You can criticize me for drinking the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong kool-aid, but I am NOT a Rand fan and never have been. (I'm a leftist for one.)

Besides, Rand's fiction was totally in favor of coercive relationships, right up to the edge of rape. How much was Rand's principles and how much was Rand getting her jollies and forgetting the rule "don't publish your Mary Sue wankfic", who knows...

In spherical cow land, sure, but my argument is that an adult/teenager relationship (with a sufficiently wide age difference) is always coercive because the adult has more experience than the teen. The very nature of expertise is to train our minds to automatically jump to the right answer without any conscious thought (cf. Daniel Kahneman), which means that the more-experienced adult will take advantage of the situation, bending it to his/her will even without intending to. The difference in dating experience creates a power imbalance, and power imbalances are inherently coercive (pretty much by definition of "power" in the social sense).

Pretty much the only situation I can see where it might work out OK is if the adult has never dated, not in high school and not since then. But in that case the adult is likely to have other issues, in which case the "don't date anyone who obviously needs more therapy than you do" rule might kick in for the teenager (though sadly odds are good no one told the teenager about that one).

Two words: mind games. The drama in high school is all prep for the adult mating dance: "how do I get his/her attention without coming off as clingy/desperate?", "is he/she really interested in me or just planning to use me as a status symbol?", "but he/she isn't mature/hot enough, if I settle for him/her it means I'm less of a person because Hollywood tells me so". Adolescence is the phase where we take all the crap society has crammed into our skulls about love/sex/romance and sort out fact from fiction.

Adults already know and play the mind games; whether we treat them as friendly Canasta or as winner-take-all Russian Roulette, we DO play them, constantly. For example, info-dumping your life's backstory on the first date is (a) narcissistic, (b) clingy/desperate, and (c) ammunition for a poorly chosen partner to shove a knife in your heart and manipulate you like a puppet in your future relationship. Therefore even the kindest, most genuine form of the adult mating dance involves concealing information and strategically revealing your cards at the right time, to protect yourself from awful people if nothing else. But teenagers don't have any practice with this; not knowing any better, they think it's romantic to trust someone fully and unconditionally, which lasts until they put that in practice precisely enough times to get burned. During this phase, it's important that the participants in the mating game be at roughly the same skill level (viz. xkcd.com/314), as it limits the potential for damage. A teenager is wide open to the manipulation of information that adults do 100% automatically and subconsciously.

Oh, and then there's the whole "adults are the authority, you must obey them" thing. Even rebellious teenagers still recognize adults as authority figures — if the adults were seen as equals, they wouldn't be seen as authority figures to rebel against.

(It probably doesn't hurt to mention that I was molested by my stepfather from ages 16 to 18, so I've got a fair bit of firsthand personal experience on the matter. It took me years to spot the web of manipulation that he laid in my mind and unwind past his lies. What were his lies? That I chose it of my own free will; that I should feel guilty for "making" him cheat on my mother; that he was doing me a favor by giving me "pity sex" because I was too shy to get laid in high school. Nevermind that he pinned me in a corner, bullied me into coming out gay to him when I didn't trust him with that information, brought up the idea of sex with him and wouldn't drop it, and made me feel too physically and emotionally threatened to defy his rage-laden authority. For the next two years, he had me wrapped around his little finger until I left for college, and I blamed myself the whole way.)

What about a distro with DKMS? Wikipedia claims Fedora supports it these days...

Directly? Not at all. But it's worth keeping in mind that white ice has a higher albedo than dark blue seawater, which keeps arctic / antarctic summers cold by reflecting away summer sunlight.

Great plan: spend man-years of effort forcing the handful of companies with class A blocks to re-architect their networks... only for each class A block to be consumed by the RIRs in 6 months or less. Did you even pay attention to how fast APNIC ate two of its last three /8's? Seriously, this idea can't extend IPv4 by more than 2 or 3 years, even if it works flawlessly and re-IPing is free.

AppEngine apps can make HTTP requests from Google's IP blocks. Not sayin' that's what happened here, but just throwing that out there.

You have it backwards: the CAD per USD ratio hasn't gone much above 1.07 CAD per USD in the last 10 years, and used to swim in 0.75 territory for the longest time. Hence the well-known phenomenon of books and magazines with two list prices, a US price plus a Canadian price that's a good nudge higher. That suddenly became obsolete when the CAD achieved rough parity around 2007 or so, in part because of the USD inflating a bit faster than the CAD.

