If you believe that, then you have failed to understand the Internet at a profoundly fundamental level.

The Internet was designed from the very beginning for all of the intelligence to be at the edges. The network itself is supposed to be as dumb as it is possible to be while still moving everybody's packets around. If you want censorship, it's your job to implement it on the tiny little network in your house, or even individual nodes on that network, and leave everyone else alone. No one else should be spending any CPU time for what you want.

Easy. You call up the US vendor that sold China their Great Firewall and order another one. This one will be cheap, considering the UK's population is a fraction that of China.

And yes, you can hire enough busy-body bureaucrats to keep the blacklists up to date. China does. Think of it as a jobs program. If there's one thing history has shown, it's that 10% of the population is willing, eager, and waiting to oppress the other 90%, "for their own good." That plus a tiny number of sociopathic opportunists is all you need to get it done.

I'm sure when it's in place that the UK will become a beacon of morality for all the world to admire. Kind of like the Victorian era.</sarcasm>

The US did that with Goldman Sachs more than a century ago, and they've been a scourge on humanity ever since. I can't imagine why Europe thinks creating their own banking weapon is a good idea.

Hey now, I'm pretty sure Henry Kissinger actually exists.

Although on further reflection, he might be a lizard...

Let's go even further back, to Anne McCaffrey's novel The Rowan, which featured a pooka—an animatronic stuffed bear used as a therapy device for the titular character. Published in 1990.

Technically not prior art, since it was a sci fi bear, far advanced of current robotics, with sensors in every hair, and squishable enough to be hugged by a child.

Are you kidding? One of the victims of the Benghazi attack was a major diplomatic power in EVE Online. The game was permanently altered by his death.

He served on the Council of Stellar Management, a position you get by player votes, and there are only 9 members. You have to be very visible and quite well respected to get a seat. You get a free trip to Iceland out of the deal, plus the ability to propose significant changes to the game with the assurance that CCP will seriously consider the proposal. It was a major loss for his corporation in particular and EVE Online in general.

He was also a Something Awful moderator, for what that's worth...

What makes you think anybody wants to see Mrs. President Hillary? (Again?) The last time she tried, an unknown senator from Chicago got the nomination, and I'm willing to bet only pat of the reason was "unknown half-black senator." The other part was "not Hillary."

Well, almost. A good sized fraction of North America gets buried in ash, which is dangerous to inhale, and makes a mess of machinery, but it isn't immediately deadly if you make any effort at all to avoid inhaling it. It will definitely result in another Year Without a Summer, possibly two. But the ash in the upper atmosphere, the lightest and finest stuff, tends not to cross the equator, so the southern hemisphere won't suffer the serious crop failures that the northern hemisphere will. Given how much of North America's food (and Europe's food, these days) comes from South America, the resulting famine will only be bad, rather than catastrophic.

The problem is how many volcanoes get set off by a large asteroid strike, including possibly Yellowstone itself. Given the probability of an ocean strike (high), you get all possible fun: massive steam cloud and tidal waves, followed by volcanic ash everywhere.

A state of affairs that will undoubtedly be "fixed" in the next Mickey Mouse law...

Disingenuous statistic is disingenuous. Costco is legendary for paying more than minimum wage and irritating stockholders in consequence. The famous quote from Deutsche Bank was "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder." Naming an extraordinarily unusual retailer does not bolster your point.

It's that and it's money they didn't pay to their employees.

Walmart pays a dividend.
More than 50% of Walmart shares are held by Walton family members.
Walmart has 3.226 billion shares outstanding.
In 2014, Walmart paid a quarterly dividend of 48 cents, or $1.92 per share for the year.

So for 2014 alone, the Walton family collected approximately $3.09 billion in cash from Walmart. Completely ignoring the value of the shares themselves, and changing no ownership of those shares in any way...

...you ignorant fuck.

Because every square centimeter of this rock is owned by someone? And no one owns any square centimeters of the other rocks in the solar system? It's about the frontier, and its opportunities.

Nobody said it had to be an easy frontier.

You or I might not be interested in making the attempt, because sterile, barren, bathed in radiation, etc. but other people do, and why do you care if other people run off and get themselves killed in an attempt to acquire unclaimed land?

Have you got a license to use that much sarcasm in one post? That exceeded the unlicensed sarcasm allowance. You'll need to file a form and pay a fee. The queue forms on the left. The office is open on alternate Tuesdays if the previous Wednesday was a full moon.

Never heard of coolie labor, have you. In much of the Americas, it was literal slavery, and in the US, it was slavery in all but name. Until 1879, where it was recognized as slavery even in name, in the constitution of the State of California.

Chinese immigration to the US up to that time was nominally voluntary. And you can believe as much of that as you like. Once they got here, they were enslaved with contracts of indenture that were rigged to be impossible to pay off because they were forced to buy all necessities from the company store, which was rigged to make them go further into debt. It didn't last nearly as long as Black slavery, but it still involved hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Many, many third and fourth generation Chinese-Americans can claim a slave ancestor.

They don't. And they don't dwell on it.

Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be a Mars-shattering kaboom.