There are now lists of millions of stolen passwords, and frankly none of them are safe. Why shouldn't someone set up a password security app (like captcha, but in reverse) so that a large web site could

- download a large stolen password list (even 1 billion would only be a few GBytes)
- checks (a salted hash) of your password against the list (say, salts changed every day or hour or...) and
- if yours is on the list, tells you to do better

It seems this would be much safer than just having some app that counts punctuation characters and tells you your password is strong if it has more than 3.

Make it profitable, and they will go. How do you think North America got populated* ?

*Well, there is making it a prison planet, and sending everyone who gets a felony. I am sure some would love doing that, as long as they didn't have to go.

Sure. Just remember to give us a acre or so of surface area while you're at it.

Actually, after following artificial intelligence for some 5 decades now, I suspect he or she is highly likely to sound more uninformed in a few decades. Very few things are as wince-inducing as reading 3-decade old AI predictions.

The real goal of the habitat is the Martian moon, Phobos, which is reachable for nearly the same expenditure of energy as the high retrograde lunar orbit planned for ARM. It would take a good deal longer, though, thus the need for a habitat.

If you think of ARM as a training wheels dry run for Phobos, you would not be far off.

Just as plausible as his assertions.

And that (as I suspect you know) is just the rationale behind ITER. In a sane world, ITER would be treated as a crash program, but I guess we have to be glad it's there at all. The frustrating thing is that it's the next (post ITER) reactor that's supposed to be the actual production power generator.

First, no long-lived radioactive waste is not quite, not exactly, true for the current Deuterium Tritium fusion reactors (which ITER is, and I assume this new U Washington fusion reactor is as well). DT fusion produces neutrons and neutrons can't be controlled and thus go off and hit things (steel in the containment vessel, for example), which both weakens the steel, and makes it radioactive. So, after a while you have a junk old reactor that's radioactive. (One of the benefits of Helium-3 fusion is that it doesn't produce any neutrons, but it is a long way off without some fundamental breakthroughs.)

Second, fusion is like the Internet - the one question you always have to ask is, "will it scale?". (Will plasma instabilities kill your attempt to make a small lab experiment with some confinement into a viable large scale source of power.) Fusion has a long, long history of cool ideas that did not scale, and I do not regard a press release as proof of their having cracked that problem.

Firechat uses Apple's Multipeer connectivity for IOS, and a similar protocol for Android, to achieve a mesh network. I do not believe that any of this is MANET (the IETF's favorite mesh networking protocol).

I can actually understand this - suppose I was an agent and I made up a random name, like 'Polly-O string cheese'. If I used it consistently, a spy for the other side could do traffic analysis - things like " 'Polly-O string cheese' always gets a coffee, except for 2 recent periods of about a week each. Suspected agent X was reported as being in country Y, an ally of ours, during those 2 periods, and at no other time. Next time 'Polly-O string cheese' doesn't get a coffee, if X is in country Y, get the Y state security to arrest him.

If I were agent X, I would be very nervous at having to give any name, even if I could make one up each time. Humans are not very good at making up random things...

I thought that was a Pike's Place in Seattle?

During a power failure I found that I can make much better toast in the fireplace than in a toaster. I prefer it now.

In business, whenever you have to ask, why?, the answer is generally, money.

Another hyperventilating article about things I have no desire or intention to possess.

The OP meant grade as in second or third, not as in B or C.