20 kilotons is probably the upper limit of what their detector can handle. ">20 kilotons" is simply a way of expressing "off the scale".

No, modern telescopes use mirrors instead of lenses for two reasons:

1) Once a lens gets more than about a meter across, it starts deforming measurably under its own weight (and the direction and amount of deformation changes as you shift the telescope). A mirror can be supported across its entire width and does not have this problem.

2) A lens experiences chromatic aberration, causing different frequencies of light to focus at different points. You can reduce (but not eliminate) this by using achromatic doublets or other optical tricks (such as absurdly long telescopes), or you can take the easy way out and just use a mirror.

Hmm... the Incomputatibility of the Universe, maybe this is an avenue for proving the the Universe is not a simulation?

No, assuming the paper is correct, it merely proves that either P = NP, or that the universe simulation is running on a computer more powerful than a Turing machine.

The number of unrecovered black boxes is pretty damn low: in the past 25 years, only one airplane's recorders were lost. The rest were either destroyed in the crash, or deliberately not recovered.

I'm sure a "very clear explanation" is given, but I'm not going to read something that presents it to me at a rate of one sentence per page.

The author is correct, but he expressed it in a very awkward way: below Wanapum Dam is Priest Rapids Dam, and below that is the Hanford Reach, a free-flowing section of the river. If Wanapum fails, the Priest Rapids reservoir needs to absorb the entire flood; releasing it will cause flooding in the Hanford area.

A programming language with primitives like:

"Compile a list of all European Capitals"

sounds like a damned powerful language to me.

To me, that doesn't sound like a very powerful language, it sounds like a language with a huge standard library. Power comes from things like making

"Compile a list of all European capitals, but I don't consider Iceland to be part of Europe"

easy. If it's hard to step outside the limits of the standard library, it's not a powerful language.

I never understood why leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded back when both were for sale. They actually added the lead.

Because "unleaded" is a misleading name. There have been three major types of gasoline over the years:

1) Raw gasoline: unmodified crude-oil distillates. This is one of the original automobile fuels, and had a varying octane rating; this made building high-performance engines difficult.

2) Leaded gasoline: crude-oil distillates with Tetraethyl lead added to raise and stabilize the octane rating.

3) Unleaded gasoline: crude-oil distillates with additives other than tetraethyl lead used to raise and stabilize the octane rating.

it's said to be vulnerable to timing attacks esp. by those same entities with extremely large means. So why isn't this news about anonymous IM on a garlic routing network or something?, either switch to a new network or upgrade TOR and call it TOR 2.0 or TOR 1.1 or something but please, something has to be done.

There are networks that protect against timing attacks, but the nature of the protection makes them unsuitable for IM or other near-realtime communication. Basically, they operate by having nodes send constant-size data blocks on a regular schedule regardless of how much data needs to be transmitted. This increases latency -- sometimes to hours or days -- and puts a cap on the amount of data the network can transfer. It also wastes bandwidth when the network is operating at less than full capacity, since blocks with random noise need to be transfered to keep lulls in activity from being visible.

Let's say the IoT existed in 1994 & you bought a new Kenmore IoT fridge running Linux 1.x. Fast forward to 2014--who today is doing anything with the Linux 1.x kernel? Nobody--including Kenmore support engineers.

In 1998, I purchased a computer running Windows. Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux 2.2 and a webserver on it. Strangely enough, the computer is still working, is running a modern kernel with full support for the hardware, and somehow managed to avoid being pwned at any point in the intervening 15 years.

The nice thing about open-source software is that you generally don't need to run obsolete software on ancient hardware. That Kenmore IoT fridge would probably run a Linux 3.x kernel without problems, as long as the software was genuinely open-sourced.

This. I'll never understand why when someone "thinks they're the opposite gender" we don't try and fix their mind to match their body but instead are willing to send them through some incredibly dangerous and life-shortening medical procedures to do the exact opposite.

Because it doesn't work. In the century or so between when gender dysphoria was identified and when gender reassignment surgery became practical, any number of techniques to "fix their mind" were tried. None of them had any measurable success rate, and most of them resulted in the patient committing suicide within a few years of starting treatment.