Clearly our attempts to lead the commies out of the darkness and into the glories of the free market were not entirely successful. Surely a good, honest, American, defense contractor wouldn't even reply to an RFP for that kind of money, much less actually deliver, and comrade Putin wants a finished hack? The nerve...

I would certainly be (a lot) happier if medicine actually worked that way; but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations? I may be forgetting, or ignorant of, something; but I can't think of any aspect of science where we've taken on a problem of that scale without a whole lot of hacks, constants defined to make the numbers work out, simplifications, or just plain acknowledgement that we have the math to describe the problem but it is not computationally tractable for most real world targets.

Does the baseline healthy human enjoy targeted advertising, or does he really enjoy targeted advertising and find it to be an enriching aspect of his modern lifestyle?

The really depressing bit is not that they are drug tested(this part is depressing; but not really depressing); but that we currently don't have any drugs worth testing chess players for...

At least in more...muscular...pursuits team biology has done a sufficiently good job that there are plenty of actually performance enhancing drugs out there. For the mind we have some mediocre alertness aids and anti fatigue stuff that allow you to study a bit longer; but nothing nearly as dramatic as what you can do to muscle mass or blood oxygen transport if you aren't afraid of a few side effects and/or disqualification. It's a tragedy, really.

The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...

Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where that statement doesn't imply sarcasm...

Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.

Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.

Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.

How can you be so crass as to bring filthy, filthy, empiricism to a discussion about government?

Only people who lack faith in the a priori truths of Objectivism would be so base as to drag some nonsense about "what is actually happening" into the discussion. It's simply a fact that absolutely anything a government does is just a cover for expropriating the wealth creators and building a cadre of elitist bureaucrats to centrally mismanage things.

I think that Newsmax, 'linkbait for reactionary old people', is behind much of that. They are ostensibly a political thing; but their advertising leans heavily into (sometimes rather dubious) tabloid medical reporting when there isn't a good red-meat issue to run banner ads about.

Only when we aren't trying to figure out why the planes keep asphyxiating them; but in theory, yes...

This seems like a sensible approach, I just hope that it isn't accompanied by a raft of broad and dubious patents that purport to cover pretty much any 'printing something to fit someone' application. That would both serve as ammunition against a broad range of printing applications and be unjustified given the things that have already been 3d printed for medical applications(usually on a small scale). If they have something more specific, covering programmatically generating customized deformable shapes for best fit, or some elegant manufacturing twist, that may well be all good; but it would be unfortunate to see something overbroad.

On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.

I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...

Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.

This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.

But where will the US get its supply of mutant kangaroos?

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.