Yea, I know the idiom. But I didn't write kangaroo, I wrote "Godwin". As in the potential for tyranny in the government you unquestionably trust.

You stated that I wrote something I didn't, then beat the strawman like a good troll.

Don't assume that I should know you.

On /. , you are defined by your posts.

If you think I'm slimy because I question the capbility of the state to properly facilitate trials with life and death consequences, that is you choice.

But don't think I would think any different of you from what you post here, simply because I don't know you.

I've formed my opinions of you from your rigid and unenlightened views expressed here in writing. If you are now saying you've somehow been disingenuous - that I would have different "if I only knew you" - well then, I'm not sure my opinion of you would not change for the better.

I'm sure the first building he builds will be pretty good, with hype to boot.

The second building will be the best one he ever builds.

The third building will have Ewoks.

I'd really hate to be the poor baster that ends up in a building after the third.

In CA, wood is the preferred material for buildings under 5 stories.

Your logic is the logic of an automaton. Only a fool would have logic this simplistic.

You strike me as the kind of person that likes being told what to do by authority, and then attacks anyone who doesn't obey. You'd make a great cop - if you aren't one already.

Sorry about your wife. I can see how you might achieve certain perspectives after that.

Nervetheless, I think the scenarios I'm speaking of do have a valid perspective in this forum. This is /. and a internet privacy is a recurring and important topic, is it not?

Two points here:

1. Clearly our internet communications are being monitored by third parties outside the endpoints. Time, data, endpoints, and content. This data is being stored forever. To what end?
2. Encrypting everything is not that radical of a position - its not like the existing infrastructure can't handle it, and it is not like the end users would even notice.

As far as Google goes, isn't that part of the deal? I know Google will use some bit of my information, and I have an idea of how they use it. I chose Google here, and, FWIW, the deal is pretty well outlined by Google. For unencrypted comm, Its not like I'm choosing the third who is listening. I don't really know that deal - the rules aren't really published.

Did I say "Kagaroo"? No. I'm talking about the moral authority of government to kill and you are dreaming about kangaroos. You are full of crap. Government trusting, non-critical thinking, pseudo argumentative crap.

The fact that you devolve into some ivory tower slippery slope argument on tax collection - as if losing money were equatable to losing ones life - just shows how afraid you are to even question what "authority" might be doing wrong. Keep that tower alive, I'm sure those theories of yours are working well in every daily life...

Following your logic to a reasonable conclusion - if criminals held a trial first and then kill someone, it wouldn't be an "execution" rather than "murder".

Your overly technical logic assumes that the government and justice system couldn't have possibly been infiltrated by criminals. One could invoke Goodwin....

Execution becomes murder when the official government, who facilitated the trial and performed the "execution", loses the moral authority. The problem in the US is that moral authority has been chipped away with every execution of an innocent person. We should at least acknowledge that wrongful executions occur, and that perhaps we can't trust our government to properly facility trials that lead to execution/murder/whatever you want to call someone losing their life at the hands of another.

But, hey, at least the government is introducing some efficiencies. They could have gone with helium....

Robot wins Beer Pong? Kids these days need robots to tell them when to drink? Ingrate whipper snappers.

I guess it wasn't *that* difficult for computers. Were the human opponent 4 years old?

Seriously, yes it does. It makes a big difference.

First there is paranoia, based in the obvious facts that throughout the course of human history aspersion have been cast, prosecutions have been level, executions committed, stakes burned, all with the evidence simply being something read - be it books or web page. Maybe nobody will get prosecuted for reading the NYT today, but human history has has episodes of tyrannical left/right turns. And what one reads in the NYT today will be logged and stored by people who have questionable motives of logging and storing this data in the first place....

And then the is the simply more practical op-sec argument. When there is both unencrypted and encrypted communication, simply the fact that a communication is or is not encrypted provides a ton information. This is why several privacy advocates have lobbied for the encryption for all web traffic, be it an NYT article or a banking transaction. The theory being the harder one makes it for the whoever is tracking traffic - be it hackers with ill intent of the surveillance-industrial complex - the better.

"Does it really matter...." is an intellectually lazy argument. Yes it matters. And there is really little excuse beyond intellectual laziness. The infrastructure for encrypting all we traffic exists - its not like one has to decrypt by hand.

The HTTPS Everywhere is a great idea, but how great when so many use self signed certs. This just gives the illusion of security. One of the biggest problems here is that browsers don't recognize legit free third party cert authorities like CAcert.

It must be the US. As a lot, the Taxi drivers are nasty, no matter how respectful you are to them. I get it - getting paid close to minimum wage for driving around minimally maintained leased vehicle for hours in heavy traffic amongst poor/lost drivers, jay walking pedestrians, with sometimes difficult customers, and little accountability - that can likely turn the best of them into trolls. The Uber drivers attitude seems a bit better attitude towards their customers, and maybe that has to do with who owns the actual vehicle and the nature of the app. But for someone who most of the time isn't a customer of either, their crappy driving habits are about the same.

As a passenger, you may find them great. But then again, you probably don't have to deal with Uber SUV's right hooking you on a bike, or Lincoln town cars parked in the middle of the road, creating gridlock for blocks behind them. In my town, Uber drivers have become just as much as an entitled dipshits as Taxi drivers, maybe more so.

I will welcome our robot Uberlords.

The pumps may be lighter, but where do they get the electricity to run them?

I wouldn't expect the energy required to run electric pumps to be any different than the previous methods, and that probably wasn't trivial to start with. So does the electricity come from batteries (heavy), or are they doing something tricky like generating current off the massive amount of waste heat using some undisclosed thermal junction technology. A scenario like the latter would be interesting. But if they are using battery pumps instead of more established turbopump designs, then the whole thing smells a bit BSy.

I know of more than one startup 3D printing engines out of titanium over the past few years. There is a lot of VC money going towards space stuff these days - private launch firms, asteroid mining, etc. Kind of a subtle gold rush if you know what to look for. These guys certainly are looking for a marketing edge. Do something shiny, put it on the Internets, get funding, eh?