What happens when its raining heavily, and a vehicle going the other way hits a puddle, and dumps a massive wave of water on your windshield? What happens when its full inch of heavy slush? I'd say its a nice addition on top of regular wipers, but I'm very skeptical about replacing them.

Summed it up in one word. Someone offered me the chance to go to mars, hell yeah I'd go, but I'd want to know a lot more about the details of the plan then those guys are providing. There are tons of big hurdles, they can be overcome, but its not gonna be simple, or cheap. I don't think a reasonable person would put faith in the group running this to be able to overcome those hurdles. Now if SpaceX was recruiting for a mars mission, sign me up.

Look at the population density, it is a lot easier to provide services like high quality broadband to a dense population. South Korea - 1,303/sq mi Japan - 873/sq mi Hong Kong - 16,876/sq mi Switzerland - 505/sq mi Netherlands - 1,287/sq mi Latvia - 80/sq mi Czech Republic - 344/sq mi Sweden - 60/sq mi United States - 89/sq mi Denmark - 337/sq mi Only Sweden and Latvia really out perform us without having several times higher population density.

A one time pad is impossible to crack in theory, but may be crackable if the method for generating the pad is flawed. Creating true randomness is a tricky proposition, and I don't see why its safe to believe that "shining a light through a diffusive glass plate" will generate true randomness.

Right, but value in the fashion industry is more about style, aesthetic, and branding. Very little is about improved utility. People will pay 1000% more for a piece of clothing from a famous designer, but not 1000% more for a branded drug, or branded computer when there is a generic of equal quality and utility available.

Suppose I invest $1B in researching a new drug, getting it through FDA approval, and bringing it to market. Then you immediately offer a generic version that is exactly the same composition. Our drugs are functionally identical, there is no way I can offer a superior version because when it comes right down to it, the composition is what valuable, and its easily replicated. How will I make my $1B back when you can offer the drug at a price that never needs to pay back the research investment. Don't get me wrong, the patent system is seriously messed up, but there is a need for patents in some cases.

That isn't even the biggest issue for me. There are several key challenges a real attempt would face, and little to nothing is said about them. 1. Money - Not even considering design, construction or training, and even presuming future price reductions in orbital launch, the launch costs would run north of $100M, and likely much more. Yet almost nothing is said of how that or anything else would be funded 2. Radiation - Both during the trip to Mars, and while on the surface, the crew would be exposed to solar and cosmic radiation, while to some extent increased exposure is just one of the risks, without any mitigation, the crew could be exposed to lethal doses just on the trip there. 3. Landing - Nothing is said of the difficulties of landing on mars. The concept art has heat shields like you would expect of an earth landing module, but nothing is said about dealing with the martian atmosphere. There are of course plenty of other challenges, but that those huge ones are totally unaddressed, and instead they are moving ahead with crew selection, seems very suspect. They are putting the thing they can certainly achieve first, selecting a crew, to distract from the things they may not be able to deal with.

See, thats where it doesn't make sense. They have the infrastructure to make the kinetic energy storage devices and to continue bio engineering, so they should be able to produce solar/wind/hydro/tide power, and did use a limited amount of fossil fuel generated electricity. Even if it wasn't economically viable for the masses, certainly the rich and or gov't would have been able to afford some as a prestige item or for critical purposes. Both solar and wind have major drawbacks, but in a time of such energy scarcity, the draw backs could be lived with.

There were a lot of interesting ideas discussed in the book, but it fails to really explain why things like solar power were not used... at all... not to mention any other form of green energy that is available even today. It seemed a pretty big hole to me.

Actually, I wouldn't worry about the results not getting released. Instead we would get loaded questions designed to influence the results. A skilled pollster could move public opinion pretty far based on how they ask the questions, and there is no way they would be unbiased. "Do you support closing the gun show loophole" vs "Do you support the ban on the sale of guns between private citizens without requiring a gun shop as an intermediary" Same outcome, but will get very different results.

Who needs to come back. We should send a one way craft, there would be countless volunteers even if it was clear that they are never coming home. Once there, you could start working to establish a sustainable off planet colony... Would also make getting there a lot cheaper.

So first I needed to enable javascript for the site. Now it wants me to allow some random website to install a plugin so that it can tell me if my security is up to date... yeah if it can't detect a security vulnerability without me going through a bunch of hoops and ALLOWING it to install on my system, I'm going with the whole thing is BS.

The idea is cool, but I would be really pissed if someone could put ads on my car without my consent. But how else will they rake in the money for the state? (Maybe make it optional and split the ad revenue with the driver?)

You want the data turned over to the government? That is the absolute last thing I would want if google inappropriately collected my wifi activity. The government should supervise the destruction, not be given the data set to do with as they please...

From the google bug tracker: "we (the UI design team) made the choice to purposefully remember incognito zoom levels."

Sounds like the intentionally gutted the security of the incognito mode for the zoom levels... Its one thing if its an oversight, but to do it intentionally reveals a total disregard for the privacy someone using incognito expects.