What part is untested? How about the whole thing? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. We won't know about practical difficulties until we actually try it.

You think Project Orion is the solution to interstellar travel? Look, guy, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.. You may think it's a long way to the chemist's/drug store, but.... If we can get a spaceship going at three thousand kilometers/second, it'd take centuries to reach the nearest star. You may want to calculate how much energy it would take to get something going that fast, and consider the size of a self-contained habitat that will function for centuries.

The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?

Strange. I live in the American Midwest, and I see lots of people around me. When I go for a drive in the countryside, I pass through a lot of farms and small towns. You'd think people actually lived here.

Could the US feed the world?

IIRC, feeding plants to cows to get beef is about 10% efficient, so let's assume that each of about 300 million Americans is eating effectively ten times as much as is needed. Then, the US could feed about three billion people, or less than half the population.

Water availability is not just a matter of cities. California has some farmland that is very productive, except that it requires considerably more water than it actually gets.

You could compare the progress under communist dictatorship to progress under Peter the Great. Both were strong top-down pushes for modernization in a very backward country, and both had big effects on Russia's economic progress. However, I don't think Peter was a Communist.

" let's use cheaper, more effective solutions that will slow down the virus and save lives."

Like what? Bringing infected people to the US. That sounds like a real good way to keep infections out. Or do you not understand the consequences of bringing African Bees to Brazil for "research"?

The US has a primarily capitalist economy, and certainly wouldn't be socialist even if some of modern capitalism's worst excesses were eliminated.

Actually, give me one regulatory agency that has shrunk or disbanded itself when it was no longer needed. Off the top of your head. I'm sure one exists, but for the life of me, I can't think of one.

While not "proof" of expanding powers, it is something to contemplate.

Netflix is providing content Canadians want, and the government is deciding that isn't good enough. Netflix is STREAMING video, and there is a shit ton of content available, most of it isn't Canadian. If Netflix is required to carry one Canadian show, per non-Canadian show, they better start making a shit ton of new shows. Otherwise it is impossible to comply. Basically it shows that the original mandate is no longer feasible because of technology changes. This is exactly what can be expected when the world changes around those that wish it to remain the same.

Good luck making it work.

Depends partly on how new the subject. If it has something to do with computers, I can probably learn it faster at my present mumble years of age than when I was 20. Something like music theory I'm not so sure about. I've lost a few mental steps, but I've learned a whole lot about how to learn.

There's a difference between chemistry and chemical engineering. If you don't care, and you're not independently wealthy, go the chemical engineering route.

If you read the news headlines less and statistical data more, you'd know that the chances of that happening are far, far lower than your kid being hit by a school bus, or drowning in your pool. You might as well worry about him dying in the next 9/11.

Elizabeth II is the Queen of Canada. That she also happens to be a Queen of some other realms is completely immaterial to her position as the monarch of Canada - her royal prerogatives in Canada are defined by the Canadian political system, not the British one, and her duties and responsibilities are also before the Canadian nation.

Careful there. By design, the IPv6 address space is very sparse. For instance, my house has a /48 netblock allocated to it. If that were the universal rule, the effective address space would be 2^48 networks, not 2^128 hosts. That's also assuming that all of the /48 space is allocated perfectly and densely, and not like a /16 per ISP which would mean that we'd never be able to have more than 66,000 ISPs.

IPv6 will not feasibly support 2^128 hosts because it was never meant for each host to be consecutively numbered. While your coworker is incorrect, your standpoint isn't exactly right, either.