Is the "19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons" a viable plan, or wishfull thinking?

For that matter, is it real? Do we have any reason to trust a file presumably found on a laptop held by intelligence agencies?

I know, it would probably be better to set up a cron job.... but I actually know very little about cron...think I've used it once or twice.

No, because then you risk simultaneous uploads stalling each other and eating potentially unlimited amount of resources until the machine crashes.

And this is acceptable because...?

Because the idea of domination - of the strong enslaving the weak - still lies at the heart of even modern society. Harassment is simply a crude way of establishing these roles. It's tolerated because someone engaging in it is expressing their acceptance of and adherence to this idea. They simply lack the sophistication to bully others in ways society has sanctioned as right and natural - mainly wealth, in ours.

Absolute truth. Women as a group tend to be more emotionally mature, and apt to avoid senseless conflict. Men are perfectly free to act like 14-year-old testosterone-mad Peter Pans, but women are just as free to reject their infantile behavior.

So does this mean that any woman engaging in sexual relations with a man should be looked down and possibly arrested because, after all, she is taking advantage of a 14-year old hormonally imbalanced orphan? Or did you mean "absolutely truth" as in "look how cool I am"?

Hardly. What he's said is: "!E(x) hasredblood (x) && handskeystochauffeur(x)", which is equivalent to "A(x) !(hasredblood(x) && handskeystochauffeur(x))". Since according to you you already fail the first part of the conjunction by not having red blood, the second part is not constrained by it.

In other words, you can hate driving as much as you want, since you don't have red blood ;).

It is expensive because of all the prior improper risk taking.

It is expensive because you're deliberately trying to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear power in order to make renewables look better in comparison, just like the enviromentalists have been doing for decades. Unfortunately, that tactic won't work, since renewables aren't capable of providing reliable baseload power, so all you'll end up doing is shifting to gas and, once it runs out, coal.

A bunch of apparently quite dumb, reactionary and fearful people somehow dictate policy for multi billion dollar industry with armies of lawyers and wads of cash to throw at lobbying.

That's the dark side of democracy. Everyone can see there's something very wrong with the world, and no one wants to look into their own soul to see what it is. So any demagogue who comes out and blames it on someone else never lacks followers. Fear sells, but beyond fear it's the good old "the world will become a paradise just as soon as we exterminate this one last evil opponent".

That said, democracy is still progress: a couple centuries ago Greenpeace and nuclear lobby would had been killing each other. Unfortunately, avoiding outright war is not enough, so I guess humanity's about to be tag-teamed by climate change and energy crisis. And it's all you hippie's fault.

You do realize this scenario happens beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles on Earth every winter, right? Both of which have life.

We can continue looking for them, but studding the entire globe with uber-telescopes, as NotingHere insisted, seems pointless until we can (or, at least, come close to being able to) reach any of them in reasonable time.

Putting telescopes in orbit is a good way of pumping money to the emerging spaceflight industry.

Don't send a person, send a blueprint and some way to raise and teach a first generation. We don't have to get there ourselves as long as our "children" can.

And that "some way" would be?...

In all likelihood it would take a fully sapient AI with a humanlike body puppet to raise a human being. At that point, what would be the point? Just accept these sapient spaceships are as good as our "children" as meatbags would be. And of course, since we're talking about sci-fi tropes here, there's always brain uploading.

Also, you're not considering the moral implications of sending a bunch of babies to live or die in an alien planet, in what are likely to be extremely limiting and harsh conditions. Whether you personally care for such things or not, a society that can simply ignore them is unlikely to send anyone anywhere, for the simple reason that this entire project requires a lot of people putting other objectives before their personal interests for a long period of time.

Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one.

Too inexperienced to make good decisions + too strong to be easily controlled = excellent chances of dying young.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Not really. Remember, the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. So your dam walls only need to be higher than one layer of stones: after a layer of is finished, move the walls on top of its outer edge and refill. Sure, you need a system of levees to get the ships to the lake at the top of the growing pyramid, but that's okay: it can just rest against the pyramid wall. 45 degree rise is no problem if you can move weight one bucket at a time.

And if you use windmills to pump the water, you don't even need all that much human labour.

making the init system a large complex system that does lots of things rather than the old school ideology of doing one thing and doing it well

Which init scripts didn't do. They approximated what's really dependency system (B and C need A to be up before starting, and D needs both) with a bunch of sequentyally-ran numbered scripts. The end result was both inefficient and fragile.

Apple the corporation exists to enhance shareholder value. All corporations do.

You do realize that every legal entity that counts as a person under the law is a corporation, right? This includes such non-profit entities as cities and towns.

Apple doesn't design attractive platforms for developers for entertainment, or because they love changing the world. They do it to increase shareholder value.

That's probably the biggest threat facing Apple in the post-Jobs era. There seems to be a rather ironic trend that those corporations which focus on "enhancing shareholder value" are worse at it than those which focus on delivering goods and services.

I bet you're a lonely guy. Bitter, much?

Whether he is or isn't, false accusations of pedophilia are a real risk for any adult working with children, which is unlikely to increase the quality of said people any.