Bonus points: it wont flood any place in land that is not actually flooded twice a day,

But, by retarding the tidal current, it WILL dry out part of the area currently intermittently wetted, and WILL keep continuously wet another part of it that is currently intermittently dried.

In particular, I wonder how they'll handle Global Warming / Climate Change discussions.

That's a simple one. There's not really a dispute there.

Q.E.D.

Airplanes that can travel around the galaxy? Wow! Fast progress. How about a Galactic Boat now. And where's my flying car!

...

The line losses would be tremendous...most of the power would be lost to heat and RF emissions.

Can you prove that with math instead of just assuming abstract losses? How much real power line looses per 1000km for example? Soviet Union moved electricity around its vast spaces, using its non-high-tech united electric grid. Without any superconductors.

It is far more efficient to have highly distributed generation AND storage than to have an intercontinental power grid of supersized transmission lines.

Yes, it is. But it's much more expensive than global transmission grid.

Anyway, my point was not that we must concentrate on single solution, but rather that solutions exist in many ways, I just suggestged simpliest one (except that political fantasy part of couse).

While the early search engines indexed largely based on content, Google primarily used hyperlinks to index. And most found it better, making Google the king. It's how they Won the West. Now they are going back to content-centric indexing?

Simple reason: they cook your balls, you have less children, less stress, and live longer.

... when there is more than one version of the truth (conflicts, spin vs fact)... plus not all information is facts... philosophical questions may have more than one answer etc... so I am definitely curious to see how this works out.

I'm curious as well.

In particular, I wonder how they'll handle Global Warming / Climate Change discussions.

Then there's electoral politics, economics, Illegal immigration / undocumented migrants, ...

Comparing to a knowlege base presupposes that the knowledge base is full of truth. Filtering search results to exclude (or down-rate) anything at odds with the current paradigm is a recipe for hamstriging research, debate, and intellectual progress

  Ideas need to be supported or rejected based on evidence and logic, not whether they're orthodox.

I mean if they go to the trouble to do this why do it in a way that would be discoverable via jtag for other state actors. I mean if they go to the trouble to do this why do it in a way that would be discoverable via jtag for other state actors.

Because hacking the JTAG to hide malicious hacking of the software is a massive endeavor and a massive PITA.

Besides, if they built it into the original software they wouldn't NEED to hack the JTAG to hide it. The code would match the released version. (You'd have to reverse-engineer it to discover their back doors.)

Technology creates new fields

Yes, I realize that, but will it always be enough to offset the losses? I don't see enough "new fields" to replace lost factory jobs. Retail? That seems like a stretch, but the web and self-checkout technologies are eating into that also. Plus, retail pays lower than factory work.

Road construction, gas stations, repair shops, car factories, etc. clearly offset any loss in the "horse and coach" business. I don't see the equivalent in quantity these days.

If you ask the drive to read out the whole flash.
The maybe the firmware would have to go to the platter to get the real image.

Or the malware could regenerate the un-attacked version.

For instance: If it's a patch that loads into an otherwise cleared-to-known-vallue region it can detect that region while reporting flash content and report the cleared value, instead. Add a couple other tiny regions where it saved (or alread knew) the previous contents where it "sank it's hooks" and you can't tell it's there from its replies to dump requests.

JTAG seems safer.

Yep. JTAG, in principle, could be corrupted. But it would require substantial hardware support that almost certainly isn't there (yet!)

Which is why I always laugh my ass off at all these people who use PGP to sign things and put a hash on the same website you download it from ... look you can verify this file you downloaded from the website hasn't changed because theres no way anyone would be smart enough to update the hash as well!

That's why you SIGN the hash. Then only the public key needs to be published by a different route.

And it doesn't HURT to publish it on the web site as well: Then someone tampering by substituting a different public key sets off alarm bells when that differs from the public key obtained from another site or by another path. Blocking that makes man-in-the-middle more complex: The attacker has to have essentially total control of the path to the victim and be able to recognize and substitute the public key whenever it shows up. One slip-up and somebody may raise the alarm.

Meanwhile: Even if publishing hashes on the same site may not provide additional security against MITM, it DOES let you check the download wasnt corrupted in transit (in ways other than malicious substitution). With modern protocols that's less of a problem these days than it used to be, but a check would be comforting.

Quark chips?

It used to be that new technologies created new jobs as it destroyed old ones. But that's merely a historical pattern, not necessarily a law of nature, and it may end.

It's kind of like Moore's Law: it's held so far, but nobody knows if it will keep.

Many conservatives feel that if the gov't doesn't meddle, new jobs will come from somewhere. However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.

If the Chinese gov't cant find jobs for that many people, bleep will happen. Rioting will likely happen based recent history just after the mortgage crash. They may have to dust off the socialism.

As far as I'm concerned, if it's gravitation is enough to pull it into a sphere, it's a planet

Then we'd have hundreds of "planets".

One could argue that since the definition is arbitrary, including that of "sufficiently round", we might as well stick with the "classic 9".