You're moving the goalposts. Where do you think the point of ingress is? Chances are it's a carrier exchange point run by those corporations you want to designate as common carriers, and who can then no longer do anything about filtering the traffic. Oops.

Well, it would if the "metaphor" I had heard about how Hawking radiation works were correct, but apparently it isn't. While I won't say the explanation in the linked page makes sense to me (I probably couldn't follow the math anymore even if it was included), I must admit I had some similar concerns as Mr. Kujareevanich regarding that metaphor. If a gravitational well did result in the polarization of the gravitational dipole, then it would seem that perhaps it might affect the results. However if Hawking radiation is just an apparent effect, like blue/red-shifting or Lorentz contraction at relativistic speeds, then it presumably wouldn't be affected.

I have been wondering how this would affect black hole evaporation through Hawking radiation. If it invalidates it, then we might want to be extra careful in the future about risking creating quantum black holes.

Um, no. What needs to happen is that there needs to be an in-depth and independent review of the effectiveness of the information gathering activity after the fact by a party other than the FISA court and security establishment. If the data that you are collecting does not in fact achieve the purported aims (apparently, despite the misleading cheer-leading by the NSA director, all the NSA data collected under FISA warrants has not actually provided any information that has been key/required in helping prevent any terrorist acts), then the "probable cause" justification process is broken and those justifications and those types of data gathering activities should no longer be allowed.

Reason #0. They are in the USA or run by companies based in the USA. Which means that the USA government can do anything they want with National Security Letters and Theo would not be notified that the systems have been compromised. Now CSIS might do/have done the same thing, but not legally.

When a large proportion of those spammers work out of jurisdictions that turn a blind eye to the practice (China, Russia, other Eastern European states, Nigeria) and refuse to prosecute, then your preferred approach doesn't work.

Let's completely ignore that the three main proponents (including the two authors) of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 were Republicans and that, while passage of the bill was mainly bipartisan and Clinton did support it, Republicans had majorities in the House and Senate. Over 80% of the no votes in the House and Senates were Democratic Party members.

that little HR app that only a half dozen people use gets its' own server (no proper backup/redundancy mind you, but it's own box).

Apparently you've been under a rock for the last 5 years and completely missed the move to virtualization. Can you guess what the main business driver is? More efficient use of computing resources, power, and data centre infrstructure resulting from consolidation.

No, what happened is that the Chinese used predatory pricing on rare-earth minerals to put nearly all other world production out of business and discourage exploration. Then, with control of the raw materials, they nearly shut off the tap on the raw materials to everybody else and insisted that everybody by the higher-value finished high-field magnets from them.

Apparently you are blissfully unaware that China used predatory pricing on rare-earth metals to put every other non-Chinese rare-Earth mine out of business or mothballed quite a few years back, and then parlayed that into a monopoly in powerful magnet production by squeezing out every other manufacturer once they had the monopoly on the raw materials.

In China, most people write the same language

FTFY. While the written alphabet is consistent across China, my understanding is that the regional dialect groups (Mandarin, Wu/Shanghainese, Yue/Cantonese, etc.) can vary so much as to be effectively unintelligible to each other. While Mandarin may be the lingua franca of the national government, it isn't as widespread as English in the USA.

Then they are people who understand insurance as poorly as you appear to. The healthy pay the unhealthy's medical bills because a) the risk and cost is shared by all premium payers when they are healthy (including those who get sick later) b) the unhealthy don't need the added stress of getting huge bills to impact their attempts to get better and usually can't work while they're in traction or a coma.

You know, sort of like how in fire or flood insurance the people whose houses are standing help pay for replace the houses that got burnt down/flooded/washed away (but whose owners had paid insurance premiums). That's how insurance works!

So Cobalt 60 was really Fe 56!

I noticed this while the car was still less than 10 years old (closer to 5 actually). And even though it's now close to 17 years old, its mileage is very low for the car's age and it's been well maintained over that time. It's far from a beater.

WD-40 is probably composed of a fair number of organic and inorganic molecules. So while a mass spectrometer might tell you the proportion of component atoms in the lubricant, that's a long way from knowing the composition of all its molecular components. I mean mass spectrometers are cheaper now, but they've been available for almost a century (longer than WD-40) so if that was all that was needed somebody would surely have done it by now. Perhaps you might be able to distill/separate the various components with a distilling tower and then analyze them with X-Ray crystallography? That would get you closer but would still be a ways from reproducing the process to make it, one which has probably been adjusted and refined in the last 60 years..