The examples are meant to show that light travels at a measurable, finite speed, rather than being infinitely fast as it appears to the naked eye on Earth. To a nine-year-old, the idea that the light from a distant lighthouse takes a tiny bit of time to reach his eye might be pretty profound, or that it takes whole minutes for the sun's light to reach the Earth each morning, or that even the brightest stars in the sky might not actually be there right now this instant, cause the change in their light won't reach us for years... to a nine-year-old, that's wacky enough.

The advanced implications of a finite speed of light, ultimately leading to special relativity, that can be put off til the child is a little older. Again, Einstein's thought experiment with the train and the lightning bolts is difficult to explain even under the best of circumstances. "no matter how fast you travel, light always appears to be going 300,000 km/s"? Leave that for another day.

Just plausible enough that... I DON'T believe it. A 100 MB bomb like Tzar Bomba is HEAVY, and in the water that means slow, and probably has a radioactive signature. Then, there's the autonomous bit, which might get fried by radioactivity leaking from the bomb fuel. The U.S. has some of the best self-driving tech testing around right now in plain sight, and things are still banging into each other. You trust a nuke to this technology, fully automated, roaming around all by itself around the oceans? You trust this to work?

Really?

There are two ways to navigate underwater. The easy way, sonar, unfortunately lets everyone around you know where you are. The hard way, silently, using nothing but quiet, passive sensors like a compass, your best guess at where you're at, your best guess at the surrounding oceanic terrain, any GPS that might make it down to where you're at, is a matter of such skill that submariners won't talk about how they do it. I don't believe the silent stuff is even close to being fully automatable, particularly to the level of perfection necessary to completely trust a damn nuke on it.

Then, strategically, you have to face up to what happens if it gets discovered. US Navy pings a fat, heavy Russian bogey sitting in U.S. waters near the Norfolk Navy Yards, for example. This would be grounds for war, like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, except this time there's no Cuba offering safe haven for the nuke. Ambassadors politely tell Putin to surface the damn thing and dismantle it, on camera, in the presence of U.S. Navy personnel, now, or we blockade Crimea and fill Turkey and Poland full of cruise missiles tipped with Castle Bravo-style payloads, all wired to a vintage Commodore Amiga for launch control. Two can play at the Mine's Bigger Than Yours game, and the last time Russia played it against Reagan, the Soviet Union went bankrupt and collapsed.

I call this story Bullshit. Even if the idea were "floated around", the damn thing would never be built, and it built, it would never be launched, because too many things could go wrong (imagine if the clever Americans could figure out how to hack it, turn it around and send it straight up the Moscow river?) and Putin would still be fucked if it works perfectly, because it leads to a brand-new 21st Century nuclear arms race. The U.S. can always out-spend Russia, offer a better quality of life for nuclear scientists, offer a better quality of life for rocket scientists and aerospace engineers, offer a better quality of life for AI developers. Like Sputnik, the Russians might do it first, but once motivated the U.S. will do it better and bigger. Russians make a berzerker torpedo drone, U.S. replies with Skynet and hundreds of satellite-based launch platforms (treaties be damned). One catastrophic event near a U.S. coastal city is not enough to deter an entire a complete, automated airborne continent-dusting response.

So, Russia has nothing to gain from this. ISIS, maybe... cool terrorist device. But not a sovereign nation that is a fixed, land-based, terrestrial target. So, I say BullShit. Too risky if it gets spotted, hacked, or let's face it, it's Russian, so it very well may simply malfunction... how would its Russian handlers know? Capture it (gently), put it in a container, ship it on a container ship to Crimea. Hey, Putin, got something of yours. Marked "Handle with Care". Try this shit again, the WOPR Version 15 might decide to send more.

Ok, sure. But a bomb takes a lot more than just that to make it go boom.

Not a problem. Example, the US Navy manages to train plenty of people to service nuclear power plants for its ships and submarines (Russians and Chinese got 'em too). and you're not sending untrained/untrainable people into space anyways.

Nine-year-olds can be smarter than you think. Just keep him interested with simple things that are imaginable and relateable, either to the real world or TV/movies. First, light travels with a constant speed. How do we know? When NASA spoke to the men on the moon, it took half a second for the radio waves to get there. When NASA radios satellites around Mars, it can take 5 to 10 minutes. And Voyager 2 is way, way out there. It takes almost a day for a command to get to Voyager just to find out if it's still working (it is).

Einstein's thought-experiment with the train near the speed of light and the two mirrors and the simultaneous lightning strike is a little complicated. Skip that for now. Just tell him the reason Star Trek has warp speed and Star Wars has hyperspace is because we all know, under normal circumstances, you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Next, gravitation. What's cool? Einstein figured out that gravity bends light. How do we know? Mercury. Draw your kid some circles around the sun with Earth and Mercury, tell him that when Mercury gets close to the sun it appears in the wrong place in the sky. Einstein predicted, correctly, that the light from Mercury is bent when it passes close to the sun. When did he prove it? During a solar eclipse, when we could actually see Mercury when it's real close to the sun, Mercury's little dot was right where Einstein said it should be, not where it would be if its light went in a straight line.

