I think the original post is delusional. People would still use AdBlock if ads were unobtrusive and static. They just want the content, just like they download movies without paying.

I am willing to bet that the fraction of AdBlock users that turn on the feature where some ads are allowed does not exceed 1%.

Humans want all of it, for free, and now. If they can't have it under those terms, blaming "stealing" on the providers is only half of the story.

You are vulnerable to Social Engineering (and almost everyone is), no security of any kind will ever work. Become a Scottish crofter, it's your only hope of a life.

You are a private individual, see all XKCD coverage. Same remedy.

You are Sony, abandon hope now. You wouldn't even make it as a crofter.

You are anyone else, encryption is not enough. You want segmentation, active NIDS, proxies and firewalls at the gateways, HIDS on the machines, role-based access controls, host-to-host IPSec, security labels on packets, total removal of all vulnerable protocols, disk encryption, strong authentication and Neuromancer's Black Ice. A platoon of extreme freediving Ninja with enhanced magnetic sensors in their eyeballs would help, too.

Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science.

Science fiction isn't science fantasy.

Science fiction isn't pure fantasy with stuff science geeks like.

Science fiction isn't biologically improbable females fulfilling spotty teen fantasies.

Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.

That's life. Or will be.

Absolutely wrong on all accounts.

People are the least important part of a story, they exist solely to represent something. What they represent is almost never another person. In fact, it is never another person.

Science fiction is about the universe, about meaning, about the nature of reality. There are perfectly good science fiction stories that don't include people, or indeed any living thing. And that is fine.

Stories that are people-centric are no more science fiction than vampire stories are history, or Microsoft manuals are about learning.

This isn't up for discussion, it is the way the ontology is. Don't like it? Fine, don't call your crap science fiction. It's very simple.

...It's Cheers in Space, or Eastenders on Mars, then no it is not science fiction. It is Cheers in Space or Eastenders on Mars. There is no science and there is precious little fiction.

While early computers had very limited graphics and usually no sound, the arrival of colour and sound (er beeps) resulted in a large number of games and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did. I started on a Commodore Pet (horrible BASIC) and went through the Sinclairs, the BBC Micro and then onto UNIX machines skipping PCs entirely (at least until Linux came along) and what I appreciated about all these was the ability to program them (same goes for Linux) but I was a minority.

The sad thing is once you got to PCs and GUIs, programming was largely a thing of the past. My son just got interested in computers and asked me to teach him to program so I pulled my actual Spectrum out and gave it to him. Sadly, age hasn't been kind to the hardware so the modulator failed and wouldn't display a picture. I bypassed that and got composite video out but in the process the keyboard membrane cracked so I had to order a new replacement (yay for retro computer fans) and it works again. He's getting on well and hasn't really shown interest in games on it. I did load up Manic Miner for a laugh but it was awful. I forgot how precise you had to be.

I just wish this was a real Spectrum with a keyboard. As it stands, meh. Emulators are also hard work without the real keyboard.

That's not the point. The point is it has three moons of the same size as itself, and a lot of other debris. It's not dominating its environment.
You can choose: Either we have 8 planets, or you have to learn 19 names, and new ones every year or two. 9 is not an option anymore.

Anyways, I don't understand why "dwarf planet" was not made a subclass of "planets" along with "major planets" (where the others go). But no, it is "planets" and "minor planets", which are by definition not a "planet".

It has a term on the left and a term on the right, and an equal sign in between. You can also see the Drake Equation as a Bayesian Network combined with a Poisson estimator for the mean (n*p).

Why are Chimps not people? What exactly separates humans from non-humans?

Regardless of the decision, I think it is good that people are forced to argue why.

Caching: You can not cache Facebook for example, because the content is generated differently for every user. Youtube goes through great lengths to prohibit caching (e.g. with Squid) in the first place.
Proxying: You can proxy https just fine.
Firewalling: You can firewall https just fine.
Parental control: You can block websites just fine, either via DNS or IP.
I suspect they mean snooping for "copying that companies don't approve of" and "freedom fighters" here. And child pornography. It's kind of the point of HTTPS that it should be private. So yes, I can accept these costs.

[citation needed]

But I think there’s something even more compelling at play here: most of us learn about Pluto as children, and as a child, Pluto reminded me of myself. It’s smaller than all the other planets, and it was the newest one to come along. To me, it represented all the undiscovered mysteries, all that was still unknown, and the hope that someday, it might matter more. I was actually rooting, as a kid, for Pluto to be bigger than Mercury, simply because I wanted it to be more important in some measurable way. And because it took longer to orbit the Sun than everything else, because it was different from all the other planets in practically every way, I truly believed it was special.

It’s been some thirty-odd years since I was that child, learning about Pluto for the first time, and in those same thirty-odd years, our estimation of the Solar System has grown to make it a larger, more well-known place. But in that same time, I’ve grown, too, and the most important lesson I’ve learned about Pluto—that I would have told my young self if I could—is this:

The fact that there are other things out there that are bigger, smarter, faster, stronger, or better than you, in any regard, in absolutely no way diminishes how special you are.

Compare that to Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Pluto is not a planet. GET OVER IT!

Maybe there is something to it and astronomy should incorporate peoples feelings in their classifications. Probably not.
But maybe in the communication? Actually i think they could have classified planets in "Big planets" and "Dwarf planets" instead of making "dwarf planets" not a subclass of "planets".

Not all supermassive black holes are actively accreting. In fact, the fraction of time their accretion disks actually output massive amounts of radiation is ~10%, on patches of ~ hundred million years timescales.

A planetary system could form outside the center of the galaxy and travel close to the galactic center. You have to keep in mind that the distances between stars are enormous when compared to distances between planets. For example, our nearest star is 270 000 earth-sun distances (4 lightyears) away, while Jupiter is only 5 earth-sun distances from the Sun. So a "stripping" of planets, due to tidal forces, is extremely small, even when it comes close to the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. It is true however that for the closest orbits, such as 120 earth-sun distances for S2 (S2 reaches speeds of 5000 km/s), this effect will be important. However, I suspect that while a single, quick swing-by will alter the orbits of planets (generally increasing ellipticity), that effect leads to the immediate destruction of the entire system. Normal planetary systems are also not stable systems. Changes in the orbits, interactions between planets, etc. are common; Only when stable oscillations are reached, the orbits remain the same for a few million years. So I suspect that the planets can re-arrange into a stable system (perhaps under ejection of one of the planets).

I think the changes are better if the system is a newly born star, where planetoids are still forming in a thick disk of gas and dust. Then, the partially destroyed disk can re-arrange quickly and form planets after swing-by. That would not necessarily be a problem for "spreading of life", if this process occurs e.g. via comets.

Unfortunately, space is not Euclidean on giga-parsec scales. Here, when talking about 5000 Gpc, they refer to a "comoving scale". That is a scale where the expansion of the universe has been divided out, so that e.g. the same number of galaxies remain in this box. So if you would place the atoms of the number of swimming pools you computed in the volume, they would be twice as dense at the largest distances, where the Universe was half the current size. Also, the largest distance within a 5000 Gpc^3 is 3200 Gpc (space is not Euclidean).