Humans are by far the most intelligent creatures on this world, and thanks to that intelligence can learn a lot.

Learning primarily takes place in the childhood stage, when parents directly teach their children all they need to know to survive (which until not so long ago, was indeed mostly survival skills: how to grow your own food and so). A long childhood (and with that, long parental care) may for this reason be an advantage: longer time to learn typically makes for a better end result.

As another poster pointed out, childhood is not the most robust stage of the life cycle of a human, especially early childhood. And even if parental care during childhood improves survival during that stage of life, it's genetically not exactly a productive stage of life - no procreation yet, so surviving that part is great but it doesn't necessarily help to spread those presumably beneficial long childhood genes in the overall population. Procreation tends to happen when the parental care has finished.

Maybe you should start following some proper news outlets, including some run by traditional news organisations, you know, the ones that search for news and publish it. Go out of your basement and buy a newspaper or so. Or if that's too much, try the online BBC news.

If you only found out about this by reading about the removal of the video, you're really looking in the wrong places for your news.

A large stock of cryogenic, cyborg moths; ready to be unfrozen and directed to do whatever their masters tell them to do.

This starts to sound rather creepy to me. Stuff for a scifi thriller.

As counterargument, a couple hours of flying time is enough for many missions like seeing what's around the corner or inside a building, and cyborg moths don't come out of their pupa on demand, nor can they be pre-produced and stored waiting for use in an emergency.

Solve it the same way the roads are solved.

The government builds the infrastructure (roads), then allows everyone to use this (bus companies, truck companies, private cars), as long as they follow the rules of the road (including safety requirements on the vehicles, size limitations, etc) and they pay a road tax (depending on vehicle size/type/weight).

It's not hard to translate this into network service. Don't say it can't be done, it's exactly how it works in many European countries - with great results. With the minor difference to the road part that the government does not own the infrastructure directly, instead it's owned by a heavily regulated private company that is responsible for the maintenance of this infrastructure.

Chickens can definitely fly. I've seen them fly on many occasions. Sure they're nowhere near as good as a seagull or an unladen swallow, they can get off the ground and fly short distances. This is why chickens are either kept indoors or have their wings clipped (and now you know where the expression comes from), as otherwise they'd fly out of their pen.

The number of birds killed by windmills is actually quite low: apparently the woosh-woosh sound of the blades cutting through the wind is enough to scare most birds away.

If those features are truly "essential", I wonder why Mozilla, Apple and Google haven't picked them up, and added them to their respective browsers.

What you consider "essential" obviously isn't that essential for a large part of the web-surfing public.

Maybe it's time to reanimate (D)ARPA - the guys that gave us the Internet.

They forgot to add the distiction "... your average script-kiddie has ever heard of".

I'd prefer to rephrase that last sentence a bit.

... those spies did it for a foreign, enemy power. Snowden did it for his own country.

Huawei is one of China's main phone manufacturers. The brand is quite well known around here, and apparently they try to expand globally. Their advertising is probably to create brand awareness in other parts of the world, such as where you happen to live - and considering your comment, they're succeeding.

Unless they have some special powers, I suppose the police will have to pay for those ads, just like the regular advertisers do. This would result in the police actively sponsoring these allegedly illegal sites. Can have interesting political repercussions.

Well, of course. They're digging too deep in that. In the real world, I believe that there is no such thing as "the one" or "the perfect match". Maybe it feels like it, but that's in part thanks to the "pink glasses" effect of being in love and because both parties tend to adopt to one another, especially when a relationship lasts long (years, decades).

People probably can form lasting romantic relationships with a large number of other people, after the following basic matches are followed (assuming heterosexual relations but some will apply for homosexual relations too):

• Geographic proximity.
• Speaking the same language, or at least share a second language.
• Similar age, preferably the female 1-5 years younger than the male.
• Similar educational level, or the male having higher education than the female.
• Similar political/religious views (left/right wing, Muslim/Christian/Buddhist/etc).

The above are true for the vast majority of heterosexual relationships. Another major factor in partner choice is also the availability of the person, as in, that s/he is not in another relationship already. The fact that someone is active on sites like OKCupid fulfils that requirement. Coincidence plays a great role as well: whether you meet a person now (when he's single and looking) or in half year (when he's just got a girlfriend). Whether you meet the person at all. He may be a perfect match for you on all fronts, yet unobtainable due to living 1,000 km away.

At least in this case they made significant savings - or at least, so they claim. The question is now of course, how was this calculated, and will it pass muster if an independent accountant checks the figures.

It's harder to give economic returns of a F1 race track; even harder to make an overall profit on one.