I wonder if solar-assisted trains would make any sense. Lot of nice flat surface area on all those freight cars roofs.

Sure, a zapper that might indiscriminately spray bug guts onto the people walking below =)

Transparent spinning blades with lights on them attached to light poles. I wonder if moths and other insects end up getting attracted to the light and then get whacked by the blades. Hopefully birds are smart enough to stay clear.

FWIW, it need not be a bogus card. You can buy a VISA gift card (paying cash and showing no ID), then on the gift card website enter the name and address of your victim. It is now a perfectly legit card in that person's name. I use VISA gift cards on Amazon all the time (in my own name). You could probably do quite a bit of identity theft or creating false personas, using such a method.

That was my thought too.

What exactly does Apple have to do to before their users will stop buying their products? because apparently trying to destroy your life by having you thrown into a federal prison doesn't make the cut.

Given how hopelessly addicted their users are, I'm surprised Apple just doesn't design their computers to randomly explode, in order to boost sales. "Yeah my girlfriend lost three fingers this time, but at least the Apple Store was still open after I dropped her at the ER, so I was able to buy a new MacBook right away."

That might be too obvious to a human judge. Better would be to come down like rock and then stick out your fingers like scissors. If it's operating at thousandths of seconds and we are operating at tenths of seconds, then one may well be able to beat it that way

Yes, I was thinking the same thing. My vote would be for the Buffybot. That'll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo!

A sufficiently massive projectile of sufficient velocity will result in a huge amount of momentum that needs to be conserved. You will either need
1) a very very massive ship,
2) powerful engines,
3) to shoot an identical projectile in the opposite direction, or
4) to live with the fact that you will propel yourself into a much higher orbit, or quite possibly out of orbit

Nuking has its advantages.

I found it worked well enough even with hundreds of concurrent visitors. Even if some connections did fail, it's still better than doing nothing and have all connections to the old IPs fail.

A simple trick I've often used is to port forward traffic from the old IPs to the new. For an an emergency physical move once, I just left behind a linux laptop and it port-forwarded the traffic for multiple web/email/DNS servers until the DNS caught up. Worked fine.

Disease, as in the movie Outbreak.

Widespread acts of terrorism (we could well have seen such a system used on 9/11).

The reason that mankind is unlikely to colonize space is that most alien technological civilizations in the galaxy will have already beaten us to it. People who talk about the scale of distance in interstellar travel often don't appreciate the scales of time that existing civilizations would have had to work with. Even at just 1% the speed of light, you can colonize the entire galaxy in less than 10 million years. That's nothing when you consider that another civilization could easily be up to a half-billion years older than us.

If smartphones were prohibited in court, then wouldn't that make it harder to convict somebody of stealing smartphones, due to the lack of evidence the prosecution could present?

So chances are we'll never be able understand it. Shaka, when the walls fell.

Gun laws simply disarm honest people. That is it. there is no other use.

So, basically you're saying that people are better off being shot accidentally or by a first-time offender, than by a career criminal.