Mesh networking, peer-to-peer, power to the decentralized people -- it all sounds great. But some of those people will still be on the side of the government. I wonder how much information one mesh node could accumulate to incriminate other participants? How many of "the people" will be willing to participate in an uprising like this if they know that a government stooge is likely no more than two or three hops away?

There's a long tradition of regulating electrical utilities -- their new-plant construction, their service build-out, and most especially their rates. If connecting single-household solar installations and buying back power from them is imposing an undue burden, and they can prove this, adjust the tariffs accordingly.

But you shouldn't quash an entire emerging industry just to protect an old and established one. Unfortunately, that seems to be one of the main duties of legislatures.

I repeat. It's 3D PRINTING FOR LIFE EXTENSION -- specifically, preserving the life of patients who would otherwise face a fairly quick (and extremely painful) death.

I'm listening for that faint sound of a certain Fark refugee's skull rupturing in the distance.

If this kind of rat experimentation bothers you, and I can't say that it shouldn't, I'd like to ask two follow-up questions.

First, have you ever seen what a cat does when it encounters a rat or a mouse? Cats are predators, but they don't always just swiftly kill and eat their prey. They often toy with it for quite a long time.

Second, having learned about this behavior, are you ready to call for the abolition of cats? I'll promise you that cats torture and kill far more rats worldwide than all scientists put together, and we gain far less from that activity than we do from medical research.

If you oppose animal testing, I can see that as a principled and well-supported stand. But if you aren't willing to go further and call for the end of domestic cat propagation, I'd very much like some insight into your reasoning.

As a chemistry hobbyist, I always wanted one of those big organic-labware sets with pluggable components -- you could build a multi-stage vacuum still, controlled-atmosphere reactor and separator, whatever you wanted -- but true micro- or nano-scale chemistry never seemed as appealing.

By analogy, I always thought playing with discrete components or small-scale logic chips was a lot more engaging than wiring up a microcontroller and loading it with canned or slightly-modified firmware.

On the other hand, you can unquestionably get a lot more done with the canned-complex-parts approach. I'll be fascinated to see where this leads.

...nah, somebody's already got it parked.

So, all these folks who are saying "low-life criminals are the problem, and we need to stop them by whatever means necessary" shouldn't be calling for harsher penalties, but more pervasive surveillance (because the important factor is how likely you are to be caught, not how severe the punishment is).

Yeah, I'm sure they'll get right on that.

That's right, some psycho kids once tried to kill another kid in the woods. So DON'T EVER THINK OF LETTING ANY KIDS GO INTO THE WOODS EVER!

Keep them inside, where nothing bad ever happens to kids. No kid ever suffered harm while locked in the basement. Right?

I remember yelling and waving my arms at some length years ago when I discovered that you could put arbitrary JavaScript into your auction descriptions. Sure, it lets you have cool expanding images and whatnot -- but I can't imagine securing it against attacks that do something like this, or attach event handlers to the controls in the eBay-served sections of the page, or any number of other nefarious things. Everybody told me to calm down and shut up at the time, and my posts on eBay's discussion forum disappeared pretty quickly.

I'm only surprised that it's taken this long for an attack to get even this minimal degree of coverage. (I was going to say "I'm surprised it took this long for someone to implement an attack", but I have no reason to believe that this is the first one.)

I can't possibly hope to "keep up", because you'll always be able to make up random nonsensical claims faster than I can debunk them. Enjoy your perpetual leadership.

Oh, is that all you have to do?

That was an awfully big wall of text to write for just one nibble.

The civilizations that evolved earlier than us harvested it all to power their plugin-hybrid starships. What are you going to do about that, Elon?

Nice condescending swipe. Now, would you care to explain why you said you need "a gap no greater than two protons thick" to block the escape of helium atoms, each consisting of a nucleus with its attendant populated orbitals, several orders of magnitude larger than the bare nucleus that you seemed to be describing?

For that matter, how exactly would you define "a gap no greater than two protons thick" in an object made from molecular matter -- that is, matter bound together by those clouds of electrons that you alluded to? You know, the things that "don't really take up physical space" (except that they really do) and "have no mass" (except 9.10938291 × 10e-31 kilograms), and don't really "orbit" (but certainly do interact to form what's "conveniently" conceptualized as a van der Waals surface)?

Nonsense.

The argument seems to be that, because we don't see "evidence of technological activity" when we look out at the universe, intelligence leading to technological culture must be rare or absent. If an entity or a culture doesn't cause huge, recognizable perturbations in its environment, it must not represent "intelligence".

Think of an electrical engineer from the 1880s studying the data cables that run through a modern city. He might cut into a cable, expecting to find a wire carrying electrical impulses. Instead, he sees a bundle of glass fibers, glowing brightly if he nicks or breaks them. No tools at his disposal would let him even detect the gigahertz-scale fluctuations in that light.

For that matter, consider a 1960s "exobiologist" trying to decode an intercepted 2014 video stream. If you told him it was image data, he might look for periodicities that would let him determine rows, columns, and pixels. In an MPEG-compressed stream, he wouldn't get far. Heaven help him if it's DRMed.

My point: the things we look for as evidence of technological civilization may just be evidence of insufficiently advanced technological civilization. The "filters" we fear -- nuclear annihilation, bioterror, grey goo -- may indeed claim a lot of civilizations, or they may be laughably uncommon. It seems to me most likely that, instead of trying and failing to build space-opera-scope interstellar empires, most civilizations simply grow into something that we aren't yet sophisticated enough to notice.