The stopped just short of saying he was going to imbed an arc reactor in his chest. A superhero, he ain't.

In the same way we could learn about the culture of foreign countries by nuking them and examining the radiated spectrum. The search for knowlege only occasionally involves explosives.

Yeah, factually untrue. Industry statistics show Apple products to be consistently the most dependable you can buy. If that's not good enough to meet your standards for reliability, what does?

See, all that would be hard, and could take a while. Also, "criminals" tend to be mobile and surreptitious. An ISP, on the other hand, is visible and stationary. If you can just shift the blame to someone you can actually reach, "doing something" becomes much easier.

Might as well stop fooling ourselves that we're a nation of laws. The actions of the US government are indistinguishable from those of an unlimited monarchy; they take what they want. Soon the burden of writing, re-writing, and re-interpreting little laws to justify it will be onerous, and they'll stop.

Then we won't have to (and indeed won't be allowed to) waste time talking about it.

This. PLEASE! I've been saying it for years.

But it's the system we HAVE. It's not called the corrections industry for nothing; one of the largest businesses in the country is catching people and punishing them. There's a reason we have the largest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. If there were no crime... the cops, lawyers, prison guards, surveillance equipment company employees, would all be out of work. For heavens sake, if you're a patriot and love your country, support it by breaking the law today!

Largely in that "eugenics" is a word associated with a Very Bad Politician and therefore cannot be said in polite company. All it really means is "The practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population." A noble goal, to be sure. Like many things, however, eugenics can be practiced the innocuous way or the horrifying way.

For obvious reasons, you want to do your culling before fertilization occurs. In Heinlein's story, they examined the otherwise-wasted polar body thrown off during the development of the cell. The genetic content of the final cell can be inferred from that. Not sure how well that would work out, real-world; but the story was written in 1942, and the idea hasn't been discredited yet (that I could find).

Positive side: Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon"
Negative side: Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"

If we don't do the first, we get the second. There's a reasonable argument that natural selection isn't working anymore, and in fact may have been reversed. At one point, poor eyesight or ADD meant the sabre-tooth edited you out of the gene pool. So, we'll have to add the chlorine ourselves. I'm not sure we should be editing genes directly, but selecting the best gametes from the available pool (for a given set of parents) à la Heinlein almost HAS to be done at some point.

Agreed. While I've never easten octopus, I have previously enjoyed squid, something I may re-consider. Arbitrary, perhaps - but they're personal standards.

One just has to be careful of the acronym used for the computers name, and assiduously avoid omnipresent red-glowing video eyes. Then you'll be fine.

When they land, they'll be a demonstrated fact. Religious faith deals with the invisible and unprovable; it's not involved in observable ET's. The alien's beliefs? We'll ask them. Only problem is, if they ry to convert us.

Hmm, I was service manager at an Apple authorized computer store. Fixed hundreds of white plastic MacBooks. I would think that, given a long enough timespan, you could get to 30% failure on those three items, collectively. But certainly not within warranty, and generally not due to manufacturing defects.

I never saw any yellowing that wasn't caused by abuse. And I mean cigarette burns, being left on top of a radiator, etc. Cracks on the keyboard bezel, sure. That WAS a design flaw. Cosmetic only, BTW - didn't affect function. Apple fixed them all, in or out of warranty.

Hard drives fail. Apple doesn't make them. Look up the manufacturers specs for G's of impact in operation, and compare that to the way MacBooks are used. Mostly by students... We had one guy who was using his laptop on the seat of a moving, off-road truck. Apple replaced that hard drive, four times that I know of, in and out of warranty - at no charge. Eventually he got a free upgrade to an Air, with SSD. Solved.

Battery failure. Well, batteries are expendable items. I would say 95% of the batteries replaced were over their rated lifetime cycles; usually WAY over. The few that weren't, were also replaced free, in or out of warranty.

...by having lots of people with guns on hand. They can do whatever they want, ESPECIALLY if the programs are covert.