Granted, this whack-a-mole game with individual torrent sites makes for a fun show sometimes. But I find it embarrassing that the online community has to work around these issues time after time, and that some good people get caught up in legal battles.

Are there any good alternatives to bittorrent for private, anonymous file search and exchange? I heard about several "darknet" projects, but they never seem to gain traction for some reason. Given a huge number of hobbyist hackers who support free exchange of information, I am surprised.

Is there a fundamental reason why we cannot have free, anonymous file exchange? Or is everyone just happy with the status quo?

I would put the telecom second and the media distribution mafia first.

It is pathetic, true, how the telecom providers have been selling a commodity service on mass scale for 20+ years, yet the pricing and service quality are on "novelty" levels or worse. Your cable bill has no good reason to be higher than that (local) phone bill 30 years ago. One of the reasons for the pathetic prices are the unreasonably high media licensing fees and unbreakable channel bundles. The cable companies then cut costs on everything else, which gives you multiple week waiting times to connect, half-hour wait times on support lines, and clueless staff.

And the media mafia also criminalizes everyone for downloading a few songs on P2P and threatens with lawsuits.

I did pay attention. It is one thing to get net positive energy in an experiment, and another thing to capture that energy and to sustain the reaction in a feasible way.

I would argue in favor of this experiment for the possible interesting scientific results, but by trying to market it as a viable power plant before 2020 they are turning it into a scam.

Not if they really had made their case.

Are you going to invoke the oil industry conspiracy, too?

They didn't have much credibility to start with, and turning to crowdfunding only makes it worse.

It is not a mass market product with quick deliverables, it is an industrial solution. So the natural financing source would be venture capital, rather than crowdfunding. If they have to turn to indiegogo, it can only mean they failed to convince anyone relevant and are desperately trying to ride the "fusion is cool" fans, and disappoint them in the process.

As much as I would love to see fusion plants soon, it looks like this is not the company that will deliver them.

Maybe the producer's preferences are a factor, but I believe these two are more important:

1) Google ranks videos higher and displays them more prominently in their regular web search, plus you come up in video search on Google, YouTube and possibly elsewhere.

2) Some people, for whatever reason, perceive reading as "hard", "boring", or "work", and prefer to watch videos for all their non-work information needs, even if those are just talking heads. I cannot understand it, but apparently this is a real phenomenon.

I believe the producers are just acting rationally to get the word out. I wish they at least provided a transcript more often.

In possibly related news, Russia is building their own Internet! With central control! And domestic payment system! And in fact, screw the whole "inter" thing...

Under a heart-warming name "Cheburashka".

Not sure if this is directly related to the 28% Cisco orders decrease.

Why does NSA have to do this? Can't they just order Cisco to install this in their factory?

Or did they co-operate in this way to prevent whistle-blowing or counterintelligence at the factory?

In any case, I doubt Cisco didn't know about this. They are probably trying to save their face after a third party uncovered this.

...because jets are so 20th century, no-one will take you seriously.

I find NoScript extension convenient.

I wish that every launch was a success, and that humanity expanded into space faster. But the recent issues come just in time to help SpaceX win the much needed first contracts. They only need to finish their man rating and first stage return, and they are golden.

Also William Zinsser, On Writing Well.

I think your sarcasm is not entirely fair. Several governments and private companies now estimate this at 15-20 years away. It is still not tomorrow, but it is less than 30 years. For instance, SpaceX work on reusable rockets, powered landing and Mars Colonial Transporter looks promising.

Do you think NASA could consider/design a Voyager-like mission with a much higher speed, using three-body chaotic gravity assist method, like this article (pdf) suggests?

Basically, it involves capturing an asteroid in a mutual rotation with the probe, then entering solar gravity assist trajectory with this binary object, then making small adjustments at the right times, so that the probe gets an even bigger kinetic energy boost at the cost of the asteroid losing its energy and falling into the Sun. Maybe there are asteroids or comets with close-to-required orbit where we could take a ride.

To a layman like me, this, while hard, sounds like the most realistic method for reaching speeds relevant for interstellar travel with our current technology. Rosetta spacecraft did perform a successful rendezvous with a comet recently, which looks like a solid stepping stone for a mission like this.

Once again, the "abolishing" did not happen. Imagine people who felt that Ukrainian unity and sovereignty was under threat from that law, people who felt repressed by the previous administration and promised to their voters to fight. I am not advocating one way or another, but I understand why they tried to revoke that law. I'm also glad that they managed to moderate themselves.

I also don't want to delve into whether Crimea was a "gift". In any case, Russia recognized Ukrainian borders in the 90s, and even promised to protect them. And now we have an aggressive takeover.

It is sad to see how some people support revising of historical borders using military force. If this becomes popular, the world will be a very violent place. There are so many regions that changed owners throughout history.