Actually, you have it backwards.

The algorithms are already here. The hardware is here. The problem is connecting real-world problems to the algorithms and hardware. The people who can do that are revolutionary.

In a few centuries we'll all be buying beachfront Antarctic condos.

Apple is a hardware company, Amazon is not. They both have different motives and you can clearly see it reflected in their products. With the Kindle and other tablets sold at a near-loss, vendors have an incentive to shove advertising in your face. Everyone will likely complain that the iPad mini is overpriced and shame on them for making a profit.

The truth of the matter is that Amazon is just repeating the commodity PC bundleware strategy. I'd rather pay a little bit more to support a company that doesn't subsidize it's products with advertising.

It's a fallacy to think that the US Christian population is the major drive in pushing Internet censorship. Look at the more advanced European countries where religious practice has been on decline. It doesn't seem we can go a single week here without hearing about yet another country-wide website blocking system being implemented in places like the UK, Germany, Sweden, etc.. At the moment, the US is the most free in regards to the Internet and has no country-wide censorship program.

Just because a populace is educated doesn't somehow protect them from fascism or the stripping of their rights. Having a population that believes in personal liberty is much more important than a highly educated one.

<quote> The shuttle will be long forgotten before replacement trees can be grown.</quote>

NASA is taking the most environmentally conscious route possible, so much so that they re-routed the transport of the shuttle to preserve the most trees. That said, somehow local flora (which they are replanting) is more historically significant than a vehicle that inspires us to transcend our own planetary existence?

It really depends on where the "knocking off" happens. If the FBI knocks off some bot's C&C network, then it's fair game. If an ISP were to start blocking ports, addresses, etc, for "spam" reasons, it's the start a slippery slope. I've always been against sender-side spam mitigation for this exact reason.

Yes, spam/bots are annoying as hell, but it's not the ISP's responsibility. Anything less threatens the very nature of the Internet as an open platform.

Yes, the engineering is fantastic, yes, building a space vehicle is going to be expensive and difficult, but I wouldn't go so far to say that it couldn't be a private effort for a fraction of the cost. The Wright's had a high-school education and DIY engineering background. Today we have supercomputers on our desks, access to infinite amounts of knowledge, and engineering tools that the Wright brothers could never have dreamed of.

I think it's fair to say that a lot of low hanging fruit still exists that eludes multi-billion dollar government projects.

It's different when you have a monopoly.

Apple doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems -- either in the mobile market or the PC market. Microsoft does in the PC market at least. The anti-trust issues with Microsoft and IE had nothing to do with "freedom", they had to do with M$ leveraging its monopoly to shut out competition.

What's happened to our society?

There are many things more important than life, and I'd say exploring another planet is definitely on that list. There are billions of people on Earth; it will go on perfectly without minus a few people that go on to become immortalized heroes.

Didn't we explode hundreds of nuclear test weapons all over the world? I think the local effects of nuclear war would be horrific, but the planet as a whole wouldn't even bat an eye and would be back to normal in a few decades. Nuclear winter was cold war FUD designed to keep us (and the USSR) from actually going through with the crazy. There is a lot of criticism and debate over the accuracy of the nuclear winter hypothesis.

You could imprison me under citizens arrest. You could also use deadly force if faced with a threat to your life. Obviously you can't murder at will, and neither can the government (we hope).

You could tax me the same way that universities and private toll companies tax drivers for parking and toll crossing. It's voluntary, just like your citizenship, which you can legally forfeit at any time.

Is there any evidence that the actual :food: from an organic farm is safer than a conventional one?

I would think that advanced synthetic chemicals would be more effective at killing off pesticides and bacteria than natural alternatives.

/sigh
I really appreciate organic products, sustainable farming and renewable energy, but ultimately the argument for all-of-the-above distills down to this when I'm talking to someone with any mild interest in the environment and it's really a shame. We shouldn't deny the "rest of the world" a first-world standard of living because we want to force our personal vision of what the environment should be on them. You can damn-well bet that world population is going nowhere but up. Instead of resisting change, we should be developing chemicals and processes to modernize the rest of the world (i.e. evil nature-killing chemicals).

The supply of ideas, engineering, and human spirit is not finite. We're damn clever and with any luck, it will be the chemicals and sciences that pull us out of the population mess that we're in, not conservation or organic (read: inefficient) farming. Arguing the ethics is beyond the point of the conservation. If you play the raw numbers game, we're going to need science to keep people from starving and continue the development of civilization.

Conservation has it's applications, but if you spend more time conserving than you do inventing the technology that obsoletes conservation, you're being wasteful.

How is drone technology a "secret"? Mixed UAV/FPV platforms are available for your everyday hobbyist at well under a few hundred $$$. Anyone with a basic grasp of high-school engineering could rig it up to drop bombs/shoot a gun/take pictures in a lazy weekend.

Did someone not tell Iran this? Or is this just dick-waving? The real technology here would be the engines, radio technology and stealth properties of the airframe. Or maybe us hobbyists are good at laying low - considering the potentials of the technology, and Iran just isn't able to do a Google search because they blocked the Internet ;)