That may have been their excuse, but I'd bet that the real reason was for correcting grammar and being right.

Google decided that I was a minor, the idiots. And they didn't need to do so. So I've switched from Google to Duck-duck-go, and abandoned my gmail account. (I didn't want to even log in enough to delete it.)

I suppose I'll eventually need to find some other way to sign up for sites that demand that kind of id. For now I'll just use the existing gmail account for that, since most sites no longer work from an ordinary email account.

Stalking laws tend to cover surveilling someone without their consent. If they can claim they have cause to follow me home, I can claim they’re being malicious and threatening doing so. Followingme home with the implicit threat of sending armed government employees after me is threatening.

Large computer centers in space seems like a really bad idea, unless you plan on doing something like capturing an asteroid to use as a heat sink. The moon is much more plausible..but you'd still need to connect down to bedrock.

Yes indeed. I'm constantly appalled here by posts written by people who have (or at least imply that they have) at least one college degree and possibly more but write like a high-school dropout. Poor spelling, (Can't they use their computer's spelling checker?), misuse of it's and its, using the various forms of "their" seemingly at random, constant syntax errors and punctuation put in by guess work. Now I only have a high-school diploma and two years of college before I ended up in Uncle Sam's Navy, but at least I don't have to be ashamed of my writing skills. I only wonder what Henry Higgins would have to say about the writing standards here.

Maybe it was just rash and defensive locker room talk? Maybe you wanted to provoke a response for a conversation?

That wasn't some sort of BS trying to make an impression, it was the reaction you should expect from a soldier or sailor defending an Allie from an invasion. If you can't, or won't understand that, we can never have a meeting of the minds.

Not really. It really *IS* a danger. IIUC, however, currently most of the things it predicts don't really work. (This is also true for professional organic chemists!) So it's going to be something expensive to implement...and require a bit of research (i.e. actually building stuff and testing it).

OTOH, bacteria have been doing this research as long as they've been around. So don't immediately freak out. (Most of our fancy medicines are just tweaks on the bacterial research projects.)

My wife used personal pronouns when talking of the car. (OTOH, she also used to say, when driving, "the cars knows the way to" any favorite location.)

Don't read too much into the use of particular pronouns.

I notice your memories don't involve people. And you suggest it's easy to kill them.

The only reason I might be lonely here is would be that all of my friends live about 1,000 miles away now that my sister and I live in our retirement home in a different time zone, but oddly enough I don't feel lonely. And the reason the memories I listed don't involve people is that I don't know you, I don't know what kind of experiences you'd understand and decided to stick to the type of thing that would make sense to anybody reading this. As an example, I have many good memories from the time I spent as a seeing eye person for a diabetic genius who'd gone blind because of diabetic retinopathy and keeping him working at JPL as a computer programmer until he had to retire because of kidney failure. Would you understand why I like remembering getting three cheers every year at a LASFS meeting, first as a Patron Saint and now as a Sacred Object? As you can probably see, my best memories aren't exactly mainstream, but they are my memories and I cherish them. Now, why do you feel that you have to denigrate everything in my life trying to prove that you're better than me? And, as far as it being easy to kill people goes, stop putting words in my mouth.

Pigs are relatively large animals. Small islands don't support enough genetic diversity. (Well, that's my guess. Perhaps there's another answer...like small islands don't have multiple water sources or something.)

Whatever the reason, the fact remains. Possibly small islands are inhabited by people wherever it's possible to live. Small narrow islands don't have much interior.

You need to study pacific island ecology. There are reasons why many were cannibals...the only proteins available were fish...and most of those are low fats. Topical plants produce lots of carbs...and not much else. (Yeah, they imported pigs onto many of the larger islands, but most of them are too small for that.)

Judging only by the other responses to your post, your experience with the VA was highly atypical. I'll add my own experiences to that, making yours even more of an outlier.

Some of the clinics at the Los Angeles VA facilities might not have the fastest service, but once you're seeing a doctor (or nurse practitioner) they're highly focused on giving you the best care possible, and that goes double for any facility I've been to in the New Mexico VA system where I get my care now. (I actually live in Colorado, just North of the state line, but the nearest clinic is about 20 miles away in NM, rather than 100 miles in CO.) And, they have a robust Community Care program so that you can get specialist care from a local practitioner at VA expense rather than having to drive several hours to the nearest specialist the VA has to offer. And, you can get your travel expenses reimbursed at a quite reasonable rate.

Now, that's a brief description of my experiences; please tell us yours and explain why you're so opposed to getting care at the VA.

In a song from the early 1950's ("The Roving Kind") a man being a politician is used to justify the claim that he's a "good and righteous man". (But that may be a hang-over as it's a rewrite of a song from much earlier that I don't know.)

Health coverage is a good idea. Insurance is the wrong model. It should be more like clean water or garbage collection, a "public good".

So when you pulled the trigger or pressed the button or whatever it was. How did you know at that moment where the shell would land and who was under it?

Actually, the only time I got to push the button was during target practice in Hawaiian waters, where the target was an uninhabited island. Normally, I had nothing to do with that as my job had to do with a missile system. Still, I did get to fire what might be considered a huge machine gun (a 5"/54 naval rifle) as I got to fire "five rounds, rapid continuous."

You are old. It does not appear you have learned to love life. I hope you find some peace in this world before you leave it.

Yes, I'd call myself old at 76, and do, but I have many wonderful memories to cherish, such as watching both an annular and a total eclipse of the sun, seeing a lava fountain on the Big Island during an eruption from Honolulu, and seeing the Grand Canyon, Half Dome and Fishers Peak. What memories are you storing up for your Golden Years?