A little of the money is from Stanford and UC, but most of the $1.4G comes from a consortium of foreign countries. Choose one that has a good site, and build it there.

That's... amazing. Color me incredibly jealous.

I'd guess they were throwing away nearly all that aperture -- to get all the scope's light through a 4mm exit pupil, you'd need close to 2000x magnification, which would make the nebula look like it was about 24 degrees across -- okay, that would fit perfectly into a normal field of view.

So, yeah. I hate you even more.

(Wonder what kind of 4mm lens could successfully catch all the light from a system that size? It's been a long, long time since I was immersed in the amateur-telescope-maker literature...)

Please, cut back on the "everyone in your industry are chauvenists assholes and you owe us a place in your ranks" crap?

We don't need shit and abuse in our leisure time, we get enough on the job.

There are places that allow you to be buried in a pet cemetery. Cheaper.

Just because something is criminal does not mean it should be criminal per our system of morals and ethics. Free speech in China or Saudi Arabia, for example.

As well, governments will cooperate on issues that may not be illegal but are inconvenient to them, for whatever reason.

You place too much confidence in government doing the right thing.

I can't believe you could be that naive.

That's like the UN Security Council. If China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States agree, they can do what they want.

That would probably mean their police agencies deciding among themselves.

Let's look at real cases.

If you had a news service, like Wikileaks, that managed to annoy all of them (as a good news organization should do), they could agree to go after that news organization.

And what are the politically-correct grounds for using the back door? Child pornography? Human trafficking? Tax evasion? Drug dealing? Bribery? Terrorism? Capital crimes? Weapons of mass destruction? Waging war?

What if Miss "A" claims that Julian Assange raped her on one night, though she had enthusiastic sex the nights before and after?

Every spy agency, then, would see that they could monitor sensitive communications simply by collaborating with other spy agencies?

What I'm taking away from this is that anything David ever has made or will make in the future should not be trusted.

Is he claiming he found a way to safely have backdoored communications?