Fun trick to learn exists. Though I would really like to know what led up to it, since it seems ... unhelpful.

Edit: Looking at other comments, I did try popping off that entry in the dict, and no, it didn't have anything in it (it doesn't make the dict anything like defaultdict).

I'd imagine that could allow an adversary to compromise DRM for the SKY perhaps? (Based on the domain name.) But there seemed to also be concern that improperly set up cookies for other cisco.com domains may allow this to compromise them; do Cisco devices put sensitive things in cookies where that could happen?

EDIT: I am not in any way, shape, or form a network or security 'guy'. I just read the thread and wasn't horribly alarmed by the discussion; seems like a reasonable but bad exposure on the device.

Now, I'd guess there's some debate if the Golden Gate was worth it, but I think in the long run these sorts of things define regions and become essential.

EDIT: Noting I already did the 1930s money conversion.

There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).

Which may just be an open pre-order on my part. Which is sort of the stupidest way to buy anything, I suppose, except for the social trust aspect I have in him.

I really love the story about Norman Borlaug [0], because it shows how these great advances can be from enormous work from unexpected places. His research and testing - over decades - saved so many lives (he earned the title "The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives", and it may not be an exaggeration).

I vaguely recall the econ nobel a few years ago studied how people starved with food rotting in enormous piles just a few dozen miles away. It's utterly heartbreaking, and the worst is that it was largely bad policy that did it. We already overproduce food enough, but we can't get it where it needs to be.

Now, though, imagine that we find a way to mine asteroids for rare earth minerals. Imagine we can have clean power without the horrific pollution as industrial infrastructure ramps up. How could that change the world, leading to logistics networks that could fix distribution issues?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

EDIT: terminology, and I'd like to disclaim about the strife problem: space can't really fix. But food and money can't either.

And expectations are everything. I had endless hours of fun with Privateer as a kid, and had a blast with Freelancer when I was older. That covers a large chunk of my life, so my patience is tempered, a bit. Eve fills the niche while I wait, and I'm very excited to see my old memories come back in HD in a new universe. What's another 5 years out of 25? (And I'm serious - I had fun with Privateer, and in retrospect it was kinda terrible! Pushing past the uncanny valley of VR sim is effort worth waiting for!)

Honestly? Expectations are screwy. Eve has a sophisticated character creation system, and it's essentially to take a 200x200 pixel picture. Just fantastic, and almost as useless. But it really makes the game feel bigger and more real. Eve's taken more than 15 years to get to where it is, and that's sort of where I hold my standard. Time ain't the barrier to me.

My point is that lateness isn't the sin people make it out to be. A well polished and expansive game can come late, and so long as the medium still does it justice it'll be great. All the gnashing of teeth and whining will be forgotten as people play fun. Setting expectations for deliverables is far better than expectation for delivery times, since you can miss deadlines while still delivering (leaving you with a lose-win pattern). And it's better to set expectations realistically rather than disappoint, because then at best you can deliver disappointment on time. SC has some damn good pedigree, so I think it's easy to believe they'll deliver on quality and expectation, and that overrides everything else.

I was thrilled about NMS (and had a blast with it), and I think it panned a bit because it rushed. There was some noise that warped expectations, and yet the game became just what it set out to be. Further updeates made it even more fun to play, and to quote Day9 "I will play the shit out of No Man's Sky 2." Heck, we even have celebrated failures like VoxelQuest, which is one of my favorite KickStarter epics. Obduction was just what I expected from Cyan. And I'm honestly kinda excited to see if Hiveswap manages to deliver despite hype. Broken Age was a bit bizzare, since it actually probably would have been better if it stopped in the middle (but still a lot of fun). We live in such a golden age of choice it's possible that Dual Universe will be good!

Imagine having NMS, SC, and DU all with their own take on a large persistent universe - pick the style you like! I'll happily wait years to see that, and we can usually play them before they're done, which takes the sting out of waiting I think.

And I say that as a person with a few ships awaiting release, too. While I really want my Carrack, it's far more important that they make it good. The estimated release times have moved back a few time, but that's the expense of great work in the rest of the game. Backers seem to largely accept this as the cost of buying into an in-progress development: priorities must be fluid, and we have to make do.

