I always consider the geography when looking for a house. River valley, probably a flood plain. Dense bush nearby, forest fire risk. Steep slopes, too prone to landslides. Silt bed in an earthquake zone, well, let's just say that I want a chance of survival. The thing is, after taking out the crazy risks, there are still plenty of places to live.

Problem is, homeowners want something scenic. Developers want something cheap to build upon. City planners are more concerned about tax revenues. If they want to accept the risks, fine. It's their homes and their lives.

Just don't make the wiser folks pay for it when the disasters ultimately strike.

I disagree with the ban, but anyone who frames this as a question of freedom is fooling themselves. These major corporations put huge amounts of money into influencing consumers to buy more. In the case of carbonated sugar water, it should be obvious why: the restaurant's major expense is labour. Selling a large instead of a small doesn't increase the cost of labour, but it does increase the revenues (with a minor increase in the cost of materials).

So the government is really stepping up to say that it is protecting us from the corporations. It isn't really stepping up to protect us from ourselves.

I would argue that the problem is that many men don't know how to behave respectfully around women. That is a result of many factors: pop culture (games, porn, television, music, etc.), parenting, and the failure to establish civil social norms in a society where all genders are considered equal.

I am fairly certain that a lot of good work has been done by the SETI Institute in terms of science (e.g. consistent monitoring of parts of the RF spectrum and identifying new sources) and engineering (e.g. signal processing and distributed computing). Of course, I would also love to find an extraterrestrial funding.

But the Intelligent Funding has never been with SETI. When SETI started, we did not even know if extrasolar planets existed. Smart money would say that they did, since the abundance of stars in our galaxy alone puts the odds in favour of there being an awful lot of planets out there, but we only had a rough idea of how planetary systems formed based upon a sample of one. That left major gaps in our knowledge, such as the probability of finding a planet around any given star and what the composition of those planets would be. Even our present knowledge of extrasolar planets is skewed because of observational limitations.

There remain many limitations to the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Searching for weak signals is challenging even if you knew what to look for and where to look. Because of that, I believe that the Intelligent Funding should be directed towards astronomical research that would lay down a foundation for a real SETI in the future. This would be things like finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, creating better models of star formation (particularly with respect to the protoplanetary disc), and getting a better handle on the chemistry of the objects that we are observing.

The SETI Institute does solicit private funding. There also is nothing preventing private projects from popping up to monitor radio signals. Please inform yourself, rather than spewing inaccurate ideology.

By refusing him the privilege to set on American soil, his business opportunities will be diminished. Now maybe Saverin doesn't care, since he has taken enough money out of the economy that he doesn't have to worry about working ever again.

Plenty of countries were interested in censorship while regulating the RF spectrum, particularly things like internationl broadcast bands. Yet even short range transmissions can be an issue. Remember the iron curtain? Often times the only thing separating the laws of one country was a line on a map.

Part of the reason to take this to an international body is to hash things out in a way that is acceptable to member nations. Note, acceptable doesn't mean it mirrors the interests of those nations. It simply means that it is something they can live with.

The Internet is an international medium that needs international agreements in order to operate. Just because there are international agreements in place doesn't mean that it will be reduced to the lowest common denominator either. Radio and telephone systems are prime examples of this. (The governance isn't perfect, but it works.)

There seems to be this mentality that advertising is equally valuable regardless of how much is slammed in the face of consumers. Since more ads mean more money, we've ended up with a situation where consumers are saturated by advertising. Sometimes they tune out mentally, but sometimes they cut it out literally. I'm sorry TV networks, but you created the environment where this happens so it is your fault. Don't blame other people for your problems.

Different wavelengths of IR have different properties. Indeed the BBC article notes: "as terahertz waves penetrate many materials as effectively as X-rays".