No, we don't even have evidence that anyone even tried. I think it's silly to conflate willfully negligent economic and fiscal decisions for at least a couple of decades (and really ever since the 1950s off and on) with actual enemy action.

Lately, every time I've allowed a google app to update I've regretted it. I was just fine with gmail the way it was. The latest incarnation I just don't like. For one I really hate how they are starting to ignore the menu button on phones that have them. I like having a menu button down at the bottom of the phone, close to where my thumbs are naturally. If I wanted an iphone I would have bought an iphone.

In any case I've learned to never update a google app that I like. One of the biggest problems with the Google Play walled garden is the complete lack of version history. Once a new version is out, the old version is gone forever. Always backup your apps before upgrading I've learned (and forgotten too many times).

But the real problem is that google apps are getting bigger and bigger and slower and slower. I don't install very many apps, and I finally ran out of space on my older phone, due to mostly google apps getting so huge. And over time my phone is getting less and less responsive. It's not like I have a lot of apps installed, and I never automatically update them. I do it judiciously, after looking at the changes list.

As I mentioned I don't update google apps much anymore, but the Google Play app and infrastructure update automatically and silently, and I have a hunch this is part of the slowdown. Sometimes I get a ton of "google play services has stopped" error messages until I reboot.

While sure, it's true that some flavors of socialism don't, it's worth noting that public surveillance is a natural consequence of the creation of public goods. For example, are you going to take my word for it that I'm actually five hundred people, all drawing a public pension and all using up expensive health care at my personal health care facility which strangely enough has an abandoned parking lot as address and only employs a few dozen members of me.

To prevent such fraudulent overconsumption of public welfare-related public goods (a standard tragedy of the commons situation BTW), by necessity, they need to know that the application is a real human and relevant data to that applicant. The more services and goods provided, be it welfare or some other things, the more surveillance of its citizens needs to be done merely to protect the viability of what is provided.

Not only does this directly encourage more surveillance of a populace inching towards total surveillance, it also creates ammunition for a future tyranny. Health care records which can be used to prevent abuse of public health care can also be used in combination with other data to create a more complete understanding of would-be rebels and their associates in a society.

Actually, the laws did work and by the end of the series had worked too well, to the point that robots had not only removed themselves from human society in order to protect humans, but it is implied that they also had removed any other potential intelligences (in the whole galaxy!) that they had deemed non-human as well.

I remember when people said that about GW Bush. Kind of funny. Guess that goes to show there's no real difference between the two teams and the fans that support them.

The irony is that it could be seen as "karma" that Jobs basically committed "suicide by woo", refusing to treat his cancer with any recognized scientific technique for most of a year and instead trying pretty much every technique in the book popular among the sort of person who typically believes in karma.

So perhaps all of the woo stuff actually works, but it plays in with the laws of karma ;)

News to me.

Greece is an own goal. Don't make the mistake of assuming it took any sort of effort to take them down.

I read that in the sense of, "Let's say that I'm in the position of being a general manager", as a hypothetical rather than something to be taken literally.

It's easy to criticize in hindsight. I found their response to the disaster more than adequate. Similarly, now that we know there's a problem, it would be inexcusable to do that. But not prior.

I've been right more often than people like you have. For example, you make above the classic conflation of hindsight with foresight. That demonstrates profound ignorance of how we learn stuff that we haven't done very often like operating nuclear reactors in times of disaster.

Why don't you do that yourself and show me how it's done? Who knows, maybe you'll learn something.

because it's still wildly popular in Japan. The US shards are, as the author notes, virtually complete ghost towns. I recently went back for a month, and other than banksitters in Luna or house collapses I'd literally go days without seeing another player.

If you want to talk spinoff technology from manned spaceflight, so far we have infrared ear thermometers, ventricular assist devices, artificial limb enhancements, "invisible" braces, scratch resistant lenses, memory foam, enriched baby food, cordless tools, freeze drying techniques, water purification, pollution remediation technologies, food safety tech, and quite a bit more just from NASA alone.

ROTFLMAO. I just love it when the cargo cultists quote NASA on how wonderful NASA is.

Damm few of those come from NASA, at best NASA used them and took credit for using them, and that's been spun into NASA creating them. Take freeze dried food for example - the process was first used commercially in 1938. The modern process was perfected just a few years later when it was used to preserve blood products during WWII. Or cordless tools, first available commercially in the 1950's. Etc... etc...

Income is a hard problem to control. Spending is an easy problem to control. If spending were the most important part of income, then Greece would have never gotten into trouble in the first place.

And "austerity" is not being used in the meaning above. It's painfully obvious that Greece isn't embracing any sort of self-denial, but is rather being subject to fiscal discipline by external pressure.

you can imagine that since Uber already has a fleet of vehicles driving around they could pay drivers to capture this imagery while delivering people and save a fair bit of money.

It doesn't make any sense (capturing the imagery requires specialized hardware), but you can imagine it.

The Three Gorges dam uses up a bit more than 1000 sq km of land due to its reservoir. That's about the area exclusion zone from Fukushima (which I gather is a bit smaller, maybe 600-800 sq km), but considerably smaller than the current exclusion zone around Chernobyl which is around 2600 sq km. In other words, one of the larger dams (by reservoir size) uses up more than a quarter of the land set aside after the only two significant nuclear power accidents (in terms of radiation released to the outside world).

And dam failures kill more people than radiation poisoning from nuclear accidents does.