Germany was spending far more on their military during that time than Britain was. If Britain and France had stepped in earlier, Germany would have been totally unprepared and the war would have ended quickly. Not to mention all of the horrors of the Holocaust that would have been prevented.

If Britain and France had managed to delay the war to "prepare" even more, say a few years, the Luftwaffe would have been dominated by jets, German ballistic missiles would have been longer range and more precise, and they might even have become a nuclear power. I really don't think this is the analogy you're looking for.

By now would be surprised if they don't have at least a couple Taepodong 2s that have at least a fair chance of a successful flight. They're not impressive as far as ICBMs go, but they are ICBMs.

Propaganda campaign by who? I think Singer needs to check his haughtiness at the door:

the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this."

Except, of course, for the fact that the prime suspect is the hand-picked hacker squad of the Hollywood-obsessed leader of a nuclear armed state with ICBMs, whose family's Hollywood obsession has gone to such extremes in the past as kidnapping filmmakers and forcing at them at gunpoint to make movies for them. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this.

Well, at least Russians won't freeze to death this winter. They can use wheelbarrows full of rubles to insulate their homes. ;)

We are living in a world where the west is increasingly persecuting people for ideas.

There's nothing new about this. If you look at history, you'll see things like this happening over and over. Look at how Rome treated Christians, look at the Spanish Inquisition and their expulsion of Jews, look at the Holocaust, look at Stalin's Great Purge. For that matter, remember that the Pilgrims weren't interested in letting everybody worship they way they wanted, they were interested in creating a colony where everybody had to worship the way the Pilgrims said they should. Up until recently, the US has been an exception to the general trend of mankind to punish anybody who doesn't think the same way as the ruler does, but I'm afraid that this is coming to an end. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight the trend, just that we shouldn't fool ourselves by thinking that this is something new in the world, because it isn't.

That's not all that different from how he got started with Tesla. He had no intention of starting a car company (he already had SpaceX), he just wanted AC Propulsion to build him a copy of their t-zero - but they had no interest, even for a small fortune. But then they pointed him to this guy named Martin Eberhard who had this wild idea to commercialize the t-zero's tech base on a Lotus Elise body and was looking for funding... and thus Tesla was born.

I have my own website, but it's just a vanity site. Why do I need to get a certificate and use https?

g++ supports it with __restrict__. And if you're writing high performance code but not having support for the features of modern compilers, you're an idiot. In appropriate situations, the performance difference for using restrict or not is huge. Array-heavy tasks like image processing often get a 2-fold or more benefit with using restrict. There's very few places in the coding word where a single keyword can raise your performance that much.

And examples of these which could plausibly be on Titan are....?

There's not much in nature that's that light.

So you think massive yachts, ridiculous-priced art/jewelry purchases, palatial estates, gold-plated toilets and the like are a better use of money?

Trust me, I'd have a LOT more fun with a giant rocket than I would with a gold toilet.

I'll begin by stating that I I don't support such a mission, as I prefer robotic exploration. But this proposal isn't as extreme as it may sound - it's probably a heck of a lot easier than landing on a planet and taking off. It's only 640 m/s from earth escape to Venus (3/5ths that of Mars). Transit time is less and launch windows a lot more frequent. Venus offers very easy aerocapture. You don't have to deal with the randomness of the surface - your "landing" is a lot more forgiving. Your habitat is probably simpler, not having to deal with a surface (although there's a few potential complications that need to be studied, such as storms, and I don know the radiation level at the desired altitude). Keeping it aloft is easy - even normal earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Solar energy arriving at Venus is double that of Earth. Nearly earth's gravity eliminates a lot of the uncertanties about skeletal and muscular wasting.

One of the neat things is that a person could potentially step outside without any sort of special suit, just an oxygen mask. It's a "maybe", though, as there's a few complicating factors. It's 37C (100F) at the same sort of heights that it's about 600mb; for US analogies, it's Phoenix temperatures at Mount Whitney air pressures (lower or higher for both, depending on your exact altitude - you can choose). So it's not a perfect match - but probably tolerable. But there's two potential complicating gases: SO2/sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide. Breathing them is right out, but even long-term (hours at a time) skin exposure might be problematic at the given concentrations; it's not certain whether at these altitudes they'd be prohibitive. They would however make eye protection a must at the very least, the eyes are more sensitive to both CO and SO2 than the skin.

Manned or not, the main advantage of a Venus blimp would be the lower altitude it would provide to scientific equipment versus satellites. So you'll get a lot more information on the atmosphere, which could help answer questions about Venus's evolution (and how other worlds in other systems might be). You'll get higher resolution radar imaging of the surface. You simplify to some extent sample return missions from the surface, as each sample collection doesn't have to be a self contained return mission. Etc.

One thing on Venus I'd love to see studied more is the super-reflective radar surfaces. It's now believed to be due to a "galena snow", snow made of shiny, electrically conductive lead sulfide. I'd really love to know more about the surface minerology of Venus in general.

I'm not talking about ideals, or tourism, or saving the world, or finding anything "up there", or anything of that nature (did you even read what I wrote?). I'm talking about the sheer awesomeness of, at your whim, shooting up a 1500 tonne rocket into orbit then landing it on an automated oceanic platform. It's like playing Kerbal with a real-life 70-meter tall rocket. Why don't more billionaires do stuff like that if only just for the fun of it?

But clearly you have an axe to grind against something for some reason, so I'll let you get back to that wheel.

Why don't more billionaires do stuff like this?

I'm not saying do it "for the benefit of humanity", or even "for a profit". Just simply.... if you have billions of dollars, and you want to spend it on something, what can you possibly spend it on that wins in a sheer awesomeness category as "shooting a gigantic rocket up into orbit and then landing it on a robot boat in the middle of the ocean"? That's like a freaking video game, played with 1500 tonnes of aluminum and highly combustible fuel.

Back in the day, Dr. Dobbs was giving the world invaluable stuff like Mode X. Your average programmer had to be a lot more connected with the hardware, and working with the hardware was somewhat of a black art. Nowadays there's still some black art stuff out there for getting good performance (even a lot of simple, important stuff is inexplicably obscure... I bet you that 90% of C/C++ programmers don't even know what the restrict keyword does, for example), and you still see the occasional inner loop of some high performance code use assembly, but that's not the general case.

Usually most aging-preventing discoveries cause cancer. For example, the p21 knockout mice that gained almost salamander-like regeneration also gained a high tumor rate. Usually processes in your body involving the stopping of growth and areas dying off are things that help prevent cancer from forming or growing.