Seriously, he's going to die like the rest of us. I've seen how far we've come in medicine and I see how far we haven't gotten yet. The body starts failing one way then another way and it just keeps piling up as you get 70-90 years old. Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.

It's actually very common here in Europe, it's a public service but the government issues some form of tender to buy it from the private sector. And yes, they do often suck at writing the contract and following up that what's been ordered is delivered in correct quality and quantity. If you ask for "a security guard" you get a body with a pulse, if you ask them to have mandatory training, pass certifications and exams you'll get that, but if you don't ask you don't get it even if they're totally unfit for the job. The ones you're buying from is in the business of making money, they'll cut corners if the contract permits them to. And you got issues with continuity and such, but people complain about public departments full of public employees that have a more or less permanent monopoly on what they're doing too. It's easy to get complacent at all levels when you can just say "it takes what it takes" and get funded next year too.

There are ~30 million commercial flights and around 2 hijackings per year, so that nobody's tried at Frankfurt might be just statistics. None of the confirmed hijackings since 2001 has casualties, though I suppose there's mysteries like MH370. Even if you assume the worst though, statistically you're far more likely to die from technical malfunction or pilot error. Or external causes like being shot down by a missile like MH17, but I guess that's location dependent. Unless you can bring a bomb on board to take down the plane yourself there's no way people will let you cease control of the craft anymore, so hijacking as we knew it is a past era. Most of it is just preventing a stabbing that could just as well have happened on the bus or tram or subway, it just happens to be up on a plane.

Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?

They have a great plan, but they don't have the money. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the SLS flies it'll be in a class of its own we haven't seen since the Saturn V. I wouldn't hold my breath though, while the Falcon Heavy seems very likely that will happen.

Do you have any idea what the error rate for manual data entry is? Typically about 0.5% of the entries will be wrong. Retyping information is a very error prone process.

As long as the character they create is entirely fictional and not based on impersonating someone they know is a friend of the suspect, I'm fine with it. Cops running around trying to "friend" people in my name is not.

You do realize that most "darknets" are built on a "bust one, bust all" model? Pretty much the only security is that the bad guys aren't in your darknet, they've never reached a popularity where there's any plausible deniability. The only other people likely to be in your darknet are the other members of your terrorist cell or whatever you're part of, it has never offered anything for "normal people" for you to hide in. And darknets have actually been used as honeypots, to make clueless people give away their IP to join a private group which turns out to be a sting. It is pretty much the exact opposite of anonymity, it's joining a conspiracy and you're at the mercy of the stupidity of everyone in it.

TOR is trying for something entirely different, which is to keep everyone at arm's length from each other. I talk to you over TOR, you get busted well tough shit they still can't find me. The users don't know the server, the server doesn't know the users. Of course by adding that glue in between you run the risk of the man in the middle working out who both ends of the connection are, but that's the trade-off. TOR is trying to do something extremely hard, it tries to offer low latency - easy to make timing attacks, arbitrary data sizes - easy to make traffic correlation attacks and interactive access - easy to manipulate services into giving responses, accessible to everyone and presumably with poison nodes in the mix. It's trying to do something so hard that you should probably assume it's not possible, not because they have any special inside access.

I actually did look at trying to do better, it was not entirely unlike Freenet done smarter only with onion routing instead of relying on statistical noise. It wouldn't try to be interactive so you could use mixmaster-style systems to avoid timing attacks and (semi-)fixed data block sizes to avoid many correlation attempts but I never felt I got the bad node issue solved well. TOR picks guard nodes, but it only makes you bet on a few horses instead of many. It was still too easy to isolate one node from the rest of the network and have it only talk to bad nodes, at which point any tricks you can play is moot because they see all your traffic. Even a small fraction of the nodes could do that on a catch-and-release basis and I never found any good countermeasures.

Just show him the South Park episode "Freemium isn't free" and he'll learn all about modern game mechanics, along with a few lessons in economics and marketing. Before you know it he will be pushing his game in the school yard like a pro.

False dichotomy, the test may be inconclusive. /pedantry

From what they've said before they expect you to eventually return to pick up your original batteries on your way home, though they haven't said how long you can keep driving on your loaners. If you don't they'll create some kind of fee to offset the condition between the battery pack you had and the one you got. If you're permanently relocating and make arrangements I'm sure they'll offer some kind of system to choose a battery in roughly the condition you had if you want it to be free or to swap for a brand new one if you want to restore max range at your final destination. Otherwise you could swap a 7 years old/100k miles battery for an almost new one for free, that wouldn't be right.

If your commute involves a battery swap for a Tesla you should really consider changing jobs. I'm guessing it's more about the weekend rush, Friday afternoon lots of cars will be going on long range trips and return Sunday evening, I'm guessing a battery swap pad is a lot more involved than a gas station pump so they won't have very many of them. They did run a test here recently driving a Tesla ~1000 miles and they said it all worked well but there was a lot of waiting, for every 2-3 hours of driving there's was one hour of charging. I know that when we drive to the capital it takes ~7 hours and we have one 30-45 minute stop, if they could swap batteries on at least one stop they'd be down to one hour charging per 4-6 hours of driving which would roughly be the break time we'd want with an ICE car too. But Friday afternoon I'm one of a thousand lemmings trying to get out of the city, it better go fast.

The first amendment only says "Congress shall make no law..." but everybody understands you don't have much freedom of speech if you end up hanging from the nearest tree afterwards. Because the law isn't supposed to shield me from lawful retaliation like a boycott only retaliation that's already illegal you don't need a specific law for that. But everybody realizes that targeted action against those who exercise a particular freedom is trying to encroach on that freedom. Of course the government can just wash their hands and say we weren't the angry mob holding the rope, but it wouldn't be a very good government.

Any time you refrain from a lawful action because of the risk or threat of illegal action is a failure of the system of law IMHO. If I can't walk through a part of the city at night they're failing to keep the street safe. If they can't show this movie at the cinema without the risk of terrorism they're failing to keep the country safe. At least if it's a genuine risk and not chicken little screaming that the sky is falling, I mean you can't expect them to be everywhere and prevent every crime everyone's trying to commit. And I don't want to sell out all my rights in an attempt to make it so either. There could be a price for not caving but there's a price for caving too, the terrorists don't need to take away your freedoms if your too afraid to use them anyway.

Funny, since Linux does everything it can to break a canonical name model with symlinks. In fact, you could mimic a case-insensitive system with 2^n symlinks like /foo/bar/COnFiG -> /foo/bar/config. And the captialization is the cause of errors in mixed environments:

1) Create file on Windows called "Foobar.txt".
2) Copy it to your Linux machine.
3) Rename it to "FooBar.txt"
4) Do lots of work on the text
5) Copy it to your Linux machine
6) Copy the Linux directory back to Windows.

There's now a 50-50 chance that your work just got overwritten by old crap from step 2). Of course you might argue that Windows is the problem here since it wouldn't happen on two Linux systems, but then it wouldn't happen on two Windows systems either. They just don't play nice with each other.

Tag: NOTABUG and WONTFIX. Case aware filesystems so you can have normal names and not like AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS from the DOS days is great, case sensitive file systems are a really bad idea. Is there any kind of sane situation where you'd like to have two files "Config" and "config" actually coexist that isn't just begging to be confused/abused/exploited? For a marginal performance optimization all POSIX systems have shitty usability. Why am I not surprised? I guess for a server it just doesn't matter, but for the desktop you should file this as a bug against Linux, not Windows and OS X.

This excellent blog article describes a technique developed by Judea Pearl decades ago to do exactly this. Would be interested to understand how this is different/better.