Are you being flippant? You don't experience ANYTHING. It does not matter if the universe ceases to exist the moment you die : from your perspective, it does.

After you die, it doesn't matter if you were Jeffrey Dahmer or Neil Armstrong. For YOU, your life experiences never even happened.

To me this prospect is far more upsetting than some religious view of heaven or hell.

So you think that experiencing absolutely nothing, forever and ever, like you never existed is better?

It's not like a person's bodily tissues failing after decades of service should be a surprising or unexpected event. Probably, the fault is in our own DNA, causing our cells to give up and fail according to a schedule.

Perhaps instead of arguing over healthcare or corporate taxes or other petty trival issues we should as a species work on stopping these biological decay processes, and since that is a very complex problem, develop methods to preserve ourselves if we fail before the cures can be developed.

I bet if Mr. Armstrong had been successfully cryogenically frozen, the people of our future would make a considerable effort to bring him back.

The nasty truth is that actual living plants have so many mutations and gene crossings and chromosomes doublings that you should not think of extant plants as some pristine, perfect creation passed down from God (or Gaea). This is what the nuts in California are actually up in arms about : they believe that "naturally" occurring crops have to be superior to something that has had a few genes artificially spliced in.

Thing is, every crop humans grow for food already HAS been genetically modified, through centuries of selective breeding. In the case of ruby red grapefruit, the crop was developed by exposing the seeds to radiation and causing a LOT of mutations quite fast.

Modern genetic engineering is just a cleaner, and more accurate method. Rather than mixing genes up blindly, the scientists who perform it carefully insert desirable traits and test the outcomes. This can also lead to much safer, faster growing crops. Optimize the Krebs cycle for corn, and it will grow twice as fast. Allow crops to synthesize their own pesticides in the inedible parts of the plant, and humans stop inadvertently consuming pesticide in their diet. Make the crop resistant to pests, and you won't need as much pesticide. And so on.

Amusingly, it might stick the pirates bay somewhere WAY down on the rankings, basically making it "unsearchable" directly. But, sites that link to the pirates bay and talk about how it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy will be riding right on top of the rankings.

Scenario : there is 5 years warning, and the asteroid is 10 km is diameter (the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Could we deflect it? Assume that the mission to intercept the asteroid reached it 2 years before impact.

I kind of feel like there would be a way. In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem. At least 50 trillion dollars or more. Most other activities are suspended in the western world and china. A salt-water fission rocket or something ought to be powerful enough to deflect the asteroid.

Well, I will admit that users can switch to another site moderately easily. But you lose all your current facebook friends and contacts unless you log in periodically.

It's a weak monopoly. A strong monopoly is something like windows, where you can try to switch, but no other OS can even RUN a huge list of applications, including virtually all games. Even stronger is the power company or ISP, where it's usually physically impossible to switch.

In what universe was this considered a good deal? How on earth does a company that lets users take chintzy photos with a fake aging filter worth 1000 million dollars?

There's nothing that makes Instagram a natural monopoly : at least with facebook itself, the vast userbase it has makes it a de-facto monopoly. (just like there's only space in front of your house for one power company and one set of roads, there's only time for you to put inane status updates on one social networking site).

And, worse still, Facebook doesn't have the deep pool of genius level talent like google, so it's entirely possible that Facebook will not STAY on top. But at least it has most of the user base for social networking, and people use it to get stuff done. Instagrams an internet fad that gives the product away for free.

Shit...for a cool 1000 million, facebook didn't even get a deep talent pool of genius level software engineers. They bought themselves a whopping 10 or so employees. No matter how skilled, 10 folks isn't worth that kind of scratch.

Yes. Our Lord the FSM might at any moment extend his noodly appendage and delete the very ground upon which you walk. At which point you would fall, unless by the grace of Our Lord he chooses to hold you in the air using his appendages.

It won't. Poison is all about the dosage. There's a LOT of water, and not much caffeine compared to that much water. Also, caffeine only works because it interfaces with specific receptors in our brains. It probably affects other mammals, but is not going to affect random fish or other aquatic life.

Boeing 460 milllion....SpaceX 440 million...

Boeing has performed how many launches? Historically, when have they ever made ANYTHING for a low cost? As far as I know, Boeing has been charging top dollar (and, admittedly, provided top tier quality) for aircraft for over 70 years.

SpaceX, on the other hand, has shown cost efficiencies that have never been seen before in space travel. They've already done 2 dragon launches that would have been completely survivable if a stow-away passenger had been riding aboard (assuming they brought a small life support system)

It will probably become easier to enrich uranium for anyone who has the resources to do it, whether or not this Silex technology is made commercial scale. It's not like the basics of the technology are a secret.

Yes but the power of eFormats could mean that in theory all books ever published could fit onto a single, or a small number, of portable reading devices. Just one of them stored in a faraday cage (a plain old iron box is all it takes, or the trunk of a car for some models of car, etc) and all of mankind's knowledge survives. MUCH harder to lose every copy of a particular book than there is with the library system.

SD cards store the data in electric charge trapped in special types of transistors. This charge does leak over time at a very slow rate. The cheaper flash chips are only rated for a limited number of years without the data being accessed and recopied. These effects are temperature dependent, and I think 25 years isn't too long of a time period, but it isn't forever.

Truth be told, the private copyright cops have no reason to lie or cheat. What they are doing is quite easy and straightforward. All they have to do is hit a major torrent site like TPB, click a tracker with their hacked version of an open source bittorrent client, and save all the IP addresses in the swarm. The rest is just meaningless fluff that costs stupendous sums of money. The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case.

If the U.S. legal system were in any way remotely efficient or speedy, it would dispose of all these cases in a week. And if the legislature were also not so corrupt, the fines for these infringements would be in some way based on reality.