It's not insider trading, because the information is public. He's not the only one getting it, dozens are getting that information at the same time.

No, dozens aren't getting the information at the same time. They get the information when it enters their past light cone, which for some is later than for others.

HFT is a very competitive space with hundreds of firms doing it and competing against each other. They all have access to that information at the same time.

Even if every HFT firm gets the information at once, that doesn't mean that the market (everyone) does and has had time to react before they send their orders. Which is what needs to be shown to prove it's not insider trading.

I don't really care what sneaky leagalese was in their TOS that justifies them legally.

What makes you think anything does? They marketed a lifetime service; while it's obvious that no one and nothing can guarantee it's going to live longer than you, it seems that No-IP is still around, so why not take them to small-claims court and demand your money back?

They explicitly sold this service as "lifetime", and I feel this was a completely underhanded move.

And it is. So, even if the TOS actually does legalize this kind of thing, it's entirely possible that you might get yours back by pointing out this fraudulent advertising. Perhaps you could see if you can get a class-action lawsuit going - you can't be the only victim?

Probably actually. It's way easier to manage that way. It also solves tons of problems.

The problem is... that's also true of all always-on connections. The whole reason we got dynamic IPs in the first place is that a 300-line ISP only needed one IP per line, not one per customer. But an always-on broadband customer needs one IP per computer, and the only question is whether they're public or behind a NAT. IPv6 removes the need for NAT, but does not solve the "need" for a dynamic IP for a broadband customer since there never was one in the first place, except for greed. And, sadly, technology can't solve greed.

A home charger could not do deliver this much power,

Of course it could, it just draws it from my main home UPS. Which, more importantly, would make renewable energy practical since I could conceivably stuff solar power all summer long to my battery cellar and draw from it in those cold, dark winter days. In other words, it would allow delivering baseload power with unreliable (in the short term) sources.

Good batteries would be a true game-changer, and solve both energy crisis and global warming in a single strike.

The fundamental problem is that they're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That sucks for metal welding, it sucks for soldering, and it sucks for plastic welding.

Does it absolutely need to welding? Could you use a quick-curing resin and a constant pour from, say, a mesh top plate that rises steadily to stay a few millimeters above the gelification front? You'd get a totally smooth surface that way, too (since it's kept that way by surface tension as it cures), and it wold be easy to extend this system to have reinforcement fibers spooling out from the top too..

When you see the market, you see a system before you affect it. Once you affect, I think it's fair for the system to change. You buying should raise the price, and it does.

This sound suspiciously like insider trading: the guy with a supercomputer at the exchange's basement gets price-affecting information before anyone else does (because speed of light) and can react to it before other supercomputers, much less mere mortals, have had a chance to.

Its more likely that the energy released by annihilation in the early universe reconstituted to form ordinary matter.

That's pretty unlikely, actually, since energy-matter conversion must obey conservation laws and thus create equal amounts of antimatter and matter so that their properties cancel out. Which is kinda the problem in the first place.

You failed to complete the cliche though, there should have been a slam aimed at the GOP in there somewhere.

The $TRIBAL_ENEMY are so stupid their brains technically count as below non-existing, thus balancing the baryon count of the universe to zero without need for anti-matter.

Why GOP counts as a tribal enemy for enough people to become a "cliche" butt of such jokes, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Why a lack of anonymity is a nightmare to you? Is it because you don't live in a free country and the only way you can express your ideas without going to jail afterward is with anonymity?

In no country can you express any actually significant idea without making enemies. Powers that be want nothing so much as status quo, since that means they stay on top, and any significant idea by definition threatens it. Anonymity is absolutely vital for any society, since it allows unpleasant truths to be expressed without fear of legal or extralegal punishment, whether it comes in the form of jail, vigilantes or unemployment.

Furthermore, as Manning and Snowden showed, even nominally free countries tend to have boils of corruption which need to be exposed to be healed - and we can't rely on always having a hero ready when we need one, thus such exposition needs to be possible anonymously.

And of course there's the "knowledge is power" -aspect, where the state being able to casually record everything its citizens do online (and increasingly offline) simply makes it too powerful to resist the temptation to abuse said power.

Don't for a moment think that the country is run my crazy people, they know exactly what they are doing and every move is carefully calculated.

MAD was and is carefully calculated yet utterly insane. It's almost - as in a single person making the final call to not launch - resulted in a nuclear war at least twice now. Nazi regime carefully calculated its movements. So did Stalin.

Just because you are calculating doesn't mean you can't be crazy. And it especially doesn't mean you won't start wars you can't possibly win, for example by suddenly firing missiles at Tokyo.

If there was a reliable implant that could detect anti-government sentiment in a person's thoughts the North Korean government could easily decide to implant it in every child at birth.

Would Kim be stupid enough to do so, though? Dictators don't stay in power with brute force; they don't have magical powers capable of subduing millions of ordinary people. They stay in power because people think it's safer to not do anything than to resist. Put a thought-reading implant in them, and they no longer have a choice: any dissident thought means they've been cornered and must fight or die.

The more you tighten your fist, the more star systems slip through your fingers - because it makes participating in the lie, the masquerade of benevolence, costlier. And North Korea has nothing but the lie. A country that turns its army against its own people has already fallen, because you can't win a war against the same people who supply that army. It's just a question of how long the insane situation goes on before the inevitable collapse.

Of course, this might make Kim desperate enough to instigate a war against some neighbour simply because he has no other hope of staying in power than a distraction. While that would of course result in North Korea being turned into rubble, I think its rulers have proven beyond reasonable doubt to not give a tiniest bit of a shit about that.

It *also* doesn't apply when faced with real fascists from the pro-gay side either.

Who on the "pro-gay" side, when and how has tried to merge state and corporate power into a totalitarian dictatorship? And how does being "pro-gay" help them revive the Roman Empire?

Or did you mean "real fascists" as in "not fascists, but I'll call them that anyway because my intended Religious Right audience doesn't mind slander as long as I hate gays"?

What specific skills should the schools be teaching?

Rhetoric, psychology and logic. Students should be trained to automatically pick apart and analyze any argument or assertion they come across, note its underlaying assumptions and measure any "wiggle room" the speaker is leaving for themselves.

The core problem with psuedo-science is a lot of it is unfalsifiable.

No, the core problem with pseudoscience is that people want to believe in it. Falsifiability is insignificant next to the power of insane troll logic. Look at the discussion on any climate change story to see how it works.

Sure, you can show in a double-blind study that magic magnet bracelets have no significant effect on mood or back pain,

Oh, really? So you admit you have magic bracelets, and thus that magic exists? We got you now, Mr. Science-guy!

They'll just restart it from a recent backup and we'll never even know it happened.

Given this, would you actually need to restart it? I mean, if universe is deterministic, then all future and past is already contained in a description of its initial conditions. You'd only need to run the simulator if you wanted to observe or communicate with the people inside; otherwise, as far as they (we) were concerned, why would actually crunching through those numbers have any effect?

But of course, if you're not going to run a simulator, there's hardly much point in uploading it to a computer, now is there? So simply write down your initial conditions and rules of evolving them. That should be enough for us. Except, of course, your pen is not magical, so simply writing anything shouldn't cause a universe to exist; but if it doesn't, then merely existing in whatever sense mathematical concepts exist should be enough to "create" all their possible consequences, including us.

Metaphysics is fun at 3 AM :).