Actually, in typical totalitarian societies, drug dealers usually make arrangements with the "authorities". The thing is that totalitarian societies care not one bit about the welfare of their citizens, they only keep up appearances. What then happens in addition is that everybody on drugs is known to the authorities and if any of them ever voices a critical thought, they will be publicly crucified. All that are behave like the sheep they are supposed to be are left alone.

So, no, expecting that crime against citizens is less in authoritarian societies is not realistic. The one exception are some theocracies and quasi-theocracies where they are true believers and even see thinking anything else than the church/party line is a capital offense. There you actually may get less crime. The cost is extreme, though.

Very much this. Polite and evil are not at all incompatible. Nice and evil are. The only thing surveillance will do is make hidden backstabbing more common.

"Near" keyword, logic constructs, all those nice features AltaVista (which was just a hardware-demo) had, and Google never managed. Google is borderline unusable these days and you strongly notice they do not care about good search but only about placing their adds and profiling you.

Apparently, sexism is alive and well. What these morons are trying to do is force people into directions that they do not want to go. I know a few women in tech and science, and they all say that it was hard, but not harder than for the men to succeed. That is equal opportunity and when it has been reached, nothing needs or should be done anymore. If individuals still decide more for a gender-typical career, that is their right.

And where did you miss the part that I was obviously talking about what was going off? Also, explosives used for this task do not go off when exposed to flame, they just burn harmlessly.

You can only get a high-pressure event if you finely distribute the fuel in the air before igniting it. (Traditional fuel-air explosives have one charge for distributing the fuel and one for detonating it. Other designs exist.) Everything else is just a flame.

"Hope" is never rational. It is an evolutionary mechanism that keeps people going in two circumstances: 1) Then they have grossly miss-estimated the actual risk to them (a very common problem, see for example all the morons that are afraid of terrorism but are willing to drive a car), and 2) when most are going to die, but a tiny number may be enough to keep the genetic group going.

What is rational is actual risk management with real numbers. Your 1 in 1 Billion is not relevant, as the change that you will be killed by a freak accident soon is already far, far higher and hence completely supersedes that small chance. As such it is not rational at all to even consider it a possibility, except in a theoretical sense. Life is messy, and assuming that very rare things will never, ever happen to you is the only rational course of action. Anything else opens you up to scams and prevents you from taking control of your situation. That is also called dysfunctional.

People are a) stupid and b) very much afraid of death. Hence they are easy marks for this scam.

The reality of things is that there is no suitable cryo-technology at this time that allows even reasonable-quality freezing of anything much larger than a single cell. Crystals will form, it takes far too long and storage temperatures may be far too high for long-term storage. Also, the person is dead at the time this is done which may well be to late for any recovery. The other problem is that for the foreseeable future, cryo-revival will be infeasible and after that exceptionally expensive. Why would anybody revive strongly damaged legally dead people when making new ones is so easy and there are already too many anyways? And then there is the little problem that anybody revived will be displaced in time, with nobody they knew still alive.

This whole thing is just one of the tributes the time-honored tradition of separating stupid people from their money.

Seriously, find out the facts before posting BS. DDR has single word access times (and that is what counts) around 100ns. These drives have around 10...100us latency. A factor of 100...1000 is nowhere near comparable. What you are apparently unaware of is that DDR does not use any command queuing and has really small blocks, while the SSD uses, for memory, very large blocks and it only gets the 1.2GB/s because it knows about a whole set of future requests before it has to deliver them. That does not work for RAM.

If you limit the SSD down to RAM-sized blocks and force it to deliver immediately, it gets completely trashed by DDR RAM, and that is the only sensible benchmark for random accesses to RAM.

Some people really have no clue and only can compare numbers. Pathetic.

Well, basically they are aiming to get some degree of re-use. If, say, 4 in 5 can eventually be recovered, that would be significant cost savings. Seems they still have quite a while to go, but that is actually normal at this stage.

There was zero actual explosives in there and there was a showy, but mostly harmless fuel combustion which does not qualify as "explosion". Seriously, they do this in the movies because it looks impressive and at the same time does very little actual damage.

Actually, any competent engineer can. You mistake "Hollywood" explosions for ones that do actual damage.