However, humans are practicing artificial selection in the opposite manner.

Evolutionary selection doesn't work on those too old or too sick to breed. Since most of the deaths are of the elderly and the sick, not much selection of fit or "unfit" genes is going on. The virus is simply hastening the natural process of death. Maybe that's why we've never evolved much of an immunity against flu-like viruses. The overwhelming majority of the breeding population survive the infections and so would continue to spread whatever genes they have.

I know it's humor or sick humor. But why use fire when steam will do just fine. No viruses are known to survive steam. If humans can be safely boiled, then you can cure them of any known viral or bacterial infection. Thermopiles don't infect humans and many self-destruct at sea level pressure.

A more plausible but still sci-fi-ish possibility is developing a system for triggering a warm enough fever that would kill the infection but leave human cells largely undamaged.

That or we wait until somebody develops programmable hunter-seeker molecular-sized nanobots.

While it looks and quacks somewhat like a court, impeachment is a political act. It shouldn't be surprising that even if quite a few Republicans thought him guilty, they voted in favor of political or at least party survival. I suspect the more pragmatic Republicans who thought Trump was guilty worried about the destruction of the party if the president was outed from office.

Impeachment has lost its force. There's isn't going to be another Nixon, unless one party manages to get both a large enough majority in the Lower House and a supermajority in the Senate. Impeachment effectively becomes a recall vote, a referendum on the incumbent president, i.e. a vote for a Democratic senator is a vote against Trump. Trump's problem therefore is to get not just himself but more Republicans elected to Congress.

Nitpick: "to kill" something doesn't necessarily mean the deed is done, the target dead. I mean, wasn't that the point of that famous Shakespeare line "to be or not to be". To do signifies intention, rather than accomplished fact, such as in the To-Do list of the things I forgot to do today.

Dogs get fed, squids get eaten. But cats are even smarter. They get fed, even without wagging their tails and drooling like stupid.

and now they can't employ the only way left to defeat entrenched Marxism

Fallacy. Nobody has ever overthrown "entrenched Marxism" by force of arms, since the entrenched "Marxists", as you call them, always have tanks, APCs, bombers and better arms. With the possible exception of Afghanistan and other countries where a strong religious element could fire up the resistance, the best that has been done to undermine a one-party socialist regime is to force the ruling party to agree to a peace treaty and elections supervised by the UN or some other international body. This was the case in Nicaragua and Cambodia. Afghanistan was practically a Soviet invasion, their equivalent of the Vietnam war, so might not even count as an "entrenched" regime but a regime that was bound to fall the minute the armed foreign support was withdrawn.

The collapse of one-party states in Europe at the beginning of the Windows era was due to a number of factors, partly economic, partly political (notably the attempts by Gorbachev to reform Soviet socialism), and partly pop-cultural. Hollywood, Coca-cola, and McDonalds can claim more credit for the fall of Iron Curtain than guns or CIA subversive schemes, unless, of course, Hollywood and McDonalds were CIA schemes.

By the way, not all Marxists are communists (i.e. supporters of a Communist party). There are many paths to the tower. While most Marxists probably believe in the necessity of violent social upheaval, some consider this as simply the natural consequence of captialism's so-called internal contradictions and adopt a more cautious attitude, basically just waiting for the state to collapse rather than taking up arms to bring it down.

According to the almighty Wikipedia:

• Bernie Sanders, b. 1941
• Mike Bloomberg, b. Feb. 14, 1942
• Joe Biden, b. Nov. 1942
• Warren, b. 1949

So by a hair, Biden's the second youngest of the quartet you listed. These guys are practically all war babies in the great war and flower children in the proxy war. Bloomberg's apparently born on that most famous of V-Days (not the V-Day across the pond or the V-J in the Pacific). So I guess it's a case of made love then war.

You assume that there are always clear boundaries or demarcation lines between between sites that are open and sites that are off-limits to the public. The drones could very well reveal the borders or edges of supposedly secret military or intelligence sites since they would have a clearer picture of the ground beneath them than what satellite photos can provide. Besides the images, someone with access to the flight data might notice the existence of areas where drones fear to tread, a likely location for a military installation or other area of high security.

Is this really true? I've always assumed that drones are just flying IP cameras. Now there are IP cameras made by companies notorious for pushing their cloud architecture to users who want tap and swipe convenience (e.g. Xiaomi and its "smart" home range of devices that include kettles, light bulbs and even power extension cords). But quite often these products operate on top of HTTP hacks obscured by fancy GUIs that can be bypassed if one can sniff the "secret" URL that the smart ape sends to the device.

Is it just me or is the site really incompatible with secure HTTP? Using Firefox with the following links:

• https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fparismuseescollections.paris.fr%2F (Firefox complains "can’t establish a connection to the server at parismuseescollections.paris.fr")
• http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/ (Works)

There's actually a fairly easy way to solve the problem without unnecessarily inconveniencing the user. Stamp or paste the password on a discreet but easily accessible part of the device, say, on the battery compartment (this is where the password of my mobile AP is located). The device can only be "hacked" (in both the good and bad sense of the word) by someone who already has physical possession of it. Just make sure the password isn't in some thermal print that fades a few weeks after the device has been unboxed.

An alternative will be a simple hardware access button. No passwords needed. For devices where security is very important, that button could be a reset key that wipes the user data clean.

You and parent both have 6-digit UIDs, and yours is nearly just 5. You folks must have been ancient enough to have overseen the birth of Web. Or is this stuff still being taught in high school? Only that "ancient Mariner" line tipped me off this was a rhyme by some writer less famous than the guy who wrote "nevermore".

Gross oversimplification: fuel in space is a matter of two things: propellant and a heat source. Barring some exotic vacuum drive or fairy dust, if you have the two things, Newton has you covered. You don't need some fancy chemical refinery to make fuel (which is what the word "fuel" brings to mind here on this hydrocarbon-polluted planet) if you can find enough ice and heat.

The trick is to find an asteroid with lots of ice that can be turned into gas (liquid is practically a non-existent form of matter in the absence of pressure), preferably some volatile with a steam or sublimation point much lower than water. When you get the ice to boil, you got yourself a steam-powered rocket. Or an artificial comet.

Not a physicist by any means. But it seems to me that the problem of waste disposal can be solved by launching the radioactive materials with long half-lives into outer space, preferably on a burn-up trajectory toward the sun (probably one of the most polluted places in the solar system). I read somewhere (don't quote me on this) that the total fuel waste product of a typical nuclear reactor is measured in tons, not hundreds of tons (this isn't counting of course the other materials that might become contaminated but which can be filtered or cleaned). So it's within the carrying capacity of one of the moon/Mars rockets in development by Elon & Co. Can someone do the maths and tell me whether this is a cheaper alternative to burying the fuel in some shielded underground bunker under lock and armed guard?

Cheap shots are okay if they're timely, within a few days of the event, and no "personal" attacks are made. Think of it as a sort of long-winded joke. The FSF was taking an advantage of the event to get itself in the news, which is understandable, given its limited media budget when compared to goliath, Microsoft. How successful this strategy is, is another matter. Maybe Windows isn't news anymore?