Also the pile of anti-discrimination themed hiring laws.

Whether or not a company is trying to avoid being shaken down Americans with Disabilities Act style, or actually a bunch of racist assholes, turning down someone who falls into a protected category is always going to be risky. That person could turn around and cause a lot of legal headache and expense (not to mention bad PR) if they start claiming you didn't hire them because of discrimination. List a bunch of requirements that no one can possibly fulfill and now you've got an out if someone applies who you don't really want. Once someone applies who you really like and want on your team, just make an exception and you're good to go.

Lasers aren't quite as infinite as you make them out to be. There's still the matter of upkeep (all that supporting hardware is much more delicate and complex than a big gun), and often the optics and/or bits of the cooling system are expected to be replaced as wear items.

The trick is keeping it on target for long enough to do damage. A glancing hit or two from the cannon of an A10 is going to do a lot more damage than a glancing hit or two from a laser that takes a few seconds to heat up the target to damaging levels.

Ringworld would make for a pretty amazing movie if they paid as much attention to correctly representing the physics, engineering, and scale as Niven did in the books.

I'd also love to see some of the Pournelle books done properly. Janissaries or King David's Spaceship would make for a great movie (mixing technologies like that makes for some really fun settings), and Falkenbergs Legion has a lot of potential to make a pretty awesome miniseries or TV show.

Who says he was really abducted? If I was going to go work for a drug cartel, staging an abduction could give me some plausible deniability if the cartel gets busted or I need to go back to normal life for some reason.

Yep. Everyone loves a good false flag operation. To be honest I'm kind of surprised that it hasn't happened more already.

To be fair, it really depends on the specific teaser and their motivations. The ones who do a half-assed job of it and are easily bored will usually move on if you ignore them. The ones who are more tenacious probably do need a kick in the teeth to get the message. Then there are the ones who are both tenacious and actively malicious, those are the ones that it's not a good idea to escalate with unless you're really prepared to follow through as far as it takes.

I still don't understand why you'd hide it from them even if they were a moron. No harm in seeing it, and they might even one day wonder why there are those weird 3 letters on the ends of all their files and take some initiative to learn something.

It doesn't matter who made the exploit or who their targets are. Once the exploit is out there, it's there for anyone to take control of. The NSA may very well only be interested in a few high value machines, and could even be the most trustworthy people on the planet (lol), but there's no reason someone else couldn't stumble across the NSAs backdoor (I'm sure that just like how we saw stuxnet infect thousands of non-target machines, it won't be limited to just the handful of targeted computers) and start using it for their own ends.

It's one of the reasons it's so annoying when people pull the "well what use is my data to [entity collecting it]? It's not like they're going to do anything nefarious with it". The problem isn't the trustworthiness of the people collecting it, the problem is that now you've effectively doubled the risk of that data being stolen by a random hacker

It seems sort of odd to me that that's even brought up as a negative. I mean, in the first instant of thinking about it sure, but my thought immediately after that was "nah, those places that do your taxes brag about how they hire former IRS employees, isn't this kind of like the same thing?".

I'd be really curious to find out for sure where that TV antenna based energy harvesting circuit is actually harvesting the energy from. Power levels that low can be created through static charge, or even the difference between two ground points a few meters away from each other (e.g. if the antenna is on the roof and the clock is on your workbench).

Have you tried putting it inside a large faraday cage and seeing if the energy levels remain the same?

Yeah, when I was a student my natural rhythm would slowly creep out to a 25 hour day. Especially in the winter when there wasn't as much pesky sun reminding me of what time it was. It would be fine for a while until eventually I rotated around such that my sleep schedule intersected with my class schedule and I'd have to spend a few days as a zombie resetting my sleep schedule again.

These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.