Why limit it to nations? Major corporations are as capable as most countries, and only a little bit more endangered if caught.

Despite the "only security through obscurity" meme, you need to understand it, not just say it.

There are only two types of security:
1) security through obscurity,
and,
2) security through inaccessibility.
They can, however, be intelligently combined.

Please note that private key encryption is security through obscurity. Cutting the phone line is security through inaccessibility. Saying that "it's secure because they can't get the prime factors of that key" is security through obscurity.

Despite the meme, security through obscurity is widely and properly used. What's wrong if false obscurity, which is common. If you don't properly assess just how obscure your secret is, then you have a security failure.

So having a monoculture is reduced security, because that means that there are a much larger number of entities seeking to discover the secret...and any breach in security cannot be easily contained. If you don't have a monoculture, then a single breach cannot be as widely damaging, and is thus also less valuable to find. This is a sort of network effect.

OTOH, a diverse community means that more effort needs to be devoted to security, because each branch is a separate thing to be maintained. So it's not all benefit or all loss, it's a mixture.

FWIW, I choose not to have flash installed on my system, despite the fact that it would have some utility, because I consider that the weakness that it presents is not worth the benefit. The ability of refuse to have such a service installed allows increased security...at a cost. For some people the cost is higher than they are willing to pay. This reduction of the attack surface is a form of security through obscurity mixed with security through inaccessibility, i.e., I have become inaccessible to some forms of attact, and I have reduced my visibility to many attackers.

Power supplies are inefficient at low load. If you care about them kicking out heat, you should buy them as small as you can get away with.

How do you get the different countries committed to the same climate change ... and to hold their decision long enough to have a desired effect?

I think the politics are too chaotic and short-sighted to make geoengineering feasible, even if there weren't a great need to avoid mistakes.

Rosetta/Philae returned to Earth three times for gravity boosts. Each time it was going at speeds which would guarantee its destruction if it hit the deeper parts of the atmosphere. Had this happened and Philae had carried an RTG, it would have been the end of ESA due to the public outcry, and NASA would likely be in public relations trouble too.

There are places for RTGs, but Rosetta was not it. Philae may have died prematurely, but ESA is alive to try again.

No. A fuel cell is a device which turns chemical energy into electrical energy without having to turn it into heat first.

Still, when the NSA wanted access to Google's information, they went for tapping fiber optic cables instead of hitting them with National Security Letters.

The solution is encryption of course, but IPSEC is a royal pain and MACSEC is too limited.

Line of sight. Sorry, it's a pet peeve.

Fiber optic is trivial to tap. Almost as easy as analog phone lines.

Zimbabwes loans are primarily in foreign currencies. Never do that.

GNUStep is very interesting, but every time I've tackled it, I've bounced. Sometimes I literally couldn't figure out how to do things, other times it's just that it was too difficult to bother.

They *REALLY* need better documentation. Probably the toolkit is fine. Every time I worked at it long enough I was able to make it do what I wanted, but the documentation is truely terrible. And it needs to be written by someone who already understands the system.

If the GNUStep documentation had been better, I'd probably be programming in Objective C today. (Well, maybe not, I tend to switch between languages a lot. But I would have used it significantly.)

Well, I haven't tried it in a few years, but the last time I found it intensely horrible, to the extent that it was unusable. OTOH, for most of what I do I prefer Inkscape over the GIMP.

The is only possible if the hardware layer is separated from the rest of the business. The hardware layer is a natural monopoly, in the same way that water pipes are. The ISPs have created monopolies by packaging the hardware layer together with the communication services. They MUST be separated. Even wireless has it's limits, though cellular can get to pretty small cells in dense populations. But that's a part of the hardware layer, as are cable and fiber (and for that matter flocks of pidgeons).

One of my hypotheses about how anesthesia works is that it prevents the fixation of memories. Certainly they have that effect while you are coming out from under them.

If you combine no permament memories with paralysis you get all the signs that I see WRT anethesia. OTOH, I do understand that there are other tests (brain waves, cortisol, etc.) which indicate that more than that is going on.

That is called elastic demand. Almost everything has elastic demand. Assuming the opposite would be very silly indeed.