Not hard at all. EMP does not blow up starter motors and does not blow up lead acid batteries. Hell all I have to do is connect jumper cables from the battery to the starter lugs to start the generator.

Granted that's far more difficult for the typical person that cant get past the "I pushed the button, it most be broke" thought process, but that is why most places actually hire competent employees to manage that stuff.

Real transformers dont die from EMP unless it is a direct hit by a megatron.

" disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps"

Every single water filtration plant has very large diesel generators that can run the place for months without electrical power. And no, a solar flare can not burn out giant motors and generators, all that can be ran easily without the SCADA system. In fact we used to run drills operating the place by hand, as most of the guys that did it from 1940 until 1990 did it mostly by hand.

No. That was point:
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.

If you want to call that corruption you can. In my mind it merely includes corruption.

FWIW, I don't think that power corrupts, rather it's lack of consequences. This is closely related, but not the same. But it's also true that power attracts the corruptible (as a gradient). Different people are corruptible in different ways and to different degrees. And one consequence of that is that they are attracted in differing amounts to different kinds of power. The guy who's attracted to being a policeman isn't the same as the guy who's attracted to being a politician, and neither is the same as the guy attracted to being a banker.

P.S.: Yes, that's still an oversimplification. Think of it as a finger pointing at the moon. Look at the moon, not the finger.

Even if they did, and I were to agree to their EULA, I don't like lifting my finger up to touch the screen. Some things that are reasonable for tablet computers are only reasonable for tablet computers. This might be one of them, but I'm not even sure it's reasonable for tablets.

It's plausible, but not guaranteed. Another quite plausible scenario has the US collapsing economicly and everyone who can bailing out. There are other plausible scenarios.

OTOH, it does seem like most of the US govt. should be put in a home for the bewildered.

I was not trying to kill him, I was simply sending him a large amount of high speed data.

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

It's a reasonable thing to worry about, but not to fixate on. As you pointed out there are worse problems.

OTOH, this is a plugin that directly manages communication over the net, so it's quite appropriate to be somewhat concerned.

I don't think you understand "trusting trust". If you have the binary, and you are verifying it. that's not the same process at all.

However, no, you can't trust it. It's not because you can't verify it, it's because you can't do it without violating their patents. Also because it's quite difficult to verify large code bases. But if I understand things correctly, even to translate the binary into assembler code would violate their patent.

P.S.: Trusting trust was about a compiler that compiled itself. And it showed that no source code inspection could reveal the inserted trojan, because the compiler binary would insert it even though it wasn't in the source code. That would be analogous if this were a code compiler that compiled itself.

OK, so the first LHC cost $9billion. How much would the second one cost? I'd bet a LOT less.

OTOH, this IS a new project, not a second LHC. That probably means that they'll run into new and unexpected problems. So the estimate is almost certainly wrong, and on the low end. (Not certainly. China's been doing some work with large 3D printers that print buildings, and, I believe, also tunnel construction machinery. And almost certainly on things I haven't heard about.)

But, yeah, my guess is that the price is lowballed. This is true for most construction projects, and is NOT something special to China. If they bring it in on or under budget, THAT will be special to China.

With a really large ring doesn't bremstrallung become less of a problem? And for protons that shouldn't be a problem at all.

IIRC, when the Stanford Linear Accelerator was built there were comments to the effect than a longer one would always be impractical. This is clearly incorrect, as if one were built in space there wouldn't be any curvature problems, but it may inidcate that there are severe problems with building a longer one in a strong gravitational field.

There are two major downsides to a one-party system centrally planned economy.
1) Sometimes the guy at the top makes mistakes, and nobody who knows better can call him on them. See "Great Leap Forwards".
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.

Mind you, the US recently has been exhibiting those very same problems. In the US it's fairly clear that the problem has been that:
1) Corporations are not people. They should not have rights. (The stockholders should, as should the management AS CITIZENS. But not the corporation.)
2) Plurality wins voting is solidly broken. It is just about guaranteed to result in vastly increaded corruption at the upper levels of the political process. It should be replaced by some form of majority (i.e., 50% or more) wind voting. One plausible candidate is Instant Runoff Voting. Another is Condorcet voting.
2a) Multiple political parties, as currently exists in the US and Europe, is beneficial, but only in the context of a Majority Wins voting system. When combined with a Plurality Wins voting system they merely serve to disenfranchise those unhappy with the two major parties.
2)

Actually China *does* have a lot of corruption. So does the US. But they have corruption in different places. (I can't speak for the EU, and I'm not even sure it's the same from country to country.)

The question is "Does China have corruption in places that would grossly interfere with the construction of a large new particle accelerator? I don't know. The US did. The Supercollider proposed location was chosen because of corruption, and the project was cancelled because of corruption. OTOH, it would have been quite expensive, and very difficult. Corruption wasn't the only factor.

Depends.

  I switched from MSWind to Linux back before Linux had a decent word processor, because I wouldn't agree the the MS EULA. Currently my cell phone doesn't have ANY apps, and it wouldn't support them were I willing to try to install them.
OTOH, I have som apps installed in my browser, e.g. NoScript.

But, I *do* have a Google sign-on that I occasionally use. And I rarely block it. I don't have g-mail, because I don't like giving up that much control. This doesn't fool me into thinking my email is private, but it does fool me into believing that it won't just disappear on me. (I know, however, that an email program can do that to you, and the idiot providers of the email programs don't really care about any email that's over a month or two old.) What I need is something that can export emails from the browser into a commonly used format. I CAN edit them as text, but THAT's really obnoxious.

So there are some things I will accept for some levels of intrusiveness. But not all.