It's "lodestone", you infidel. And they aren't gems, either. Did you sleep through earth science?

The framework is fine. The linker isn't designed to put objects this size on the heap. Goddamned Insmell smegma registers.

Nah, those of us that think don't hang out in earthquake zones.

rimshot

they risk releasing biomechanoid killing machines that will destroy all of humanity.

Too late, already done. They're called "televisions." They kill the mind first.

There is a bottom, you heretic. It's a Yurtle.

These tunneling machines are not meant to be stopped, and consequently do not have a "reverse".

We engineer types call that "a failure of vision."

So because to our knowledge nobody has ever sold a rogue nuclear weapon to someone in the past that means it will never happen in the future?

No, it probably won't happen in the future, either. There are huge technical hurdles, most likely insurmountable.

But I'll tell you something else: Say it happens. Some big city somewhere goes up in a mushroom cloud. It still won't knock civilization out. There are billions of people on the planet, hundreds of societies, and the complete destruction of a city or two -- regardless of how -- won't mean squat in the long run to civilization at large. As we have already seen many times in the last hundred years, examples that come right to mind include Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Beirut, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to name a few. The whole "terrorists might get a nuke and end civilization" meme is pure hysteria, nothing more.

And you can leave out the government propaganda nonsense - I don't believe in government any more than you do.

What are you talking about? Did I say I "didn't believe in" government? No, I didn't say anything of the kind. Please try to keep the strawman assembly to a minimum. Let me explain my previous post in just a few short words: Your thesis about nukes ending civilization is utter nonsense; what you ought to be concerned with is the actual threat, which is the present government out of control. None of which is propaganda: it's straight up fact. Also, just as an aside, I consider government an absolute necessity. Get it now?

Standards have never been as high as I'd like - typos and grammatical errors abound in articles - but noospeek is definitely a new low. I would suggest sacking the current editors and replacing them with Grumpy Cat and Happy Cat.

It is not only valid but required, so although your thoughts are appreciated, they are nonetheless wrong.

Actually, archaeology shows that only some societies are greedy. It happens that those are the societies that dominate, but that is a consequence of short term gains being militarily better than long term gains, in early history. You were very vulnerable back then and even small losses had large impacts.

Ultimately, though, it means that humans are not compelled to be a bunch of arrogant twits. At the very worst, some societies may have a genetic propensity for it, but that dictates nothing. Even if it did, sending the right-wingers to Mars (or, better, Venus) and using gene therapy or eugenics to reduce (not eliminate, that would be bad) violent tendencies should be sufficient.

The Pledge is an affront to all that school stands for. Unthinking obedience simply isn't compatible with intellectual growth or rational questioning. Obedience to a nation is also incompatible with the international semi-borderless worlds of science and art. Neither paints nor positrons have any respect for local laws or political boundaries. Boundaries exist to maximize the benefits within and minimize contagion from flawed systems, the notion of "loyalty" to any standard is relatively modern as society goes and has been a failure from start to, well, it hasn't finished yet but it's time for philosophers to stop poking at their navels and start thinking about metanations and paranations, how to draw on what has always worked (cooperation across strengths) to derive a notion that is functional, rational, sane and likely to (as an early Megadeth noted) work this time.

Not really. The NSA costs more to run than the national debt. Closing it would be one of the most cost-effective ways to save the nation from bankruptcy. Not that the US is anywhere near close. It will be, if it continues to not spend on the arts and sciences, but economies can remain entirely stable when running 110% of GDP, at least for a few years. Nations aren't like personal bank accounts and you cannot run economies as if they were private budgets.

At this point, the NSA has cost the economy not only its own expenses but billions in international trade (plus interest spanning decades), but can produce no evidence of any benefits. Skipjack is broken, as was SHA-0 (the NSA version of the algorithm). Cryptologists ignored Skipjack once it was determined to be faulty and spent a fair bit of time fixing SHA. These are additional costs, created almost certainly as a result of deliberate breakage by the NSA (it's either that or they're incompetent, take your pick).

When you have something very expensive with no direct or indirect return, you generally term it a failure. When something fails on that scale when your economy has been crippled by neocons and kept defunct by Tea Partiers, the sound fiscal move is to cut losses. When a ship is struggling to stay afloat, you dump the deadweight. The NSA is deadweight until or unless it can show value for money.

It only takes one wealthy wackjob to buy a chemical or nuclear weapon and use it to kill millions of people.

No, it also takes a seller of such weapons. And there aren't any, or we'd have been sweeping up the remains of some city, political center, or major chunk of infrastructure by now. The whole "terrorists and nuclear weapons" is a total mind job done on you and yours by your government. One thing to to keep in mind: Nukes are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and pretty damned difficult to lose track of.

Civilization isn't likely to die due to nuclear weapons. We've set off well over a thousand of them already, and there's no particular notable effects other than the low hum of hysteria at the intersection of the set of the ill-informed and the paranoid.

Also, Chemical weapons are a lot less "mass" than nukes are, barring very sophisticated delivery systems, which again, aren't available to religious tools. Bacterial weapons are vaguely possible (although still very, very technical), but incorporate the downside of most likely eventually killing everyone everywhere instead of just the target(s), and so not even your average superstition-addled dingbat seriously considers them.

If you are a US citizen, If you want to worry about civilization, you should be worrying about the decay of our government from one authorized by the constitution into a form exclusively controlled by corporate and political groups. Because unlike the "nuclear threat", said decay is real and ongoing and has already screwed things up immensely: almost 100% loss of manufacturing capacity and so also jobs, crippling inflation, loss of citizen's rights, usurpation of article five powers by the judiciary, illegal legislation that spans almost the entire bill of rights to ex post facto laws to the complete inversion of the commerce clause, promulgation of multiple very expensive, ultimately useless wars... the problem isn't terrorists. The problem is our federal government. The whole terrorist thing is to keep the citizens looking the wrong way.

The NSA is doing everything it can to save your ass.

No. US citizens are not under any real threat, either short term or long -- at least, no threat that isn't in the end posed by our government itself. What the NSA is doing is attempting to shore up the government, which, frankly, I'm beginning to feel would be better off being replaced by people, almost *any* group of people, who simply understand that it is not acceptable to break one's oath, and that the oath to the constitution is designed to, and should, ultimately govern all of our legislation.

The people who say that obviously don't know enough about themselves.

With a USC so dense that even the feds themselves admit they have no way of knowing everything they've criminalized.