Not interstella, but the Voyagers were able to do what they did because "the planets aligned" to allow for lots of slingshots. You could argue mankind waited a few millennia for that specific situation before launching those probes...

Repeating the exercise either takes some supremely advanced technology, lots of additional effort, lots of time, or possibly waiting the however-many-years until it happens again.

This time around though, Microsoft has a warehouse or two full of Surface 1s to 'dump'. A quick firmware change, and poof! 'budget' Windows tablet for the masses.

I recently put my blog on the .onion. You can get to it via the "normal web" via it's .com address, via google searches and whatnot, or you can use a .onion address to get the same stuff. I have to say, it was pathetically simple to set up, and I encourage everyone with a server of their own to do the same. Feel free to upgrade to a Tor relay if you have bandwidth too.

You may well ask what's the point? Well, my motivation was to see how easy it was, and to increase the amount of content available on the .onion network. I'm pretty sure the only people who've ever visited it are me and one friend of mine, but the fact there's another IP on the internet talking to Tor nodes, and the fact that on very rare occasions those Tor nodes talk back to it makes me feel good.

If ever I have too much spare time, maybe I'll make a search engine for .onion addresses...? ;-)

Back on topic: the Silk Road had a restrictions policy (albeit an inconsistent one), but other people have no such qualms. The authorities have succeeded in one sense in that they've fragmented the market, they've also put some additional risk onto the purchaser because it's now less clear how legit the site or vendor are. However, they've enabled someone looking for something minor like a bit of weed to also find all manner of other things. I'm sure someone looking for an RPG would have found one with or without the SR, but someone looking for weed might start thinking "I could also buy an RPG", where they might not have done before. In that sense, shutting down SR was a failure.

Ultimately, if there's a demand, there'll be supply. Shutting down websites of any kind doesn't alter demand very much, and so there'll always be supply. If the authorities wanted to do anything about this, they'd spend more time working on the demand side of the problem. Sadly, that doesn't have instant results, doesn't get headlines and for every success it has there's a notable failure too.

Does that imply there's a problem with the image processing then? I mean, if a high res sensor gets 100% red on one pixel, and 50% red on the ones surrounding it, should the image processor actually puff up the surrounding pixels to (say) 75%? My thinking being that the blob of light that got to the central pixel was partly lost in the gaps between pixels, so the ones surrounding it don't fully represent what was actually hitting the sensor.

As much as I agree that this case seems to have lots of holes in it, running a marketplace is not 'common carrier'. The important distinction is that a common carrier is paid to provide a 'connection' service, after which you can do anything you like with it. A marketplace connects a buyer to a seller, handles the money, and takes a fee for that introduction. Thus, the marketplace has to know what is being sold and whom the buyer and seller are, and further more collects the money from the buyer and gives it to the seller.

Had the Silk Road been more like a chat room, then there'd be many more parallels with the 'common carrier'. If Silk Road had provided the place to advertise goods and to connect buyers to the sellers, but otherwise kept out of any transactions, it's possible the 'common carrier' thing might work. However, as soon as SR started handling the money, it became part of the transaction, and so became implicated. As I understand it, the goods and services didn't have 'code names', so there's no way DPR could claim he thought he'd just brokered a 'cleaning' service for someone's apartment - so no 'reasonable doubt' there either.

Everyone knows real hitmen call themselves 'cleaners'.

It's okay, I'm sure tourists from all over the world will literally flock to Jeddah to have a look at the world from that high up. Oh wait... it's Saudi which doesn't do tourist visas... maybe not then.

We'll have the space elevator, just as soon as we find someone who's a bit too rich with a dick that's a bit too small that wants to build a monument to themselves.

Let's say I hire a PI to follow you around and take photos of everything you do in public, and perhaps through the windows of your house, maybe using a laser microphone to listen to what you say in your house, and make notes of everything you do. At no time will you be physically obstructed by any of this. Do you honestly not feel that impinges on your freedom at all?

Amazing.

I've been using Pico CMS recently as an experiment. It too seems pretty nice.

I saw an ad at the station for some company doing personality tests to 'unlock your potential'. That reminded me that I did a bunch of these at the start of my teens at school, primarily as a means to determine the sorts of jobs you might want to look into. I answered those tests in good faith, I wasn't trying to game them, and yet, without exception, they came out as "inconclusive", with no career suggestions at all (I wonder if they refund the test fee for that!?). I sure hope they've improved since then, because they were no use to back then.

...and when the probe sent in my name crashes into said object (deliberately, or due to decaying orbit), I'd prefer that the object in question was contaminated by it as little as possible such that any future missions could look at it in it's original form.

It was gonna be called Stoojcoin, but got changed right at the last moment.

If we make it too easy for him, we don't need him at all. We'd need maybe 10 police officers for the whole country, and they only need to be 'plod' and not some sort of highly trained super-cop. They'd just wait for the computer to text them the name and address of a 'criminal' and they'd go fetch them and throw them in the back of the van.

Honestly, if I need something in order to do my job and stop some systems falling over constantly, I ask for it. The difference is that if my management agree with me and give me something to help me, other people don't lose anything as a result. This guys doing the same as me, but with considerably graver consequences.

You're just a few hundred years too late. Had the technology existed, I'm sure all the things you describe would have been happening during the Crusades.

Rest assured, a lot of people have died in the name of $religion. Thankfully, Christianity has, on the whole, evolved beyond such things )although certain outposts in the US (including the White House) do slip up from time to time). I'll leave the question of Judaism's evolution, and its effect on the Israel/Palestine region to the reader.

I think it's fair to say that just because you're in a club, it doesn't mean that the actions of everyone in that club are things you agree with or support. On occasion, people will join a club in order to give themselves an air of legitimacy, or to give their cause a greater meaning or voice, whilst they continue with a course of action that is contrary to the majority of club members beliefs or support.