"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off." --Seen on the desk of a secretary in the Psychology Department

...and right there your argument runs off the rails. The answer to #5 is No. No one can devise a test. Why? Because no one understands the entire system. You can not test a cycle that you can not describe.

But all of the blah blah above doesn't even matter. If it was as simple as you persistently and repeatedly claim, no climate model would ever be wrong. But looking around, we discover that, in fact, not a single climate model has always been right. Not one. Every single one of them has been wrong in its predictions, some of them laughably wrong. Yes, each one of those tiny little factoids you like to write is true. And if the Earth was a bell jar full of CO2 that might matter. It's not. A bell jar full of CO2 is an utterly useless model of Earth when talking about temperatures. It has nothing to do with anything. It's so far removed from reality that it makes a spherical cow look like an optimal model of friction. The real system is vastly more complex. It's so complex that no current climate model contains every aspect of it, as evidenced by their continued failure to match reality, by the (published, peer-reviewed) admission of their own creators.

If and when a model successfully predicts half a century to within the commonly accepted rate of statistical significance, we will know the model is a reasonable simulation of reality. Predicting next year or next decade is not enough: that's just weather. Until then, they're just spitballing. Unless and until the model meets the commonly accepted evidentiary standards of science, it's neither complete nor worthy of consideration as a guide for public policy, especially when some of the public policy proposed on the basis of unproven models will actively harm a very large number of humans. Possibly all humans everywhere.

Perhaps before you advocate actively harming each and every living and future member of the human race, you should have a more accurate model.

According to the structural engineer, yes a 20 km tower is probably possible. There's nothing in material science preventing it. The detailed engineering to figure out how to build and assemble the largest structural members in the base have not been worked out, but at least in theory, it can be done.

Presumably Neal Stephenson will finish a story telling us what the hell it's for.

The legislators were involved. This whole situation was supposed to be a good thing.

The theory was the government could be more responsive and more able to keep up with changing times than the legislature could be, so the law was written to broadly authorize the Executive branch to come up with the details on its own, rather than having every tiny little thing argued over by Congress itself. All the various federal commissions and most of the administrations were set up under that theory. Congress broadly sets policy and writes up the authorizations and the Executive branch takes care of the details. In an attempt to preserve a little democracy, Congress did mandate this public comment thing. At least the part where comments have to be solicited. Of course, odds are good that nothing says those comments have to be in any way heeded.

If regulatory capture wasn't a thing, it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the phrase "for the public good" has fallen out of favor. The Almighty Dollar speaks, and the government falls all over itself to listen. As if somehow all things business does are guaranteed to be good for the general public. Apparently all of history happened in vain. People never learn.

The main difference is the Germans built ovens and gas chambers and the Allies didn't.

It's not at all possible because it's not scary. All smart watches run on low voltage DC, just like every other battery-powered watch since the dawn of the electronic age. Human skin has no difficulty resisting the voltages involved. Have you ever licked a 9 volt battery? Or know someone who has? They don't have a burned tongue. And smart watches run on less than 9 volts. Sweat is only a corrosion problem, not a conductivity problem.

Household power should be low voltage DC, not AC. Edison was right, at short distances. It's much much safer than even the 110 AC we use in the US, let alone the higher voltages used elsewhere in the world.

You included links to SparkFun but still called them bricks? They're called blocks, not bricks.

There was a time when SGI held a trademark on calling computer expansion parts 'bricks'. Not sure if that trademark has lapsed or not. If Intel was calling them bricks and is now calling them blocks, one can surmise the trademark is still extant and it took a while for the lawyers to notice.

That's no moom...

Wait. What?

Yo momma's so fat, astronomers can use her to detect cosmic rays.

There we go. I knew there was a kitschy joke in there somewhere.

Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first twelve successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellites operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - first twelve launches successful, although a secondary payload on the fourth launch was aborted as a precaution
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first twelve launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - first twelve successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed

Falcon 9 will remain one of four until it beats (or fails to beat) Shuttle's record, probably sometime in 2016. Then it's likely to take many years to beat Delta II (which had a three decade head start). It may only beat Soyuz-FG if the Russians foul up, since they're still being launched quite regularly.

No, we won't.

This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.

Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).

Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.

So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.

People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?

Held against them or affect their careers? I don't read mainstream news or pay attention to celebrities, so when this story hit the Slashdot front page, I didn't recognize any of the names, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people named are all pretty girls. I'm quite certain that in Hollywood, naked pictures of already famous pretty girls are only a help to their careers, not a hindrance. With the possible exception of Disney stars, but that's probably only momentary. They'll just sign with Sony instead.

All the false outrage over naked people is just that: false outrage. The rumor-mongering, scandal-spreading, gossip-loving general public laps this shit up and begs for more. It sells papers (metaphorically), it drives hits, it pushes up ratings, and a bunch of pretty girls are going to see their star currency ratings climb substantially for a while.

In the end, much sound and fury signifying nothing.

And in the case of properly utilized public/private key encryption, see both the sender and the recipient. You will need both private keys to decrypt the message. And no, the mail transport and storage host should not have either private key.

I don't see large numbers of people moving to seasteading, which is a much closer analogue to space settlement.

Having said that, I don't think any of the four destinations is any indication at all of the will present to move to such places. All four are very capital-intensive places to live, but with the massive concentration of wealth happening in the US and around the world, very few people with the will also have the capital to do anything about it. With respect to the fourth destination, space, only one person in the entire world has both the will and the capital: Elon Musk.

There may be hundreds of thousands, even millions, who are willing to risk the frontier, but only a handful of them are suicidal about it. They're the ones who signed up for a one way trip to Mars. The rest are aware that it takes a significant amount of money to do such a thing, and they're aware they don't have that kind of money.

Bullshit.

Density of gasoline: 0.73 kg/L
Typical gas tank capacity: 57 L
Typical number of fillups per year: 52

0.73 * 57 * 52 = 2200 kg/year.

Gasoline contains various different organic molecules starting from hexane and running up through decane. Hexane is C6H14, so the carbon makes up 84% of the mass. Octane is C8H18, so the carbon makes up 80% of the mass. Call it 82%.

A single average-sized car emits 1800 kg of carbon every year. Less than 2 metric tons.

Yeah, NSA is busy upgrading all their gear. They took out Charter earlier this week. Today it was Time Warner's turn. They'll get to Comcast in a day or two.