The Google Apps Device Policy app supports password policies and remote wipe, and Ice Cream Sandwich supports full-device encryption (I turned it on for my own ICS phone, took about an hour to encrypt the 16GB internal storage partition plus two or three reboots).

Here in meatspace, putting a human in a sensory deprivation tank is torture and one of the more surefire ways to drive a person insane. The brain isn't wired to believe in null sensory data. If a region of the brain stops receiving stimulation, it frantically strengthens its connections to other regions, tapping randomly into its neighbors and interpreting their arbitrary stimulation as sense data (compare the hallucinations of sensory deprivation to phantom limb syndrome and somatosensory remapping in amputees, e.g. touching an amputee's face triggering sensation on the amputee's phantom fingers because the face and fingers are next to each other in the sensory map of the postcentral gyrus). If this frantic effort fails and the brain regions can't find a source of stimulus, they start to die outright, nerve by nerve, because nerves are wired to commit suicide if they don't fire regularly.

But even a sensory deprivation tank still provides senses of sound, proprioception, temperature, gravity. If we were to create an accurate nerve-by-nerve simulation of an entire vertebrate brain and then provide it with no sensory input.... Well, at best the result would be phantom body syndrome. At worst, it could go well beyond torture and become the greatest suffering ever inflicted on a single sentient being. And we don't understand the brain well enough to know which pieces of sensory data must be provided to maintain sanity and prevent existence from being torture.

And that's not even getting into the legal and moral issues. Let's say we can put a sane mind on a chip by cloning the synaptic structure of a recently deceased human and feeding it all the appropriate sensory inputs. Is it a person? Is it a citizen? Can it consent to a contract? Is it a minor until the hardware turns 18? May I enslave it? Is it ethical to feed it false sensory data culled from a virtual reality simulation, i.e. trap it in The Matrix? If I turn it off and erase it at the end of my scientific study, have I murdered it? If yes, am I legally obligated to keep it powered until the hardware fails? Am I morally obligated to transfer the synapse data to new hardware before the old hardware fails, making the uploaded human immortal? Alternatively, am I morally prohibited from doing that for more than N years, for some value of N? If I'm transferring the mind to new hardware, and my mistake causes a power surge that erases its synapses, am I protected by existing Good Samaritan laws, or have I committed involuntary manslaughter? As it's a simulated human mind, complete with all human appetites, am I obligated to provide it with pornography and the means to masturbate itself to orgasm? Do I have to obtain consent from the human whose deceased mind will be used to create the chip? Am I obligated to pick an atheist, or more to the point a subject who doesn't believe in souls? How well informed does the consenting subject have to be before dying? Does the family have to consent as well, or are we content with provoking another HeLa controversy for the greater good? And so on...

Actually, there's some research that strongly suggests that there's only a finite amount of aging going on. What's happening in aging might not be "the body's self repair process falls behind entropy", as commonly thought. Instead, aging would be "the same tradeoffs which favor reproductive success in youth exact a cost later in life"; after some finite time, you've paid those costs in full and aging stops, leaving only a constant risk of disability and death per year instead of the ever-growing one postulated by the "falling behind on entropy" model. In this view, there are still some specific things that actually do wear out with age because they aren't constantly replaced (tooth decay and cornea clouding / cataracts are the obvious ones), but general health doesn't suffer the same fate.

See New Scientist's The end of ageing: Why life begins at 90 (behind a paywall, sadly), which references a demographic study where annual mortality rates became constant above age 93 (Greenwood and Irwin, Human Biology, 1939), a study confirming the same pattern in fruit fly populations (Carey and Curtsinger, Science vol. 258 p. 457 and p. 461, 1992), and an exploration of a mathematical model of mutation which concluded that a mortality plateau is inevitable, not a mere special case (Rose and Mueller; PNAS vol. 93 pp. 15249-15253, 1996). (Of note: Rose is the author of the New Scientist article, with all the confirmation bias that implies.)

Also, the research into aging suggests there are only a handful systemic problems that actually cause it (accumulation of crosslinked proteins; declining telomerase production causing cells to stop dividing; etc.), and if those systemic problems were addressed we could largely arrest the aging process. Aubrey de Gray's TED talk is pretty much mandatory viewing on that front.

