As a semi-serious answer, I think a lot of it is the current mindset both in Western politics and business. Everything has to provide short-term benefits, whether it's the politicians thinking about the next election, or the shareholders looking to next quarter's numbers. Infrastructure projects require a long-term view. Hence, they (a) don't get the attention they need and (b) are tossed around on the stormy waves of ever-changing short-term objectives.

Your math needs some work. Monthly, Texas sees 5000-10000 illegal migrants crossing the border. We don't know how many they don't see and therefore cannot count. So let's take the 10000 as a likely total figure. times 12 months/year, times your 20 years. You want to pay $50k/year, and on average (over 20 years) you would pay that for 10 years. That is a lot more than $6 billion.

Ok, I'm being facetious, because I know you didn't really mean the number seriously. But: what is it about the word "illegal" that people like you don't get? There are legal ways to immigrant into any country. People attempting illegal entry need to be immediately and forcefully deported. It would be far more effective to stop them at the border in the first place.

Texas isn't "showboating" except in the sense that they are showing up the federal government's failures. While, at the same time, trying to stem the flood of illegal immigration.

Living in Switzerland, I use trains a lot. They're great, no question.

Having read story after story about commuter rail and high-speed rail in the USA, and having ridden on trains there a couple of times? I cannot imagine this project succeeding. It is more likely a trough for distributing pork. The schedule will be delayed year after year, more money will be poured into the trough, and ultimately someone will take passengers from LA to Las Vegas on a mule cart.

Am I overly cynical?

I kept up quite well through my mid-40s. I stopped, not because I couldn't keep up, but because I got tired of seeing the wheel be reinvented time and again.

New blippet - does the same thing as the old blippet, only differently. Rewrite and re-test all your code! What fun!

It's a stupid treadmill, because each new crop of developers thinks they know better and are smarter than their predecessors. Hint: they don't and they aren't.

You're trolling? Please say you're trolling?

Look, if the police can get a warrant, they can get a warrant to spy on one of the endpoints. Encryption becomes irrelevant.

Compromising encryption for everyone goes far, far beyond that. It endanger s everyone, and enables whole new levels of criminality.

Police forces are supposed to protect citizens. Dropping E2EE would open the doors to all sorts of crime.

Unbelievable.

Splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, fine. Takes a lot of energy. Then they spend more energy crushing rock and using it for the CO2 removal process. They don't say what their energy source is going to be. More, as one critic in the article writes: instead of using that energy to crush rock and process seawater, wouldn't it be better to just use it to directly replace fossil fuel usage?

Sounds like yet another great behicle to provide "greenwashing".

After the 2008 debacle, one thinks of banks, when one hears "too big to fail". We (the collective world) were supposed to ensure that no single institutions remained "too big to fail" - not that we've done that.

Anyway. No single company should be allowed to become so large that its failure would be a catastrophe. That's just another aspect of anti-trust regulations. I submit that Microsoft has long since passed that threshold. Entire governments, indeed, all governments in the West are utterly dependent on Microsoft software. That should ring all sorts of alarm bells.

It's been a while since I looked into EMP and nuclear weapons, but I think you may underestimate the dangers. Your processor may be safe inside a metal box, but EMP will induce a voltage spike in the wires is uses to get power and to talk to the outside world. Are *all* of those wires shielded? Almost certainly not.

Your point about a CME is accurate, but just imagine the voltage that EMP can induce in power lines. I'm less worried about the high voltage ones, and more worried about the low-voltage lines directly supplying houses and businesses. Finally: To be devastating, EMP doesn't have to take out everything. A random 5% would already be devastating.

While I have no way of knowing, I will bet that the system had redundancy. Separate providers, separate contracts. However, it is insanely difficult to know where the data actually, physically flows. Even if the providers have completely different networks, at some point those networks may run on separate fibers in the same bundle.

The college where I teach has campuses in various locations. We have two endpoints, in different cities: If one goes down, the other one ought to still be alive. It has still happened once that a single cable cut took us offline.

IANAL, but: In the simplest case of a purely EU company, they would not be subject to US law, and providing the US with user data would certainly violate the GDPR. In the case of a purely US company, the GDPR would prohibit them from gathering data on EU citizens and sending it back to the US. The big multinationals, like Alphabet and Meta, have therefore established subsidiary companies in the EU (of course, there may be other reasons as well). In Meta's case, their subsiduary is based in Ireland. Meta-Ireland cannot provide data on EU customers to the US, without violating EU law, and anyway is not subject to US law.

There is the more general question of whether data on EU citizens can ever be stored on US servers. If it were, then Meta-USA could be subject to FISA. For that matter, they could do all sorts of other things in violation of the GDPR. This is an ongoing issue with (afaik) no resolution in sight.

This situation annoys the US government, because they don't like being told "no". It also does not make Meta (or Google, or Amazon, any other US tech giant) happy. They occasionally threaten to leave the EU. The response from the EU is: "fine, don't let the door hit you on the way out." Which they also don't like :-)

This would be great news, if true. But you can prove this without going to space. Hang it on a cable, like a pendulum. Turn it on. If the cable is no longer vertical, you have thrust.

Can't do that? Then it doesn't work. Simple and cheap to test.

But first we need to have a meeting to plan all those meetings.

If The FBI has such specific information ("23 pipeline operators"), then it should be easy to inform the companies and support them in fixing the problem.

Honestly, knowing the FBI, this is more likely about justifying their own existence. Ask them to show the evidence, and have a third-party check it out. Won't happen, of course...