He's avoiding imprisonment in Sweden because Sweden has an extradition Treaty with the US, and once he walks out the front door of that embassy and walks on that plane to sweden, it's about 50/50 odds he ends up in US custody.
 
That said, thanks for the tip on Jozsef Mindszenty, I am going to have to read up on that.

That list is about 100 titles shorter than I would have expected

I plan in 2015 to build a computer that I will use at least until 2022.

 
Absolutely. I'm rocking an i5-750 on my desktop from about the same era (early 2010) and I'll be replacing it with an i7-skylake when they come out this fall, which I expect to ride until the end of western civilization.

Well they do in California, which is where the uplink and downlink would be happening. So there's that.

Wind and Solar are already lightyears cheaper than fossil fuels in remote areas like islands and the third world. Remember how we skipped providing land lines to Africa, and everyone there got cell phones instead? How Facebook has a mobile app specifically directed towards those mobile users in Africa? Solar and Wind will come from the bottom up (Africa, SE Asia) and from the top down (Germany, Netherlands, Sweden). As capacity increases and price decreases you'll start seeing middle-tier economies like the United States and Canada finally adopt them. Taking a train through the countryside you'll see hundreds of houses with solar panels on their roofs already. While the legislative push isn't needed, it will help move other countries in that direction, as the G7 acts as a leader and weathervane for countries worldwide.
 
TL;DR Solar and Wind will drive the price of fossil fuels in to the ground in 20 years, anyways.

If you can dump your 80 year old brain in a healthy 18 year old body, I would imagine a good number of people would take that option over death, at least until they sort out the whole "connecting the brain to the central nervous system" problem.

Mars' gravity is well less than half of Earth's gravity. It's not a lot larger than the Moon. To put the same stress on your skeleton on Mars that an obese person does to their own in Earth gravity, you'd need to add about 250 to 350 pounds of radiation shielding.

Seriously? You move my poll and don't give me a Cowboy Neal option? Slashdot, you are dead to me...

Argentina was a special case where an investor rolled the dice on buying up all their debt and then somehow taking them to court in the US and winning a judgement that crippled them financially. Previous to that, Argentina has had a long track record of failing to pay back their debt going back decades without repercussion. So do most other countries outside of western europe. Spain and Greece are two of the biggest examples of what happens when you join a currency union and your economy is not in sync with the strongest players.

Yeah I was going to say, I wrote a crude flight simulator, including the display drivers for my Arduino and SSD1306 OLED display, that weighs in at 31KB. A piece of code to focus a laser should be less than that.

I think the thing about Teddy Ruxpin was that he had always moved. If you have an inanimate object for a lifetime, and then suddenly it springs to life but without facial features or moving eyes, yes that is creepy. But if it's advertised as a moving device from the start, it's not creepy as that's expected behavior. It's when things suddenly spring to life that it triggers stalking predator alarm bells in your brain. If your houseplant started talking to you that would be freaky, but if it said hello and goodbye to you every day when you go to work, and helped you keep track of where you put your car keys or to remember to pick up milk on the way home, that's just another family member. Digital assistants will head in that direction eventually. The British series "Black Mirror" had an episode like this, where the AI was held in an "egg".

At least 7 of those boards have SATA ports, and one has mSATA support. Just do a ctrl+F for 'SATA'...

This is sort of like the minimum drinking age. There's no federal minimum drinking age, yet every state has the age of 21 set as their drinking age. Why is this? Because starting in the 1980's, to get federal highway funding, you had to have a drinking age of 21. In this instance, a lot of states balked and avoided changing it, and their roads deteriorated. But eventually they all gave in. So, you have to have your children vaccinated if you want to send them to public school. The good news is that unlike federal highway funding dollars, there are multiple schooling sources you can choose from, and in many cases are a better option.

No, we're all soulless sacks of meat, fuck the other guys on the other side of the planet, we'll never meet 'em, so fuck 'em. Preach it, StickyPad!

This is the airplane speech about automotive safety devices from Fight Club, right?