Ding ding, zoom! Mr. Saturn font!

To take an entire country "off the internet" would require the cooperation of every country they're peering with. I don't know the details of China's network infrastructure, but I'm willing to bet they have direct connections to quite a few countries. It would be much easier for whichever country is being targeted to have their ISPs blackhole everything coming from China. But then you start risking a trade war scenario. The United States, as you may know, has a particularly large amount of trade with China. Not just physical goods going back and forth, but companies with branches in both countries, and online/remote services of all kinds. If email and web contact between the US and China got broken, there would be major disruption to all sorts of businesses. Neither side wants that. GitHub going down for a few days is nothing compared to the disruption that closing all US-China data exchange would cause.

That's only 50% misleading.

The feds have written policies now about not enforcing those laws in states that have legalized. "But they said they wouldn't" probably won't hold up in court, but the average stoner doesn't need to worry about the feds.

Right, smoking bud is so much nicer and less damaging. I hear you don't even have to worry about the legal issues in some states anymore.

Some games like Morrowind and SimCity 4, you could just delete the video files. This also saved a significant amount of space. To this day my archival copies of both of those games are ZIP files of the game folder after installing the desired expansions and mods, and ripping out the intro videos. (And the nocd patches of course.) The games are almost "portable" like that, in that you can just copy the folder to a new computer and run it. I think the latter game has a couple of registry entris in a .reg file, that's it as far as installation goes.

Probably; it's California.

This type of thing is de facto legal as a final sentence. Far more restrictive travel bans are commonplace in certain situations, such as when someone is sentenced to probation. It's usually laid out in terms like "You are not allowed to leave the State of X, and must notify the court if you plan to travel outside of County Y". That's a lot more restrictive than banning a Floridian from traveling within D.C.

CoD and FIFA mentioned in the same breath... I never thought I'd see the day.

Do you have a source for that? Certainly there are narcs, but I've never heard of any of them enrolling in high schools undercover. Cops threatening high school kids who got caught anyway to cough up some names, sure. But when they invest an undercover agent (= lots of money), it's going to be for a big investigation, not to find out which high school kid sold a dimebag to which other high school kid.

Maybe the terrorists aren't as fixated on planes as the westerners are after 9/11? I've noticed that when you add "...on a plane" or "...at an airport" to things that people otherwise wouldn't care about, suddenly it's a huge issue. While there are certainly special considerations that need to be made for safety in the context of air travel, there's many easier ways for terrorists to make a statement and kill a bunch of people. Fill a U-Haul with a couple tons of explosive. Fill smaller containers with explosive and distribute them around a city. Walk into a crowd and open fire. Let out poisonous gas in a subway or other enclosed space. Car bombs in particular happen on an almost monthly basis in the middle east, and there have been quite a few high-profile terrorist attacks in the west since 9/11, none of them have involved planes. Boston bombing, Madrid bombing, London bombing, Charlie Hebdo, Ft. Hood. Terrorists aren't looking at planes.

I'm with you in doubting that you could get hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a single exchange. But it's valuable enough for the darknet drug dealers to rely on. There are several exchanges that you could pull USD out of, so that adds a multiplier. There are also goods you can buy directly with BTC, computer equipment and Tesla cars at least, maybe more that I'm unaware of.

If you know your virtual and meatspace markets well enough, you can also make "withdrawals" from your BTC wallet by buying and selling drugs, quintupling or more the "face value" of your BTC on a legal exchange. This, of course, involves significant risk.

The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.

Usually I'm against nanny-stating, but in this case there is a clear and immediate problem, and there is a quick way to mitigate it. What I hope will happen is that this will (1) put more focus on pollution in France, and (2) teach the people there alternate ways to go about their day that won't pump gobs of pollution into the air.

Not to mention, India's got a few nukes of their own. I don't know if they have a delivery system that will work after a first strike though.