Many people spend time here to read and participate in the commentary.

Seconded. Slashdot is a debate club; the articles exist only to get things started.

I run slashdot on the "very" old classic mode. not even the web2.0 mode that is now slashdot default but an even older version.

Ditto. But do you know what would be really awesome? NNTP interface. Slashdot already allows disabling advertisements (at least it offered the option to me), and the discussions are thread-structured, so why not offer them up via Usenet server? Every section would be its own newsgroup, articles would be top-level posts, and filtering could be handled by having multiple newsgroups with different tresholds for various topics.

That way, you could have Web n+1.infinity for the ooh shiny -crowd, a program of their choice for hardcore users, and a good API for mobile access.

But I still think that Iceland should have granted him asylum.

Iceland couldn't grant Snowden asylum. It's an island with no army and no neighbours to buffer it from US peacekeeping operation. Nor could it smuggle him out of country through a blockade.

France with its nuclear weapons might have worked.

Both made very important statements we must pay attention to, but a fucking headshot beats hanging out in a Russian airport IMHO.

Both made important statements. However, that one managed to get away afterwards shouldn't weight against him.

Also, let's be honest here: that religion-dominated countries are horrible places to live is not news to anyone, nor is islamic countries being especially bad for women.

Do they do ANYTHING for the actual good of the country?

Why would they? The country is too big to fail. Just like the British Empire was.

That's the problem with expectionalism or manifest destiny: you start believing your own bullshit, start believing that you are destined for greatness and therefore don't need to work for it or even care at all about the consequences of your actions, since you're at the top and always will be. At that point the only question is whether a competitor knocks you down before your own internal corruption will.

American politics are full of hubris, and will result in a fall sooner or later. Probably sooner, since there's the tripple-whammy of competing superpowers, energy crisis and adapting to climate change all hitting at the same time. Any one of these would require competent leadership, but you get all three and a "leaders" incapable of even passing a budget without a political crisis. Kinda reminds me of the last days of the Soviet Union...

It would be a problem because you need to accelerate the bodies with the ship to ridiculous speeds at ridiculous accelerations. Even if you manage to accomplish that and keep the bodies stable in relation to the ship referential with pinpointed gravitational fields you would submit them to a ridiculous amount of stress because an extremely high resultant force must be applied to the body center of mass. You simply cannot give that amount of kinetic energy in this short time to a human body without making it fall apart.

Except, of course, there's no stress: giving energy through a uniform gravitational field means the body is basically accelerating in freefall. Every particle has the same acceleration vector, thus the difference vector between any two of them is null vector, thus the stress is zero.

Actually, coming to think of it, if you also use artificial gravity to accelerate you reaction mass, you get this "naturally": both the ship and the RM are basically falling away from a common center of gravity (presumably the engine), thus they are in freefall and experience no acceleration whatsoever. Tidal forces could be a problem, but the technology needed for artificial gravity would likely allow shaping fields too, so they would be uniform throughout the ship; if not, you could simply put the engine far behind the rest of the ship, tow it along with a cable and accept the resulting lower efficiency.

The Jedi, the most powerful beings in the galaxy, and within 20 years of their mass slaughter, they're forgotten and a joke,

Is that really that incredible? The Empire has every reason to make the Force seem like a "silly religion", both to hide Palpatine's true power and keep anyone from investigating the old stories and perhaps re-establishing a new Jedi Order. Real world is ripe of examples of just how easy it is to make people believe absurd bullshit.

and Obi-Wan's wistfully reminiscing about them, instead of having 'nam-style flashbacks to the worst trauma he had ever faced?

Obi-Wan lives as a hermit on a desert, comes up with pleasant lies about the past ("I didn't really hack my best friends limbs off and leave him to burn to death after he became a mass-murdering monster who tried to wipe us all out and establish tyranny on galaxy, only for him to survive and finish the job. Vader's a different guy, he did it, it's his fault!"), and when the opportunity comes, basically commits suicide by Vader. Yoda lives in a swamp, the only sapient being on the entire planet, ignoring the affairs of the galaxy even when a whole planet gets blown up, never once trying to fight the Emperor again, perhaps this time with Kenobi's help. I think it's safe to say both suffer from a heavy case of PTSD.

is the minds of the Slashdot nuke fanbois blowing a gasket.

Not at all. Of course you can produce energy cheaper by burning fossil fuels than with nuclear, because fossil fuel plants are allowed to externalize most of the costs of energy production, such as pollution. Once these externalities - such as turning every coastal city into a New Orleans - is taken into account, nuclear power is cheapest and safest.

a rooted Android phone with some sort of toddler app mode or custom ROM.

It sounds like you haven't tried Tripple Salt Licorice. No sugar in that - you just wish there was.

I dunno, I kinda liked raw ammonium chloride. That chemistry class probably wouldn't fly today :(...

There is by the way a lot of theory that argues that monetary systems are superior to other economic systems.

I very much doubt that seeing how "money" is just a convenient one-number summary of the concept of "resource usage" which all economic systems by definition have, because economy is all about managing resources. So the statement doesn't really make sense.

Perhaps you meant capitalist systems? In which case, yes, there's a lot of theories arguing their superiority. And plenty of theories arguing the opposite. Both of which tend to cause spectacular failures when someone tries to actually implement them.

End-to-end cryptography won't stop "them" from seeing with whom you communicate, how often, where, and when.

Use Tor or Freenet and make them transmit everything in fixed-size (padded if necessary) fixed-frequency bursts, encrypted of course. Keep every communication channel constantly saturated and if becomes impossible for an attacker to know when they're actually in use.

In the long run, though, we have to build mesh networks. The current semi-centralized model with its ISPs makes it too easy to tap or cut people off.

Things are all automated and depersonalized now. You have machines making the decisions and people trusting the machines. We are turning into a dystopian "future" that'd make a Nebula Award jealous.

No. All it means is that your personality - your ability to charm people - is taken out of equation. Which is bad for those who have charisma and good for those who don't. There's nothing "dystopian" in evaluating potential employees solely based on their education and work history, and ignoring how smooth talkers they might be in person. If anything, it could be argued to be fairer than letting the recruiters personal biases affect the process.

Validate me, respond to my pictures and comments and tell me what an interesting person I am!

You are.

That guy should join a debate club because he would win after his opponents all fell over laughing.

Just out of curiosity, can you come up with an argument for why he's wrong - why endangering your life or health for a thrill is okay when doing so with extreme sports but not with drugs - without resorting to begging the question? Because an appeal to ridicule doesn't actually prove anything, and in any case classes of drugs such as psychedelics are often used for the supposed spiritual experience rather than mere thrill.

Terms like "adrenalin junkie" exist for a reason.