The point, as I understand it, is that even if these specific vehicles cannot be scaled up to have orbital capabilities (and I think they may well be), they WILL serve as stepping stones to vehicles that WILL have full orbital capabilities. With their suborbital "toys," these firms are building up the knowledge, skills, and technical infrastructure necessary for a real spacegoing capability.

Having multiple private space ventures is the best way for the US to stay in the space game. Why stay in the space game? Because the winners will be the dominant players in the planet's future. The more space-capable players we have, the better off we'll be.

So if a company doesn't operate in a way I like, the best way to express that... is to invest in them? I don't think you thought that one through completely.

Nowhere did I say anything about malware, abuse, or severe annoyance: you are taking a simple hypothetical and using an unstated extreme possibility to suit an unyielding position.

If a website uses one or two small, innocuous ads that aren't animated, I'd see no problem with it. You seem to be taking the extreme stance that any advertising at all is a personal affront to you. If that's the case, you are being unreasonable and such an opinion shouldn't matter to most people.

Now, it may be difficult to find an ad host that doesn't push giant, screaming, in-your-face ads, but that wasn't the point.

You're right: intravenous tuna use doesn't sound healthy at all! Salmon, however, is another matter entirely.

Because newspapers have the resources to get companies to advertise on their pages, it is part of their business model. A small open source project website, for example, can't afford to go out and find people to advertise on their website. But they can get help with hosting costs by using a company whose focus -- and business model -- DOES include finding people to advertise with them.

Most normal website owners are not comparable to newspaper publishers in any meaningful way.

Because they could recreate anything on a holodeck: why would anyone bother with a camera?

You're Tien Shinhan!

It exists because the rockets used for satellites and for ballistic missiles are close enough for the former to be a way to get the latter.

It's much cheaper to rent payload space from Russia, the only reason to do it yourself is if you want the military capability.

The same goes for enriching uranium to 20%, there is only one reason to do that.

And progressive lenses for everything else.
Not a solution for everyone, perhaps, but they work for me.

Vernor Vinge dealt with this topic rather convincingly with the Blight in "A Fire Upon The Deep".

The great stumbling block to any such possibility (aside from the immense improbability of our being able to develop a self-aware machine in the first place) is that we haven't developed computing hardware capable of remaining operational for very long without ongoing maintenance and a reliable supply of electric power. Any AI dependent on these resources would be utterly dependent on human goodwill for its continued existence. Reboot the poor sod and "it's a whole new world for ducks every day." Even the hypothetical Trojan-horse devices suggested by a Blight intelligence would be subject to the same limitations. Not exactly global conquest material.

If a person discusses their own medical history with someone else, HIPAA does not apply. If they talk about it in public and someone overhears it and somehow uses that information, including a marketer, somehow, HIPAA has nothing to do with that.

Now, there may be an expectation of a certain amount of privacy when discussing something over email, but if that information is somehow obtained -- even by a breach of the email servers, and assuming neither server/individual is a hospital/doctor/insurer/etc or an employee of such -- HIPAA does not somehow magically apply. Just because it is medical information, it is not immediately protected by HIPAA.

I'm not sure why you're hung up on PHI, I didn't see anything related to medical information mentioned yet. But that's what business agreements are for: to share or pass the blame.

A few years back I took $100 out of one bank and deposited it at another. The second bank only credited me $80, and sent me a letter informing me that one of the bills was counterfeit. I called the bank and explained that while I'm sure they were right, I'd been handed the bill by another bank and I had no chance of detecting the counterfeit bill so it wasn't fair to punish me. They, of course, wouldn't agree with that but they *did* give me a $20 counter credit because they wanted to keep me as a customer.

A couple decades ago when all paper money was as counterfeitable as the $1 bill remains, I worked at a fast food joint and would encounter counterfeit money on a fairly regular basis. The thing is, it was obvious to me that the poor schmo trying to buy a burger hadn't made the bill, and was just handing me a stack of money he'd been handed by somebody else. Who knows where the counterfeiter was? So unless I thought the customer was actually trying to swindle I'd just take the money and let the banks sort it out later.

Similar thing here: the purchasers are unwittingly caught in the crosshairs. Nothing good comes of attacking the person who's already been unknowingly swindled.

In 1977 or thereabouts, I was a co-op student at Xerox' Webster, NY Research Center. At lunchtime, I had access to an Alto, and spent far too much time playing MazeWar, a networked multi-player real-time 3D-perspective game wherein the players navigated a maze (displayed as wireframe 3D with an overhead map at the side), finding other players (who appeared as giant floating eyeballs) and zapping them. Once zapped, you respawned elsewhere in the maze and attempted to sneak up on your opponent and return the favor.

The graphics were extremely simple; there was no detail in the walls, just lines showing the edges, and player positions were limited to the center of each grid square; player movement was in discrete jumps. All of this was done to reduce the computational load for the graphics, of course. As a result, the system was very responsive, and the experience was quite immersive.

I've read the Heise articles in the original German, and the GPUs were not faked; the cards were an older generation graphics card (~10% of the graphics throughput of the claimed item) with the video BIOS hacked to zero out the card manufacturer ID and the GPU type twiddled to fool the driver into thinking it was the newer card. According to the articles, NVidia is tracing the GPUs through the supply chain by their internal serial numbers.

I would speculate that someone bought up a truckload of obsolete cards, reflashed the BIOS images, and relabeled them with plausible product ID labels. Could have been the Chinese manufacturer, could have been someone elsewhere in the pipeline.