10/gal gas in Denmark, and are not exactly in the poor house. In fact whenever I travel to the U.S., it seems third-world in comparison, full of crime, poverty, and pollution. Maybe you want to get out of the dark ages and become an advanced, first-world society?

It's increasingly the job of professors at research universities in the sciences to be more of a "research manager" than a "researcher". They're expected to have a big lab of 5-15 students and postdocs, and to bring in enough grant funding to pay for this lab. The ones who are successful at this lab-head game bring in a bunch of money, have a large lab, and as a result oversee a lot of work that comes out of that lab, most of which has them as a co-author. Individual researchers without a team can't really compete against that.

On the one hand, it was a dumb purchase on the part of Seattle City Light. But on the other hand, I do think there needs to be some crackdown on bullshit advertising in the SEO/PR sector. Maybe if a few companies get sued for breach of contract, they'll be more careful what services they claim to offer in the future.

I doubt it will be fully legal by 2018. At the state level, I think it's likely more states will decriminalize or even fully legalize, but not all of them. I'll put a guess at: by 2018, it will be fully legal in 15 states, decriminalized in 15, and still criminal to possess in 20 states.

At the federal level, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs would complicate legalization efforts, since the Treaty requires signatories to ban marijuana. And the U.S. doesn't want to undermine this treaty, because it uses the treaty to strongarm other countries over things like coca and poppy growing. It's possible the DEA will lower enforcement priority, though, and maybe possible (though imo this is less likely) that Congress will revise the law to reduce sentences from their current levels.

Why worry, when the full terms and conditions of the Google Privacy Policy are protecting you?

That would require some target-identification, while this is just target-tracking. You point at a target and shoot, and the system makes sure the target is hit. Now it could avoid any target you try to shoot at, but that would be a bit silly: a good way to make sure all your bullets miss is to just not fire them!

If you can't read the scaled-down map reproduced from the report in the linked blog post, you can either look on p. 54 of the PDF, or else here's the site on OpenStreetMap. It appears it's not just that they're being given permission for the launches, but also that they're being given use of the land: the approved launch site is Texas state-owned land in Boca Chica State Park, which they'll be allowed to construct a facility on, and use for a certain number of days/year.

But a football is the ball used to play Gaelic. A soccer ball is what you use to play soccer.

But then it gets ambiguous, because someone might think you mean Free University as in no tuition, rather than Free-as-in-Freedom University. And Liberty University is already taken.

Huh, I had overlooked the name when reading the article, just read right though to "some physics prof thinks NASA is wrong and it's actually super-dangerous". Didn't realize it was Michio Kaku, which is indeed surprising.

I do:

It sounds a lot like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster: A deep-space probe powered by a highly radioactive substance could wipe out humankind.

If you want to knock people unconscious, there are already less invasive ways of doing it, like general anesthesia. Though it would be interesting to know whether general anesthesia operates by a mechanism related to this one, or is doing something else.