No, you must be thinking of 1970's stuff. Integrated circuits and surface-mounted components were mainstream by late 1980's.

We've sent more spacecraft to Mars than any other planet. We've had space stations with sustained life-support environments for quite a while. The Apollo stuff on the other hand started pretty much from scratch as far as space-faring goes.

Yes, but it was all-new tech back then. It's not so much about science and research anymore, just about finance and engineering to pull this off.

Not to mention, in Asimov's world, robots were self-aware.

You're letting your imagination get away from you. If you are an insurance company, and a patient presents to you with a potential in $500K+ in medical expenses, you'd want to unbook that risk as quickly and as affordably as possible.

Whatever naked force the people bring to bear through their government, representative or badly so, overrules just about everything. This belief in "natural rights" is a fantasy, unfortunately. You have no more rights than your and your neighbors can enforce with locally applied military power, and have none at all to the degree you fail to do so. Believing in these "natural right" is about as fantastic as believing in unicorns. A pleasant fantasy, perhaps, but only that. "God is on my side" would have no more appeal than this fiction.

> Again, the government didn't GRANT you the rights listed in the first amendment

Irrelevant. The Constitution is a document which restrains the power of the Federal Government. Your "rights" as you otherwise call them out are not otherwise meaningful.

I have to say, you rather got him there.

> The part where you throw him in jail afterwards until he hand them over seems a little much.

As a bit of an aside, if you get to the end of a legal proceeding in the united states, and a judge thence ORDERS you to a specific course of action, if you directly defy this judge and say that you will not comply, they have the legal right--and have been known to exercise their legal right--to throw you in jail indefinitely until you comply. While this may seem outrageous at first blush, I don't really think we can have any kind of effective society at all in a world where the law has no power.

The "technical details" that I was ignoring were not in your favor. Which is to say, and to wit: the Federal Reserve has not been "injecting money," they have been replacing a certain type of reserve holding with another. While it's true that this sort of holding carries a potential inflationary risk, two observations apply: 1) There affirmatively has been no noteworthy inflation, and 2) should the risk begin to realize itself, the Fed is not without instruments to reign said inflation in. It's a long conversation. As for saying that I should "look up how things actually work," you could stand to benefit considerably from this yourself.

> You should look up "Quantitative Easing" as well. The Federal Reserve has been injecting money into...

That's not _exactly_ what has been happening. Forgetting the technical details on this for the moment, what's undeniably true is that there actually has not been any "demolishing of value" (inflation of any noteworthy significance at all) yet. If you believe that there will be, that's your prerogative, however I will note with some irony that this places you affirmatively into the bucket the OP is wondering about, and that is the climate of fear. Fear, this case, which is obviously yours.

The closest thing you have to a structured reality check on this situation is a court of law. The judgment reflects the opinion of the jury, and typically the judge, on the truth of the matter. These people have been engaged to determine that using the best and most fair methods available. None of the press have been so engaged. Since this has now survived a court of appeals, we can safely say, to the degree it is possible to say, that Terry Childs is GUILTY.

Yeah. If an employee of mine "refused to hand over the password" to a system for which I had fiscal responsibility, I suspect he'd be terminated so fast not even security would let him empty out his cube.

Your root the devices, which takes a competent networking person (these devices were networking devices), albeit it's disruptive if the network isn't designed just right.

Because there's already an awesome open-source Mach kernel out there: XNU, and it ships with most Apple devices.