The problem was in the story telling. Every writer would put Superman in a perilous situation and then invent a new power to get him out of it. Eventually, they found it hard to write for Superman. After all, when you have a guy who can juggle planets around for fun, what can threaten him enough that readers would think "this could conceivably kill Superman?" (We all know that Threat Of The Week won't kill Superman, but the villain needs to have a reasonable chance of winning or there's no suspense in the story.)

They tried correcting this when they reset the DC Universe and lowered his power levels, but the writers keep doing the same power ramp-up.

Then again, some depictions of Superman work nicely with an uber-powerful Supes. The final episode of Justice League, for example. Superman is beating up on Darkseid and notes that he feels like he lives in a world made of cardboard. He needs to be careful of his every action lest he hurt someone or break something. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in just letting go instead of worrying that hitting the villain would result in needless death and destruction.

SETI is trying to pick up alien signals. These might not be "Hi there humans, we are here" messages. Instead, they might be more mundane messages that alien civilizations "leak" out right after they learn how to use radio signals to communicate. Of course, if they encrypt those radio signals (using a purely alien encryption sequence, of course), we might not be able to tell that encrypted data from random noise.

That's why I made that mistake. The word "Austrian" appears once in the title and once in the summary. My brain skimmed the "where" and focused on the "what" - Tor exit node operator ruled guilty of facilitating a crime as if he had been in on the crime. When I commented, I repeated the wrong country. Which just goes to show you should never skim! That being said, I probably will still skim more posts in the future. I don't have time to read everything there is online!

D'oh! Read the headline too quickly and thought it said Australia.

Modern ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise.

This is a big reason why I think SETI-type programs are doomed to fail. If it would be hard to tell the difference between encrypted data and random data, how much harder would it be to tell the difference between an alien encryption scheme and random noise?

Comcast is turning users' cable modems into public hotspots. So anyone could connect to a user's modem and use it for any purpose that one might connect to the Internet for. If said use is illegal, would the person who owned (or leased it from Comcast as the case may be) be liable as an accomplice? After all, if you provide open Internet access, you've got to expect that someone is going to do something illegal with it.

(I know that the story is in Australia and this is in the US, but this sounds like a valid comparison.)

Ah, but the ISPs and backbone providers are likely big companies with lawyers. So they can't possibly be accomplices and must be completely innocent angels. This individual with no team of lawyers on retainer is obviously guilty of helping out nasty criminals.

Eventually the sun will engulf the earth. Long before that I'll die. Before that, I'll change banks, credit cards, whatever. Encryption only has to work long enough, not forever.

If all rights are absolute, how do you balance it when two people's rights conflict? Person A has a right to freedom of speech. So they put a soap box on the sidewalk in front of my house and start shouting religious diatribes 24/7 at my family for not following the "right" religion. Any time I try to leave my house, they block my driveway and shout at me until I go back inside - or until I convert to their religion. There's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't do this so should they be free to do this? What about my right to practice my own religion (or no religion) without being harassed? If I call the police on this person, am I (or the police) violating his freedom of speech by making him stop shouting at us 24/7?

To give another example, I have freedom of speech. Suppose I publish an editorial stating, as fact, that someone committed some serious crimes - crimes that would lead to their being fired from their current job (e.g. claiming a teacher was "touching" her students). Now suppose I had no proof of these allegations. Perhaps I made them up to get at the teacher for giving my kid a bad grade or maybe the teacher cut me off on the road one day. Whatever the reason, I publish these false allegations and the teacher is fired and her life is ruined. Since I have absolute, unrestricted freedom of speech, I can't be sued for libel, right?

Making everyone's freedoms unrestrained would just lead to chaos. There have to be some boundaries where the freedoms intersect. It's just a matter of where do you draw the line.

Your freedom to swing your fist wildly about ends at my face.

People's freedom to not have their constitutional rights violated is in no way equivalent to them punching your face. Try to keep it relevant, yes?

I believe he was referring to the previous poster's comment about the government restricting freedom of speech by saying you couldn't yell "fire" in a theater. The point being that all of our rights have limits. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can say untrue things about you in a newspaper. That would be libel and would be against the law. You wouldn't be able to get out of a libel lawsuit by claiming "Freedom of Speech." Likewise, you couldn't declare "everyone should track down So-And-So and kill him" and then say "Free Speech!" to get out of it.

We have our freedoms but they aren't carte blanche, they have limits. Typically, the limits of your freedoms ("the right to swing your fist") are when they impede someone else's freedoms ('ends at my face").

Of course, the government is taking these reasonable restrictions and is building upon them until they become unreasonable. (e.g. "Free Speech Zones" to keep protests far from the people they are protesting against.) This doesn't mean that all restrictions are unreasonable, just that we've got to rein in the government's overreach until the restrictions are reasonable again.

The government even has a system where, for cases where time is of the essence and the threat is high, they can take the action first and get a retroactive warrant later from a court that will essentially rubber stamp anything. However, the government's law enforcement divisions are complaining that even this is too much work. They sound like my pre-teen when he's told to do his homework: "It's too hard! I don't want to do it! I'll do it later! I don't have to do it!!!"

There is a corollary to the first law of Superpowerdynamics. If you are a young man, but out of shape, you can get superpowers which will immediately give you a perfect physique even if your powers have nothing to do with muscle tone/burning fat. Unless your power is akin to The Blob in which case you're physique will grow ever larger until, by all rights, you should die of a heart attack from your heart trying to pump blood across your fat-laden body.

It seems suspicious that God is so eager to heal infections, yet never helps out any amputees.

Making an amputee regrow a limb would be too obvious. Remember: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

Just because a DVD can hold 7GB doesn't mean that a DVD quality movie takes up 7GB. Usually room is left for extras, trailers for other movies from the same studio, etc. 1.6 - 1.8GB sounds about right for just the DVD movie (which is all Netflix streams). Blu-Ray movie files would obviously be bigger, but I doubt they'd take up the entire 50GB that a Blu-Ray disc can hold.

Government bans competition. You can't very well expect an agency that claims a "natural monopoly" to not consider other "natural monopolies" both wise and judicious.

Not true. Anyone can start an ISP as long as they are willing to pay for the infrastructure to deliver the last mile connection to their customers.

And in instances where under-served areas tried to create their own municipal broadband network, the ISPs that weren't serving them sued to stop them or got their lobbied state officials to pass laws declaring that illegal.

Community fiber is still the answer - there are just so many hurdles that make it slow in coming.

You just criticized both the government and lack of competition and your answer is to eliminate competition and let the government run it?

If a community isn't being served by an existing ISP, why is municipal broadband "eliminating competition"? If an area has an ISP but they are refusing to improve service, how is adding a municipal broadband option eliminating competition? Is the presence of the USPS eliminating competition from FedEx and UPS?