People like to think infrastructure just works. People shouldn't have to plan for the cloud going down, any more than they should have to plan for a power outage during a storm or a broken traffic light on their morning commute. When shit happens, it should get fixed, hopefully before anybody important really notices. That was life before the internet, and it will continue to be life after the internet. Oh, btw, lastpass has an off-line option -- nothing wrong with having an alternate commute route either, in case that traffic light didn't get fixed quickly enough. :)

chill, dude. i kept it linear for a reason. you are *way* over-analyzing this.

Not sure what you mean by "very short order." For this particular black hole, the Schwartzchild radius is about .12 ly. Even moving at a non-trivial fraction of c, say .01c, it would still take 12 years to reach the singularity.

The issue you raised about IPv4 was recognized and resolved over two decades ago through the creation of a less provincial, more far reaching standard. That isn't going to work on the EM spectrum.

You seem to be confusing limited with scarce. EM spectrum is relatively scarce, yes, but it is not limited. There is a huge difference, legally, and more importantly, economically, between "limited" and "scarce." Unlike oil and other finite natural resources, the EM spectrum is going to be exploitable for a long, long time. It's been around since the Big Bang, and will be around until the heat death of the universe. Calling it a limited natural resource in the same way oil and natural gas are limited natural resources is, to use your own word, wrongheaded, and more than a little naive.

If you have a great idea about how to use the EM spectrum, great; go for it. But you have to convince Elon Musk or whoever is exploiting the portion of the spectrum you are interested in it is in their best interest to give you a shot at it, since they got there first. You need to wait your fucking turn, not rewrite the laws so that Elon is legally compelled to give you a turn.

...only if Apple can convince me that it is discarding and not profiting from the biometric data it collects from me. You don't need to keep more than a few seconds worth for a heartbeat check. Apple has medical doctors on the payroll that are trying to figure out how to monetize all that free biometric data (full disclosure: I work for one of those doctors as a data wrangler) and the insurance companies are all for it. We need much tighter regulatory control before I personally would ever consider giving that data to Apple or anybody else. Case in point: What happens when Apple sells this guy's entire biometric history to his medical insurance company? They will undoubtedly jack up his premium...or better yet, use it to deny any claims because his biometric data shows he was engaging in risky behavior for his age. sorry to rain on your parade, but this incident does not bode well for people who can't afford to self-pay for medical care.

Heh...Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The cancer on the body politic goes *way* deeper than that. That some misogynistic, xenophobic racist could end up as president is fucked up. It is *embarrassing.* You are absolutely right about that.

No, not crazy -- it makes good sense, from a risk management perspective. To weaponize your ultralight, you must be willing to die for your cause. That willingness is rare in America; the probability of an ultralight as an attack vector is too low to justify the cost of defending against it. Weaponizing a scale model of that ultralight, otoh, has no such barrier. The only risk to the attacker is the cost of the model, which is no barrier at all. All the authorities can do is make it harder to remain anonymous if somebody wants to pursue that vector of attack.

I advocated for open source software when I was a sysadmin at the rocket ranch twenty years ago. But there is more to a manufacturing business (we made weapons) than just having the best tools in the hands of the sharpest minds on the planet. You have to have somebody you can hang if it all goes south. You don't get that with open source. We can (and did) sue IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and HP when their tools fail to work as advertised. Open source license agreements protect one thing -- access to the code, which is good for developers. And as long as the enterprise isn't eying some way to make a profit, open source is probably okay. But every other license model out there protects everybody else in the enterprise -- the developer, the distributor, and your customer/end-user. And you need to protect everybody -- when your widget accidentally cuts a swath of destruction through somebody's playground, blame has be assigned and heads must roll. Open source makes that damn near impossible. This kind of asymmetric weakening of license law is great for people who want access to the code, but it is anathema to the people who have to protect the enterprise from lawsuits.

that's pretty easy...he's got some really...old-fashioned...ideas about the relationship between a company and its employees. Like, 19th century old. Exploitation is not a good thing, and as long as he continues to exploit labor, he is not going to be well-liked on the left. His whole business plan -- creating a self-sustaining vertically integrated economic infrastructure (read: monopoly) so that he can tap the vast resources of space -- is copied from the tactics of 19th century industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles M. Schwab. For such a forward thinking man, he has a lot of historical baggage he needs to shed.

