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.

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).

What happens when you link the Antikythera mechanism with the Kythera mechanism? Fusion experts should investigate!

Yes, so what init system and service management are they going to use?
Is it meant just for servers? Then they could get away with sysvinit.

If this Debian derivative is meant for desktops too, then you want some type of the systemd solutions to service management, to dynamically change hostname, datetime, do hibernation, add/remove bluetooth/modem devices, multi-seat login, etc...

I think the options are: Upstart or OpenRC; the others are too obscure or untested.
Probably you would have to use the abandoned Consolekit to replace logind?

If you are unfamiliar, this is what (systemd-)logind does (and previously ConsoleKit did part of it):

.
        keeping track of users and sessions, their processes and their idle states,
        creating control groups for user processes,
        providing PolicyKit-based access for users to operations such as system shutdown or sleep,
        implementing a shutdown/sleep inhibition logic for applications,
        handling of power/sleep hardware keys,
        multi-seat management, session switch management, and device access management for users,
        automatic spawning of text logins (gettys) on virtual terminal (console) activation and user runtime directory management.

from https://access.redhat.com/docu...

That's not true. We know the luminosity output of GRBs very well, as well as their spectrum across the electromagnetic spectrum. For a number of exoplanets (and the planets in the solar system) we know their main atmospheric content. For each composition of atmospheres you can predict the effects of a GRB for any chosen distance in terms of photo-dissociation, heating and radiation pressure. I don't see great unknowns there.

I think it can be argued that due to the luminosity output of GRBs, that "GRB==doom" holds, within a certain radius and for typical orientations. That serves as a useful starting point. For special orientations, or special atmospheres that one could imagine, this may not hold. But then the burden is on the person dreaming up these scenarios to show that these can more happen frequently than expected due to random orientations and atmospheres representative of the gas make-up of observed stellar and star-forming systems (which is well-studied as well, the technical term is metallicity and (heavy) element abundance). Until then, I think "GRB==doom" is a suitable working hypothesis we can adopt.

Actually, it's only 17 million. A quick calculation gives me that the number of galaxies within 5 billion light-years is 170 million. Neglecting very small, dwarf galaxies, which are more numerous but have drastically fewer stars, I multiplied the stellar mass density by the comoving volume up to z=0.5.

I can not answer about the deadliness of GRBs, but I think you will find those answers in Phil Plaits book "Death from the Skies!".

Yes, insulation is a good idea. But the planet will always radiate as a black body and loose energy, which has to be re-supplied by the suns radiation. The radiation drops with the square of the distance, so rather quickly. These considerations (make-up and size of planets) go into calculations for the habitable zone.

I can also imagine that a GRB comes with considerable photon pressure and might strip the entire atmosphere off a planet, or heat it to a point where it dissipates into space.

I think the rotation of planets around their own axis (spin) is not known outside the solar system. Generally, the spin is generated from formation of planets in the rotating protostellar disk, but interactions and changing orbits may modify the spin (Venus, Uranus).

If you do not have the problem of heating and evaporation of the atmosphere I mentioned above, then yes, that is probably possible. For example if the GRB goes off from the direction of the spin axis ("below/above the solar system"). This may safe you from one GRB, but since GRBs come randomly from all directions it is not failsafe across many billion years.

Not sure. I think it is possible to come up with such scenarios as you stated, but it has to be shown that they are frequent occurrences to be relevant for changing the survival rate of complex life.