foreigners, non native speakers

Maybe you could use JNI for that, in certain very specialized cases, but if you write parts of your application in C/JNI you run the risk of just combining Java's weaknesses (memory, performance) with C's weaknesses (error prone). A nullpointer in a native code part of your application will unceremoniously crash your JVM and everything running in it.

JNI is often used for things that can only be done in native code. An example I can think of are atomic compare and swap operations in the java.util.concurrent package. These are implemented via a JNI method essentially calling just one machine instruction (on Intel, it may be a hand full on some architectures). Yes, this is for performance reasons - an atomic compare&swap is faster that using locks, not because native code runs faster but because it's the only efficient way to implement it.

Someone boasted that with some clever shopping around, he was now only spending some $60 a month on copays for his proton pump inhibitor prescriptions, meaning his insurance was covering the other $540 a month. This is not a life saving experimental cancer drug, but something to prevent heart burn. Cross any border, and you would have been paying 1/10th of that or less, which the insurance wouldn't mind covering 100%. I don't know what caused health care in the US to become so expensive, but it's clear that at these inflated costs, a system that covers 100% of the health care for everyone is going to be an unrealistic goal. Before people respond with the cliche about the highest quality care money can buy: it's the exact same, or worse care than in other OECD countries, that you simply spend more money on. Obamacare opponents who believe the quality of health care in places like France, Switzerland, Australia etc is poor are deluding themselves.

I'm not saying this foreign country I'm living in is better. It's not, it's such a dump that the sun refuses to shine on it, but the health care is of a quality only millionaires could afford in the states. The waiting lists are shorter than in the states, it's easier to get treatments approved: you and your doctor decide, not the insurance, you get the same prescriptions, the same diagnostic tools, just for less money. It's not free, but at about $150 a month per adult (kids are covered free), it's not expensive either. There's a few % tax to cover uninsurable health care costs, such as disabilities requiring life long care, but after taxes and premiums I get to take home about 65% of my income, which isn't all that different from what I would have been paying in the US.

For some reason, everyone, both liberal and conservative, seems to take it as an obvious given that if a human influenced on the climate is happening, something should be done to stop this. This means that people who like our current way of life have no choice but to deny a human influence on the climate.

In my opinion, this is the wrong way of looking at it. Whether human activity influences the climate is a scientific question, best answered by scientists who have actually done the work to study the matter. It should not be a political question any more than research into the cause of cancer or earthquakes.

The political question should be: given that evidence shows that human activity influences the climate, what should be done with this data. A very valid answer could be: nothing can realistically be done about it, so stop talking about it.

The economic and social cost of reversing our effect on the climate would be staggering, and vast amounts of political and military force would have to be used to make sure every country cooperates (because any unrestricted outlier will soon start to dominate the world economy). People would have to get used to living in a state we would now consider poverty. No personal cars, very few gadgets, no airco, definitely no air travel. A huge sacrifice, and all just to keep the climate very slightly colder, which doesn't necessarily benefit everyone equally. Many parts of the world will become more pleasant and productive with a slightly warmer climate...

You're right, I phrased that poorly. What I mean to say is: the propulsion is a problem that will not be solved (even if a solution exists), because investments are just not made in projects on the time scale of more than a human life time. Even if there were profit in it, noone paying for it will ever even know whether it worked.

Don't underestimate the might of exponential growth. Accelerating at 1G for two years (ship time) gets you to over 95% of light speed. Five years (ship time) of constant acceleration at 1G gets you to over 99.99% of light speed. The real challenge is that it's a fire and forget mission: children born on earth at the time of the launch will have died of old age before the message that they arrived safely arrives back on earth.

Does Europe have better foo than us?

Does an article like this serve a purpose other than flame bait?

Ok, I'll bite. Any foo Europe had that was better than foo in another part of the world moved to the (former) colonies long ago, leaving Europe second to last on the human civilization scale, only narrowly beating Antarctica on account of the slightly better food.

Not to mention the fact that plutonium is far more valuable than copper. Thieves from all over the world, and possibly from other worlds, would hurry over to come and steal the plutonium clad wires.

You do know that he has admitted doping, right? He has since described how it happened: The suspicious blood levels and performance spike were the result of a transfusion with blood carelessly taken too shortly after taking testosterone during training. Blood transfusions can be detected by the presence of blood preservatives and plastic weakeners from the blood bag, but tests for these are not considered conclusive evidence on their own, if i understand correctly from the Alberto Contador case last summer.

Another sign is a skewed balance between mature and young red blood cells. Floyd Landis described how this was masked by taking small doses of EPO immediately after the doping test, to give the body enough time to break down the evidence before the next test.

I thought the code mainly concerned itself with mandating death by anal rape for speaking French insufficiently fluently, but I wasn't sure, so I looked it up

Basing A.I. on psychology will be only a stop gap measure, on the way to the true solution to this sort of problems: basing A.I. on evolutionary anthropology. You see, both the crew and the passengers can be modeled as as tribe, trying to adapt their stable trajectory based culture to changing conditions, namely a nose dive. As more and more air tribes experience such disruptions to their familiar environment, you will find that some develop better coping strategies than others. After a number of generations, all air passengers will be descendants of the air tribes with the more successful coping strategies, and you will find that nose dive causing bugs no longer matter. The people on board will have learned to deal with it. They will probably even have developed tools, either to survive the crash, or to patch firmware on board.