There's a big difference between how you treat your desktops and your servers.

I wanted a change of pace and moved from embedded stuff on Linux to iOS development. So my desktop is basically always the latest OS X version.

I still have Linux servers running for OwnCloud and my personal website, and that's all Debian Stable. But given that it's Stable, I always update to the latest.

IMO that is the reason why advertising is morally reprehensible. It's manipulative mass mind control.

Of course it is. And as people get more used to it and filter it out, it becomes harder to manipulate them in general - even by the politicians and special interest groups. So I guess it's a case of the Invisible Hand accidentally smacking the 1% on the face.

My first thought was that the entire point of the site was to BE a blackmail scheme.

Correct. From the article: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."

Now if you just add that the smart people end up hiring the stupid people to be armed and around them to protect them while decrying the evils of guns, you might have a solid theory on your hands.

Nope. People who believe violence will keep them safe will arm themselves, directly or indirectly. Intelligence doesn't enter into it, one way or another, any more than it does with any other basic instinct.

It seems like all the largest mouth pieces against guns sure have a lot of them around in the hands of hired help to protect them.

There's a running joke that the most vocal gay bashers are closet gays themselves. It's the same principle at work here. Internal contradictions tend to make people search for scapegoats.

Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.

Amen. I've been visiting this site around user ID 110.000 or so, and I've actually never experienced a full blackout. Static version every now and then, that's all.

In fact, a CS degree is not proof that you can code, it is proof that you understand the theory of Computer Science.

More to the point, it's proof that you have massive student debts so you're likely to put up with abuse to keep repaying them.

Couldn't they have come up with some ridging or some pattern of grooves?

I bet some stupid manipulative marketing asshole/bitch just made that up.

Our first flight didn't end well due to another reason. The next balloon flight, the electronics engineer just removed enough insulation to keep it cosy at the height where the balloon would mostly stay. He then added a small additional battery pack connected to a heating element. A colleague coded a PID algorithm to keep the big pack warm at the start of the flight.

I've seen this up close. I'm a software engineer and I've worked for a scientific institute in the past. One of the project involved putting a camera on a helium-filled balloon. The electronics and PC equipment (a PC104-sized Linux box) were powered from a big pack of lithium batteries.

The problem is basically that lithium batteries perform best in a certain temperature range, say from 10 to 25 degrees Celsius (50 to 65 F). But that's rather difficult.When you lift off, it might be cold and you want the batteries to have a decent temperature. Otherwise they can't deliver enough power. So you insulate them and they stay warm by themselves, because when you draw power, they get warm.

But then the higher you lift off into the air, the thinner the air gets. Thus convection will be less and less. You can shed heat via radiation (into the infrared spectrum) but that's only half of the heat or so. And then the insulation can overheat the battery packs.

There's all sorts of tricks, for example copper-strapping the packs to a large piece of black metal so you increase the heat radiation. But if you automate that (or the insulation), you also get additional possible failures.

What it comes down to, is some calculation but also some experience.

The problem is that most of the time, voters are two dumb to actually understand the issues at stake or the consequences of their actions. Fix the dumbness, and you fix all sorts of other cultural mal-consequences (not just clumsy politics and gimme-dat laws).

Make people smarter and the issues and consequences will simply become more complex. They're not some external invariance, after all, but a function of those very same people's behaviour and mental make-up. So every organization must deal with the fact that its decision makers are going to be too dumb for the job. That's not something that can be avoided, and consequencetly the success or failure of the system can't be blamed on the intelligence of the participants. It is, instead, a function of the system itself.

For all their faults, democracies tend to be more effective than autocracies precisely because they make it easier for members to participate, which leads to greater collective intelligence: a greater pool of ideas and more chances to call out really dumb ones. If we need smarter societies still, we need to continue developing them further, not wish for some general population intelligence boost that wouldn't solve the issue even if it happened.

Sadly, a lot of societies seem to be going backwards towards the less efficient autocratic model right now. Natural selection will take care of that in due time, but combined with all the challences our species is currently facing, the process can get pretty unpleasant.

For example, I've heard flanges for molten salt reactors are a potential for failure, one leak and your radioactive fuel is everywhere.

No, it's a piece of rock salt on the floor. It's not liquid at room temperature, and will cool and solidify almost instatly if it leaks out of the reactor vessel.

If productivity enhancements means we don't need as many secretaries and factory workers, those expenditures will go towards marketing and sales.

No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense. That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.

The idea that productivity enhancements will ever reduce the need for human labor was always laughable. Only people such as an ivory tower economist like Keynes could have ever thought this.

Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?

Well I understand that it's science fiction, so I give them a pass, but in the real world there's obviously no way you can 'shield' against a freaking nuclear weapon. Unless you're willing to consider a solid metal shield with a thickness of a hundred meters. Wouldn't be much of a ship though.

Just turn your engines towards the explosion.

We just don't have any need for such massive nukes so none ever got made. But they'd be very useful fighting against a multi-planetary enemy, if only as a show of force.

Super-nukes would be just as useless for fighting a multi-planet enemy than normal nukes were for fighting the Cold War. You can't use them without getting yourself killed too, so all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc. And of course in the interstellar scheme this is all made worse by the fact that you're either surrounded by other empires eager to exploit your distraction, or empty space you could be colonizing.

What's even worse, justifying such useless cost to your own populace means a massive propaganda campaign; the mindset bred by said campaign will take a life of its own and limit your options, even after the conflict is over. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; when you have a military you went a trillion dollars into debt to build, you will damn well look into excuses to use it, which in turn will provide reasons to maintain and further develop it, ultimately destroying both your economy and society.

So I suppose the truly succesful interstellar empires will be the "unofficial" ones, which specialize in getting around - or perhaps even assimilating - occupying forces. So the grunts of future space wars will be smugglers like Han Solo rendering Empire's effective control near zero, not fighter pilots like Luke trying to fight it on its own terms.

We're already at the point where wars typically result in expensive failures, damaging both the economy, culture and prestige of the participants. Future belongs to whoever can solve the problem of having an organized society with zero reliance on coercive force. It's not an easy problem, but the prize is also tremendous: nigh-invincibility combined with the ability to devote all resources to productive activities.