Well they can blow up conventionally. Chernobyl exploded because the reactor's graphite moderation rods caught fire and the uranium fuel produced so much heat that the structures covering the reactor became pressure vessels and exploded.
Chernobyl didn't have a massive containment building like all western reactors do.

Unless you're planning to visit the nuclear plants themselves, it won't affect anything. The Fukushima Daiichi plant is 250km away from Tokyo.

Not really, middle of Tokyo has a ridiculous population density but the more rural regions have a relatively low population density.

You're giving the computer too much credit. The choice that the computer makes is dependent on how it was programmed. No computer at the application level is purely logical.
An AI isn't going to be driving your car, an automated driving program is. The driving program won't even consider your worth compared to the 7-year old. It's likely that it will be programmed to chose paths which will cause the least damage while prioritizing some types of damage.

Having an AI driving your car is silly, I don't want my car to have an existential crisis while on the freeway. Having an automated driving program driving a car would be fantastic.

Cells are cancerous, but virii can cause a cell to be cancerous. A virus itself cannot be cancerous, because it cannot reproduce alone. More importantly, this magical technique can tell the difference between a healthy cell and a cancerous cell, which might only be two or three switched genes out of trillions? And this will work over my entire body, despite any reflection and other interference?
Virii are a bit more believable, but still, the difference between two virii could be only a single gene swap.

Maybe the reason he was discredited was because it didn't work?
Considering this technique could wipe out all viral, bacterial and fungal infections, as well as all cancers... I'm inclined to believe that it didn't work.

As long as it doesn't contain any cells, couldn't you take each protein and have a bacterium produce it? You would no longer have to worry about sterility issues, since no animal was involved. I know it would be by no means simple, but it would allow for completely ethical mass production.

The problem is that they are not private networks.

The way the internet is designed you have no way of knowing the path your packets will take, or even if the return packets take the same path. Each packet you send to the same destination might take a different path. I have Charter, the server uses AT&T, but all of our traffic might go through Verizon.

You are not also paying for an IP address from their servers, there are no servers in this situation. There are routers, but just because they route for me doesn't mean they can do whatever they want to my traffic. This is especially true since at every hop on the internet there is some sort of routing happening, so you're in effect saying that every single router in between two hosts can do whatever they want to the traffic.

Real net neutrality isn't giving the government any power over the internet, but rather that the government denying power to the Telcos.

DMCA is already a US government construct, and is a darn good one compared to the alternative. DMCA gives copyright holders an opportunity to remove infringing content without resorting to court actions. Now this doesn't mean that the system isn't abused, but imagine getting sued instead of getting a DMCA request, it would be horrible!

By piracy site takedowns I assume you mean the US government seizing web addresses, which is DNS and has NOTHING to do with net neutrality. The only way that piracy site takedowns could have anything to do with net neutrality is if the US government somehow forces the routers to drop certain addresses from their tables, which would do nothing because of our good friend dynamic IPs.

They might also implement it via RED. As an outbound queue fills packets going into that queue start getting dropped. This is done to prevent TCP global synchronization, and is standard practice. But if you change the rules a little, saying that packets coming from payer X get into the queue more often than non-payer Y, you've effectively lowered Y's performance during congestion without impacting Y during non-congestion.

Or it could be done via managing router queues. In order to route a packet you must inspect it anyways. Instead of having 1 outbound queue from a router you have two, three, or more. The outbound port sends from the high-priority queue more often, but still sends from the lower priority queues, or else to the hosts it appears to be congestion or a dead connection.

It could also be done via policy based routing on the AS level. An AS is a set of routers divided from other routers by political divisions rather than any technological reasons (AT&T routers vs Verizon routers). Each AS communicates routes and speeds via BGP. You direct the payer packets towards the faster AS you're connected to, then send the non-payer packets over to the slower AS.

There is no real way to speed up some packets without slowing down others, unless you literally build a whole new faster network, in which case why not put the other packets on there too?

I hate it how anyone uses a SSN as both an identifier and an authentication number. If someone gets your SSN, then you are screwed, and getting a new one is hard because you have to go through and replace your identifier everywhere.

Really SSN should only be used as a unique identifier, especially since they are fairly predicable. If you know when and where someone was issued a SSN then you can narrow the possibilities down to just a few.

Ideally everyone would have a credit card sized device that generates authentication numbers, as well as a passcode of some sort (not a password, but a rather large number). The credit card device is actually generating public keys, which is used to encrypt the passcode.

Someone intercepts your traffic? they don't know your public key, nor your passcode
Someone steals your device? they don't know the passcode
Someone somehow gets your passcode? they don't have the device.

Thus the attacker would have to be physically present to get the device, as well as cunning to get the passcode.

The authoritative body has its own private key which is used to ensure that the response can only be from the government.

The hard part is of course getting people to remember (and not write down) their passcode, and being able to physically identify someone in order to issue them a new device/passcode.

Although not necessary you could also have the person trying to do the authentication sign another piece of data with their company's private key. You could mandate that only registered banks and government could even try to authenticate people.

I'd suggest an infrasonic microphone, feelings normally associated with haunting have been shown to also be caused by sounds in the 1-20 Hz range. Places normally considered haunted have been shown to have infrasonic sources that when turned off, cause the feelings to disappear.

http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ghost-in-machine.pdf (7 page PDF)

You would have to get it up to a high enough temperature to stay molten throughout the night, while still providing power. It's a lot more practical to use other solar technologies for home use and keep these ones in big arrays. It's a bit like why power plants will always have higher efficiency than home generation, it's a matter of scale.

They didn't have the desert sun pouring onto a thousand large mirrors perfectly aligned on something for hours on end. Their test was more about the ability to align all of these mirrors without technology. These kind of things are dependent on energy going in vs energy going out. A thin sail surrounded by cool damp sea air only being shone upon from one side is going to have a lot less energy going in, and a lot more energy going out than a desert solar array.

If you do so in an attempt to harm or otherwise deny access, then yes, it would be. It's more akin to getting a thousand people to sit outside their building and forcefully block anyone who tries to come in.

This is on a completely different level though. The only people that have anything to do with BGP are the ISPs themselves. BGP is only used to route from groups of routers to other groups, where a single organization owns the entire group, and they're sending to the group of another organization.

Perhaps, but what choice so we have? Once we run out of v4 addresses we have to do something.
Also: IPv6 is initially allocated via geographical areas.

More importantly, it doesn't matter how sparse the table is as long as each section is contiguous. If I know I can send any traffic from (made up protocol) hosts 1 to 1000 to router 1200, and any hosts from 10,000,000 to 10,010,000 to router 4500, then my table is just fine.

As the life of an address space goes on it will tend to become less compacted, switching to a new one that is huge will make a sparse, but compacted table.