It's worth keeping in mind that if metabolism and entropy inevitably led to cell death after 100 years, then human beings as a species would have already died out: sperm and egg cells are metabolically active cells that contain DNA that's millions of years old, and there's no time machine that allows a pristine copy of the germline DNA to be copied forward from conception to adulthood without at least a childhood's worth of accumulated error. Likewise for our mitochondria, pseudo-cells that they are, with their own mtDNA separate from the DNA of the nucleus, exposed to the entropic ravages of the Krebs cycle firsthand without a nuclear membrane to protect it; our bodies pass these pseudo-cells on from mother to child unchanged, without even giving their mtDNA a de-methylation/re-methylation spring cleaning like mammalian nuclear DNA receives. But they thrive in the germ cell line, generation after generation, even as they suffer and decline in the somatic cell lines. There must be a difference in upkeep, some cost that evolution is willing to pay for the germline but unwilling for the somatic lines, that allows the germline mitochondria to remain healthy and "young" for millions of years.

Uh... the old "left brain is logical, right brain is creative" stuff is out the window. Please refer to Dr. Ramachandran's work on anosognosia in stroke victims.

It's described in IPv4 terms, but extending it to work with IPv6 addresses should be simple enough. The trickiest part will be finding the golden CIDR mask to replace IPv4 /24. Giving up /64 is too much, since it identifies most ISP customers uniquely, and /48 has similar issues. Probably something near /32 or /40 would be appropriate, although you could probably do a lot with as little as /20.

Other than that, the described technique is still fully relevant because IPv6 doesn't change the game in any other way: DNS still works the same way, HTTP still works the same way, and websites are still slow for the same reasons, so you have the same incentives for regional caching and the same choices in how to do it.

The point of NaCl is that it's a virtual machine bytecode language, and you can statically verify (without running the code) that the bytecode conforms to the spec. However, for performance reasons, the bytecode language and the virtual machine architecture just happen to line up with the native machine code and native architecture. NaCl provides only a subset of the full instruction set, though, and this prevents arbitrary pointer arithmetic or self-modifying code that could break outside the sandbox. NaCl authors actually need to recompile their code to x86 NaCl or ARM NaCl as a distinct GCC compiler target, instead of plain old x86 or ARM, because the NaCl targets are easily distinguishable from the native ones when you examine the machine code bytes. (The most important feature: all jumps are aligned and no ops cross an alignment boundary, so there's only one possible machine code interpretation for each byte of NaCl code.)

Needless to say, this is a vastly different model compared to ActiveX, which was "we'll trust any old native code to make arbitrary system calls, just so long as there's an RSA signature attached". NaCl ditches the central trusted authority model that Microsoft preferred, and instead goes with the Java/JavaScript/Lua/LISP model of "you can only perform side effects that the interpreter chooses to expose to your code". As with the interpreted languages your NaCl code is Turing-complete, so you can waste CPU and RAM until the cows come home, but you can't actually touch the filesystem, create GUI elements, or modify the address space of other processes unless Chrome decides to permit it. The only difference is that you don't run at some fraction of native code speed, but exactly at native code speed, and you can statically optimize as much or as little as you like, or write in any language you want (so long as someone's written a NaCl target for your language's compiler).

There will probably be a few bugs in the static verification logic that allow not-quite-NaCl code to slip through, but this is no worse than the sandboxing problems we already face from Javascript in the browser. With JavaScript, this has even included double free bugs that allowed overwriting arbitrary memory with native code and executing it. The risks with NaCl are no different.

If anything, patents in the software industry cause innovation NOT by rewarding the company that holds the patent so that they will feel inclined to invent more, but by encouraging companies to patent the lowest-hanging fruit and forcing everyone else to invent workarounds as the patent owner lords over the market by charging exorbitant prices. Think of gzip, PNG, Vorbis, Tarkin, and to a lesser extent VP3/Theora and VP8/WebM, which were all developed in response to the patents on LZW and MPEG 1 through 4 because the licensing terms were greater than the market would bear.

Patents give their owners monopoly power, which ipso facto means that the licensing fees charged by the owner will never be at the free market price created by the intersection of supply and demand. Even the MPEG-LA consortium, which actually goes to the effort of trying to invent a "fair" price, doesn't have enough information to actually determine what the fair price would actually be in the absence of a monopoly, e.g. what the MPEG algorithms would sell for if they were a contractually-protected trade secret bought and sold on the open market (the scenario that patents were created to prevent).