I enjoy the spirit of your post, but I would disagree that the days of 'pioneering' are over .
from a broader historical perspective, the internet is still very young, there is still an enormous amount of stuff to be invented and figured out around it, we are still grappling to fully understand what it means to humanity, and from a business perspective its still a place where clever guys with some ideas and good luck can go from zero to a billion in a couple of years - which isn't the case in the steel industry.
its still quite pioneers time to me.

mod AC as 'I know perfectly what you mean but there's no way I'll waste a chance to pedantically show I know protocols'

whoever downmodded this, deserves to be wished a pimple in a very embarrassing place .

arguably, even if the ROI was absolutely nihil, 300M to experiment with a non-carbon technology are still a reasonably good investment for the long term security of Americans. Better than, say, half a wing of one of these:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

if a Belgian had invented the wheel, would we all be stealing from the Belgian people or we would thank them and move on?
We don't think of stealing from the Romans, even if our basic idea of how to organize an army is largely derived, through the century, from theirs. Oh, we also learned quite a bit from Napoleon. And where would be modern military aviation without the Germans? The British were the first to have a truly global Navy, my guess would be that they learned a thing or two in the process, technically and otherwise. And I would not put past the modern navies to have carefully studied some of such learnings.

At some point information is considered public domain. Any information - if nothing else because at some point the long haul of history clouds everything. Many of us believe that a more expedite process benefits the humankind.

"The only answer you ever get to any of these questions is "Shut up you can't prove anything" which is true"

I hereby accuse you to be an operative of the Secret Great Lizards Conspiracy that I know all about, because i read it on a web site that had actual ANIMATED GIFS OF LIZARDS AND CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!

I may not yet be able to prove my theory conclusively, but the same can be said of Al Capone and OJ Simpson.

"I have to say, I didn't read the whole stack, but the ones I saw didn't seem to be anything other than a couple of people venting opinions in private that would be politically incorrect in public."

yep, there is no more than that.
if there was more, you would see the bad parts quoted everywhere.

"Really? They're full "programs"?
Idiots"

I believe you might be slightly overreacting to your semantic concern.

"Oh, I was pretty interested in looking at old computers as a child."

there were NO _old_ computers, when I was a child, you young insensitive clod!

I'm not sure what your point is here, and i don't mean it rhetorically.

look, we probably agree there's a number of things out there that are simply _not_ a matter of opinion (like "how many stars are there in our solar system?")

if I were to challenge the accepted, patently correct answer ("one"), i'd better come armed with extraordinary data, sound arguments, and the expertise to put them together meaningfully.

the shorthand for this we call "scientific evidence".

if i lack any evidence , and I claim to see a second Sun in the sky, you would question my sanity or my motives, rather than the astronomy in the textbooks.

some questions are open for debate and opinions (is murder the moral choice in very special circumstances, e.g. self defense?).

some questions, on the other hand, are just empirical / factual (how many stars in a system, what's the value of pi, are antibiotics effective against bacterial infections).
opinions simply don't count much here, in the face of the correct answer.

"We humans do not have the knowledge needed to modify an ecosystem while accounting for all of the potential outcomes."

that might be true, but we've doing exactly that since we started smashing rocks one against another.

the only effective answer to your concerns is more research and more science.
going back to caves could also work, but few among us want to die at 35.

but some facts are just facts, and some batshit crazy ideas are just plain flat batshit crazy ideas.

"Things fall on Earth because gravity."
"I don't like this gravity of yours. You are a shill for Big Physics?"

See how this doesn't work?

has someone declared tinfoil day on /. and I missed it ?

lighten up, Francis.
besides, people have been adding tiny drawings to their written text for centuries, until the adoption of the printing press, which made it largely impractical for various technical reasons.

technology is catching up and people are using tiny drawings again - its not such a huge deal and certainly not something to spend your hate on. 8-8

the article reads like a barely disguised, PR buzzword filled press release:

"the device first captures your iris pattern for recognition, extracts and digitizes it, and then proceeds to match it with the encrypted code to provide access."

maybe the technology is interesting, but i wouldn't wager on it based on anything with this level of buzznoise-to-content ratio.