If he's impressed and still interested, equivalence. Acceleration, gravity, same. Ever ridden in an elevator, little man? You like roller-coasters, right? Same thing as gravity. If you're riding in a space-ship that's accelerating at 32 ft/s*s, then it feels exactly like standing on the earth. Now, if that space-ship is going really, really fast, like close to the speed of light, and there's a window in the side of the spaceship where light is shining in (draw a picture!), by the time that light hits the opposite side wall of your spaceship, the accelerating spaceship has moved a little out of the way and the light shines a little below the opposite window. Draw a line: light is CURVING because your spaceship is accelerating so fast.

Well, if acceleration and gravity are the same, Einstein figured a whole lot of gravity should make light curve. Then came the solar eclipse, and Mercury was right where Einstein said it should be, it's light curving around the sun. Neat, huh?

If he's still with you, thank your stars you got a bright, imaginative little kid. Move on to Black Holes, gravity so powerful light can't escape. Cooooool. So long as you can keep tying the theories to stuff your kid can relate to, either in the real world or the movies, you got a chance. Run it as far as it's worth, he might catch the bug.

Don't forget Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan... not sure how they fit into some Star Wars analogy, but they sure keep all those Congress-critters in goose-step behind the Dear orange-haired Leader. People so easily forget, Congress has the ultimate power in the U.S... they can shut down a president, cut off his money supply, and even kick him out of office, and there's nothing the president can do about it. But McConnell and Ryan are happy the way things are going.
Ryan's up for re-election next year. Anyone from a district in Wisconsin be so kind as so make him go away?
I mean, if all else fails, vote him out.

THIS. Show up in 2018 (and any local elections along the way), demand from your candidate laws to reverse Ajit Pai's FCC or else vote for the guy who will. Otherwise, sit and spin on the monetized, content-monitored, multi-tiered toll-road Internet you deserve.

I still say chuck it. Better than being forced to sit in a fume-filled cabin while the plane lands somewhere not your destination.
The only downside I see with a convenient airlock eject-o-matic is someday they might make 'em big enough to toss an entire passenger.
the cabin crew would love that. finally get some damn respect.

There's too many battery things to just prohibit them all. Prohibit them from the luggage compartment, but for the cabin, have aircraft include a small airlock so cabin crew can take your self-destructing phone or tablet or shoe-bomb and just chuck the thing overboard. Include disposable heat-resistant bags with little self-deploying parachutes to quickly distance it from the aircraft and so that some unlucky sod doesn't get killed when the flaming thing hits the ground.

Straight from the horse's mouth, apparently.

Apple (and a lot of other corporations, to be honest) pulled a LOT of tricks to keep from paying taxes in the U.S. and elsewhere. I suppose it's nice some country is getting a big corporation to pay up, and if it's Ireland, I'm certain it was a sweet deal to start with (just to get Apple to settle down there in the first place).

Here's hoping Ireland uses some of the money to finish some lovely road and railway and railway projects - they need 'em.

Their costs were also heavily subsidized by classified ads. Huge source of revenue for any newspaper, large or small, now completely gone thanks to Craigslist, e-bay, etc. etc. That's a large part of the revenue that has to be made up since the glory days before the Internet.

People STILL don't know what Net Neutrality is about.
Net Neutrality is not that all content should be free from content creators. Paywalls are just fine. Net Neutrality is about what the guy-in-the-middle can do, your ISP, the guy who's supposed to just shut up and deliver the packets, but who now thinks he's got the right to add a little extra for himself.

Net Neutrality rules prevent your ISP, and any intermediate provider between you and your content, from inspecting what it delivers to you before it delivers to you, and charging the sender a fee to deliver it to you.

Think Comcast, which owns Universal, billing Disney for the delivery of its packets along the last mile to your house. Why? Because Comcast owns the wires and the equipment between you and the rest of Internet, because streaming Disney movies requires a lot of Comcast's bandwidth (think equipment upgrades, more fiber, angry customers saying service sucks), and why should Disney get all the money (from your subscription with Disney) when Comcast's wires are crucial to you consuming the content? The MBA's at Comcast feel like they are doing Disney a service, providing this last mile of delivery, and with their monopoly over subscription territory, they got Disney by the balls, so it's time to give 'em a squeeze.

Net Neutrality means delivering Internet is boring... shut up and deliver, regardless of content or sender. On December 14, this rule will disappear (on a party-line vote), and delivering Internet will become super-exciting, because ISP's can discriminate between one packet and another, throttling some content and expediting others. So, Disney may have to charge you a dollar more to stream that movie because, too bad, you're on Comcast and Comcast throttles non-Universal content; your friend on FIOS may get Disney cheaper because Verizon chooses not to throttle Disney packets. Or maybe Disney will just hike up subscription fees on everybody, just to be safe. Gee, ain't de-regulation great. May weasels eat Ajit Pai's eyes out and piss up his nostrils.