That's just the kind of thing Hitler would have said!

Yeah. Physicists. The term "physics" in fact literally means "knowledge of nature", i.e. knowledge of those things in the natural world (this is an old definition, of course, from back when physics was considered a philosophical discipline, but while the methods used in physics have changed the subject matter has not). As opposed to supernatural objects, which would fall under the purview of metaphysics and/or theology.

Believe it or not, "observable and consistent" and "natural" mean almost literally the same thing (using the term "natural" to refer to "things in nature", not to natural vs. artificial: in any case, all artificial objects are at some level made up of natural stuff anyways). All natural objects are observable in some way (i.e. have observable properties: mass, volume, location, etc... something that can be quantified, in other words), and the word "nature" in one of it's oldest definitions in physics means "how something acts always or for the most part", i.e. it acts in a consistent fashion (not sure most modern physicists would even bother giving a definition of "nature", but when we speak of the "nature of an object", that definition is essentially what we mean). Supernatural objects, by definition, lack both (actually, having one generally (always?) means you have the other as well).

Make sense. I had to use Vim once, and it felt like I was in Hell.

I'd guess Snake Oil Monthly, peer reviewed by "homeopathic scientists". Obviously. Or (since Rossi is a tiny bit subtler than that... though only a tiny bit) the """Journal of Nuclear Physics"""*, which (in a startling coincidence) is "published" by Rossi himself (if posting something to a blog counts as published). It may well have been peer reviewed, but of course since Rossi is a fraudster, not a scientist, the peers in this case... well, lets just say they probably have more of a theoretical degree in physics than a degree in theoretical physics.

*As a side note, this is a good example of why simply because something was "published" in a respected-sounding journal does not mean it's actually trustworthy. I could form the American Journal of Renowned Physics Breakthroughs tomorrow and publish the flimsiest of flim-flam in it. Anyone could.

All ships of that class have been decommissioned/scrapped already, so any details of the interior are irrelevant, as it's no longer a design in service. Knowing where to hit to sink a ship that isn't being used anymore isn't exactly useful military knowledge.

In the UK, this is simply and completely not true, and the entire point of the news story. The UK "Communications Act 2003", section 127 (1) states (and I directly quote):

So yes, sending an offensive message in the UK is a crime, no matter if the message is true or not.

It's because dark matter only interacts gravitationally. See, normal matter clumps up into planets and stars because it sticks to other particles, and loses energy from collisions, causing it to collapse over time into locally dense spheres (planets, stars, black holes, etc.). But dark matter doesn't: it just passes through itself (mostly: it may interact through the weak force, but only very very very rarely if so, not enough to clump up). That means it doesn't form local regions of high density. On the other hand, an object immersed in a more or less uniform sea of matter (of any kind) won't notice any gravitational effects, because it's being pulled in all directions equally (for example: you'd be weightless at the center of the Earth. Dead from the pressure/heat/lack of air, but weightless). So, we can float through a sea, even a fairly dense one, of dark matter and notice nothing at all. Now, there is an non-uniformity in this dark matter "sea": there is more on the side of us towards the center of the galaxy than there is on the other side, but that pulls the entire solar system uniformly, accelerating it in it's galactic orbit, and that effect we do in fact see.

It's arguably entrapment, and whether or not the guy will end up with a criminal conviction I don't know (IANAL, certainly not on matters of treason), but this has nothing to do with "policing". They aren't looking for criminals at all. It's essentially a penetration test: they generally try to only give out security clearances to more or less trustworthy folks, but some people with clearances are going to be willing to give up classified information for money. The way to find those people is to offer them money. This sort of thing is routine practice in many different areas. It's quite common, for example, for companies to send out fake phishing emails so they can identify people who might fall for them. Usually, this sort of "entrapment" results in firing or training, but when you're dealing with classified information, criminal prosecution is a pretty obvious step.

Generally, being stupid and greedy isn't a crime, but when you work in a field where being stupid and greedy like this can easily get people killed, and you know that, and signed a document to that effect, well, then when you act stupid and greedy, you won't get much sympathy from me if the government tries to throw you in jail.

Unfortunately the Drake equation is worthless even for that purposes, as several terms in it cannot be estimated with any accuracy at all, and may in fact never be able to. You can't for example, extrapolate the probability of life evolving on a given planet when you only know of a single example of life evolving (extrapolation requires at least two instances). That leaves 4 terms in the Drake equation (fraction of planets that develop life, fraction of living planets that develop intelligence, fraction of those that end up sending signals into space (though those latter two should probably be condensed into a single term), and length they send out said signals) that cannot be estimated with any accuracy until we discover some instance of them. Which, rather ironically, means the Drake equation is worthless for any kinds of actual predictions unless we actually discover intelligent life, at which point the entire problem it was meant to illustrate becomes kind of moot (because we'll then know the answer that yes, there definitely is other intelligent life in the universe).

