There's no need for that last step -- you already have a political system that ensures people are forced to vote for the "lesser of two evils" rather than their actual preference -- and those two evils are really more or less equivalent, I mean there's differences, but not in these things.

True. But mortality is equal to frequency of accidents, multiplied with death-risk in an accident. Even if death-risk is higher, you can still be a lot safer if the frequency of accidents is much lower.

These capsules run inside a sealed (airtight!) solid-steel pipe. That alone eliminates a pretty large fraction of all accidents, it's not as if you'll ever get a pedestrian on the track or crash in an intersection in one of these.

They switched because they where paid to do so, because it looks good in marketing. They're in the position to control the webserver for millions of domains, thus Microsoft bribes them to use IIS.

What happens to the balance of the wheel when you release the bullet ?

Hard to say. Seems plausible, certain even, that always *having* a cellphone saves lives sometimes. It means quicker alerting of 911 for example, especially in the case where something happens far from the nearest landline.

I was just taking issue with the "even more dangerous" nonsense. There's plenty folks argue as if the world is going to hell and everything is deteriorating. Some things are, but traffic-fatalities certainly are not one of them.

What do you mean "even less safe" ? The roads in most of the developed world are safer than they've ever been, and improving rapidly. For example, here in Norway when I got my drivers licencee we had around 400 casualties a year, now 20 years later we've got around 170.

And that is despite the fact that driven-kilometers has almost doubled in those 20 years. Thus fatalities-pro-driven-km has fallen by something like 80% in 20 years.

I expect autonomous cars will continue the trend, and in another 20 years we'll have double-digit-fatalities, despite another increase in kilometers-driven.

True. So perhaps that's more easily doable than I imagine. A solid-fuel booster is similar to a explosive shell, but it's not throttlable and poorly controllable in general, is that sufficient for orbital insertion ?

People have -not- been making liquid-fuel rocket-engines that survive 60000G for 100 years, indeed they like to blow up even under 1G if built imperfectly.

Seems to me there'd be plenty application.

What about artillery-shells that are able to do last-second course-corrections ? I suppose in atmosphere that's more easily done by aerodynamic fins, though.

I'd not call it impossible either, but it does seem to me to be a fairly tricky piece of engineering.

orbital insertion engines that can withstand 60000G and survive to function are in somewhat short supply.

Turkey comes to mind. The military there has on several occasions defended the constitutions againts attack from government, and then handed the keys back over to the ones who, by the constitution, should hold them; namely the people (trough elections)

True, you have to stay secure for the length of time the message has value. This varies. If you're the military, and reporting the position of a patrol in the field, this doesn't need to stay secret for very long. (3 days later the info is pretty useless anyway)

Breaktroughs in algorithms makes this hard. You can nest encryption, which means you're safe unless *all* of the levels are cracked, but it's a hassle.

That's both right and wrong. It's right in the short term: If there's no civilization, what you need is knowledge of how to survive without one - designing CPUs isn't a useful skill in that setting.

But bootstrapping civilization should be -much- faster than discovering everything for the first time, even if 99% of humanity dies out. I thinkt it's perfectly plausible for CPU-design to become useful again in a generation or two, short enough that normal books should survive if protected from the elements.

Then get sure. This argument was old a decade ago, and is getting ridicolous by now. (you hear it against solar too, not just about wind)

Windmills produce (over their average lifetime) 15 to 20 times the energy needed for producing them in the first place.

Photovoltaics produce 5-10 times the energy needed for producing them.

A large fraction of new PCs come with 8. And it's a problem. For example, my wife bought a 8-PC a couple of months ago, and hates it. Now she wants to buy a new computer for her mother, except she can't imagine going with a win8-thingie since she conciders those horrible. Might end up going with Mac, or scrounging for one of the new PCs still being sold with 7.

You know things are bad when nontechnical users are willing to pay a premium to get your 4 year old product, rather than the current one.

Or post things you want googleable under your full name and things that are more controversial under a pseudonym. For typical employers it's not even as it needs to be hugely well-hidden, they seldom do more than look at the top 1 or 2 pages when googling your name.

Is it possible to find out who (say) Indian Homemaker or Conjecture Girl is by researching on the web ? Certainly. Is it likely that the antics of these pseudonyms will be linked to the identities behind them when they apply for a job ? Not really.