I'll assume, for the sake of argument, that conservation of energy still applies to the discussion. That is, you can't move a chunk of the crust into orbit without expending more energy than the gravitation potential energy thusly imparted into said chunk.

Let's assume the energy to make the handwavium drive go is equal to the potential energy of a 500 kg mass, as it says in TFS. Presumably we've got matter-energy conversion or antimatter fuel to make this work, that's no more implausible than the handwavium required to make the FTL drive work in the first place.

How much energy is liberated by converting 500 kg into energy, say in the form of 250 kg antimatter to 250 kg matter? About two hundred and fifteen times as much as was released by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Make no mistake - that's a huge amount of energy, but nowhere near planet cracking levels. For another point of comparison, the impact that (probably) killed the non-avian dinosaurs was a couple million times as powerful.

Further, if we've got some way of supplying that kind of power, in a package small enough to fit on a spacecraft, wouldn't the power plant itself be a more dangerous weapon than a handwavium suicide run? Dangerous in the sense of city busting, not planet cracking.

When the dictionary says one thing and a journalist says another, the journalist is wrong. If a newspaper refers to an iPad as a laptop, or calls a head of lettuce a fruit, or calls Micheal Phelps a diver, the newspaper is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of "I don't agree with this", but wrong in the sense of "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means".

An assault rifle is a select fire automatic weapon. Not semi auto. Unless, of course, you want to accuse the Oxford English Dictionary of being in the pocket of the NRA.

A contradiction in terms.

An assault rifle is A) fully automatic (with a fire selector that includes either full auto or burst) and B) fires an intermediate rifle cartridge, meaning not high calibre.

If it's high calibre, but still a military rifle, it's a battle rifle. If it's intermediate calibre, but limited to semi-automatic fire, it's just a semi-auto rifle.

You can't legally buy assault rifles, or select fire battle rifles for that matter, if you're a civilian living in a first world nation. Doesn't matter what you might see in the news that says otherwise, go try it at your local gun store and see how far you get. If it's got automatic fire capability, it's a military weapon belonging in the hands of soldiers, and cannot be owned by your local gun nut anymore than he can own a live grenade.

Referring to anything that looks remotely dangerous as either an assault rifle or machine gun is a good indicator that the person doing the labelling knows fuck all about the subject at hand. "Assault style rifle", which is the weasel word term for weapons like the one in TFA, is about the same thing as a car that looks like a racecar, but drives like a sedan; legal, fancy looking, but boring under the hood.

(Disclaimer: I am Canadian. The second amendment down south is none of my business either way. I own no guns. I am firmly in the "guns belong in the hands of professionals" category. Anyone busting out the "sure, that's what an NRA drone wants you to think" in response to my post presumably didn't read the post script.)

A useful rebuttal (in the form of a car analogy, slashdot's favourite) I posted elsewhere for dealing with people calling an AR-15 an assault rifle:

Some people own cars where the suspension, tailpipe, wheels and paintjob are meant to make the car look like a race car. Under the hood, it's your average sedan, on the surface it looks like it belongs on the track. These cars are sometimes called ricers.

An AR-15 is to an assault rifle what a ricer is to a race car.

It looks similar. It looks fancy and powerful. It isn't. It's boring and ordinary.

No soldier takes an AR-15 into combat, and most criminals avoid it too; it isn't rapid fire, or powerful, or concealable, or cheap and at the range most gun crime happens, it offers no advantage over other guns.

You can actually buy an AR-15 in Canada; CBC was running a story about that earlier. Need I say more about the guns "military" status?

Which is not to say anything one way or the other about the American gun control debate, rather it's to dismiss the notion that you can judge a gun's legal status and purpose solely by appearance, without examining functionality.

Yep, most of the stuff (banks, 401(k), mortgage, insurance, etc) listed in the summary would be best suited to paper. And safety deposit boxes are the way to go.

For the stuff like email and online banking, might I suggest setting up a main email account with a stable password that is as strong as you can make it? I.e. twenty characters, alphanumeric, no words in the dictionary?

You don't need to use this account for your regular email, you just use it to reset your other passwords when needed. So you've got "yournameherebackupaccount@____.com" on every online form for password recovery, and the backup accounts password is written down someplace secure, and too strong to need resetting. Pretty sure you can even set up a "forgot my password" option for your regular email provider (I recall doing something like that with gmail in any case).

Once you become metabolically challenged, your family just needs to access the one account, using the password saved in your deposit box, and reset the passwords on everything else for their own access. Since the password is saved in a deposit box, your bank becomes the gatekeeper for it, and they're pretty good at that job.

I'd like some more detail too.

TFA specifically mentioned sites that have been hijacked. Which makes sense to me, since there can't be that many sites where the viruses are the work of the site owner - spyware is another matter entirely. Porn sites, especially pay sites, are bound to have better security than a site made by amateurs.

Which leads me to wonder why religious sites would be hijacked more frequently than other amateur operations. Are they more vulnerable due to shoddy security practices? Are they attractive to people looking to spread viruses? Do they have a reputation for attracting users who may not have antivirus software installed?

Bingo.

