If you proposed something like this as part of a medical research proposal it would get shot down. Exposure to x-rays, no matter the dose, always carries the risk of mutation and transformation to a tumorigenic state. Exposing these people to ionizing radiation without medical benefit nor consent is equivalent to shooting influenza at them. Most of the people will be just fine, but is it acceptable if 1 in 1,000 dies from a complication? 1 in 100,000? In practice the estimate of the radiation dose of these machines is underrepresented since they are using low power x-rays which are absorbed or reflected in the first few millimeters of skin. This means that the dose is actually concentrated into a very small volume further increasing the risk of cancer.

This is exactly right. Rare earths aren't that are at all as you'd think. The only reason we are all depending on China for them is that they seem willing to sell them to everyone else for less than anyone else can produce them. If they want to give away their natural resources, that is fine with the rest of the world. The US is sitting on one of the world's largest reserves, but it is not economically viable to pull them out of the ground vs China. On the other hand helium is much more of a problem...

One thing that people seem to forget is that the protocols that the internet are based on are fault tolerant. They were designed to be able to adapt and route around broken links in the communication infrastructure. Breaking a couple links would cause the performance to take a nose dive, while the routes adapt. The only way such a shutoff system could work, is if a sizable number of routes were simultaneously disrupted. I don't think there is any reasonable way that this system could be used to suppress information selectively without smart people realizing it. It would have to operate as an all or nothing switch.

This is less of a problem of movies and music, but if this ruling is allowed to stand a very large amount of books will cease to be public domain. One example of a work under essentially perpetual copyright in the UK is the King James version of the Bible. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples which could be dredged up as well.

From what I remember from a tour I had of the DSN facility at Goldstone is that even back then(~2000) that both Voyager 1 and 2 were well beyond the noise background. I think they said it was 9dB below noise even then. The only way they could understand the signals coming back from the probes was by "voting". Basically they would have the probe send the same message over and over and over. The message was then reconstructed by saying Bit #125 was 65 for and 35 against, probably a 1. More than that they also knew the formats of the messages so they would have a good idea of this bit is probably going to be a 1 or a 0 in particular spots. If something has happened with it, it might be impossible to ever reconstruct the messages coming back even if we have them recorded. The signals have only gotten weaker since then because the probes are that much further and their power sources that much weaker. It is absolutely amazing they have been able to keep in contact as long as they have.

I also bought a 80gb Intel SSD. I agree that it absolutely lives up to the hype. I use it day in and day out on my desktop since March 2009. I have been running Windows 7 beta through release on it. I have had zero problems and zero performance degradation so far. I run games and I run normal productivity software. Nothing fancy, but it does see about 10 hours per day of use. With that in mind it only take a cursory review of SSD articles to find that not all SSDs are created equal. Many are really crap because of bad controllers or flash cells that were not designed for use in an SSD.