I had some HP printer drivers that I couldn't get rid of on a Windows 7 machine, no matter what I did (well, I didn't boot into recovery console and delete the files that way, but that's dangerous territory), so yes, there are ill-behaved applications that can still leave their rotting remnants around the system.

I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.

Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.

My JR Tokaido Shinkansen ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto was $140. A Southwest flight from LAX to SFO is $73.

I think of Southwest as the real "high speed rail" of California. Flights take off almost every hour.

That seems to have been a problem only with Windows XP. I didn't have it with Windows NT 3.1, NT 4, Windows 2000, or Windows 7. (I skipped XP).

Ubuntu Linux seems to have an incredible number of background processes that aren't really necessary.

Right. It's ordinary industrial automation. It's also strange that Intel would have CPU testers that weren't networked and reporting to some machine aggregating statistics and looking for process variance. It's pretty much routine in factories today to network the machines. That's been going on since the 1980s.

The Mitsubishi C Controller mentioned is just a CPU board packaged as a Mitsubishi Electric industrial automation module for convenient mounting in industrial automation cabinets. "It includes two Ethernet ports, an RS232 port, a USB port, a CompactFlash card slot and a 7-segment display for debugging and diagnostics. The (Intel Atom) CPU comes with the Wind River VXWorks real time operating system pre-installed." It's programmed in C.

"Only about 100 missing-child reports each year fit the profile of a stereotypical abduction by a stranger or vague acquaintance." Those are the real kidnapping cases, and there's usually no identified suspect whose phone law enforcement could dump.

Burning Man Uzbekistan 2015!

Build your camp in one of our rusting ship hulks laying on the playa!

Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

I'm not clear as to why every single person flying into an airport from the hot spots isn't put in quarantine upon landing.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

The assumption here is that the exhaust is in the form of a gas.

Okay.

Once it passes through the constriction of the rocket nozzle, it expands (the effect is to turn thermal random motion of the particles of the exhaust into directed velocity).

Explain how "it expands" does not equate to expanding beyond the boundary of the shielding.

After leaving the bell, there are no more restrictions to expansion of the gas aside from the small amount of matter in space.

Again, explain how "it expands" does not equate to expanding beyond the boundary of the shielding.

And how it cools to background radiation levels BEFORE "it expands" hits the shield boundary.

Because THAT is the issue you've been skipping.

And again, so what?

Because "stealth" probably does not include "dying of old age 200 years before getting out of your own back yard".

Then use physics to make that argument not assertions that I brought up Voyager.

I already have. But you keep skipping over it. I just did it again at the beginning of this post.

Here it is again:
PHYSICS says that the exhaust will expand. Eventually the exhaust cloud will be larger than the area covered by the "shield". At which time the exhaust will be visible.

You claim that the exhaust will cool to the same level as the background radiation before that. Yet you do not explain HOW it will cool that much.

You keep confusing "cool" with "background radiation". Going from 3,000 K to 2,000 K is "cooling". But 2,000 K is not the same as "background radiation".

Stealth isn't perfect. It would be relatively hard against large, sensitive detectors.

Then it is not "stealth".

You are not "invisible" if you depend upon the enemy being blind.

OK, so now you're encrypted from user to Cloudflare, in plaintext within Clouflare, and possibly in plaintext from Cloudflare to the destination site. That's more an illusion of security than real security. Even worse, if they have an SSL cert for your domain, they can impersonate you. Worst case, they have some cheezy cert with a huge number of unrelated domains, all of which can now impersonate each other.