It's almost like (barely) developing nations with pitifully low levels of human capital formation also have pitifully low levels of infrastructure investment. Funny that. It's probably their way of making our victory in the civil war seem completely pointless.

As much as I mourn my HP Touchpad (Oh man did WebOS multitasking curb-stomp Android multitasking at the time and even considerably later); if you are still running WebOS you probably have bigger security issues. The last update for any Pre models was December 2011, and Touchpad models January 2012. That's a long time for a relatively full featured OS to go without any fixing.

Especially for missile subs. There's a reason(aside from property values and a desire to keep tourists away) that the cold-war-classic hardened silos in the US were sprinkled around various parts of nowhere; because it was basically assumed that any fixed silo Team Ivan knew about would be getting nuked and so putting them near major cities and industrial centers was a bad plan; but the whole point of nuclear missile subs is highly resistant second strike capabilities through spending as much time sneaking around underwater as possible.

The risks of being caught in drydock are hardly zero; but a submarine base is a rather different asset from a silo.

If memory serves, even more of the post Soviet republics didn't have much in the way of proper warheads-ready-to-roll; but were largely cooperative with international efforts to bundle up the alarming quantities of fissile goodness hanging out in various abandoned facilities that were 'guarded' mostly in the sense that some of the looters were also drawing paychecks.

Nukes, at least, can be waved around; but suddenly unfunded nuclear R&D programs are just a nightmare for everyone involved.

Silence, AC! Omega Override: Exigent Haggis is a heavily classified program. You can't discuss those sorts of security matters in a public forum.

I don't know what the wacky world of inheriting nukes in state breakups looks like in terms of precedent(given that our only real experience with it is 'making shit up while the Soviet Union crumbled' there may be little more than handwaving); but it wouldn't at all surprise me if both Scotland and the (slightly less)United Kingdom would have a very strong shared incentive to come up with an amicable deal.

Unless you have the ability(decent strategic air force, missile sub capabilities, or hostile neighbors within easy shooting range) and the desire to wave your nukes around, being a nuclear power is actually kind of a shitty job. Nukes are, well, the nuclear option, so they are of little use except in extreme circumstances; they are expensive and technically demanding to maintain, their PR value is deeply mixed, you have to protect them to avoid proliferation, and they have finite shelf life.

If Scotland wants to get out of the nuclear game; but the UK wants to hold on to some Global Influence, it would be a very, very, mutually convenient arrangement for Scotland to offer a sweetheart deal(if they have some sort of legal claim, maybe a relatively token payment or concession, otherwise just some handshakes and a photo-op) on the warheads in exchange for the UK packing them up, remediating any especially badly contaminated facilities, and otherwise making them Not Our Problem Anymore.

The hypothetical Scottish exit would likely be cleaner than that of the former Soviet republics, so they wouldn't be quite as badly situated; but the post-Soviet states that inherited fissile goodies were generally quite happy to accept Russian, American, or any other outside assistance in just getting the stuff off their hands as fast as possible. Having a real nuclear arsenal is expensive and requires commitment. Having a decaying one is just a proliferation clusterfuck waiting to happen.

In the specific case of humans(and other placental mammals, presumably), it probably doesn't help that "aggressively invade immunologically foreign tissue, stimulate growth of blood vessels to support voracious demand for oxygen and nutrients" is one of the qualifications that you must have to avoid dying before your mother even noticed you.

That sort of capability is classic tumor; but you aren't going to hack it as an embryo unless you are capable of it.

The stakes are obviously higher when the subject is sentient(at least the subject tends to think so...); but even organisms that are barely 'multicellular', like slime molds, have some rather fascinating mechanisms surrounding the issue of maintaining organism-level cooperation between individual cells subject to their own selective pressures.

With the slime molds some of the really tricky bits happen when the normally free-living cells congregate and form a stalk that is mostly (dead) structural cells with some spore forming bodies at the tip. This behavior is apparently adaptive at a colony level; but it involves a bunch of formerly independent cells deciding which 90% get to die in order to form the support structure and who gets to be the reproductive structure. All without access to general purpose cognition, game theory, or any similarly handy tools.

Multicellular organisms do have a variety of lethal failsafes that are supposed to stand in the way of cancer. Unfortunately some fraction of potentially cancerous cells are sufficiently defective that apoptosis is interrupted and they can proliferate.

I'm not sure why this has you so worked up; but nothing about my proposal requires assuming that all true aliens are made of silicon and element-115 or similar sci-fi handwaving.

Looking at terrestrial organisms, we see various limits on what biochemistries actually work; but we also see a lot of variation. Some of it in fairly critical systems, much of it churn. Depending on the exact resources available and any special difficulties involved we can, and do, build robust phylogenetic trees. In cases that we care more about, or are better behaved, we can sometimes nail heredity down to the individual level despite the fact that conspecifics employ pretty much identical chemistry.

It may well be the case that an alien is based on pretty much the same chemistry as terrestrial life, even that there aren't any other options; but a carbon based alien with DNA that just coincidentially fits neatly into a terrestrially evolved phylogenetic tree? That would be quite a trick.

I didn't even call Libertarians out by now, and already the morons with mod points who compromise the Ron Paul Commemorative Movement are out to stomp on me.

Well fuck you, maters. I've got karma to burn.

A lot of people who complain about government are people who would like to terminate most, if not all, labor protections. They bury that desire in ideological ruminations, and have convinced vast legions of rubes that the only good government is a non existent government, and somehow the magic of market forces will protect workers.

I gotta correct ya champ, that's not exactly true, at least in every case. Its true that the kernel maintainers (Torvalds & gang) maintain some drivers with the kernel, but not all. And what do you mean "tightly tied to the kernel"? Are you saying that if Microsoft made a radical change to their "kernel" (three big DLL's is a kernel, who knew?) architecture those drivers would still work? I doubt it. "Tightly" as a loaded word; either you have an architecture that has many parts yet all works together, or you you don't. That they all work in harmony to deliver a satisfactory user experience- is that "tightly" coupled? Oh, and don't get me started on GNU Hurd...

And yet they do (IBM), becuase there's more than one business model in the world.

Implying the Windows driver model is flawless.