Expecting respect from the current US government.

Hmm, do you think maybe it was a mistake to plant all those eucalyptus trees beside the power lines? XD

I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

If you type it in as "38C to F" (without the quotes) it will invoke Google Calc and give you an actual conversion interface in the summary field instead. This can also be used for arbitrary unit conversions of just about anything, even when including real math steps in the equation. It's very useful.

It's nothing new. Apple has been doing this to our gradeschools since the 80's. When you have any organization that's severely underfunded for a long amount of time, its key participants become increasingly susceptible to bribery.

It's not as though giving them Windows laptops, Chromebooks, or even Texas Instruments graphing calculators has a fundamentally different effect in that regard. Any company allowed to do this is effectively buying the next generation of consumers at a bargain price. That's why it shouldn't be allowed at all.

You're right, this was a completely obvious outcome, and I expect it is being used against me too. My enemies are already stalking me through my ISP, bank, credit card companies, shipping companies, cellphone carrier, insurance provider, and various online video game service accounts, (not to mention this website in particular) and even surveiling my house directly, so I didn't bother ranting about it at length. For me the battle is already lost; the criminals have already broken the circle of trust. The enemy isn't just at the gates, it's inside them.

But now what can we do?

I had some business reasons to have an account and participate in a few niche subs. The subs were niche enough to mostly be enthusiastic friendly people, but it didn't take long to notice the patterns of the same ideas making the rounds.

Then one of my posts was removed for reasons I don't understand (and didn't try). Whatever the mod was thinking, I just gave up, deleted my historical posts and removed my account. Not worth the effort.

Up to that point, old.reddit.com was working (with or without signing in, mobile or desktop) despite the threat to shut that down. I wouldn't use the new interface unless you paid me a decent wage to do so.

I've quit Reddit before - it's very toxic overall - but now it's not even worth it for business. I doubt they'll ever lure me back again.

Just have them make the requests through a second person. Sure they can still abuse it but the second person might ask questions if the same weird requests persists

Hmm. Not working for me though. Lol

Ã... is latin1. Slashdot is latin1 which is why Unicode doesn't work

No. Only dictatorships have qualified immunity. It is is not necessary

Even if you live somewhere with good cops, they're still human beings and will often put themselves above duty.

Only the fear of consequences drilled into them during training followed by robust monitoring and security audits will keep it under control (note I didn't say 'prevent entirely').

The range and payload penalties will be enormous.

If you can build an enclosed habitat that can keep a population alive for 1000 years in deep space, you'd find it a lot easier to do the same on Earth. And if that's not an option, Mars, or the asteroid belt. Places where there are resources to exploit to resupply and repair, or even expand.

And that's before you think about how your destination is an entire alien biosphere - you might know the air, water temperature and gravity are all fine... but you won't have any idea if you can digest the locally available flora and fauna, if it'll be toxic, or if it'll be digesting you.

Interstellar colonization is for when your star is cold and all the rocks around it are used up.

'Years' is soft-peddling it. We lack the technology to reach the nearest star to the Sun in less than 80 years, and even that is so expensive and unlikely to succeed that we'd never fund it. A 49 light year trip would take 980 years to get there, and assuming nothing critical broke enroute, it's incredibly unlikely you'd successfully beam any useful data back.

We could eventually build a fusion drive and halve that time. There's still nothing at the end of the trip to justify the investment. Telescopes are the vastly superior tool.

And no, nano probes accelerated by giant laser to near light speed are not realistic. At all.