Don't disregard manufacturing and management savings. Space-X seems determined to be the least expensive way to put stuff in LEO by far, and if we can put lots more stuff in LEO we can do a whole lot of things with spacecraft. As Stalin said about the Red Army in WWII, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

Do they do a test before they get elected to ensure that no one with an IQ of over 60 can be elected? It seems statistically unlikely that we've developed such an awesome collection of concentrated dumbass in one place on earth without actually trying to do so.

If there's a general perception that a stock is undervalued, people try to invest money by buying stock. This raises the price until people in general don't think it's undervalued any more.

I think you missed a few points in your theoretical calculation. Let's look at an actual pumped storage reservoir, one conveniently linked from the Wikipedia page you linked to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The upper reservoir has a capacity of 27 billion gallons, and peak output requires 33 million gallons per minute, so it can run for 13 hours with 1872 MW output. (To be more than fair, I'm ignoring the fact that you can't REALLY drain the lake completely dry each day, and that power is reduced as the level goes down. Actual power capacity may be half of what I'm charitably calculating). Giving pumped storage the benefit of the doubt, we'll say Ludington could do 1872 MW X 13 hours = 23,765 MWh.
That's 8 * 10^10 BTU

So we need 120 * 10^15 BTU and we've got 8 * 10^10 BTU. Hmm, 15 facilities the size of Ludington would be 120 * 10^10.
But we need 10^15, not 10^10, so we need 1,500,000 facilities the size of Ludington.

The upper reservoir of Ludington is 2.5 square miles. 2.5 miles X 1,500,000 facilities = 3,750,000 square miles. The continental US is 3,119,884 square miles. So, looking at actual performance of actual pumped storage, covering the entire US with pumped storage reservoirs still wouldn't be enough - even for the UPPER reservoir. Typically, the lower reservoir is quite a bit larger than the upper.

A polygraph can be good at determining if somebody's nervous, which is not a good indicator of truthfulness. It might be useful in questioning or interrogation by telling the interrogator when to press and when to let slide. This assumes that the guy being interrogated can't manipulate the machine into inaccurate readings, such as showing nervousness when being asked about something basically innocuous.

Hmm, let's see:

- technologically savvy? Check.

- Interested in/knowledgeable about cryptography/biology/chemistry? Check.

- Generally Libertarian (pro-individual-freedom) mentality? Big ol' check.

- NOT large donors to political campaigns? Good chance of another check here.

Sounds like yes, we as a group do indeed meet the Fascist, er Federal Government's definitions of "terrorist."

Any attributes I failed to list, that makes our community a target for clandestine government agencies?

I'm kinda surprised you chose C# as:

A. Radically different from java
and
B. "Fine for small projects"

I code for work in C#, and for fun in either python or whatever is topical to the project.

I used to code for work in python, and for fun in C#, and before that any mixture of java, C, assembly, and scripty-fu-fu suited my professors.

Republic comes from the Latin "res publica", and normally means a government or country not headed by a hereditary monarch. That leaves a lot of room for all sorts of governing systems. The US is a republic and a democracy (or at least used to be, and can be again). The UK is a democracy but not a republic. Nazi Germany was a republic but not a democracy. North Korea is not a republic (with three Kims in a row, I'm calling it a monarchy) and not a democracy.

My observation is that, the more democratic-sounding adjectives (other than a people or place name) are tacked on to "Republic", the less likely it is to be a democracy. You do not want to live in a Democratic People's Republic.

Because they care not? :(

You don't think you do, today, but that doesn't mean you don't, nor does it mean you won't at some point in the future.

The fact that governance is dynamic and contingent solely on the whims of a handful of powerful people are precisely why everyone, yourself included, should actually care about the government snooping on private information.

Oh, that and fetish sex. Because there's nothing wrong with fetish sex, but I'd bet most people who are into that sort of thing want to keep it hidden regardless.

No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.

Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.

If there is a god, they wanted to take a good look inside whether the stuff is still in there.

1914? Are you high?

Businesses are so intertwined internationally that it is virtually impossible to start a war with anyone without offending at least half the businesses in your country. And that's something no government on this planet can afford.

Hate to pull the Godwin here, but it fits.

People during WW2 who dared to help those that were prosecuted for no other crime than being who they are were living in constant danger. Not just of being arrested or inconvenienced, but of being killed. Along with their family. Still, people did just that. By far not many, but surprisingly many. They sure as hell could not hope for fame and glory (especially during the first years when it sure looked like Germany would win that war), actually all they could expect is that sooner or later they'll be betrayed and end their life in a concentration camp.

Sometimes some things are more important than your convenience.

Guess someone took hook, line and sinker the spin that the US population doesn't support what Snowden did...