Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your postcards.

... so they cut costs by Shanghai'ing them.

I'll show myself out.

No argument on how much is being held back, but maybe it just seems secretive because of how fluidly the press and people are now using the Internet as an information medium within the past 5-10 years. Classified information and state secrets that would have previously taken decades to come to light, seem to have details globally available within years or months, and basic awareness of their existence even sooner.

As such, I continuously wonder if there were just as many secrets before, but it's just faster to find out about their existence nowadays, leading to the current administration appearing to have more of them. On the other hand, storage has increased alongside communication, so maybe more secrets are being kept (and correspondingly leaked).

Exactly! And since they can make the plans available for download, they can take a step further and print the warheads and detonators directly at the target site. This will save costs on building a delivery system and associated consumables, such as fuel.

It's green *and* efficient. What could be better?

You no longer have to guess -- now you can ask these two.

Amateurs.

That's my text editor, you insensitive clod!

As things become more powerful, you can't just wish away the complexity. Maybe you can hide it in one of these 'shibboleth' things mentioned in the summary. That sounds big enough to hide things. Or maybe we could just use describe things more clearly -- but that's crazy talk.

Why do they need to dig through all those people? I hear Edward Snowden himself has concluded his most recent assignment at the NSA, and has government experience and a security clearance to boot. My information may be a little out of date, though.

Well, lots of things infuriate them; after all, you know, redheads. Maybe they should be targeted for anger management advertising instead?

Well, don't keep us waiting! No, hold on, you're probably going to write this up and submit it to the firehose, right?

Well, it was blackjack and hookers in my case. Then again, I was a precocious little scamp.

-- Bender

With the progress they're making in increasing the speed of light, they'll be lucky if the cable infrastructure lasts even that long, especially considering that most of the costs in laying fiber is in the initial trenching.

You might consider the possibility that these construction workers may be misrepresenting their primary occupation.

I can't imagine why scientific fieldwork in particular could provide an environment that promotes inappropriate behavior.