Dude... everything that's happened and been exposed and you still think stuff like this is pure conspiracy theory bullshit? Even if it's not something they currently do, it's certainly within their repertoire.

That's like saying betting on a coin flip isn't a luck based game. Given enough flips you'll come out even betting heads every time. The same is true of roulette, craps, etc.

Online poker sites make their money from the rake, a percentage of each pot goes to the table. Unless you are so obviously advantaged that other players get upset and leave, unlikely unless you're actually cheating, online casinos have no incentive to ban you.

His point is, we're already doing it blindly. How would you feel if we were going into an ice age and people were proposing dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to in an attempt to reverse it?

And not every form of ethics revolves around informed consent.

That's like asking "what's the benefit of studying this mold growing on my oranges?". No one knows. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

What spam filters?

Seven comments in, so far there's 4 jokes, 2 anti-us spam/trolls, and 1 crank. Quality discussion there.

"Standing up to extremists" was done by "targeted killings, against Muslim civilians". Yes, if accurate I would call that terrorism.

They aren't saying roving hypergoats are devouring entire star systems. They are saying there could be migrating civilizations so powerful that they effectively mine and deplete entire stars. There have been thought experiments done focusing on how such a thing could be possible. For instance, here is a wikipage about a few designs for the type of things they are talking about in the article, none of which are really that wildly impossible.

The Revelation Space series also had devices and civilizations capable of destroying, mining, moving, and otherwise using stars to advance their own ends.

There is a qualitative difference between any one conversation being overheard and every conversation being overheard. I may not have an expectation that something I say is private, but I do have an expectation that there isn't a database of everything I've ever said in public ever.

Yes, the next ISS launch window is Friday morning.

He's not talking technical problems preventing an abort, he's talking political. Engineers working on the Challenger program wanted to abort, expressed concern about the exact issues that caused the accident, and got overridden by management.

Yep, that's why everyone lands their boost stage and cuts their costs by a significant fraction... right?

This is highly debatable. Much of our "smarts" amounts to education, research, modern tools, and discoveries made over thousands of years. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Even if you argue by smart you mean intelligence and thinking skills, you still have to consider nutrition and health both of which can have a huge impact on adult intelligence levels.