C-3PO had his memory erased. Was he still the same droid after that?

Though since his function was to be an interpreter for a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of the Empire, his memory was probably wiped all the time and he just didn't know.

Both have big APIs.

If the author didn't realize 'coin' was already an existing word, I'm having trouble taking the rest of his insights seriously.

Vous attendez bientôt la visite de la Gendarmerie linquistique canadienne. On sera courtois mais dur. Vous pourriez être assujetti à une amende de 10 $ américains.

There will be certain cases - a lot of medical data, for example - where gender truly is important.

But in a lot of cases, you could reasonably have a person simply refuse to provide the information in the first place, or even just need a temporary value if gender is unknown at the time of record creation. A serious database has to anticipate those cases; this is not a big step.

And a database which needs gender for some legitimate medical purpose already needs to deal with special cases.

(And that's all without worrying about the question of whether those cases are lifestyle choices, genuine metabolic disorders, or something else entirely - the technology does not care about attitudes.)

The decline of the Western Rome Empire spanned generations - there is simply no way to piece together cause and effect relationships with everything happening at the same time over the course of that time period.

Personally, my guess is that after a thousand years of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, military coups, invasions, and civil wars, their luck just finally ran out.

"treated like crap by a large portion of society" or not, they voluntarily agreed to the process and they are the ones asking for an update to a record in some database.

A whole lot of prying into someone's medical history would be unreasonable, but some explanation is in order, same as, say, a correction to date of birth.

Now, we don't know for fact that the politicians are wrong on this.

The solution, obviously, is to fully, publicly, and impartially investigate everything that Snowden is claiming. And make sure the politicians get full credit for suggesting the idea.

Feature, not a bug.

The black hole would be so small that inside a planet full of matter would, from its perspective, mean being in the middle of mostly empty space.

I mean, people altering their brains with drugs has never had any adverse medical or legal consequences, right?

That makes so much sense...

On the other hand travelling to the New World wasn't profitable the first voyage either.

Snowden is from the US, so, yes.

It's hard to see how there's anything useful in sending disjointed messages without at least providing a primer on English or whichever Earth language the messages are going to be in. Something like transmitting all of Wikipedia and Project Gutenburg so there's a big enough sample of the language so they have a chance of deciphering it.

There are already the equivalents of pallets and containers for air freight. Maybe we just need to make a sort of pallet for passenger seating, and transfer it on to the aeroplane, the way air freight containers transfer from trucks to aeroplanes.

Otherwise the aircraft is transporting a lot of weight for no particularly good reason, especially if it turns out the rail gauge at the destination is different.