If the rabbits had been spying on each other they'd have know which ones were carrying myxomatosis. Instead, anti-surveillance laws passed by pinko owslas led to lupine catastrophe. Humans should learn from their example.

Then, alas, you're blind. Sure, what happens in Australia and other western countries might be sub-optimal. But to say it's as bad as what happens in China or Iran is to embrace the fallacy of the excluded middle: "A is not perfect, B is not perfect, therefore A is as bad as B." The differences include the size of the security apparatus (affecting how many people they can spy on), the existence of mechanisms for bringing the security apparatus to account (including, for instance, a free press), the process by which security people are selected and trained (affecting whether they will happily spy for bad reasons) and many others.

Thank you so much for that image. You have aided my weight-loss program at the expense of my peace of mind.

The difference is that we know where your house is so we know which governments have the right to tax it.

But where does your stock portfolio reside? Can you stop me moving it to a tax haven?

Wouldn't acausal loops and time travel be more appropriate?

Vickrey seems to be saying that the then-newly-elected Clinton administration is getting it all wrong, that it is failing to provide enough stimulus and the economy will suffer unless it changes its policies. But historically the Clinton years were very good ones economically. So did Clinton do what Vickrey said, or was Vickrey wrong?

We have a chance of stopping an extinction-level asteroid, if we see it with plenty of warning. Against starfaring aliens we have no realistic chance. Our best hope is to surrender, and hope their copy of To Serve Man was written by Jack Williamson rather than Damon Knight.

From TFA:

That's not very good thinking. What if the larger ones do much more damage?

Ethical problems? With nuking an asteroid that was going to hit the earth? What are they?

It sounds like they are letting politics drive their key engineering decisions.

I think if an asteroid were actually about to hit the earth most political problems would dissolve.

If it's small enough, and we see it far off, all sorts of things will work. But if it's large and close we need a nuke. So we shouldn't dismiss it. By this criterion, at least, nukes are better than non-nukes. Is there any way in which nukes are worse?

Basically the nuke, set off alongside and used to deflect rather than disrupt, solves more of the problem space for any given launch mass than anything else I've heard discussed. A lot of people mock nukes but as far as I can tell they remain the natural solution and the most practical one.

Well, yes, muon catalysis. But the NASA page mentions palladium. So it isn't talking about muon catalysis and Oligonicella has a point.

This won't stop us worrying. When we've colonised the galaxy we'll stop worrying about threats to single planets and start worrying about threats to the galaxy as a whole.

The problem is that the author sees a PDA and thinks it's a phone with extra features. He could just as well have seen a phone and thought it was a watch with extra features - after all it's the method most of us use to keep track of time. But if he'd told us to get rid of our expensive mobile phone and just use a cheap watch we'd have reacted ... well, a lot like how we have.

A few answers spring to mind:

1. Self-destruct is more popular in movies than real life.
2. It's easy to make a self-destruct mechanism, but much harder to make one that will reliably not go off until you want it to.
3. The usual mechanism for self-destruct on a drone is to order it to fly itself into the ground at top speed.
4. If the Iranians controlled the drone then presumably they controlled the self-destruct as well.

The facts we have so far are:

• The US has lost a drone over Iran (confirmed by both sides, so very likely true).
• The Iranians have shown a drone-shaped object on television, at least superficially intact.
• The Iranians claim that they captured the drone by electronically hijacking its command codes.

There are other explanations for these facts, but I can't think of one that is more likely than the naive explanation: that Iran did exactly what it says it did. So while it's far from certain they are telling the truth, it's also probably misleading to say there is no evidence. I would score this as medium-weak evidence, it's certainly more than nothing.

Most actual productive work needs very little processing grunt. If you can edit a Word document, make a PowerPoint presentation and turn data into a chart in Excel then a lot of people's jobs are covered. The bottleneck is input and output - mostly screens and keyboards - rather than CPU.

That said, laptops permanently tethered to a particular desk are every bit as funny as four-wheel-drive vehicles that never leave suburbia.