The threat communicated did not arise from trilby-flinging basement dwellers hiding behind Guy Fawkes masks. The threat was issued by the information warfare arm of the North Korean Army. The Norks have a number of sleepers around the US and they are feared by the residents of the ethnic Korean neighborhoods and recognized as a threat the .gov. These guys are the real deal. Singer's dismissal of the issue is glib.

Get me the amnesia ray!

Hydrogen in a metal matrix. In the 80s it was called cold fusion. Progress in CF has been slow due to a pervasive and comprehensive conspiracy to suppress positive results in the field Funny, they're still at the F&P stage twenty+ years later... Whatever. Good luck with that.

I have a 22 y.o. YNA (big green thing, 50% evil) who is very lazy. He would love to go motoring around the house in one of these things.

I should not google things before i drink my coffee... I completely messed up my delta-v estimate. You are all right, mercury is a difficult target. It would still be worth it... maybe a solar sail or electrostatic decelerator for free delta-V?

I did a cursory goog, and got the impression that the delta-V to Mercury is 1/6th of the delta-V to Mars. Mercury is down the hill from us, not uphill. Mercury would seem to have the added benefit of having 10x the initial solar radiation available for running a sail. I'm a little disappointed to see this topic get so few posts. Mercury has a lot to offer from an explorational perspective. Plentiful energy, a B-field, easy to get to.... much more interesting than Mars in many ways.

Sending neutrino messages is old hat. Receiving them is a bit more difficult, because neutrinos are so damned difficult to detect. They basically don't interact with anything, which is why Fermilab can shoot a neutrino beam an a 735 km underground trip to Minnesota. So to receive your IM, you need a detector the mass of the USS Iowa. I sent out "Dinner is served" back in the 80s, by the way.

I thought gps was a military thing and that all that civvy stuff was just freeloading.

I remember, as an ardent newcomer to L5, talking about exactly this sort of thing with Eric Drexler in a park somewhere in the Bay Area, back in 1983. What the heck, good luck to the Chinese. Maybe they'll even do it. (although the delta-V required is truly staggering, even for the kind of intercept described)

How come the first thing that came to mind was "they want to put a kill switch in my car?" They won't call it that, of course.

Lulsec spokesmouth arrested: news. In the bigger scheme of things, nobody gives a rat fuck what lulsec thinks about paypal.

Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders

Editorialize much?

Use a photo of the garbage-filled gutter in front of the NYSE, or maybe Bernie Madoff, or a simple graphic of a downward-trending chart with the words FRAUD superimposed.

Funny you should mention digging ditches. I dug a nice one across my property a couple of years ago when my employer furloughed its staff for a few days. I won't bother dicksizing what i do for money, but you can figure it out from my previous posts. You're not the only intellectually gifted snowflake in the room, son. Man-up and take responsibility for your bullshit.