You can sort-of put weak upper bounds on (at least some of) those terms, but we're a long way from being able to do that.

This is half completely wrong. Thermodynamics by definition does not apply to small scales, only to bulk systems. Hell, a small system of particles can (and in fact quite often will) easily violate the laws of thermodynamics. They're almost meaningless at small (i.e. a few dozen atoms) scales, because they're purely statistical laws. Even a large system can, in principle, violate the laws of thermodynamics, but only for extremely brief periods of time, and with a likelihood that approaches zero for macroscopic (order of 10^23 particles) systems.

Secondly, the behavior of relativity at very small scales is currently unknown. Reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics requires quantized gravity, and all current attempts to describe that mathematically have failed. This is a problem in either very small scales (i.e. Planck lengths, which to be fair haven't been observed and probably won't for quite some time), or in extremely large gravitational fields, such as that created by black holes, which we have (indirectly) observed. Both relativity and thermodynamics work great in their relative domains, but both of them have known domains where they collapse. For thermodynamics that doesn't really matter (it's constructed to only be true for bulk systems), but it's a pretty big issue for relativity, and suggests there is a significant gap in our knowledge.

In reality, fights using conventional blades don't slam the blades against each other like duels in Star Wars always do. That's a very quick way to ruin a sword (sharp metal on sharp metal quickly ends up with an edge more suitable to a hacksaw). In fact, duels with something like a katana are usually ended in a stroke or two, conventionally. Real sword fighters would usually use a shield, buckler, or some other variety of off-hand blocking device (or the flat of the sword, if absolutely necessary) if the combat style emphasizes blocking.

Star Wars duels are pure Hollywood looks-good-on-screen-but-totally-impractical (mind you, the lightsaber itself is a totally impractical weapon in a world where ranged weapons are common: it's like people in that universe haven't even heard of shotguns). Even then, no less than 3 people end up losing a hand in a duel (Mace Windu, Anakin (twice), and Luke). The fighting style in Star Wars only avoids losing hands during the duel because it's written that way (there are many times when the fighters clash blades inches away from the hilt).

Ahem. Actually, it makes a kind of sense: it always bothered me how Star Wars lightsabers didn't have any kind of hilt/crossguard, which should have made it almost trivially easy for their opponent's to simply slide their lightsaber down the blade and slice off their opponents hand. Maybe someone in the universe finally realized that with a crossguard every lightsaber duel wouldn't end with someone loosing a hand?

Yes, but he didn't fail, because that's not what he said. He said first electronic programmable computer. The Z1 (and successors) were electromechanical. Still impressive in their own right, true, but nothing like the electronic computers that were invented later.

No, it wasn't general purpose. It was designed from the ground up to solve a very specific class of problems. It would have been possible (as the linked article states) to put a bunch of them together to form a Universal Turing computer, but it itself was not general purpose nor Turing complete.

That has *always* been true of computers. That is, in fact, exactly why we built computers in the first place: to do things faster than humans can. Saying that something is "smarter than any human in certain ways" is meaningless. Hell, in a way, rocks are smarter than humans. After all, if I throw a rock, it "knows" exactly what path it should take (minimizing energy, interacting with the air, etc.) Sure, it'll be nearly a parabola, but it will be perturbed from a parabola by tiny air currents, minute fluctuations in the gravitational field, et alia. And it will follow the resulting path perfectly. Humans cannot calculate, and will never be able to calculate, this trajectory with perfect precision. No one would ever say the rock is smarter than a human, however, because obviously, it isn't. It has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.

Watson is, fundamentally, no different from that rock. Sure, it follows a very complex "path" indeed (though laid down by humans), but the only difference between the rock and Watson is the *kind* of path. In fact, Watson's path is less complex than the path of the rock (which isn't entirely a fair comparison, since the rock's path is practically infinitely complex). There is intelligence in Watson, sure, but it's our intelligence, in the same way a thrown rock can make a deadly weapon if well-aimed. This is not to say that it's impossible for humans to design an intelligence that can supersede our own, but the kind of intelligence required for the "singularity" is entirely and almost completely different from anything we've come up with so far. We might do it one day, but it'll require an invention of an entirely new kind of artificial intelligence, and we don't even know what that kind of intelligence would look like, beyond possibly running a simulation of a human mind (which is, quite possibly, one way of doing it).

I certainly wouldn't listen to the "it's coming in 2040" predictions for the singularity: I mean, people seriously thought we'd have fusion power, flying cars, and regular moon trips by now 50 years ago, and none of that happened. On the other hand, we did get the Internet and ubiquitous wireless communication, which few people predicted. The future of technology that far away is unpredictable, because it relies on new discoveries, and by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet.