Interesting post. Here's a topic for discussion: Noble Savage or Decadent Civilization: which would you prefer to live under?

Considering that the native population of Europe is almost all white, I'd say it's about as disgraceful to have all white speakers at a European conference as it is to have all East Asian speakers at a Chinese conference. Jeez. I can't take this nonsense seriously, no matter how hard I try to force myself.

Hey now, the lizard people only got one vote. Four years ago. Not worth an option in the poll.

Power usage. I've got the same set of AAA batteries in my TI83+ that I put in back in college, and the thing still works. iphones and their ilk need to be recharged every day, sometimes more than once, just to run basic functionality. For quick calculations at your desk, or more to the point, away from your desk, nothing will beat a dead simple, low power device with physical buttons.

Because the US constitution says the vote happens on Nov 6. You start making exceptions for hurricanes, do you extend those to nasty thunderstorms, or a little bit of snow on the ground, or below freezing temperatures, or global warming in general? Some things you just have to be a stickler for.

Now, now. No matter how silly the idea of having a queen may be to us, there's no reason to resort to name-calling.

The solar-powered UAV's that NASA built in the early 2000's were a giant flying wing (~100-200ft wingspan) with a few hundred pounds of payload. These things were fairly fragile (the last one broke up in a high wind gust), so to scale them up to man-rated safety standards would make them prohibitively large. It may be possible to make something the size of a 747 or a B2 that carries one or two people on solar power alone, but that's not the best use of airplane parts to get massive numbers of people from point A to point B.

And just another analogy. Designing a good lock requires knowing how to pick locks. Knowing how to pick a lock requires picking locks for practice frequently. Picking locks frequently does NOT require being a burglar. Adrenaline junkies do that. Security geeks wanting a job with the lock company don't. That's the difference.

A snitch or an informant, no. An undercover agent, on the other hand, damn well better be able to write up an after action report and be able to present its contents in a clear, coherent, and noncombative manner to either a judge or a jury or his boss without the Question Authority Tourette's popping out with every other breath.

Get something clear: being an effective anything requires having a rod up your ass that you put there yourself. To outside observers, it might look like a counter-culture Fuck You to your coworkers/superiors, but it's not that. Network defense requires engineering. Good engineers have rods up their asses when on company time and need to communicate profusely. Making a buck as a grey/black hat does not require these things to nearly the same extent.

I don't want a "good hacker" whose tendencies toward "counter-culture" are a hard-wired reflex. I want a competent engineer who understands what he's working with and knows how to be effective: sometimes by kissing ass, more often than not by saying "fuck off and let me work" with the right level of polish (sometimes none). If your idea of the best of the pool is someone who hacks and tinkers without being able to buckle down to do some real engineering (which means not just being able to pull off epic shit, but doing it in such a way that it's clear that it accomplishes the objective and isn't only documented between the guy's ears), you're asking for movie hackers, not for what you need.

More importantly, the same UN that with alarming frequency tasks tin-pot banana republics with chairmanships of various human rights committees. The internet needs to remain benignly neglected by a stable democracy with constitutional protections for free speech and a long track record of mostly refraining from reneging on those protections. Right now, that describes the US a lot better than it describes the majority of UN member states, and better than some the civilized nations of Europe.

stars-n-stripes for the party of Lincoln, stars-n-bars for the other guys :-)

The bigger questions are: how blindly white is it already and how massive is it. You need a very good handle on both numbers if you're trying to 1) get a tight estimate on its trajectory and 2) try to perturb it with radiation pressure. Either way, you need to visit the asteroid with a probe to get those numbers before you know if painting it white (or black) will give you enough delta v over the timescale you need.

And it crashed! Stick to X11.