Scenario : there is 5 years warning, and the asteroid is 10 km is diameter (the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Could we deflect it? Assume that the mission to intercept the asteroid reached it 2 years before impact.

I kind of feel like there would be a way. In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem. At least 50 trillion dollars or more. Most other activities are suspended in the western world and china. A salt-water fission rocket or something ought to be powerful enough to deflect the asteroid.

Well, I will admit that users can switch to another site moderately easily. But you lose all your current facebook friends and contacts unless you log in periodically.

It's a weak monopoly. A strong monopoly is something like windows, where you can try to switch, but no other OS can even RUN a huge list of applications, including virtually all games. Even stronger is the power company or ISP, where it's usually physically impossible to switch.

In what universe was this considered a good deal? How on earth does a company that lets users take chintzy photos with a fake aging filter worth 1000 million dollars?

There's nothing that makes Instagram a natural monopoly : at least with facebook itself, the vast userbase it has makes it a de-facto monopoly. (just like there's only space in front of your house for one power company and one set of roads, there's only time for you to put inane status updates on one social networking site).

And, worse still, Facebook doesn't have the deep pool of genius level talent like google, so it's entirely possible that Facebook will not STAY on top. But at least it has most of the user base for social networking, and people use it to get stuff done. Instagrams an internet fad that gives the product away for free.

Shit...for a cool 1000 million, facebook didn't even get a deep talent pool of genius level software engineers. They bought themselves a whopping 10 or so employees. No matter how skilled, 10 folks isn't worth that kind of scratch.

Yes. Our Lord the FSM might at any moment extend his noodly appendage and delete the very ground upon which you walk. At which point you would fall, unless by the grace of Our Lord he chooses to hold you in the air using his appendages.

It won't. Poison is all about the dosage. There's a LOT of water, and not much caffeine compared to that much water. Also, caffeine only works because it interfaces with specific receptors in our brains. It probably affects other mammals, but is not going to affect random fish or other aquatic life.

Boeing 460 milllion....SpaceX 440 million...

Boeing has performed how many launches? Historically, when have they ever made ANYTHING for a low cost? As far as I know, Boeing has been charging top dollar (and, admittedly, provided top tier quality) for aircraft for over 70 years.

SpaceX, on the other hand, has shown cost efficiencies that have never been seen before in space travel. They've already done 2 dragon launches that would have been completely survivable if a stow-away passenger had been riding aboard (assuming they brought a small life support system)

It will probably become easier to enrich uranium for anyone who has the resources to do it, whether or not this Silex technology is made commercial scale. It's not like the basics of the technology are a secret.

Yes but the power of eFormats could mean that in theory all books ever published could fit onto a single, or a small number, of portable reading devices. Just one of them stored in a faraday cage (a plain old iron box is all it takes, or the trunk of a car for some models of car, etc) and all of mankind's knowledge survives. MUCH harder to lose every copy of a particular book than there is with the library system.

SD cards store the data in electric charge trapped in special types of transistors. This charge does leak over time at a very slow rate. The cheaper flash chips are only rated for a limited number of years without the data being accessed and recopied. These effects are temperature dependent, and I think 25 years isn't too long of a time period, but it isn't forever.

Truth be told, the private copyright cops have no reason to lie or cheat. What they are doing is quite easy and straightforward. All they have to do is hit a major torrent site like TPB, click a tracker with their hacked version of an open source bittorrent client, and save all the IP addresses in the swarm. The rest is just meaningless fluff that costs stupendous sums of money. The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case.

If the U.S. legal system were in any way remotely efficient or speedy, it would dispose of all these cases in a week. And if the legislature were also not so corrupt, the fines for these infringements would be in some way based on reality.

Yes. Molecular manufacturing nanotechnology could do this easily. A quick summary of the idea : molecular manufacturing posits a machine capable of creating an arbitrary 3d structure that is atomically precise. It also posits that the machine itself is only composed of a few million atoms per subunit, so the machine could be used to replicate itself.

With self replication over a reasonable timescale (say a few weeks), you get incredibly rapid exponential growth. So you'd start with 1 machine, and within a few years have warehouses full of these things taking up the land area of entire states, all these machines busily converting matter into useful products or more of themselves. Please note that these machines are macroscale : they are housed inside stainless steel vacuum chambers, and an assembled machine is quite large and eats a lot of power. They would get their power from either solar or cheaply printed nuclear reactors. (right now, a nuclear reactor costs billions of dollars. If you could print out the parts for one in a way that was atomically perfect, they would be much cheaper. )

Anyways, you have these machines print devices that are a solar panel on the top side, and an array of nanoscale gas pumps on the underside. They selectively grab CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water to produce some type of plastic that is long term stable. The resulting pellets of plastic are buried in the ocean or vast landfills. You deploy these things over the ocean or something. It would take about 10 years, but you could completely collect all of the CO2 that humanity has added since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Right. A war isn't a negative sum game when you have an unbeatable technological advantage over the other group. With a big enough tech advantage, you can fight and easily win with few losses yourself.

In the examples you gave, not only did the Europeans have guns, they had the written word. That alone made all the difference. (because text language lets you coordinate groups over large distances and record knowledge for the future)

Uhh...no. Warfare is a negative-sum game. Both parties in a war usually lose far more than they gain. A successful race will have the technological and military tools needed to make sure that any potential foes face a serious deterrent against attacking, but said race will not initiate an attack themselves unless it is one of the rare scenarios where fighting yields more benefits than trading.

Everything we know now about technology and technological progress says that SETI is a total waste of time. Unless our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, there is nothing we will be able to find. This is why :

1. As radio technology advances, the signals become closer and closer to noise. Already, most digital radios today would be totally indistinguishable from noise when observed from lightyears away. Also, as the radios get better, the signals become more and more directional. It is reasonable to expect that in 50 years, all the radios used in most applications will use frequency hopping, very low power, ultra wide band, and will steer their signals to the locations of other nodes in a mesh network. 50 years is probably a pessimistic estimate for this.

2. If our theories about the Singularity are true, by the time our light reaches other stars, within another 1000 years or so we'll be roaring in on starships, running self replicating machinery that systematically converts all matter into more useful products. The presence of post-singularity humanity will be completely impossible to miss. Thus, the reason we cannot see other civilizations doing the same thing is because we are the first one in our region of space.

Obviously, your "1 penny per month" is pure ignorance. Your opinions and misreading of your utility bill (you have to compare it to EXACTLY the same load for everything else in your house...meaning you need to measure what everything is is drawing) does not change the laws of physics. Those bulbs do draw 1/5 the power of what you had before. End of message.

As for premature failures : try a better brand, maybe look up a review? Get the ecosmarts from Home Depot, those have the best reviews by far. They are less than 2 bucks a bulb. I've never had one burn out on me in 5 years.