If present trends cannot continue, they won't.

Look, birth rates are already leveling off. Several OECD countries are losing population, Russia's growth rate is dropping like a stone - only immigration flows keep America's population growing. The true key to defusing the "population bomb" (ehrlich, what a fucking idiot - I hope to god he isn't writing another book) - is simply to allow the world's economies to develop. Industrialization drives urbanization which reduces incentives to procreate - all while educating women and raising the standard of living. Stop trying to pass regulations that the majority of the world does not wish to abide by, and let them get on with developing as a society. We'll all win in the long run.

Toll booths create traffic jams, which propagate backwards down the highway, reducing overall speed but increasing risky behavior - lane shifts, tailgating, etc etc. To add toll booths would be a major, major step backwards in terms of both transportation safety and efficiency.

As a NH driver, you're full of shit. Plenty of people drive over the limit; you're talking about tiny ass po-dunk towns with more cops per capita than NYC, and the only way these towns can afford to pay for them is to ticket anything with out-of-state plates - they're never going to drive back up to contest. Any local drunk drivers or speed demons - well, hey, they're probably related to the officer, or at least best friends with the officer's cousin-in-law from back in elementary school, which is practically the same thing. Just a warning ought to suffice for them.

Yeah, take a good long look at SELinux. You'll find it everywhere - after all, it's been distributed for a decade now! And in the past ten years, they've gone on to... ?

In terms of improving overall American cybersecurity, SELinux has proven marginally more effective than sticking your dick in a toaster.

Let's face it - expecting the NSA to highlight security flaws in commonly deployed software is like expecting a magician to explain his tricks to the audience before he does them.

No, that's exactly the problem. Because computer security is roughly on parity worldwide, improving US computer security would also improve Russian/Chinese/Xforeign country security - thereby making the NSA's job harder.

Essentially, the NSA has no real incentive to improve computer security - especially given the current trend of domestic intelligence gathering.

Wouldn't the most efficient form of encryption be some kind of steganography? I mean, maybe you wouldn't want to use wikipedia as a steganotext, but receiving a tweet means having internet access, right? If all you have to do is point to a website already containing the unique information you want to send, the competition becomes pretty meaningless, right?

Why do they call it the Visible Universe, if until this point, they hadn't been able to "see" 90% of it?

they'll cost you at least an arm and a leg...

Get the email-enabled model, and your inbox will fill up with actual SPAM.

Mmmmm.

A year later, American scientists created an impressive sequence of a man walking about the lunar surface...

Entirely possible. Seatbelts save vehicle occupants' lives, but kill pedestrians.

Yes, most companies lease their offices. I would imagine, though, that commercial real estate agencies might own their own offices. Similarly, when I go fishing, I don't buy a boat - but my guess is that most fishermen own theirs. If you're not seeing where I'm going with this, you may want to consider the industry that Google is in, and why having the physical infrastructure of an internet service provider might be of use to a company that provides services over the internet. Why would they want to lease their bandwidth? Spending money on fiber isn't preventing them from business expansion - it IS business expansion. That's what makes YouTube so cheap for Google to operate.

As I understand, monochrome e-ink displays are a bunch of tiny spheres, with one white hemisphere and one black hemisphere - so how the hell does the color version work? C/W M/W Y/W K/W spheres? What's the resolution going to look like? Sounds like it might be good for reproducing Roy Lichetenstein's oeuvre... Seriously, how do you have color e-ink and have it remain e-ink? I'll wait until they explain how it works before I make plans to buy any devices that use it.

Too much of our "national cyber security" policy does seem to be FUDged together by people who don't know what they're talking about.

Or rather, the lack thereof. UO servers were limited in population to a relatively small number (at least relative to today's MMORPGs). When playing UO, the map was small enough and the playerbase was small enough that you could be reasonably certain of who you'd run into at Brit GY or Wind or wherever. They eventually changed the reputation system a bit, and while getting rid of dreadlords didn't kill the game, obviously, I think it promoted the rise of ganking, which is a shame. Another great thing about UO were the server-down fights. Yes, they might be annoying to deal with now, but being able to fight with wild abandon, with no fear of actually losing stuff, led to some incredible moments - and no doubt, was helpful for both game balance from a dev perspective, and new players learning how combat worked. As far as "catch-up" time to get started with a new character - it was insanely low. Sure, your new character was likely to get his ass handed to him, but it was also possible to start a brand new character and kill a fair proportion of players who were of much higher experience, simply because they sucked at fighting. Yes, UO was a skill-based system, but more than that, combat required *skill* - and I'm not talking about learning the timing necessary beat repetitive and predictable WoW bosses by grinding raids until your clan can run it in their sleep. And there were relatively few moments when one build of character was "the best" in the same way that you see guys relentlessly optimizing their talents and gear and all that other bullshit. Okay, maybe viking swords were the shit, or you'd want to make a dex-monkey, but you could also do something wild like a bard, and the game could still be fun. And for all that PVP was a risk, there were plenty of players who had master craftsmen, who mostly chatted with their friends by the bank and never really saw that much combat. Which was fine, because there was also a legitimate (perhap's online-gamedom's only) player-run economy. It's also the only MMORPG I've played where players actually look different from each other, with no real need for all-names or tags, and... God, now you've got me missing UO all over again.