What part is untested? How about the whole thing? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. We won't know about practical difficulties until we actually try it.

You think Project Orion is the solution to interstellar travel? Look, guy, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.. You may think it's a long way to the chemist's/drug store, but.... If we can get a spaceship going at three thousand kilometers/second, it'd take centuries to reach the nearest star. You may want to calculate how much energy it would take to get something going that fast, and consider the size of a self-contained habitat that will function for centuries.

The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?

Strange. I live in the American Midwest, and I see lots of people around me. When I go for a drive in the countryside, I pass through a lot of farms and small towns. You'd think people actually lived here.

Could the US feed the world?

IIRC, feeding plants to cows to get beef is about 10% efficient, so let's assume that each of about 300 million Americans is eating effectively ten times as much as is needed. Then, the US could feed about three billion people, or less than half the population.

Water availability is not just a matter of cities. California has some farmland that is very productive, except that it requires considerably more water than it actually gets.

You could compare the progress under communist dictatorship to progress under Peter the Great. Both were strong top-down pushes for modernization in a very backward country, and both had big effects on Russia's economic progress. However, I don't think Peter was a Communist.

The US has a primarily capitalist economy, and certainly wouldn't be socialist even if some of modern capitalism's worst excesses were eliminated.

Depends partly on how new the subject. If it has something to do with computers, I can probably learn it faster at my present mumble years of age than when I was 20. Something like music theory I'm not so sure about. I've lost a few mental steps, but I've learned a whole lot about how to learn.

There's a difference between chemistry and chemical engineering. If you don't care, and you're not independently wealthy, go the chemical engineering route.

Unlike lots of technology companies, Apple makes most of its money by selling stuff to customers. This gives it an incentive to pay attentions to the needs of their customers. And, unlike Google, the customers are actually the people who use the services.

Communications is a special legal case. Putting anything else in that category would require a new law.

Ever wondered why some places have strict policies on shredding documents and wiping email? It's because if they have these policies, they're not in legal trouble if they're asked for the material. (They are in trouble if they get rid of data they're legally ordered to collect.) It's perfectly legal to limit one's ability to comply with possible court orders.

Except that the US did a good deal of cryptanalytic work against the European Axis, including major help on four-rotor Enigma.

Sure. It's also legit to shoot at enemy soldiers on sight, or even on suspicion. LAPD to the contrary, this isn't acceptable police practice in peacetime.

IIRC, the US did a lot of good work in helping crack the four-rotor Enigma cipher, after other Allies had pretty well solved the three-rotor problem. There were other codes and ciphers the US cracked or helped crack.

(Of course, the US also supplied some vulnerabilities. For part of the North Africa campaign, a US military observer was filing excellent and comprehensive reports on the Allied forces in theater, using a code the Germans had a copy of. Once he was recalled, and the German signals intercept unit was destroyed in a chance encounter, Rommel's decision-making seemed less miraculous.)

(Can you find one country that didn't rewrite WWII history for popular consumption? If the rest of the Allies wanted to get their distortions out, they needed to create their own worldwide movie industry.)

Do you have case law to back up your interpretation? We won't know for sure unless and until the US Supreme Court rules, but there's indications that the courts will provide at least some password privacy.

IANAL, but the following is my understanding. A subpoena is for civil suits, not criminal. Most privacy fanatics are more afraid of criminal cases, in which case we're talking about search warrants. These usually involve LEOs showing up and collecting whatever is on the warrant, which may be paper files or hard disks or whatever. However, none of these require any cooperation from the defendant. If the defendant refuses to divulge a safe combination, the police can just break it open somehow (so it may be in the defendant's interest to hand over the combination, to avoid destruction of the safe). Requiring any sort of cooperation to collect evidence is getting awfully close to compelling self-incrimination.