Also, even if you have a 1 in 10,000 catastrophic launch failure rate, you will in very short order spray highly radioactive waste all over the upper atmosphere trying to get it to the sun.

Fossil fuels and nuclear don't have the "same issue" -- fossil fuels use emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere creating catastrophic future warming of the planet endangering the human species' survival as we know it. Nuclear fuel use produces some highly dangerous waste material that has to be stored or eliminated.

Which problem would you rather have society engineer solutions for? I'm voting for nuclear.

I'm not saying you don't know this already, but I am saying that your post gives the wrong impression.

Granted these are controlled experiments with prototypes, but autonomous, two legged walking by robots is not a "way off" - it's been done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mclbVTIYG8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8

And regarding four legs - seems like BD among others seem well past the "barely" stage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g

But I guess it's all in your definitions of way off and barely..

That is false. I live in California and there are people here, including some close to me, who have individual plans and who are keeping their existing plans. A LOT of individual policies in California were cancelled but it is wrong to say that ALL of them are. Plans issued and unchanged prior to a particular date specified in the law are allowed to be grandfathered.

Reducto ad absurdum against a straw man is not generally considered a valid way to win an argument.

How do you short bitcoin? There are market options for shorting stocks (via contracts I think) and for traditional currency I'm not so sure, but I'd guess similar vehicles are available. Is there a way to short bitcoins?

Lost in the operator game.. The original article talks about *drives* D through I on a Windows machine. Some idiot (appears to be Michael Mimoso) decided that "partition" is a more pro-sounding synonym for "drive" and started using both interchangeably in the article from OP. So we are all left scratching our heads. The point I think is that the thing tries to destroy data on network and attached storage devices, rather than wiping C drive which would give itself away much more quickly..

That's pretty silly. It's true that MS locked in a juicy piece of revenue when it retained ownership of IBM's OS for the original PC. But I don't think a serious argument can be made that all the subsequent successes stem from that one line of revenue or IP. The transition to Windows was based on the Mac's success not the IBM PC. The work with IBM on OS/2 and converted to Win NT was not premised on that DOS license. Office, MS SQL and just keep counting their market successes from there.

I'm not make an arguement about DRM inherently at the moment, but I use the B&N NookBook products. I can read the books any of a number devices. I read on a PC, my Transformer tablet, my B&N e-ink reader and on my Android phone (I'm certain it works on a mac and iphone/pad as well). So while the format is not open (aka w/out DRM) they definitely give you the ability to read the book on a variety of h/w platforms.

You can also side-load books into a device and I believe that works for DRM content so long as you have the inherent DRM access rights associated with that content. So I can copy my DRM'ed epubs right off my e-reader and back them up. Then I can copy then back later and they will work with my account still.

Granted when B&N goes out of business, etc, there may be some problems (not sure how their DRM is operated and whether it needs to check-in with a home base periodically to keep my DRM books open). I've had my device disconnected from the internet for a month with no problems but who knows.

Huh - interesting point. I would have a thought a few exploding bolts would do the job, not a fiery end but would end up with a drone in lots of pieces, instead of a whole stealth drone in the hands of Iran.. Which seems like something they don't want.

That airframe was stealthy apparently so I'd guess it's pretty valuable. Note the seals tried to destroy the airframe of their stealthy (and up to that point unknown) helicopter on the Bin Laden raid, partially successfully.

If it were this easy, CIA and .mil wouldn't air gap so many networks. Even so they are vulnerable to hacking.

Also, it seems like the drone that crash landed is Iran had self-destruct mechanisms which didn't work. I'm not saying Iran's claim to have hacked the drone is very credible, but even so, they should have collected a bunch of burned wreckage, not a largely intact, high value, stealth drone.

Third, remember that for a long time (and maybe even to this day) drone camera footage is beamed down from satellites to the drone operators in the US on *unencrypted channels.* The military is frequently lagging industry on digital security issues.

Not to go totally academic here but that's a structuralist viewpoint, in my opinion. And structuralists are pretty cool - not a bad viewpoint at all. Personally, I really love the work of folks like Ian Hodder who has been looking at things from a (his term) post-processualist viewpoint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hodder). This implies that normal is often an artifact of analysis, not a feature of culture. There are whole books on this, so hard to summarize, but perceived cultural boundaries are most commonly actually gradations of different attributes of humanity, and historians and anthropologists often draw these arbitrary lines around clusters of these attributes and call it "normal" (aka "normal American"). That often isn't how the emic (internal to culture) folks view it at all..

Example, I feel generally more culturally connected to people from Vancouver than people from Maine, even though being a Californian, my country is often viewed as my cultural anchor from the etic (outsider) perspective.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying there are other ways to look at this, than "normal" being the definer or creator of culture.

I think maybe you think I was not using irony.

OP was complaining that Java has too many training wheels, and it doesn't teach key programming practices. I was using irony to point out, by time honored car analogy, that sometimes training wheels are in fact real innovations that are just plain better than the old way. Sounds like you agree.

From an anthropological perspective, cannibalism is no worse than carpet bombing Cambodia, or dropping drone missiles into wedding parties right?

Nevertheless, the concept of "normal" is cultural, which was my point, and it sounds like you agree? And specifically, marriage as a concept is culturally defined, and not universally the same.