Depends on how broad the question is: given that not every potentially violent extremist will react in the same way, the answer to 'are potentially violent extremists better defused by coddling or by needling?' is likely to be something statistical, rather than "yes" or "no"; but that would be the right answer.

I don't mean to pretend that the right answer will necessarily fit neatly on a bumper sticker(indeed, it'd be quite a shock if it did); but a potentially complex answer is by no means the same as some sort of intersubjective mush of multiple valid viewpoints.

Do you suspect that this is a product of ineptitude, or an exploration of the theory that degradation enhances compliance?

Even if you can get the pesky feds away, and pay them less than minimum wage, lazy, entitled, human workers still tend to waste 4-8 hours/day 'sleeping' and engaging in rudimentary grooming behaviors; and their lack of work ethic means that if you try to pay them starvation wages they may just decide to go starve somewhere else, and at least work fewer hours while doing so.

The effect is most obvious in places where automation is ridiculously efficient(it's pretty tricky for even your most downtrodden human to be cheap enough to stuff PCBs more efficiently than a pick-and-place, for instance); but it's true across the board that no matter how hard you beat them down, humans still have a price floor. Even slaves aren't necessarily cheaper than robots.

American aerospace contractors are displeased to note that NASA plans to have the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle fabbed on a 20nm process by TSMC, rather than more traditional launch partners...

I'm certainly not going to argue with you there; though I will wonder how you can content yourself with an observation about where an opinion was born, rather than how accurate it is...

Remember back when Uber's big privacy problem was 'God View?

Well, they promised to cut back their sleazebag executives' personal access to that. They might even have been not-lying. Unfortunately, that just meant that they were growing up, and moving into the big-kid leagues of privacy violation. As I said then:

"So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.

That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed."

Well, there we are: 'turning into a big data company' is pretty much the thermonuclear option when it comes to customer privacy; more or less the most invasive thing we yet have the technology to make cost effective. It'll take some real innovating for them to dig deeper.

Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?

I apologize if this was explained in TFA and I missed it; but I was left wondering why gallium arsenide would be so dramatically expensive. A quick look shows that even the scammers selling 'gallium bullion' in small quantities are charging under a dollar a gram for the stuff(at allegedly very high purity); and arsenic certainly isn't terribly pricey. Silicon, of course, is really abundant, and still fairly cheap once you've coaxed the oxygen out of the quartz-form you typically find it in; but not lower cost enough to explain a wafer-level difference as large as the one that exists.

Are gallium, arsenic, or both markedly more difficult to purify enough to serve as reliable semiconductors? Is growing sufficiently flawless crystals large enough to be cut into wafers too error prone to get good yields? Some other unpleasant aspect of processing or handling the material?

People who react badly to having their precious little feelings hurt rarely improve through being carefully coddled and pandered to. If anything, they tend to reach the (fairly sensible, if everyone is busy justifying it) conclusion that threatening violence is an effective way to get what you want; which encourages them to push for additional concessions. And there is always something else on the list, even if you agree to everything initially demanded of you.

This is not to say that the exercise of free speech is a risk-free activity that has never been the (proximate) cause of a nasty flare-up between the opinionated assholes of history; such a claim would be trivially false: some of history's arguments have gotten downright ghastly. It's just that situations that need only a little talk to turn violent tend not to be ones that were in the process of just simmering down and solving themselves until those pesky free speech absolutists came in and ruined things. Rather, such situations are usually festering merrily away, just looking for an excuse. That's the main reason why it's so easy for trivial slights, sometimes even ones that were merely rumored to have been committed; with no solid evidence of anything actually having happened(see also: witch hunts, lynch mobs) to set them off: They want a reason, any reason, doesn't really matter much if it's any good or not, for some good, cathartic, violence.

India has had its share of moderately nasty mob violence along sectarian lines; and probably hasn't seen the last of it. Is it possible that somebody's inflammatory comment/video/whatever will be the proximate cause of another bout? Sure, totally plausible. Will it be the actual cause; or will criminalizing saying mean things on the internet to anything useful to address the underlying tensions or prevent some other, equally spurious, incident from kicking off the violence instead? Not very likely.

It isn't every day that you see a law that would make posting a copy of itself online a punishable act...

Per a spokesweasel(in TFA): "Some academic research uses proliferation-sensitive controlled goods and technologies. While the sensitive items are used for legitimate civilian research by Australian researchers, they can also be used for the proliferation of military, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. "

Notice anything odd? The word 'military' shows up along the usual trio of "nuclear, chemical, biological". Last I checked, the boundaries of 'military weapons' were very, very, broad, running the gamut from fancy-nuclear-power aerospace widgetry to relatively crude hand-fabricated small arms more or less loosely based on designs dating back to the first half of the 20th century, if not older.

