You sound like you don't believe it's possible in the US. Better go have another look out there.

When they came for the perverts, I said nothing because I wasn't a pervert.
When they came for the [etc etc]

You're kidding right? When has that ever worked? While the hydra has a dozen heads, it has hundreds of millions of legs. Taking out the little guys is little more than Roman Circus for law-and-order politicians to prolong their dubious careers.

Go after the little guy to stop the big-time mobsters. Oh yeah, sure, that'll work. Why didn't we think of that before? Put all the small time drug dealers in jail and it will put the big guys out of business. Put all the small-time incompetent terrorists who light their shoes or underwear on fire and put the big guys out of business. Put all the Abu Ghraib prison guards in jail and stop Pentagon Brass and civilian military leadership from being war criminals. Put Fabulous Fabrice on trial and stop finance industry mobsters from raping the planet.

Yeah. What a good idea. Get some good headlines at least.

Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans
. For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]

Wrong wrong wrong. Computer intelligence, when it arrives, will not have been programmed, it will have been trained in with patterns drawn largely from human behavior, culture, and other sources. So, lamentably, it will be as stupid. And worse.

Imagine the very complex and dynamic standing wave of the magnetic field around a biological brain. Can it be duplicated with a machine to produce coherent thoughts in a biological brain by magnetic induction? Can two biological brains induce such coherent activity in each other? Could this be the basis of the legendary powers of telepathy that so many have claimed to possess throughout history?

It took supposedly state of the art equipment to drill it. It'll take better stuff than that to cap it. AFAIK, this is one of the deepest wells in the Gulf. Please post add'l info if you have any.

Why do we have to go through the slashdotted blog.alexanderhiggins.com to see images hosted at NASA? This is the dumbest thing so far this month.

Some people offload significant computing to the cloud. Word has it that a well-known online DVD rental outfit offloads its re-encoding for online streaming to the cloud owned by a well-known online bookseller, just one example of people with a more elaborate business model than the one you describe. These are terabytes of data that aren't going to get sync'ed very often.

Wrong, buddy. If actual work occurs on the data in the cloud, then loss of connection will get people pissed, especially during lengthy processing of data. It is you who has a simplistic stereotyped view of both users and of the cloud.

Yay! Let's move all of our heavy apps to ARM processors! Let's pay through the nose for cloud computing instead of owning our own equipment!

Space agencies today have lost touch with reality. They seem to be dedicated more to pandering to commercial pop-culture memes than to actually doing intelligent and productive research and design.

Actually, it should be:

"wwww xxxx" "card#"

Try this:

1) Pull a credit card out of your wallet and look at the 16 digit number with format "wwww xxxx yyyy zzzz"
2) Google the first two groups together in double quotes like this "wwww xxxx"
3) ???
4) Profit!