If you can't read the scaled-down map reproduced from the report in the linked blog post, you can either look on p. 54 of the PDF, or else here's the site on OpenStreetMap. It appears it's not just that they're being given permission for the launches, but also that they're being given use of the land: the approved launch site is Texas state-owned land in Boca Chica State Park, which they'll be allowed to construct a facility on, and use for a certain number of days/year.

But a football is the ball used to play Gaelic. A soccer ball is what you use to play soccer.

But then it gets ambiguous, because someone might think you mean Free University as in no tuition, rather than Free-as-in-Freedom University. And Liberty University is already taken.

Huh, I had overlooked the name when reading the article, just read right though to "some physics prof thinks NASA is wrong and it's actually super-dangerous". Didn't realize it was Michio Kaku, which is indeed surprising.

I do:

It sounds a lot like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster: A deep-space probe powered by a highly radioactive substance could wipe out humankind.

If you want to knock people unconscious, there are already less invasive ways of doing it, like general anesthesia. Though it would be interesting to know whether general anesthesia operates by a mechanism related to this one, or is doing something else.

Sure, speed would be nice, but this is not really true:

One of the main issues with 3D printers today is that they lack in one area; speed.

3D printers lack in a whole lot of areas, and speed is not at the top of the list. There are a ton of things that you can't do with a 3d printer because the parts are too large, too intricate, need different materials than 3d printers can handle, or are too expensive to 3d print. As more of those problems are solved, the range of things you can plausibly 3d print expands significantly. Now once you can print something in 12 hours, it's great if you could print it in 2 hours or 20 minutes instead, but just being able to do it at all is the biggest step.

The weakest part of the whole fracking operation is really sloppy treatment of the wastewater. There have been large spills in some places, and the disposal is often questionable (as seen here). The fracking process itself gets the most scientific scrutiny, because it's what's technically new about fracking, but good ol' wastewater handling is a mess, just as it was in the mining days.

Yeah I don't see how "propulsion stage is based on the motor of a rocket often used by the Air Force" is a negative thing about it. If anything that suggests they might actually be able to deliver something that works.

Google, for good or ill, isn't interested in those at all (if they were, it'd be an interesting debate, though). Unlike tech startups, Google puts a quite high value on college degrees, and highly ranked ones at that. They hire a few people who don't have one, but by and large they hire out of top-50 CS departments.

The EU's position is that digging up some information and pointing to it constitutes an action that comes with responsibility. If you dig up some old government records on people and report information that has some plausible public interest, that's legal. If you dig up some old government records about your obscure neighbor, and stick them online just to embarrass him, that's considered a violation of privacy (under EU law). The view of the court is that Google doing this algorithmically doesn't relieve them of responsibility: when they dig up old information and point to it, they need to make judgments on whether it's in the public interest to do so.

That's certainly possible, yes. It's sometimes called a "series hybrid". While conventional "parallel" hybrids have both gas and electric engines connected to the drivetrain, in a series hybrid the drivetrain is 100% electric, but there's also a gas generator that feeds into the electric system when needed.

Whether you should call that en electric vehicle or not seems to depend on what proportion of the energy is expected to ultimately come from gas vs. wall charge. If most of the energy comes from gas, then it's just a different configuration of hybrid vehicle. Diesel trains work that way, for example (electric drivetrains powered by a diesel generator), and are not considered electric trains. On the other hand, if it runs mostly electric and there is a tank just used for occasional range-extension, those are being marketed as "extended-range electrical vehicles".

Our billionaires mostly do things like wearing clown noses in space or union-busting convenience stores.

Oh, the U.S. has plenty of those too: 6 of the top 10 richest Americans have either the surname "Walton" or "Koch", and they do roughly the same kinds of things with their money that someone like Péladeau does. One of the remaining four has the surname "Ellison", and his visionary thoughts mostly involve yacht races.

Musk has mentioned in the past a range of around 200 miles.

Yeah, the big practical problem with this decision is that it requires case-by-case analysis, which is probably impractical at Google's scale. This particular case is really pretty clear-cut: it's the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, and it's a story about his CEOship. If Google did case-by-case analysis, it would be easy to reject this takedown request as easily within the scope of the "public role" exception. However they probably (for understandable reasons) don't want to do that kind of case-by-case decision making.