Blockchain tech has been around for at least a decade, but no one outside of cryptocurrency circles really cared about it. Then suddenly cryptocurrency skyrockets in value, and everyone rushes out to find some way to hop on the gravy train (i.e., find some way to generate profit by cramming blockchain into whatever they're doing). I'd be shocked if most of these projects weren't ICOs promising some revolutionary blockchain application that would be funded through token sales.

The last one I saw in the wild was a bioplastic fabrication and distribution project that was going to use smart contracts to assure transparency of their supply chain. They hadn't even bought a facility to actually make the bioplastic yet; even their bioplastic process was "proprietary." But they were going to get the whole project off the ground with their token sales.

"Americans want to be left alone" has to be the most ahistorical take on the twentieth century that I have ever read (and I have seen a few over the last two years). For a group of people that wanted to be left alone, US citizens were more than happy to fuel a century of military expansion that has left them with a base on every continent (and that's just counting the facilities above a certain plant value, the US has so much property in other countries that it doesn't know exactly what it has), so many arms and armaments that the surplus production has to be sold to the domestic policing forces, an unsustainable deficit created by not a little military spending, and an economy built on elements of the military industrial complex. Just in case we want to continue the fiction that the citizens aren't in on this, let us not forget that the quickest way to sour the electorate was (and still is) to suggest that a politician was/is weak on military spending. So yes, the US citizens just want to be left alone...in the sense that they would like everyone else in the world to either understand that the US is in charge or lay down and die.

Behold the logic of Empire. It has always been this way; it takes different forms through time but the logic is always the same. And one day, when the sun has set on this Empire, the next set of assholes will be so very worse.

No, of course not. Just like the US didn't provide arms and aid to the Shah of Iran or help create SAVAK. Or that time the US didn't provide arms and assistance to a young, up and coming ruler in a neighboring country after all that stuff the US didn't do in Iran went a little pear-shaped. Or like that time the US didn't help a plucky band of freedom fighters in Afghanistan stop their country from pursuing terrible evils (like female education and suffrage). Nope, there definitely never was a time during the latter half of the twentieth century that the United States ever aided and abetted some of the worst, most monstrous assholes and governments across the globe. And I'm definitely sure that since these new technologies are being offered by military defense contractors (or their owned subsidiaries) that there will be no similar patterns of sales and transfers that we definitely did not see in the twentieth century. The United States is nothing but Freedom, Apple Pie, and valiant protection of Human Rights both at home and abroad. The only things we export are Truth, Justice, the American Way, and Coca-Cola.

If that man has ever deigned to gaze upon a demand-curve (or any other form of graphed data) and actually understood it, then I am bear in the woods who is also the Pope.

It is actually a little annoying that while the scientific and anti-proliferation communities/groups have been discussing what has happened to the testing site, you may only find a bare hint of that discussion in the regular news. But, as one commentator here has pointed out, if we all just close our eyes and pretend that the DPRK didn't shift an entire mountain on accident and create a potentially massive environmental disaster in its backyard, then it might help facilitate the peace process. Face gets saved, and actions of desperate necessity become grande gestures of peace. All the important people can get Nobel Peace prizes and feel good about themselves.

Welcome to Diplomacy 101, where you don't have to feel good about what you did as long as the results are acceptable.

Oof, that's a good one. One reply here says the person who was driving and I tend to agree. Although it's not the same, the use of force with military drones ultimately has to pass through the approval of a Human operator. I would think that the Human operator in an autonomous vehicle would equally be ultimately responsible for failing to override fatal decisions made by an autonomous vehicle. That said, if the operator attempted to override the vehicle and the fatal incident occurred anyway, then I would say that traditional law would place the blame on the manufacturer/programmer.

It begins....

As it was long said and attributed (with questionable veracity) to PT Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute." The problem is that increasing technological sophistication and socio-economic complexity have forced us to recalculate the sucker creation rate to something like one sucker generated every 10.5 seconds. Give or take a second due to server load balance issues.

Seriously? No way, no way that actually happened. That story is just all kinds of sad if it's true.

Yeah that's...that's how they innovate now. The writing has been on the wall ever since they were willing to make their flagship laptop line "pretty" by removing all the ports except one for their proprietary connector (and charging you a hefty fee if you wanted more than just one of those). And installing a touch bar (though the competition has full touch screens) while leaving the internals underpowered (though I am given to understand that was partially Intel's fault as far as the processors go). Also the keyboards are apparently crap now? That seems to be a subjective complaint, but I hear it a lot. At any rate, I expect in a few years Apple will just be an upscale, fashionable electronics boutique, and everyone will be mildly surprised any time it's mentioned that Apple once made some pretty good computers.

There was one expedition to the area decades ago by Miskatonic University, but it was disastrous. There were no survivors of the original expedition; the only two men who returned were from the rescue team dispatched by the University. They came back ranting about shifting eyes in the darkness and kept repeating a nonsense sound: "tekeli-li." There have been no other attempts made to explore that place afterwards. Even if the rumors of a great and terrible city, ancient beyond all measure, are true, we only have the word of two men barely clinging to their sanity after being exposed to one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

No, there is nothing to be gained by exploring the Transantarctic range. There is nothing but madness in those mountains.

That they are refining tech they bought from Pakistan is a fair point. Especially considering, as the person below you commented, that this is still the boosted fission device they tested previously. But I do cop to forgetting that Pakistan did a deal with them years ago.

Now that's a fair catch. The reports I saw were (breathlessly) exclaiming/suggesting that the thermonuclear-level of detonation had been reached, as opposed to their original boosted fission device

That the DPRK has performed five or six weapons tests over the period of a decade, and now have a functional fission-fusion trigger device, small enough to be fitted onto their MRBM and ICBM rockets. Not a single accident at one of their facilities; no incidents involving radiation leaks (at least any that were detectable); not one instance where they dialed the device too high resulting in an incident similar to the Castle Bravo detonation on Bikini Atoll. Just five or six tests and then boom, perfect.

There is no great wisdom in debating whether a madman brandishing a pistol has bothered to load the weapon. But this whole business just seems odd.