They were not laughable. There just wasn't enough of economical and environmental incentives back then to push for their mass production. Now there is.

So you're saying that the bulletproof way of making something complicated work is to employ people who did something simple that worked? I'm really not sure what your sentence is supposed to mean. I would have thought that future technological results depend mostly on inherent problems with the goals that we're not aware of yet.

I find it hilarious that the supposed downside of having a future-proof source of energy is that on the unlikely occasion that a terrorist group gets their hand on plutonium, the resulting threat is going to be in the 50kt class instead of 20kt. Any larger entity most likely wouldn't have a problem with generating it for themselves anyway.

I'm not arguing that it is sufficient.

I had the impression that higher standard of living goes hand in hand with lower birth rates, and food security tends to be a part of the higher standard of living. I'm not sure how exactly do you propose to reverse the causality on that.

The project's intent seems to be to give people a DIY route or perhaps adaptability for specific applications. Can you build or mod this "modern John Deere" mentioned above yourself in this way? I also wonder about the applicability of both for non-chemical weed and pest control.

I actually understand it more as unification in type rather than calling for people only having a single physical device. What prevents you from having two of them? Give it sane mechanical and electrical interfaces, and a single chassis could be specialized if needed (but not unless necessary).

If it destroys the livelihood of millions but improves the livelihood of hundreds of millions, how is your claim different from calling for buggy whip manufacturing protectionism?

Integer overflow has been in the top five causes of CVEs for several years running. Buffer overflows, sadly, are still at the top.

If you can't call native code, you probably don't have a working JVM. The Oracle JDK and OpenJDK each include around a million lines of C in their standard libraries. That doesn't mean that you won't find it easier to write secure code in Java, it just means that you probably don't have much less C code in your TCB for a Java program than you do for a C one.

Are you sure there isn't a better way, even in C?

It *does* matter what the government is using it means that private companies won't be forced to use proprietary Windows applications to communicate with the government.

Uh, "when the orbit starts to precess"? Apsidal precession is yet another phenomenon that has nothing to do with this.

It's good for Africa that they never liked gays there, otherwise they would have an AIDS epidemic on their hands by now. Oh, wait...

Why, thank you, I can read myself (and has known about these effects for years). You do see yourself how changing the rotation rate doesn't shift the trajectory, right?