Yes, but Walter was a huge fanboi, as he would have admitted if he had ever seen the term. I always thought that ABC had the better scientific info, but watching Cronkite just plain gush was more fun. Adding in Schirra after his Apollo flight made CBS the better choice, all around.

Well, yes, if you convert it from one big rock to a big bunch of pebbles too small to survive passing through the atmosphere, it WILL help a lot. Still years without summers, but not a total extinction event. They never show the effects of all that particulate matter on the sunsets, never mind the next winter lasting two years or more (at least in New England), but then rom-cons never show the couple getting bored with each other after a few years, either.

BTW, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" was a non-fiction essay, not a story, and it deliberately left off the obvious solution, a simulated red sun environment (a real red sun worked for Kal-El and every other Kryptonian, why not a simulated one for Junior-El?).

And only mate with her once every seven years.

He is probably assuming omni-directional radio versus lasers. OTOH, at light year distances, even the best focused laser spreads like a flashlight beam does, so rubycodez is still wrong.

For the past century, we have been radiating radio waves like a small radio star, and are obvious above background for almost 100 light years. Unfortunately, in Habitable Planets For Man (which "solved" the Drake equation with values now known to be wildly optimistic) the estimate was that communication-capable civilizations were about 1000 light years apart, so even the entire world isn't good enough to show above some possible someone-else's background.

Neanderthals make up about 3% of non-African human DNA, and not all the same 3% (supposedly we can ID about 20% of their genome from various groups), so you cannot really call them a separate species. Subspecies, maybe, but not their own species.

Intelligence is a bit of an advantage - there is a reason that predators are always more intelligent than their preferred prey - but it only gets one so far. A super-intelligent panda or koala, bound to one food source in one biome, would be an extinction waiting to happen. To support a really intelligent species you need adaptability on the same order as the Norway black rat. Ocean-based might be different, given that cuttlefish seem to be really quite intelligent even though they only live a few years and so have little chance of actually using their smarts for anything.

Then who/what was capable of reducing the population of Europe by 1/3 (to take the monkish chronicles) to 50% (based on the number of abandoned English boroughs) to 2/3 (last estimate that I read, based on abandoned boroughs not enough to maintain the pre-Death populations of the still-occupied ones)?

The only close competitor would be whatever almost extincted humanity about 80,000 years ago, reducing the African portion of the species to the equivalent of about 1000 unrelated individuals (I have no idea if it affected the Neanderthal, Denisovian, or the Indonesian "hobbit" groups, or any other non-African groups that we have not yet identified, by as much), and I would question whether hunter-gatherers ever class as "in large groups"

A piece of cold, wet, spaghetti. Gluten-free spaghetti, at that.

As far as them being "lazy and incompetent" goes, the people designing the Internet of Things are doing nothing different than the people who designed the Internet of networks. Back then, they assumed that the main danger would be unexpected network partitioning, not some man-in-the-middle attacker sending lies to major routers or DNS sites (hell, back then DNS was a file maintained by Jon Postell out of the goodness of his heart, sent out every so often to replace the previous /etc/hosts file for all hosts), or worse.

Leaving off security to make something useful fast is an easy tradeoff. That it is too dangerous is hard for people in high trust societies (like invented the Internet or picked it over their own ISO network) to wrap their heads around. Maybe DARPA should have outsourced the design or development to the USSR or Afghanistan, where rampant paranoia just meant that someone was paying attention, but it didn't.

That's unfair. He obviously wants to be controlled by the unelected bureaucracy, since it takes experience to learn where the real levers of power are. I mean, it works for the EU, after all (at least as described by my EU associates).

Or you have too few offices to vote upon that you can find someone of the opposite party that you like and are in your district. Both parties have gerrymandered, and people often gerrymander themselves with their feet (eg, I cannot stand that A county is totally controlled by the X party, so I will move to neighboring W county where there are more of the Y party, and vice versa). Also, I had only four (4) offices with opposition parties, and no US Senate race, this time; not even any ballot questions to worry about.

All that this lack indicates is that Linux has too small a market share among probable targets to be worth setting up a cookie-cutter process to hack it. Neither Al Quaida (sp? and whose?) nor the German Chancellor's office are likely to have dedicated SAs determined to keep out others by security through obscurity, regardless of it preventing easy usability of popular software that their principals demand.

Use any distribution out of the box, without doing something that makes things interesting (like Sun used to have the /bin directory tree in a separate partition which was mounted as read-only) and you are just as vulnerable to script kiddies (even if law enforcement agents) as anyone, although the variability between different distributions might help a bit.

Mod Parent Insightful

The child can be running away from the car, thus the speed of approach would be lower.

Everyone within half a mile with a non-trivial bank account or liquid assets. Just ask any personal injury lawyer when he is being honest (usually only when a guest lecturer in Law School, or drunk).

To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

OTOH, expecting one unique and universally acceptable moral or ethical decision in almost anything is the sign of someone who hasn't studied Ethics. Or Tort Law.

OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.