Dude, switch to a different strain or just toke once next time. The medical stuff is not like the ditch weed you smoked in high school.

Lets review the subject. (How quickly you forget.)

If you bothered to read my link, you would see that like Boeing, Dassault Aviation competed on the merits, and lost. Saab competed on the merits and won. Not that tough. I'm certain someone of your intelligence could have arrived at that if you would have tried.

Between your ears.

If I had grey windows, I'd get less heat from open blinds in the Winter. I'd have to burn more gas.

That said, tinted windows on office building are already the norm so it could work in that setting. It all comes down to cost. Also, what kind of innovative code compliance will you need for wiring from every window?

What's so wrong with installing linux on a real laptop?

Modern laptops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)

One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).

Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature. (I suspect the old Thinkpad is how far back they had to go to avoid it.)

You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.

If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.

Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):

Hardware-based AMT features include:

        Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.
        Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall on an open LAN to establish a secure communication tunnel (via AMT) back to the IT console. Examples of an open LAN include a wired laptop at home or at an SMB site that does not have a proxy server.
        Remote power up / power down / power cycle through encrypted WOL.
        Remote boot, via integrated device electronics redirect (IDE-R).
        Console redirection, via serial over LAN (SOL).
        Keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) over network.
        Hardware-based filters for monitoring packet headers in inbound and outbound network traffic for known threats (based on programmable timers), and for monitoring known / unknown threats based on time-based heuristics. Laptops and desktop PCs have filters to monitor packet headers. Desktop PCs have packet-header filters and time-based filters.
        Isolation circuitry (previously and unofficially called "circuit breaker" by Intel) to port-block, rate-limit, or fully isolate a PC that might be compromised or infected.
        Agent presence checking, via hardware-based, policy-based programmable timers. A "miss" generates an event; you can specify that the event generate an alert.
        OOB alerting.
        Persistent event log, stored in protected memory (not on the hard drive).
        Access (preboot) the PC's universal unique identifier (UUID).
        Access (preboot) hardware asset information, such as a component's manufacturer and model, which is updated every time the system goes through power-on self-test (POST).
        Access (preboot) to third-party data store (TPDS), a protected memory area that software vendors can use, in which to version information, .DAT files, and other information.
        Remote configuration options, including certificate-based zero-touch remote configuration, USB key configuration (light-touch), and manual configuration.
        Protected Audio/Video Pathway for playback protection of DRM-protected media.

Additional AMT features in laptop PCs

Laptops with AMT also include wireless technologies:

        Support for IEEE 802.11 a/g/n wireless protocols
        Cisco-compatible extensions for Voice over WLAN

This just happens to be one I'm familiar with. I don't know whether (or which) other chip makers (such as AMD) have similar "features" built in as well (though I'd be surprised if they didn't, since they want to sell into big companies, too).

No, the mechanism for continuing is already built in: transaction fees. In addition to the reward for solving a block, the miner gets a small fee (determined by the sender) for each transaction. Miners will continue mining even as the block rewards fall to zero because they'll get paid out of existing BTC for processing the transactions. Also, the difficulty doesn't increase exponentially on its own, it's determined by the time between blocks, which in turn depends on how how much computing capacity is thrown at the problem. Arguably the "carbon footprint" problem, if there is one, is due to the block reward being way too high right now. As transaction fees become more dominant they will eventually provide a more flexible way of encouraging just the right amount of mining necessary to secure the network.

Well, if you outlawed every form of argument a simpleton can misconstrue, you might as well cut your own tongue out.

Literature is great way of raising questions. It's a lousy way of *answering* them. You should never walk away from a book convinced of anything, whether it is science fiction, historical drama, or a Harlequin romance. That's because an author controls the domain of discourse in fiction. He creates the fiction world and as much of its history, natural science, and society as suits his purpose. He can produce a socialist utopia or a Galt's Gulch, whichever serves his story -- or his biases.

As for the science fiction fan's supposed knowledge of nature, I'd be suspicious of it. While it's true that sci-fi fans often have familiarity with physical science and technology that exceeds the general public, that's hardly a ringing endorsement. In my writing group, I recently critiqued a manuscript in which Shiite terrorists, working under a Wahhabist imam, build a lithium deuteride super-warhead and launch it on an ICBM into equatorial orbit to cause world-wide destruction of electronic equipment via EMP. Now virtually *every* aspect of this scenario is demonstrably *wrong*. When I pointed this out, the author's reaction was "It doesn't matter." Now there's something to be said for this. All he really needs is the set-up for his post-apocalyptic adventure, and it could just as well be magic and pixie dust as EMP and lithium deuteride. But I feel that as far as you explain anything, that explanation ought to hold water.

The thing about scientific literacy is that it isn't knowledge of a bunch of random, disconnected facts (e.g. lithium deuteride is used in thermonuclear warheads) as it is a capacity to figure things out, like whether it is remotely feasible to take out the entire world with EMP from a single warhead. Basic fact-finding and simple computation.

Given a constant currency supply, changes in the prices of goods are indicative of the relationship between the good's supply and demand. When the currency supply increases or decreases, however, that affects the prices of goods independently of their supply and demand, which has implications for comparing prices over time, making the currency less suitable as a unit of account. You can try to compensate with something like CPI, but the CPI only looks at changes in price and doesn't distinguish between changes due to currency inflation or deflation and changes due other factors which affect the entire economy, such as taxes or transportation costs. If you compare the price of a good from ten years ago with its price today, you can see whether it costs more or less, but even after adjusting based on the CPI you don't know whether production of the good is more or less efficient than it used to be. If the adjusted price increased by 5%, is that because it costs 5% more to make the same good or because it costs 5% less, but there's 10% more money in circulation? Without knowing the actual change in the supply of currency there's no way to be sure.

Would that mean that European countries would stop spying on the US? Will they start living up to their agreed upon NATO treaty spending requirements for their own defense? I assume the answer to both is no.

There is a Grippen variant designed for carrier use. Oddly enough it is called "Sea Grippen."

He has Google, FaceBook and Twitter on his list. In those three cases the product is You.

I had millions of "KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE" bumper stickers ready to ship. Now what?

The other digital systems are all centralized and subject to the whims of a particular service provider and/or the government it operates under, and to use a commodity like gold directly you need to actually store and transfer matter, not just bits. Bitcoin is the first system to combine the best of both worlds, a global and decentralized form of electronic money.

Sure, it couldn't keep up with the desire of every government ever to raise money by debasing its money supply. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the practice. It's good for the issuer of the money (until people lose trust and you get hyperdeflation); that doesn't mean it's good for the people who need to actually use the money.

I agree. There are plenty of units to go around. One thing I've always wondered, though, is why there are only eight digits. It's a 64-bit integer, right? That would allow for 2.1e18 units, or 21 million BTC to 18 significant digits, 11 of them after the decimal. What happened to the other three?