I tend to start twitching a little whenever our neighborhood geek starts talking long and loudly about his "plausible deniability."

The denial is there, in spades. I'll give him that.

The plausible, not so much.

Expected: That the owners of no-ip should continue to make their own profits from advertising revenue, and a bunch of legitimate users should continue to get free dyndns service, and the benefit to these two groups comes at the expense of a wider pool of internet users who suffer from malware (and at the expense of unpaid volunteers to police no-ip since they're not spending enough resources to do it effectively themselves).

Does that sound like a fair trade to you? Not to me. Count me out.

I think No-ip sound very shady...

April 2013: the OpenDNS blog reported that no-ip was the second most popular dynamic-DNS site for malicious software. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0... -- No-IP responded that they have a very strict abuse "policy", and they want other people to help by reporting violations of the TOS to them. They also scan daily and filter by keyword. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0...

February 2014, the Cisco blog reported that no-ip had risen to be the worst offender: http://blogs.cisco.com/securit... -- No-ip again responded that they have a strict abuse policy, and they want other people to report violations of the TOS to them, and they scan daily and filter by keyword. http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/...

Were no-ip doing a good enough job at policing themselves? It doesn't sound like it to me, not at all. It sounds like they have a decent "policy" but don't go out of their way to enforce it, their daily manual scans aren't up to what's needed, their keyword filters are easily bypassed. They can sound hurt all they want that OpenDNS and Cisco and Microsoft wrote public blogs or took action rather than reporting the individual offenders to No-IP first. But the fact that No-IP does so badly, and got worse, shows they weren't taking adequate action themselves.

You say they're "very responsive" to reports of abuse. But honestly, if their strategy for combating abuse rests SO HEAVILY upon volunteers to report abuse, and their strategy hasn't been working so far, then they have a bad business model.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but in an entirely unrelated division (I'm on the VB/C# compiler team).

This truly is the crappiest list I've seen, and I have seen crappy lists. Creating a 'cool' site like Quora somehow gets you on that list, so does answering StackOverflow questions. I guess you either have to create websites or have Google on your resume to be on that list.

How about creating 2 of the most successful and important operating systems the world has ever seen ? Namely, VMS and Windows NT.

Oh yeah, David Cutler for example isn't on that list, I guess he should have stuck to creating websites in PHP...

Leslie Lamport anyone ? Oh no, he didn't work on some crappy website either, doesn't count !

Oh, poor baby.

Often but not always ---

The truth is that the cemetery association will have the final say here --- and it won't give an inch until DC and their lawyers sign off on this. Probably not even then.

If I understand the idea correctly, isn't it true that all the instrumentation on board is to be integrated into this one big window?

Science Fiction is not prior art.

Prior art implies that almost all of the practical problems that stand in the way of progress have already been solved. That the path ahead lies clear.

The concept is quite carefully worked out in Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children." 1941, 1958.

The Enterprise bridge is a regression.

The New Frontiers had no mechanical switches or controls of any kind and none that could be triggered accidentally --- which is one-up on the touch screens of ST:TNG. The engineers who designed Heinlein's generation ships understood trigger guards, low voltage wiring, fuses, circuit breakers and so on.

And when you're flying at night and can't see anything out the windows -- what then?

And when you're flying in clouds, or taking off in thick fog, and can't see anything through the windows -- what then?

Possession of child pornography is not a "thought crime."

It's both a pity and a blessing that Orwell did not live long enough to see how the geek would misunderstand, twist and distort what he had to say,

New Zealand isn't a country.

It is a Hollywood back lot complete with tour guides. Film and TV Theme Tours

With a population of 4 million, New Zealand's value as a media market is less than 1/4 that of metropolitan New York City.

and the best writing, performance, and production values of any television series currently on air. List of awards and nominations received by Game of Thrones

then what are we to make of a man like Stephen Hawking, who defies the geek's standard of physical perfection?

Then don't mount a security camera in your bathroom.

Unless you have a legally defensible reason for doing so, such as the care of a physically frail parent or grandparent.

The geek is forever looking for some safe haven.

I don't know where you will find one when the stakes are high enough.

I do know I'm not going to be looking eight to twelve thousand miles from home for a KIm Dotcom to protect my interests.