Disparity and poverty are very different. The US has quite high disparity, but the average wealth is quite high, so the poor in the US are in general not nearly as poor as the poor in 3rd world countries.

Disparity and poverty are both bad and both cause very serious problems, but they are different.

We went from the Wright brothers to landing men on the moon in less than 60 years. In the 45 years since we have gone from landing men on the moon to not being able to land men on the moon, and the US isn't even able to put men in orbit anymore.

"We could but we just don't want to" is a common excuse, generally used by those who can't do something.

It may be small as planetary bodies go, but is still really huge, its.surface area is similar to all of Asia. We are ridiculously far away from having a resource conflict on the moon. As far as environmental concerns - it already is an ugly ("sort of like a dirty beach") lifeless radioactive wasteland - what could we possibly do to make it worse?

If some country or agency really manages to use a substantial fraction of the 40 MILLION square kilometers of lunar surface, then as far as I'm concerned they can have it, I'm on their side.

In reality any attempt to regulate commercial or national exploitation of the moon is just a way for the countries that no longer have the will to explore space to discourage others from doing so.

Please god let this be a joke.

Can it encrypt files on a different type of system? If you backup from a PC to a linux server, if the PC is infected can it corrupt the files on the linux machine. (sorry if this is an ignorant question)

I generally have one addition layer of protection - the linux server has a backup that only has root write permissions, so the windows machines can't write to the backup disks (though I assume this can be hacked as well). Then I have offsite backups, but they are only updated monthly.

Both presumably. By collecting them they scare people. The judgement was $650K, even if that is above his net worth (it may or may not be), they may be able to garnish it from future wages. $650K is below the lifetime earnings of a lot of people.

This is not to say that the ruling isn't completely unreasonable.

Piracy is tricky. People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it. It is very difficult to track down individual pirates, so most get away and reasonable fines are not a deterrent. This leads to a sort of reverse-lottery where lots of people take a chance at disastrous penalties.

Part of the problem is that the public is very split on what is reasonable.

Some people believe ALL content should be free.

Some people believe that small payments for content are reasonable, but that some industries charge "unreasonable" rates for content.

Some people believe that the industry should make all content available at the same time everywhere at the same rates.

Some people do not mind paying the rates industry charge, but prefer to download for reasons of convenience, lack o tracking, lack of advertising, or others. (many of the people who pirate Game of Thrones would purchase the content if they were allowed to without creating a subscription that they know may be difficult to cancel).

Some people are happy with any arrangement that industry wants because the purchase is voluntary .

It would be interesting to see a survey of opinions on this and see how well public opinion matches the law.

There is some value in developing cyber weapons of mass destruction to used as a deterrent, or for retaliation, similar to the way that a number of countries maintain nuclear arsenals. The existence of a possible application does not necessarily imply that such weapons could or were developed, and if they do exist it does not mean that they will be deployed.

It is well within the job of the NSA to protect us against large scale cyber attacks. The problem here is that they are not longer trusted, so it is impossible to determine if the threat ever really existed, or if their countermeasures (whatever they were) were effective and didn't produce worse vulnerabilities.

Usually people turn lights on and off as they enter and leave rooms. The automatically puts the radiant heat where the people are. The light bulbs also produce a large part of their heat in the form of radiation which directly heats people, rather than a typical resistance heater which operates at a lower temperature and tends to heat the air by convection.

Its not a big difference, but overall I think the light bulbs are modestly more efficient at providing heat where it is needed.

Of course during times when heat is not needed, the extra heat is pure inefficiency, and may even need to be removed with air conditioning.

Heat pump type heaters are also probably more efficient at heating than light bulbs under the great majority of situations.

Its a very valid point. Incandescent light bulbs add heat directly where people are located. Even though there is significant efficiency loss going from primary fuels to electricity, it is possible that it is an overall win over gas heating, and certainly is better than electrical heating. (assuming no heat pumps)

A properly designed reactor will not go "boom" but an improperly designed, operated or fueled reactor can go pphhhhfftt. (the way Chernobyl did). You need enough delayed neutrons to make the reaction growth rate controllable and it is possible to get out of that regime and make a mess.

Nuclear power is not inherently dangerous, but it needs to be designed, built and operated by intelligent careful people. This is probably my only objection to small reactors - it seems like it will increase the chance that one of them is operated by morons.

In general though I'm very much in favor of nuclear power, large or small installations. we just need to be careful.

--- Joe Frisch

The US separates military and police for very good reasons. We give the military all sorts of devices (grenades, napalm, thermonuclear bombs) that we do not give to the police, but we prohibit using the military as law enforcement inside of the country.

I believe we should do the same with information. The military gathering information doesn't bother me much if it is ONLY used against external threats. What I mostly object to is military type information gathering used to enforce drug laws, copyright, child porn and other purely internal criminal issues.

Long ago Swiss bank accounts were protected from international scrutiny, and under those rules I would have trusted them with data. Since the accounts are not longer protected, I see no reason to think the data will be.

Maybe North Korea should do data storage - they never seem to give in to international pressure, but at the same time have to power to act on any data that they find.

Unless there are no legal streaming porn sites, it seems that there is no way for a user to know if the content that they are viewing / downloading is legal. It is the equivalent of being arrested for buying stolen property when you purchased it off the shelf at a standard retail store.

If the material were obviously stolen, things would be different, but that is not the case. The streaming sites present adds, and therefore have a plausible business model. It is also a reasonable business model that porn producers might release a small percentage of their material to streaming sites to act as advertising for the rest of their for-pay content.

There is a good engineering reason not to. Small aircraft performance is very sensitive to weight, a typical small airplane will only have a non-fuel payload of around 1/4of the total weight. The added weight to make the aircraft also function as a car (removable / pivot-able wings, road worthy tires, bumpers, transmission, etc) will rapidly cut into that weight and reduce the overall efficiency.

At the same time modern consumers have become accustomed to very well optimized car designs, the added weight / drag of the folded wings etc will reduce the automotive performance to a point where it is not competitive. There are also significant differences in the optimization of automotive and aircraft piston engines.

Then there are operational issues: Aircraft require a thorough pre-flight before operation, so there is a significant delay at the airport, aircraft are almost never a time saver for trips of less than an hour driving. Most modestly priced (1M$) aircraft have limited weather capability and have nothing like the reliability of cars for transportation.

The real killer though is that (at least in the US), most small aircraft pilots will drive to their home airport, transfer their luggage to their plane, fly to the destination and rent a car. Rental cars are generally delivered right to your aircraft when you park for a small fee. In this way the airplane is optimized for flying and for a similar price as much better performance than the hybrids.

There may be a few special purpose cases were a flying car will work, but with present day technology they are very rare. This is supported by the existence of roadable airplanes since the 50's, but none have seen significant production. The "flying cars" that do not have wings are not practical - not that none of them have actually flown, the pictures are just CGI. The power to weigh requirements are not possible with today's technology.

An idea can be judged on "creativity" and "practicality". A creative practical idea is a wonderful thing, but its also quite rare. Fairly often people use "creativity" to excuse not considering practical issues. Flying cars, stratospheric power generation kites, vacuum tube trains, etc. are all "creative" but are not currently practical. Some people, including me, get irritated when someone claiming to be creative effectively says: "here is my design for a flying car - just a few engineering details to work out", when in fact it is the engineering "details" that have prevented practical flying cars for the last 50 years.