Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite)

Not enough for 3 billion people.

Whilst I can't say I've mentioned ECHELON, I've certainly known about it for at least 13 years. And why would anyone bother mentioning it when you would just have been labelled a tin-foil hat loon.

Dated 2001:
http://textuploader.com/kxe7

It's been on Wikipedia since then too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think the consensus (amongst people who knew about ECHELON) back then was that all calls were recorded but they couldn't keep them for long.

How much evidence do you need considering that the NSA habitually lie and that whistle-blowers have said they record everything. They are spending a billion plus on a data centre when $27 million is estimated to be enough for the hardware to record all calls. If that doesn't sound like an attempt to record everything then I don't know what does.

And a couple of slashdot links for good measure:
NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics

One mentioning ECHELON:
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Can't you make some kind of setup that triggers if the update fails and alerts you / wakes you up with noise from your smartphone etc.

Or like the other poster who beat me to it - off-load your work to someone in a country where your 5am is mid-day in their country.

Then there is a growing number of Americans who are prejudiced about blacks/democrats/liberals, take your pick, or have -no idea- about history, politics and governing. In these difficult times of wars and crisis, Obama is one of the best presidents Americans could have hoped for. Better than most of your clueless American public deserves.

Yes, and? What's your point? The US and Germany are allies, it makes sense to share intelligence with allies. What doesn't make as much sense and undermines trust is spying on the administration and institutions of your allies.

This is especially true for Germany, to a lesser extent Spain and France. Not true at all for Italy.
Italians love waving their flag around and displaying it on clothing, almost as much as Americans.

I really like DF and have had quite a few memorable moments in both fortress and adventure mode. But the interface is outrageous. Using three (at least) different sets of keys to scroll through a selection, depending on context, is madenning, especially when starting out. I often wonder how Tarn can have so much talent to create a game like DF while at the same time failing so gloriously at implementing a decent interface.

It's $1,7100,000 due to exchange rate. And it doesn't cost more, I think it's less on average due to better standard of driving here. Yes insurance on average costs about 20% more this is partly due to the pound being strong, dollar weak. Also of note is that there is a fraud epidemic happening at the moment, the price of insurance here has doubled over the last 7 years.

So higher liability does not equal higher insurance because those higher amounts are extremely rarely if ever claimed.

8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation. Procedural generation can be a very powerful, impressive tool, but in the case of Elite, creating some generic star systems is really not a big deal. If you want to see incredible precedural generation, look at "KKrieger".

What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds... simply amazing. The ability to fly through the depths of space and landing on a realistic planet without a loading screen has been a long time coming since then. The only other game that implements this, as far as I know, is a comparatively recent indie title "Evochron Mercenary"

Rage didn't crash a single time for me, and I didn't have any of the video driver issues some people where complaining about. I remember it being a fantastic, open shooter with some of the best AI and NPC animations I have ever seen, plus entertaining vehicle combat. And it ran fluidly on my old GTX275 card.

Anyway, JC deserves alot of credit for Doom and Quake alone, which were simply mind blowing, earth shattering games at the time.

The tipping point is where robots + AI can do work equal to that of an average human being. Once that point is reached, why would a corporation choose a human when the robot can do the work?

Luckily AI is coming along slowly, but how long is it before many jobs are replaced by systems like this 'The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong's Subway Engineers' combined with robots, or more specifically jobs being modelled by clever people like Chun in the article.

Chefs, construction workers, cab drivers, factory workers, delivery drivers, miners, cleaners, fast food workers, farm labourers, retail workers, accountants etc are roles we could see fall one by one to better AI and robots.

When most food, construction, gadgets and services can be supplied by robots, what work is left for the majority of the population?

That's rather low, UK car drivers insurance covers £1m minimum which is currently about $1,7,100,000.

In the UK all drivers must have insurance by law which is minimum 1 million public liability. Is this not true in the US? And if insurance is mandatory then insurers should have rules re hiring out their car, if they don't then it's their own fault if they have to pay out, that's how insurance works.

"It is a claim that does go against most of the science"

What is the claim that goes against the science in relation to GMO exactly? (note I answered the parents post already.)

I am aware of the majority of European people's resistance to GM food for example, but this is not the same as a singular 'claim'.

On the contrary, I have very good scientific reasons for being against GMO and it seems to me that the belief that GM is good is based upon blind faith.

The reason for this blind faith is that some science is used to create GM and the belief that progress must be best and GM is progress and that progress is needed to feed the poor.

The people with this blind faith do not seem to have a large knowledge of all the surrounding issues such as:

Knowledge of crop rotation as a natural productive alternative that is better to soil and better to long term productivity levels.
Extortion that has been done by GM corp's where GM has been planted and when the seed has traveled into neighbouring farms, the GM corp has then sued other farmers for having patented seed in there crop.

Knowing that in the past GM crops where created in the past that turned out to be detrimental to peoples health. Selective breeding would be far far less likely to create crops that poison people slowly or are a carcinogenic risk.

Knowing that the method of combining genes is (or was) a completely haphazard method whereby the gene from the plant to be altered is taken, the snippets of gene wanted were then randomly mashed in to that old gene. Unwanted abnormalities of unknown consequences were not tested for, they merely tested the resulting plant for the desired trait. This is a method that I strongly object to.

The realisation that GM is typically of one genetic variety, this creates a danger of a whole genetic species being wiped out in one go once it becomes vulnerable to a new strain of virus or bacterial infection.

The fact that farmers have worked out that the combination of non-organic fertiliser, GM seed and GM companies fertiliser etc can actually be more expensive than farming without those things.

The knowledge that the GM + GM pesticide combinations only appear to have short lifetimes (the pests develop resistance then eat the crop) and the GM companies only care about their profits and not about any damage they do to the ecosystem with their pesticides.

I think the biggest danger is in the lack of genetic diversity, with the risk that whole GM species could be wiped out without that natural genetic diversity, that's not fear-mongering, that's something that often happens. Natural genetic variation can be the key to quickly finding the resistant plants. GM seeds don't have anywhere near the same level of natural genetic variation - they are cloned from a single source.

- Left leaning person who takes scientific theories seriously.

So, what is your belief that GM is good based on?