Banks fail, even in places like Iceland, the UK and the US. Now, many countries have bodies set up to guarantee a certain amount of a given account's deposits, like the FDIC in the US will guarantee the first $250K in an account if the bank fails. But then again the US also has almost 400 million people and the largest economy in the world. It'd be a little insane to expect that Iceland with a population of less than 350,000 people could offer the same guarantees, especially on foreign deposits in privately operated banks. That would be privatizing profit, but socializing the risk, hardly fair.

There are always risks, you took one, it went badly. Such is life.

I think you vastly underestimate the market. Touchscreen games are like pretzels before dinner. You can only eat so many before you want something more substantial. And with the iOS/Android gaming market heavily F2P-P2W monetized, it feels less like gaming and more like paying rent on something. As those kids gets older they do generally get a handheld, and the numbers break means it's most likely going to be a Nintendo handheld. Most of the kids who won't bother to get a handheld now are the ones who 5-10 years ago wouldn't have bothered then either. Plus, don't underestimate the allure of the handheld crack known as Pokemon, and there's only one way to scratch that itch. Pokemon X and Y sold 12 million copies in the 5 months after launch in 2013, that's not exactly peanuts.

I've been hearing that consoles are dead for at least a decade. "Industry watchers" are about as reliable as a broken clock. They throw out a hundred predictions and when they get one correct by chance they crow from the rooftops about it like they're bloody Kreskin.

That sounds more than a little harsh, and written like you haven't actually used a Nintendo system in some time. The only two consoles that see regular use in my household are the WiiU and 3DS. XBone and PS4 are just the same old same old with a graphics card upgrade. I have a PC for that stuff and I can upgrade my GPU any time I want.

Nintendo's games on the other hand are inventive and not just rehashing things like FIFA version 22 with even better grass or Call of Battlefield Hard Lines Front 12 or whatever.

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.