The force between free quarks increases with distance to about 10,000N, then remains constant (no, I have no idea how this makes any sense, but it's what I read).

According to Wikipedia it's because gluons, which mediate the Strong Force interaction between quarks, also feel said force themselves (that is, they carry color charge(. So rather than disperse with distance like, say, photons do, they tend to stick together and form "ropes".

So it's analogous to how a flashlight loses power faster than a laser.

The Hacking Team is just business, and a business is amoral.

The Hacking Team consists of humans, and as such is incapable of being amoral. They're simply evil.

A business exists to maximise its own profit as it sees fit, and it should be free to engage in whatever behaviour that is in the interest of its owners.

"Should" why? No one has any kind of obligation to help maximize your profits.

If it succeeds by performing questionable acts, it is the fault of us, the society, which enable it to proceed that way.

The society is responsible for the loophole existing in the first place, and the company is responsible for exploiting it. Blame is not an either-or game.

Especially, it is the liability of the governments that hired THT in the first place.

What if those governments rebranded themselves as "corporate states"? Then they could claim they were simply companies maximizing their profits, which would make them blameless, according to you.

I find your comment offensive and a micro-agression against me and my kind. This is hate speech.

No, it's not. Whether you are offended or not is irrelevant. What makes something hate speech is that it attacks a group, making them more of an acceptable target for future attacks. Hate speech is, in other words, the propaganda campaign that precedes every war and atrocity in human history. That makes hate speech not just speech but also an action, the first blow that starts chipping off the preceived humanity of the target that protects them from violence.

Is someone simply being a jerk? Then it's just speech, offensive or not. Is someone working themselves up into a rage in preparation for an attack? Then it's hate speech.

Probably, but by that time, you'll have to give control of your implants to your employer, and they will turn them on and off at will.

Which seems unlikely, since implants are a part of you, and the candidates for positions requiring high security tend to have other options. It's the McDonald's staff that needs to worry about such requirements.

The cars are not designed to stop criminal actions.

Mine has locks.

IMO that is the reason why advertising is morally reprehensible. It's manipulative mass mind control.

Of course it is. And as people get more used to it and filter it out, it becomes harder to manipulate them in general - even by the politicians and special interest groups. So I guess it's a case of the Invisible Hand accidentally smacking the 1% on the face.

My first thought was that the entire point of the site was to BE a blackmail scheme.

Correct. From the article: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."

Now if you just add that the smart people end up hiring the stupid people to be armed and around them to protect them while decrying the evils of guns, you might have a solid theory on your hands.

Nope. People who believe violence will keep them safe will arm themselves, directly or indirectly. Intelligence doesn't enter into it, one way or another, any more than it does with any other basic instinct.

It seems like all the largest mouth pieces against guns sure have a lot of them around in the hands of hired help to protect them.

There's a running joke that the most vocal gay bashers are closet gays themselves. It's the same principle at work here. Internal contradictions tend to make people search for scapegoats.

Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.

In fact, a CS degree is not proof that you can code, it is proof that you understand the theory of Computer Science.

More to the point, it's proof that you have massive student debts so you're likely to put up with abuse to keep repaying them.

The problem is that most of the time, voters are two dumb to actually understand the issues at stake or the consequences of their actions. Fix the dumbness, and you fix all sorts of other cultural mal-consequences (not just clumsy politics and gimme-dat laws).

Make people smarter and the issues and consequences will simply become more complex. They're not some external invariance, after all, but a function of those very same people's behaviour and mental make-up. So every organization must deal with the fact that its decision makers are going to be too dumb for the job. That's not something that can be avoided, and consequencetly the success or failure of the system can't be blamed on the intelligence of the participants. It is, instead, a function of the system itself.

For all their faults, democracies tend to be more effective than autocracies precisely because they make it easier for members to participate, which leads to greater collective intelligence: a greater pool of ideas and more chances to call out really dumb ones. If we need smarter societies still, we need to continue developing them further, not wish for some general population intelligence boost that wouldn't solve the issue even if it happened.

Sadly, a lot of societies seem to be going backwards towards the less efficient autocratic model right now. Natural selection will take care of that in due time, but combined with all the challences our species is currently facing, the process can get pretty unpleasant.

For example, I've heard flanges for molten salt reactors are a potential for failure, one leak and your radioactive fuel is everywhere.

No, it's a piece of rock salt on the floor. It's not liquid at room temperature, and will cool and solidify almost instatly if it leaks out of the reactor vessel.

If productivity enhancements means we don't need as many secretaries and factory workers, those expenditures will go towards marketing and sales.

No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense. That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.

The idea that productivity enhancements will ever reduce the need for human labor was always laughable. Only people such as an ivory tower economist like Keynes could have ever thought this.

Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?

Well I understand that it's science fiction, so I give them a pass, but in the real world there's obviously no way you can 'shield' against a freaking nuclear weapon. Unless you're willing to consider a solid metal shield with a thickness of a hundred meters. Wouldn't be much of a ship though.

Just turn your engines towards the explosion.

We just don't have any need for such massive nukes so none ever got made. But they'd be very useful fighting against a multi-planetary enemy, if only as a show of force.

Super-nukes would be just as useless for fighting a multi-planet enemy than normal nukes were for fighting the Cold War. You can't use them without getting yourself killed too, so all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc. And of course in the interstellar scheme this is all made worse by the fact that you're either surrounded by other empires eager to exploit your distraction, or empty space you could be colonizing.

What's even worse, justifying such useless cost to your own populace means a massive propaganda campaign; the mindset bred by said campaign will take a life of its own and limit your options, even after the conflict is over. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; when you have a military you went a trillion dollars into debt to build, you will damn well look into excuses to use it, which in turn will provide reasons to maintain and further develop it, ultimately destroying both your economy and society.

So I suppose the truly succesful interstellar empires will be the "unofficial" ones, which specialize in getting around - or perhaps even assimilating - occupying forces. So the grunts of future space wars will be smugglers like Han Solo rendering Empire's effective control near zero, not fighter pilots like Luke trying to fight it on its own terms.

We're already at the point where wars typically result in expensive failures, damaging both the economy, culture and prestige of the participants. Future belongs to whoever can solve the problem of having an organized society with zero reliance on coercive force. It's not an easy problem, but the prize is also tremendous: nigh-invincibility combined with the ability to devote all resources to productive activities.