You are young BlueCoder and there is nothing wrong with that. A society needs to be bound by rules but not straightjacketed by them. I don't want my car automatically slowing down when driving my injured children to the hospital. No one is perfect and circumstances alter cases. Society needs enough slop to stop too much friction. Make it to rigid and it breaks. Rigid people are seldom sane and happy.

Good luck taking out the 911 dispatch system because it is hackable or subject to social engineering. Swatting for example. That would be a good reason for shutting the whole system down?

You would be better off mandating driverless cars in cities on the basis of congestion.

You are mistaken.

You are also abusive. I would say "have a nice life" but I know that will not be so unless you change markedly.

Well, I understood the thread to be about pr0n and other things. More particularly, it was about how you would recover your digital property if you were to lose and partly recover your memory.

I have nothing on any hard disk nor any memory stick (or its ilk) that I am ashamed of. I am a human being (I figured that out long ago) and not perfect. But I actually do not have anything I feel I need to hide. My kids figured out my fetishes in their teens, nothing to hide there. I would say that there would be more people in my situation than yours. Anyway it is irrelevant.

The point that you are failing to see is that setting up a shared secret is trivial, even if it is unknown to the parties that they have it. And that is the only point I have to make.

Well, the only thing I have that might remotely be classified as pr0n would be my personal sketches as I like to draw nudes. There are no other images. Since they are my personal artistic output they might have some value to my family and perhaps not. None are obscene anyway.

But the split/shared secret is easy to set up. Trivial in fact. I am not sure why you think it is "extensive".

Strange. I never thought about "forgetting". But my passwords and records will be recoverable after my death by means of a divided secret and just for kicks, solving a puzzle.

Tell me, A.C., why do you think there is a problem?

This is why I find religion sick, What sort of evil mind came up with concept of original sin? I guess that is the only way to justify the evils that happen to children. "There is no such thing as an innocent child". I find anyones acceptance of this to be evil and unfit to associate with.

Bzzzt! The people around you, the people you are most likely to meet carry many of the same genes you do. It is not as black and white as you claim. The notion you put forward is, to the best of my knowledge, counter to current theory.

Bzzz! Again. Many cultures putlet. I may be sixty-five but that makes what life I have left even more valuable to me. Of course it may mean nothing to you.

My response to your third paragraph is an an uncategorised "it depends". John Donne may have been a god-botherer but he had it right when he said that no man was an island. There are always other people involved. I have lost a lot of friends to a permanent solution to a temporary problem. And problems people think are permanent are not always so. While I do agree with the right to die there has to be a lot more to it than someone saying "I'm done". It cannot be unregulated.

Atmospheric diffraction used to be far more serious on earthly telescopes than it is now due to correction mechanisms and software. The flickering of stars due to atmospheric vagaries can be almost entirely eliminated. You want to bet on the fact that a lot of money has not been put into making that go the other way?

Atmospheric attenuation should not be a big issue. The point of having a ground based laser system is that you can pump a lot of power into either a flash strike or a persistent strike. Orbit to orbit? How much power can a satellite pack? I honestly do not know.

However, as we do not know it was a laser it is moot at this point.

I do not know. I am not putting forward any theory. Actually, reading back, I did. But I mentioned it only as a possibility. I am certainly not wedded to it

Whatever caused it caused it. That is the only thing I am certain of. People seem to think I favour a particular theory. I do not, Sorry to give any other impression.

Perhaps, perhaps not. An active working public satellite, well I doubt it. An old worthless, past its busby date satellite, maybe.

But there are lots of candidates besides China.

But I am not making a claim for either cause or villain. We do not know enough and probably never will.

This was a discussion about the use of Occam's Razor. How is your reply relevant?

There is no claim from me that it was or was not at battery failure, that it was or was not an energy weapon.

But if were trying to send a message I would not be taking something out that was provocatively useful and expensive. That might get a reply that I don't want. You do not take out a person's (state, country, empire) assets, you demonstrate the capability to take them out. It is a good deal less provative and sends you message more clearly.