I live in Canada, and the problem with parole being on the table for all crimes no matter what is you occasionally get a sick sideshow when someone like Clifford Robert Olsen would go up for parole (thankfully he died in prison). For those unfamiliar with that waste of flesh, he raped and killed 11 kids. Anyway, when his hearings would come up, some of the family members of his victims would inevitably show up for various reasons, and Olsen would use his time taunt them.

I think there are some lines that if crossed, you don't get parole. Like raping and killing more than 0 kids.

There's been talk about seeding the upper atmosphere of Venus with plant life and algae that, if properly developed, could thrive in the upper atmosphere and convert CO2 to O2, lowering the density and the greenhouse effect. And 2 HUGE advantages Venus has for terraforming are that nice thick atmosphere, and a molten core which generates a magnetosphere to protect from solar wind like ours on Earth. Mars has neither so you'd need to get the gas from somewhere (comets probably) and then you'd get to watch it slowly get blown back out into space by solar wind.

> and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.

Oh I wouldn't say that. Aside from the Moon, it's the only other option with both decent gravity and a nice solid landmass to build on. Building things in microgravity is very hard compared to on the surface of a planetary body, which is one of the chief draws of Mars. I agree that the moon should be a bigger priority for a large number of reasons, but Mars does have an appeal in the human consciousness that the moon just can't match.

I found Red Mars a loooooong slog. But after I finished it, Green and Blue were a lot better. Red took so much effort to go through because it's the foundation for the other two.

You're confusing a penetration tester with a security researcher. Pentesters use existing tools and libraries of known exploits and test targets to see if they are vulnerable to those known exploits. There's lots of companies paying good money for that service.

Starship Troopers does not belong on that list. It was a great movie, just not the one that Heinlein fans expected with the title. I enjoyed both the book and the movie.

Ah yes, the great Democrats Mitt Romney and Bill Koch. How could we possibly have forgotten those great Democrats?

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
>But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.

How is it misleading? It says "For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates." Local residents are residents of the island. Who will be saving 40% or more on what it costs them to have electricity.

To be fair, the guy outlines a process to cleanly sever and then prepare the nerves for reattachment under a very controlled environment, which is an entirely different thing from a spinal cord being damaged in an accident out in the world.

That said, the whole idea is terrifying and if his end goal is literally making head swaps a somewhat common procedure nothing good will come of this. In order to make this possible you need bodies after all, and if this can extend the life of the transplant-ee by a significant margin we're going to see a huge amount of pressure brought to bear to create a supply of those bodies. Maybe something along the lines of Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man" where capital offense criminals were harvested to fill demand, and as demand grew over time the bar for a capital offense keeps dropping to keep up.

I don't wish to frighten you out of your happy place, but even if the hypothetical aliens never managed to invent gunpowder, a race that can move starships around interstellar space easily can absolutely bring a planet-bound species to their knees, or to extinction just by throwing (large) rocks at the planet using their propulsion systems. And there are a LOT of rocks in our solar system that could be easily harvested for the task.

Or if you live in Canada. Price of gas before this whole dip was almost $6 a gallon up here. 35K for a sedan that will save an average Canadian commuter almost 2K a year in fuel costs is a total no brainer if they were already shopping in a similar market segment.

Not always an option. Others have posted about the newer crop of TVs displaying warning/error messages for up to a minute on power up if they can't connect to the internet, and one guy mentioned a TV that won't work at all unless connected so you can accept the TOS.

Exactly, I see this as a positive all around. Rather than them casting a country wide net and not even acting on what's in there (the French terrorists were known to the Americans and flagged for extra scrutiny who didn't bother doing anything with their info) this will force them to actually do their jobs intelligently.

> Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space?

Why would you think that? Let's open with a quote from Douglas Adams:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Our own galaxy is 200,000 LIGHT YEARS across. This means it takes light 200,000 years to cross from one side to the other. It's friggin' enormous. And what we can observe is only relatively large energy sources like stars. Let's presume for a minute that there are some ETs happily engaged in armed conflict with each other 500 light years from us, tossing around 20 megaton nukes all day long like they're NBA players at a strip club making it rain. Assume that they are using 10,000 of such warheads against each others ships every day engaged in action around a star system. That's a total energy output of 200 GT (Gigatons) per day. The STAR in that system if it's a star like Sol will be putting out 7890000000000 GT per day of energy. How are we even supposed to detect 200GT more on top of that load? That's like going into Giants stadium at night and staring at the light arrays from the pitchers mound and trying to pick out someone flicking a lighter for a half a second in the midst of one of the arrays.

Secondly, I mentioned the "space is big" thing, right? Suppose these races developed doomsday devices that could actually kill stars and are happily wiping out each others' systems with nova-bombs. But they're fighting 500 LY away from us and their war only got really going 200 years ago. It's still going to be 300 years before we start seeing evidence of their handiwork.

Gotta be the guy to say it. So what? We don't live in the medieval age. We live now, and how are they making out pushing the knowledge frontier forward today? I find it difficult to give reflected credit to anyone for what their long dead ancestors did, especially if they are not making further progress or are engaged in hindering the same.