Is there some stricter definition of 'military weapons' that makes this slightly less ridiculous, or are they in fact export-controlling basically any tech you could conceivably integrate into a weapon in some fashion, including weapons already extremely widely available, adequately functional with downright crude technology, and otherwise utterly absurd to pretend are still within the reach of counter-proliferation efforts?

Actually, it has been quite some time since utility power has been treated as a 'natural monopoly'.

There are some vestiges of regulated monopoly stuff, mostly in consumer electrical delivery(partially inertia, partially the fact that political influence over the price of consumer staple goods can be electorally popular, partly because it fits neatly with the usual state interest in not having people cut off for nonpayment and freezing to death, which generates a lot of bad PR per dollar in utility bills collected); but electricity markets(between companies operating generating assets and companies selling to end users) have been in place for years to decades at this point. Sometimes this goes badly(looking at you, Enron); mostly it is fairly uneventful.

The 'natural monopoly' is in transmission assets. Just as internet backbone and fairly fat pipes at peering points are a reasonably robustly competitive industry; but 'last mile' connectivity is somewhere between a monopoly and an oligopoly; electricity generation is a competitive market(and a surprisingly functional one, given that it has historically been utterly uneconomic to store electricity for even a few minutes, unlike most normal commodities); but 'the grid' pretty much has one path to your house; and nobody has a remotely plausible plan to build multiple, competing, paths; unless you are a really big customer, like an aluminum smelter or something.

Different utility companies still own different mixtures of generating and grid assets, so the name on your electrical bill can be anything from a 'virtual' electrical company(owns no physical infrastructure, attempts to make its money by carefully purchasing electricity on the market at prices low enough to turn a profit by selling to you at an agreed-upon price); to a distribution company(owns and operates the electrical grid in a given area; but purchases the electricity it carries from generating companies on the market) to a fully integrated outfit(owns power plants and distribution lines, buys fuel, sells electricity to end users on its distribution grid and possibly electricity to other companies outside its retail distribution area).

The advent of economically practical electricity storage (especially decentralized storage) would be a huge shake-up, because that has simply never been on the table before(a few places are naturally suited to pumped hydro; but that's about it); but energy markets are already more dynamic than you suggest, within the limits imposed by competitive grid building being hard to justify and electricity being hard to store.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of SSDs, and use them myself for everything except backup/NAS stuff where I don't have nearly enough disposable income to cover my demand for capacity. However, the biggest improvement is not absolute throughput speed(if you can actually keep a read or write nice and linear, a high density platter HDD is pretty damned fast); but the fact that you'll get almost the same speed under a pathologically random access condition as you will under a nice linear access condition. HDDs, by contrast, absolutely fall off a cliff if you do that to them.

In fairness to Enry, I (in retrospect, not very clearly) tried to make two somewhat similar points and kind of mushed them together). My intent was the following:
1. Only for certain, fairly specific, tasks does doubling 1 subsystem's performance = 'doubling performance'. In the case of mass storage, databases seem to be the particular sweet spot. For most of what laptops are used for, the near-zero latency of an SSD makes a huge difference; but the difference between 'near zero latency, 2 PCIe lanes of bandwidth' and 'near zero latency, 4 lanes' is very unlikely to double performance across the board.

2. What is remarkable, even if 'double the performance' of the storage subsystem doesn't double the performance of the tasks you use it for, is that we now have (and relatively cheap, at that, unlike DDR-based hardware RAMdisks) storage hardware that is good enough that doubling its interface bandwidth genuinely does double its performance. With pretty much any mechanical storage, and some of the earlier SSDs, it barely mattered what the nominal performance of your interface was, because the storage device would let it down. You wanted to avoid PIO, because losing DMA meant more CPU load; and SATA has cables that are less annoying than PATA; but only with big, expensive, HDD arrays or contemporary SSDs does the speed of the interface actually make much difference in terms of performance.

It is slower than a lizard in a blizzard; but the advantage is that it uses the thermal sensors that PCs include for ACPI thermal management/fan speed control/etc. not any of the hardware that is explicitly for communication(ethernet, wifi, IRDA, BT, etc. and thus almost certain to be stripped out/disabled) or that isn't for networking; but is a fairly obvious threat(speaker and mic, laptop ambient light sensors for backlight control, that sort of thing); so it is fairly likely that even computers prepared by the relatively paranoid for use on highly sensitive networks will still have the necessary sensors(and any computer will be unable to avoid having the necessary software-controlled thermal source, barring the development of 100% efficient CPUs).