And? They fucked up too. What's your point?

It wouldn't be 24/7, it would be the last 30 minutes. Or the last hour. You could even rig things so that if weight on wheels is set and the engine is shutdown normally it would be immediately wiped. Whatever. It's not about pilots playing grabass everyday. It's about pilots playing grabass and crashing a 737.

What happens when the data recorder shows you that alarms X, Y started sounding at 3 minutes before impact and Z at 1 minute, but the crew only reacts to alarms X and Z. Why didn't they verbally acknowledge Y? Did they not just not have time? Did they never see it? What if Z was the real cause of the accident and X and Y were relatively minor faults? There's plenty to be gained in terms of cockpit design and pilot training by seeing how the flight crew handles an impending catastrophic accident.

This accident isn't the right test case. The right test case is an accident where there are a dozen alarms sounding the cockpit and handling them correctly could have saved lives. Knowing how the crew reacts and responds to those alarms, where their attention is and how they work together could all be key to improving the design of cockpit systems or training programs.

I don't think anyone that yells for 20 minutes and physically assaults someone over cold food can complain about other people whining anymore.

Well, by most reports the target computers of Stuxnet were airgapped. There are ways, usually through social engineering.

Drop a particularly neat looking, high capacity (and extremely exploited) flash drive in the parking lot and wait for someone to pick it up. At worst they'll plug it into their open PC looking to see if they can find the owner. At worst they'll put it on their lanyard and start using it day to day, infecting every PC they plug it into. Yeah, airgapped PCs should have their USB disabled, but there are many places that should know better that don't bother. And that's just off the top of my head, a team of 20 brainstorming for a week is going to come up with ideas.

What's a small proportion? Iowa generates almost 30% of their power from wind. Plus a few fractions of a percentage from solar and other renewable sources.

The problem is, sometimes people that are mentally capable of making the decision need help to perform the physical act. Right now, anyone knowingly supplying said help in any way is on the hook for some significant jail time.

If I remember correctly, the guy has a technique that has been shown effective in mice. Still hardly a guarantee it'll work in humans, but it's a start. Part of it has to do with a clean cut, rather than trauma, severing the code.

We. Already. Did.

I'd rather have us fuck with Mother Nature after a decade of exhaustive research, debate, and cost benefit analysis than continue fucking with Mother Nature purely based on what's most profitable at the moment (aka, what we do now).

Think about how much power was generated over the past 100 years of burning carbon, you're going to need more than that, probably much much more than that, to pull all that carbon out. And that's on top of all the power we'll be using in the meantime.

Environmental plot? That's what people take away from that movie? It has much more to say about class inequality than it does about the environment.

I'm with the GP post above, we don't know enough about what makes the human brain different from our animal brethren to go around making them more like us without some kind of legal and ethical framework to deal with the results in a way that doesn't make us monsters. Look at it this way, there have been human beings that lived full, healthy lives with average intelligence and only a fraction the brain tissue that typical people have. We simply don't know what it is about the brain that makes us human.

I don't find Alistair Reynold's works to be boring, despite the fact that they lack FTL. You just have to reframe the story around the idea of immense travel times and throw in some science woo to explain how people survive the journeys.

Any propulsion system capable of getting significant mass up to interstellar velocities would also function quite well as a weapons system. All they'd have to do is leave a few hundred kilograms coasting at 10% the speed of light (when then begin their deceleration burn) aimed at earth and they'd wipe us out decades before they even got here.