Please - Think of the ponies!

I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine

I have got data from when 5MB H/Ds were introduced ON TAPE, written with tar that is still readable. Good luck reading your ST506 interface H/Ds written with DOS 4.2.

The manufacturers claimed 30 years for CDs, few of which seem to last even one year on my desk.

OTOH, I have read tapes after 30 years. If long term storage is what you want, the LTOx is the answer. Make multiple tapes and put them in different places (countries, continents).

Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.

Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)

The security services infiltrate the group, which causes the group to talk to them. That is far more valuable than just sitting round hoovering up the entire internet and trying to filter out what you're looking for, as they can actually ask for specific pieces of information which might not have been shared. It also means that even if the terrorists use ultra-mega-super-secure one time pads, for example, the intelligence is collected. With your dystopian view of intelligence work, those messages would not be readable. The rest of your issues stem from this simple ignorance of actual intelligence work - you assume mass collection is the only way to achieve results, when decades of history before and after the birth of the internet shows otherwise.

A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).

The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.

The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!

It makes sense. We can radiate individual photons for thrust if so desired. We can move individual electrons from one position in a spacecraft to another for tiny adjustments of angle and position if so desired. It seems you're going to be much more limited by your ability to precisely track your target than by your ability to make fine adjustments.

I think a much bigger problem is going to be isolating standing waves from within the shielding material from distorting its perfect rim (with a shield that big and thin, there *will* be oscillations from even the slightest thrust inputs). You need to isolate the rim from the shielding. And you also need to make sure that you can have a rim that can be coiled up for launch but uncoil to such perfection in space.

Tough task... but technically, it should be possible.

The GRACE mission has been doing it for a few years now, tiny fluctuations in gravity can be inferred by the change in distance between the two probes. However it's not a geostationary orbit, just one probe following the other in low orbit. Personally I think it's a genius idea to turn the problem of keeping two probes in sync into a highly accurate gravity probe.

I would presume that the bulk material in the inside has no need for accuracy, only the very rim. The question is more of whether you can have a coiled material that when uncoiled (deployment) can return to a shape with that level of accuracy. I would think it possible, but I really don't know.

I would forsee a super-precise rim with just a small bit of light shielding on its inside, deployed via uncoiling, and then attached to a much stronger, less precise uncoiled ring to which the bulk shielding material (and stationkeeping ion thrusters) are attached. The attachment between the two would need to provide for vibration and tension isolation (even the slowest adjustments in angle of such a huge, thin shield are going to set in motion relevant vibrations, you've got almost no damping - you want the structural ring to deal with those and not transfer them through to the precision ring). Not to mention that your shield will be acting as a solar sail whether you like it or not (unless you're at L2... but then your craft better be nuclear powered).

Your telescope behind it is going to need to do some real precision stationkeeping (either extreme precision on the whole spacecraft positioning, or merely "good" positioning of the whole spacecraft plus extreme precision adjustment of the optics within) . This means long development times and costs to demonstrate that you can pull it off before you actually build the shield. But I would think that also possible - just very difficult. If they take the latter route they could probably demonstrate that here on Earth, which would be a big cost-saver.

You made some good points.

Of those hundreds of years there has only been thirty where large numbers of people can communucate and plan operations without ever meeting. The criminals are allowed to use modern technology by the police are not?

The police can use the same technology - they can cooperate with their counterparts the world over, they can communicate with their agents in the field, they can send video and images around the world in seconds. Being able to use modern technology and being able to subvert its use are completely different things. Bank robbers used dynamite to blow open banks and their safes - by your logic you have no problem with police using dynamite to blow up your house looking for robbers.

Surveillance does not make people less free. Does an audience at a theater make an actor less free? If repressive things happen with the gathered data then that would be a problem but not the surveillance itself.

So you'd have no problem with government-sanctioned cameras in your bathroom filming everything. Good to know. After all, if nothing bad will come from the recording of your personal activities, nothing bad happened.

Physically intrusive searches are very different than electronic surveillance.

Electronic surveillance is intrusive none the less. You can play games of semantics if you wish, but when the state rifles through your private property, you not only risk them finding things you've done which they might not like (either now or in the future), but you give them the opportunity to put things there for them to find. Once that barrier is down you can no longer be sure of what is what, and what was once your property becomes property of dubious origin.

It's called "intelligence work", and it requires well-trained people gathering intelligence on these targets. They can infiltrate the groups, befriend suspected terrorists, etc, and gather information. This is how it was done for decades, and no-one had to have their entire lives rummaged through by default until they were shown to not be a "bad guy".

It's not a Catch-22 - it's abject laziness on the part of the security services. Plugging in servers is easy. Asking for money to protect people from "scary people who want to kill you!!!111" is easy. Strong-arming ISPs to allow data gathering is easy. That's why they do it - because they can. If they had to return to the old ways of human intelligence gathering, it would be harder work, but we'd not be fucked over constantly.

Your attitude is just as dangerous as the NSA hoovering up every bit that crosses their path. I hope for your sake it was born from a lack of information and not some irrational zeal or compulsion, and that it can be changed through learning.

If "They" are actually "Us", the only thing that changes is that instead of "them" needing to do more to redress the balance of wealth, "we" need to do more. I don't care if it hurts me financially or not - if it's the right thing to do, it's the right thing to do. Selfish attitudes such as your "Fuck you I got mine" are what cause this situation in the first place. Trying to surprise people into realising they're in the top X% is a pathetic tactic which will help absolutely no-one.

The pick a European country and a US state of equivalent size & population. I'll wait. The end result is precisely the same.

Why is it so difficult to admit that internet access in the US is a first world joke? Does it hurt your feelings? There's no rational excuse to have this opinion.

You seem to be forgetting WWII, the repercussions of which are still - to this day - haunting many countries, especially in Europe. The US sauntered through WWII with barely a scratch, owing to its geographical location, a history quite unlike most other developed countries at the time.

Ignoring that little fact kind of puts the rest of your post in doubt... Your anecdotal data set of 1 also doesn't exactly portray you in the most rational of lights...