The trick to Kickstarter is to only invest what you can lose (like anything!) and then be patient. Starcitizen is stupendously ambitious, and is going to cost a fortune to develop. They successfully made the transistion to being nearly self-sustained, basically using Kickstarter to kickstart their development process.

At least banning alchohol as a constitutional ammendment was rather ineffective and led to some wild crime and an eventual repeal. On the face of it, though, it's an interesting social experiement whose outcome probably wasn't very obvious at the time. At least to the proponents.

The guns though? I'm not at all sure how America could even try banning that. Perhaps we just need to look to another country to see how that affected society. It also has that awkward bootstrapping problem: how do you take the guns from the people? They're by definition armed, after all...

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

From that site, it seems that isolation and quarantine is largely done at borders between states and country. It's also very serious, and it's not something the CDC takes lightly: the last major enforcement of the rule was in 1918 for the Spanish Flu (though it cites there were other minor applications - the ebola scare last year may be one small instance of that).

In context of this, I would imagine that measles would need to be added to the list of diseases quarantine is enforced (I haven't spotted this list yet).

EDIT: found the important list, and it mentions specifically measels are NOT on the list:

  The list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an 
  Executive Order of the President and includes cholera, 
  diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, 
  yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, 
  Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory 
  syndromes.
  
  Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as 
  measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not 
  contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but 
  continue to pose a health risk to the public. Quarantine 
  Station personnel respond to reports of ill travelers 
  aboard airplanes, ships, and at land border crossings to 
  make an assessment of the public health risk and initiate 
  an appropriate response.

And the answer to that seems to be fairly strongly in the affirmative. I imagine we will be approaching a more nuanced legal view of such things in the near future as we battle to understand where rights really stand. (Much like many of our rights, there are exceptional situations - like the oft quoted yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater - and perhaps vaccinations should be treated similarly.)

EDIT - I was pointed to some interesting CDC info below, and there is an interesting scenario possible: make measels a quarantinable disease. This would become a choice with teeth. Choose to vaccinate, or risk isolation. Thankfully, the CDC seems like a fairly serious outfit, and I'm not worried about abuse of power in this way, but it does rephrase the topic a bit.

That said, quarantine might be overkill. But isolation really is a valid solution. It's just awful. But refusing vaccination is also awful, since it can lead to far more brutal suffering than the inconvenience of uprooting one's home.

Honestly it's just a crap situation, where each solution that isn't vaccination is just a measure of weighing the ultimate amount of suffering and choosing the least bad.

That's pretty good! At the very least, this will make it so people are more aware of the constant telemetry. Some find that sort of feature useful, and others find it chilling, but at least this is a step in the direction of making it obvious.

Then I didn't touch it for a few years, came back, and realized I had no idea how to use it again. But this time there were docs and the interface made sense. There's a lot to even like about it now!

I'm actually far more optimistic these days about tech in difficult areas. The computing power (and screens!) we can get out of just a small battery is phenomenal compared to OLPC's time.

This is something like a mosquito net. Cheap, easy to distribute, and shockingly effective against malaria. Personally, I like the laser solution more, but you can't deny helping people now for a more ideal solution later.

The trick, as always, is to also get the better solution later. And things like this centrifuge help! People have access to more advanced medical techniques and data than they had before. They'll get diagnosed sooner and more accurately. The next generation will be healthier, more energetic, and more optimistic about their chances at a longer life. They'll have more strength and will for the hard task of building up their home and country, and in a generation or two will be on their way to things like reliable power grids, communication infrastructure, transport, and more.

But they'll need things to help bootstrap them first. Iodine for clean water and paper centrifuges for diagnostics are just a few of the first steps for people who have so little modern riches are useless to them. It only took us a few generations to get here, and I bet they bootstrap faster and harder than anything we've seen, like so much of the Asian peoples.

I really like that there's a comparison to commercial centrifuges, since that shows the quality of medical care isn't going down simply to be cheap. Overall it looks like a well thought out design.