...and if it's been stripped like the one I saw, don't bother going. It isn't worth walking up the ramp to see it. Just an empty shell. They didn't even leave more than a few wires dangling around. And you couldn't walk into any of the crew areas. Nothing.

...United States...had arguably already won WWII.

"Won" in war means "the other guy has surrendered". That had not yet happened when the atom bombs were dropped.

People need to...do a little critical thinking.

Done.

Hard liquor consumption shot up during prohibition

Not so fast there. I've heard that thrown out before without any justification. Please tell me how consumption of an illegal beverage was accurately measured _during_ Prohibition? I don't think any government statisticians were walking into speakeasies and measuring things. (Gallons seized/destroyed would not be a reliable proxy, I wouldn't think.)

(And I'm sure the government had no incentive to fudge the numbers after it ended Prohibition, in order to justify its decision. Nah, they wouldn't do a thing like that! Nor would any academic researchers have bias here...)

Because they live in a colder environment, their brains contain a higher percentage of glial cells, to generate warmth. We have fewer, as a percentage, but more of the neurons that actually process information. So bald comparisons of their brain size with ours are meaningless.

I take around 23 placebos a day, and I feel great!!!!!!!!!

Seems like there would be a _minimum_ shaking velocity of the fur itself, just to dislodge the water. Anything faster than that would also work, but expend more energy.

You also have to take into account the fact that with each oscillation, the dog's trunk reaches some maximum stretch limit, at which time muscles in the reverse direction kick in and make them go the other way. But the maximum velocity would be reached somewhere near the middle of an oscillation.

Wouldn't you model this more like a spring or pendulum, where maximum velocity occurs near the middle of the cycle?

Wait...I'm taking this way too seriously.

That's why important passwords should never be directly memorized. Always put some cognitive distance + time distance + physical distance between you and the password. (Except when you're actually entering it of course.)

You can do this by making a puzzle of some sort using memories that only you would possess (childhood, etc.) Solving the puzzle might take the form of arranging the memories in chronological (if they're events) or physical order (if they're places or objects). Once correctly arranged, the password is then extracted from that, as a hash of some sort (in order to guarantee enough entropy). (Of course there would have to be enough entropy available in the original puzzle so that a computer could not try every possible ordering.) Salt to taste.

This involves creating a puzzle, and that would be time-consuming, but software could help there. But once created, it's not something you could reconstruct in a few seconds, nor solely from memory. You would have to have the written puzzle clues in front of you, plus some time to concentrate. This doesn't mean you couldn't be compelled to reveal it, but it would raise the cost to an adversary in getting you to reveal it.

Because we're human, that's why. Any country/society, no matter how "good" it is at the moment--is only a generation or so away from being capable of this sort of behavior.

It's all about the quality of your people and the financial state of the organization maintaining it. I have seen small applications (~30KSLOC) that a team of people with 10+ years of experience each could not keep running beyond 7-8 years. It collapsed under its own weight. Nobody had the skills/wisdom to refactor the code periodically, nor did the organization have the money to be able to afford it. (In fact, their poor financial state meant that they never hired the best developers. They had to take what they could afford.)

I have also worked at a different company that kept a system (3 million SLOC) going for over a decade with only periodic refactorings of portions of the system. They had good the financial status to be able to afford it, plus the skill levels to know when/how to do it. (And their good financial state meant they could --and did, hire better developers.)

The quality of one's engineers and the prosperity (or lack thereof) of the organization determines how long you can hold off "software entropy" and keep software evolving forwards.

It's got that laser that can burn through steel and trigger detonators and stuff. Maps??? How boring.

Are you saying that when a tax by definition only has to be paid by the top 2% of wage earners (let's say), that it has no other effect on the economy as a whole? Econ 101 factoid: when the structure of taxation changes, people's investing and purchasing behavior changes. Plus, the rich have the greatest flexibility in switching their investments and altering their purchasing behavior.