EA has almost nothing to do with the gay content of their games. They're the publisher for fucks' sake, at best they're not getting in the way. They are due perhaps a smidge of credit for not demanding bioware remove the "offensive" content, but no more than that. Doesn't make them the good guy, and doesn't even come close to compensating for the way they treat their developers. One brief moment of apathetic social activism doesn't outweigh a decade of abuse.

The reason they're getting flooded with angry emails from the religious right is that the people sending the letters know fuck all about who makes what decision, and I will freely believe the person up the thread who said they're hoping to capitalize on the Streisand effect for free publicity. Why address your flaws when you can paint your critics as a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth homophobes with an axe to grind?

Now, that being said, will they lose sales for ME3 and TOR because the people who sent angry letters staged a boycott? Nope. Can't boycott something you were never going to buy in the first place. The gamers I've known who dislike gays (and I don't mean "use gay as a general purpose slur", every idiot tween with a headset does that) aren't going to boycott the games, because it takes a hell of a lot more than an optional same sex relationship to dissuade them. At best a few people will give those two games a miss.

The people I've known who would boycott a piece of fiction over having even the tiniest touch of "the gay" aren't in the gamer demographic. They might matter to Hollywood, but gaming is a niche they already disapprove of.

Damn, I'm going to have to remember that one, well played.

Are you sure about that? This was someone filming two other persons engaging in intimate acts without their knowledge or consent. If the couple being spied upon were heterosexual and the spy was a stalker getting his rocks off, he'd actually get worse than this, particularly if NJ has a sex offender registry.

Not saying I agree entirely with the law on this one, but I don't personally believe that the accused here was given worse sentencing because of the orientation of his victim.

Yeah, I left that out to be polite, since the OP was talking about running a FOSS only business. Wouldn't do to conflate the businesses that don't pay the BSA because they don't use BSA software with the businesses that don't pay the BSA because bittorrent is cheaper. Apples hate being called oranges.

I don't doubt that some businesses do get threatened by the BSA thanks to anon complaints from ex employees, and actually do have pirated software. Even in the case of those companies, I'd tell them to get the IT guy(s) to do an internal audit and clean up their act, not let the BSA run the audit for them.

I think you're treating the BSA as if they were a law firm. They follow a different approach than actual lawyers do.

They don't actually sue, see the line about "hasn't pursued a court case in 5 years". Lawsuits cost money. They threaten to sue if you've got pirated software, then sell you on an audit to prove your innocence. If they find pirated software, they offer to legitimize it by selling you a licence, rather than go to court. It's a revenue generating approach where unleashing the lawyers is a last resort.

They're the equivalent to an angry McDonald's customer demanding to see the manager (for whatever reason), threatening to sue/call head office/stir up a ruckus, and walking out with a refund or free food. If they don't get their free mcnuggets, they give up and try the same approach in the next store down the road.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at, should have phrased it more clearly. So, refining my original statement:

If you get a threatening letter from the BSA demanding an audit, disregard it.

If you get a subpoena, or anything else official, forward it to your lawyer.

The letter is bait. Don't rise to it, and most likely they won't do anything about it. Actual court documents are too serious to ignore.

Doesn't really help, what with the whole false accusations from disgruntled employees angle. Replying "no thanks, I use Linux" to them isn't going to do you much good. Replying at all isn't going to do you much good. It shows them that you're listening.

A better approach is to simply ignore the BSA on principle. Threatening letters are cheap, subpoenas are expensive, and they do their business in bulk (meaning they can't actually sic their lawyers on most of their targets).

Also, try not to have disgruntled employees. A big company can't avoid a few bad apples, but smaller businesses can vet new hires better and treat existing employees less like disposable resources. If nothing else, the BSA isn't the only recourse for a pissed off ex employee to screw his former boss. I once worked at a restaurant that got hit with a surprise health inspection shortly after a round of layoffs - the people running the place treated employees and health code rules about equally well and almost got shut down as a result (I would have said good riddance if they had, but it would have meant looking for a new job myself).

I doubt we'd use them in general communication applications anyway, for the simple reason that what we have right now isn't broken, and thus doesn't need to be fixed. Hell, if we're still using telephone wires in 2012, good money is on there still being cell towers in 2112.

They mention submarine communications, and that upon reflection makes absolutely perfect sense to me. Subs are hard to reach with radio (baring ELF radio, which is a pain in the ass). Likewise, if we ever found it necessary to communicate with man made objects deep beneath the earth, neutrino communicators would make sense.

Space based communication is also mentioned, and that struck me as a little more suspect. Vacuum is the one environment where you can use practically anything to talk, and line of sight is rarely an issue when the objects in the way are tiny compared to the distances involved. How often do astronomical bodies get in the way, and wouldn't it be simpler to use a relay for the rare occasions when they do?

Second that. I've had bad bosses (and a few good ones), and I would never, ever trust the worst of them to be an employment reference.

If an employer tries to assert control by intimidation, to the effect of "quit and you'll never get a job again", they're bluffing. They know that the moment you turn in your notice, their control over your future goes out the window. They don't want you to realize this. Mostly because, if they're the sort who resorts to intimidation, they're also the sort who can't afford to rely on employee goodwill.

Most future employers will not expect to speak to all of your previous employers, and as long as you yourself aren't the problem, there will be other references you can use. Plus, if you apply for a job while holding an existing one, they generally won't insist on contacting your current employer, meaning the best time to jump ship from a toxic boss is while still employed.