Absolutely everything in space travel is about 'legacy' - "has this part, flown and operated, in an actual space mission before?"

Everything about space travel requires testing because you can't properly test anything on Earth. Not really, not as good as actually sending it up there and checking it works in the real environment. One of the fun things people do with Cubesats at the moment is build them with all sorts of random components, because a cubesat is so cheap you can afford and expect to lose it, but if it works, you can put a big tick on "yep, operates for X hours in low earth orbit".

You absolutely would not want to send a CO2 -> O2 device to Mars, to supply humans with O2, that has never been into space or onto Mars before. Do we truly understand Martian dust environments? Chemistry at extended periods of time (months) of catalysts at low pressure/temperature?

Developing the space legacy of components like that (and it's not just a CO2 -> O2 converter it will be many individual component designs) is staggeringly important. Not to mention, that it means in the future you can more reliably design experiments to go to Mars which depend on an oxidizing atmosphere, if you can reliably make it and purify it in situ. But you wouldn't want to put a chain of stuff like that on a probe, and then discover none of it will work because your oxygen maker breaks down after a few hours.

The whiplash on that one when someone finally figures out how to make asteroid mining even slightly viable is going to be incredible. I expect many breathless articles by terrestial mining magnates on how it's a terrifically poor investment that will never work in the lead up to someone splashing down a blob of aerated platinum.

Ebola is an RNA virus, very simple, with a very mistake prone polymerase - which is why it tends to mutate to harmless fairly easily. When you have such a short gestation and kill rate, there isn't much room for evolution.

Never post anything over at HackerNews which can be remotely construed as criticism of the modern hip whistleblower crowd, lest you be downvoted into oblivion. Slashdots more limited moderation horizon is a boon in that regard - much more diversity and value of comments.

NAT maps a bunch of internal addresses to a single external address. You can't, from outside of a NAT'd host, easily identify any internal hosts and you certainly can't connect to arbitrary ports on them - that's technically impossible since 65536 isn't going to somehow become 2 or more times it's own number.

I hope you've imaged those floppies at the very least. It should be fairly straightforward to extract text out of an oddball format provided it's not actually encrypted in someway, but once those platters(?) demagnetize that data is gone for good.

What's interesting about this post being modded interesting is the number of people who apparently read it and thought "yep, nothing wrong with that logic". Or have never thought seriously, and apparently have no idea, what "black hat" hacker means.

Tor is designed to be low-latency. Such complicated routing would definitely make a large latency tradeoff, since you'd have several routes, all of different latencies, which would mean the packets would arrive out of order and you'd need to delay to determine if you'd actually received a complete set before reconstructing an in-order stream to the final destination.

Attacks from the inside are an entirely different type of beast to start with. How did they get in in the first place? If someone can physically log on to an inside system and pretend to be a real user, then you have a physical or user security problem, still not an internal security problem. A firewall wouldn't save you, because the attacker looks like a regular legitimate user who would have access to those services anyway.

The original post was about the firewall on a host vs. the network firewall. The network firewall prevents people going around mapping ports on systems. Heck, unaltered raw NAT does that which is why people fought to keep it even in IPv6.

This metaphor is incredibly wrong. A port no one is listening on is a damn wall. It does not do anything. It isn't a doorway. It's a blank featureless wall.

Which is the OPs point: a firewall on internal network hosts doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of the time. The reason to do it would be if you were adding IP rules to the port some service operated on - but for a lot of them that's likely to be "accept all connections from local IPs". And it's not very useful to IP limit if you have dynamically assigned hosts, or you use cloud services and SSL to talk to your database server or the like, since you might end up updating the firewall incredibly often to stay up to date with the rules.

A firewall on a regular consumer desktop PC is a good idea mostly because at any given time you tend to vary what you run, and don't want things opening up ports you don't quite expect them to. But even then...still more of a Windows problem then a Unix one.

Do you drink coffee? Congratulations: you take a recreational drug. And no, you didn't start with any more information then anyone else. You did it because everyone else does it.

The European courts have set a precedent on the basis that the number of cases would be small, and that living people would thus be available to conduct detailed research on each one.

Naturally Google have been hit with something like 250,000 requests because of course people are trying to have every bit of material about them removed. And by people of course, it's a surprising number of lawyers, CEOs and companies.

Or over the sum of the billions of planets out there, it may turn out that at any given time there are a few hundred in the midst of an industrial revolution, who's light is just now reaching us.

Space is really, really big. And one consequence of that is provided we know what to look for, and have the capability to see it, we have a very large sample population to test for various observations.

Also no one is saying this is the only way life can possibly exist. The assumption with the search for extraterrestial life is that our first goal is to find anyone else out there, and the easiest way to do that is to look for people who are enough like us that we can make logical assumptions about them (which is a bit anthropological principlely but it's valid).

If tomorrow we discovered intelligent gas clouds living in the Jovian atmosphere, and correlated a bunch of spectral features to them, then you can bet we'd also be looking for life which obeyed those parameters.