...the other is maintaining centralized energy production. Alternative energy sources, especially solar, allow consumers to bypass the centralized energy infrastructure that that energy companies rely on for profit. Energy companies aren't against solar/wind power, they just don't want to have to compete with it. If we are going to move to solar/wind/alternative energies, it is going to be on their terms. ALEC, the Koch-brothers backed political lobby, has been steadily and successfully building legislative roadblocks to grid decentralization in the US. Every player in every sector of the energy economy on this planet is heavily vested in the current infrastructure. The ten largest fossil-fuel based energy companies on the planet have seen the writing on the wall and are moving to drastically reduce or eliminate entirely their reliance on coal, with near total conversion set for 2050. That is a good thing for the planet, but they are not even remotely interested in changing the centralized infrastructure. That is a bad thing for consumers -- it guarantees people will still be paying more for energy than they have to.

re-read the article. 210W *is* peak efficiency -- it's 15% of the average daily insolation, as the article plainly states. The article's numbers add up, and yours do not.

Absent this error, your argument for a large centralized processing plant collapses. It's almost as if you deliberately misread the article because you have some vested interest in preserving the current centralized power infrastructure. I have to ask: are you now, or have you ever received funding from any Koch-backed source?

I'll bet the answer is "yes."

What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a ball park? Ads. Ads everywhere. What dominates a televised game? Ads. Anything that fucks with the revenue stream created by ads probably is not going to be embraced by the league owners. Every gap in play has a queue full of commercials. Reducing those gaps reduces that revenue stream. For broadcast games, automated officiating means the multiple replays of disputed calls will stop, and that means all those revenue producing ads queued up for that particular gap in play will evaporate.

With that said, I will make a prediction. Baseball doesn't really have a time-out system, like American football, but I would predict the "TV time-out" the NFL introduced to enhance their ad revenue stream will be introduced to baseball if automated officiating ever is adopted.

I think a little bit of history is in order. NASA's charter was to "...provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." These are the first words of the legislation that established NASA in October of 1958. NASA has been delivering what NASA has promised since they opened the doors for business -- data on the problems of flight, and other purposes, like data on climate, crops, and the environment. They've had to deal with wildly divergent funding regimes, fluctuations in public opinion, and most recently, an active, directed effort by Republicans to remove science from the public policy sphere. Without NASA's research mission, there would be a far smaller set of commercial opportunities for American businesses in space. Plenty of military ones, but practically no private, commercial ones.

And Apollo? Apollo was a one-off. It should have been handled 100 percent by the military, and never darkened NASA's door. (The only non-active duty Apollo program astronaut was Armstrong, and he was still military, just not on active duty at the time.)

Ditto the STS -- Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, convinced Nixon that US intelligence agencies would need reliable access to space to combat the growing Soviet presence in orbit, so NASA was given the incompatible tasks of trying to do science and having to keep it secret at the same time. The STS was a failure, not a success, and it should be laid at Nixon/Kissinger's feet, not the US government in general, or NASA in particular.

So, no. Don't piss on NASA, or the government that created NASA. Instead, piss on the military-industrial complex that hijacked NASA for sixty years. Ironically, the same president that proposed NASA to the American people also warned against that military-industrial complex. And doubly ironic, the agency that was created simultaneously with NASA to handle the weaponization of technology, the Advanced Research Project Agency, accidentally created the Internet. Go figure.

The legislation, which just passed the Senate Transportation and Public Safety Committee in a 5-3 vote that was about as party line as it gets (5 republican yes, 3 democrat no) and still needs to be voted on by the legislature, applies only to people licensed to provide direct care to mentally disabled patients in an intermediate care facility, and was initiated because some fuckwad raped and impregnated an incapacitated woman at the Hacienda Healthcare long term care facility.

So we are talking about legislation that affects at most a couple hundred people, in a state with six million citizens. Arizona already requires bio-data (read fingerprints) for tens of thousands of people who have jobs involving direct contact with their fellow AZ citizens -- everybody from cops and firemen, to school bus drivers and pharmacy technicians. This legislation requires a small subset of those people already required to provide biometric data to provide additional bio-metric data that would be *useful* in identifying somebody suspected of a heinous crime and clearing everybody else. And making them pay for it? Hey, it's Fiscally Responsible! (TM). They can write it off on their taxes, the way pharmacy techs write off the costs of their fingerprint cards.

Why is anybody getting their knickers in a twist over this?