That memo is waaaay too long. No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.

Actually, the FAA told US airlines not to fly over Crimea, because in April Russia claimed they controlled air traffic over that airspace. The FAA told US planes not to fly there because it was a convoluted, disputed mess which could lead to accidents. It had nothing to do with risk of being shot down, and that area does not (or did not until today at least) cover the area over Ukraine where this flight was shot down. That flight path would not have been restricted by the FAA.

Your generalization is quite wrong. Humans classify organisms based on the evidence in front of them. Can you show me this continuum between a platypus and some other animal? How does that fit into the "everything is a continuum" that you speak of?

Uh, they most certainly have extremely crisp boundaries. Species are classified by the ability of two organisms to breed with one another. There isn't any "crisper" boundary than that. Once two lineages are different enough, it is no longer possible for them to reproduce sexually with one another. That is a quantum leap, a boolean yes or no situation (at least in 99.9% of the cases). Humans have nothing to do with defining that boundary. It is merely what we have observed and appropriately classified.

What's carding? Like hacked SIM cards or something?

The moon has no atmosphere, thus radiation from the earth cannot affect the far side of the moon at all. So obviously, even to this day, the earth still affects "the locked side of the moon more than the other". The question is simply how much. The moon and earth were both molten after the collision, so it was not a matter of the earth being hot enough to melt the moon, but merely the earth imparting energy to prolong the cooling of the near side. No matter what, the near side must have cooled slower than the far side - it's a straightforward matter of thermodynamics. One side of the moon was receiving energy from the earth while the other side was not. The near side didn't need to stay so hot it was incandescent, but merely "softer" so that small impacts would heal more on the near side than the far side, and the duration only needed to be long enough to result in some degree of visible difference, which is what we still see today.

The whole thing sounds plausible to me.

Wait!!! What happened to Pascal?!?!? On a more serious note, Pascal was the premier teaching language back in the day, but it really wasn't used much in the real world. It was a stepping stone for learning C, which is where the real power was at and what "real" applications were developed in. I believe there is less disconnect today between the popular learning languages and what is actually utilized in the real world.

Can things possibly get any more bizarre with Assange? I have an idea. Let's lock Julian Assange, John McAfee and Edward Snowden in a room for a week and see who is left surviving at the end. We can call it Hunger Games - Nerd Edition (my bet's on McAfee).

Problem is purple hearts are not awarded for self-inflicted injuries.

8 of 9 lives is 0.8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888889% Just sensing the irony as you complained about rounding pi down to 3.

...which indicates that the gun was bought specifically for that purpose in those 50% of handgun suicide deaths. It wasn't the other way around - people didn't die because they happened to have bought a handgun, which is the way you phrased it. They wanted to die, so they bought a handgun. I've owned my handgun for over 20 years, and I've not wanted to die, hence I'm not dead by it.

I live in the Appalachian mountains. As I watch weather radar, observing weather systems come at us from the west, I've seen dozens if not hundreds of times over the years where very powerful, well-defined weather systems (individual cells as well as frontal systems) totally disintegrate as they cross over from flat regions of North Carolina and Tennessee into Virginia, because they hit a literal 1,000 foot wall of mountains. Tornadoes are extremely rare here. A few years ago we had small one that messed up a couple sheds and the canopy over a gas station, and that was the first in decades. So I do believe this physicist is onto something that would be effective. Whether or not it's practical or acceptable to construct such a thing is another question.

Why C#? Develop your game in C++ using OpenGL ES for rendering. Your code will compile as-is for iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, and others. You will only need a couple hundred lines of native code (java for Android, Objective C for iOS, etc) to handle events and pass execution into your C++ code. My game engine runs on all the above platforms and 99.9% of my code is shared across all of them.

Also, these days many, many developers simply use an existing game engine and only bother with the high level code specific to their game. Mundane stuff like the low level rendering, Audio APIs (which unlike OpenGL ES, differ quite a bit from one platform to another), physics, etc, is ground that's been treaded several thousand times nowadays, and most game developers leave that stuff to the experts in the various fields to handle the nitty gritty. Optimization of those routines is usually where the "expert" part comes into play.

I work with a game designer / artist who implements all the high level game stuff in Lua, and my engine takes care of all the aforementioned "boring" stuff, freeing him up to actually develop games, and not worry about crap like polygon tessellation algorithms and tons of other very boring stuff that would just be a waste of his time.

This has nothing to do with programming languages. It's the entire server / HTTP / HTML / web browser infrastructure he's complaining about. You've got a document format (html), originating from servers (PHP / Java / whatever) with embedded scripts (javascript), which can dynamically modify the HTML document (DOM / DHTML), as well as making additional requests to and from the server ("AJAX"), most recently extended via rich multimedia standards (WebGL, Web Audio API). The whole thing is a kludge that has expanded from HTML into.... whatever this huge mess has become after layer after layer of more stuff thrown on top (HTML5?).

Replacing the one little part of all that, javascript, with some other language, would only make things even more convoluted and complex. What he really wants is Flash and Java Apps. And how well did those technologies pan out as universal cross platform environments in the long run (and no, Java as used in Android does not count, as it only runs inside a single platform called Android). IMO, Apple has done us a favor in rejecting both Flash and Java on iOS. They've given two developers choices. One, feel free to use HTML as far as you're willing to try and push it. Good luck with that beyond anything reasonable as far as interactivity and responsiveness with HTML on a mobile device. Two, create dedicated applications for the target platforms (iOS, Android, whatever).

What this Google engineer is wanting is to be able to create dedicated applications without having to create dedicated applications. He wants to implement something that runs optimally on iOS without having to do any iOS software development. I have news for him... Apple has 100% control over that universe right now, and he will not be getting his way any time in the near future.

This is nothing more than the type of fingerprint matching that's been going on for many decades. It just puts a name to a person after the fact. Now on the other hand, if he was actively recognized via facial recognition as he was out and about in public and then apprehended, well that would be a different story.

One word: polarization. Man made radio waves for communication are almost always polarized. Further, reflected radio waves are often very polarized even if the source was not (which is why polarized sunglasses reduce glare). They did not see the polarization expected from reflected radio signals. It appears they are actually emitted.