Ok good! But how do you contain the blast without harming the ship or sending it off course?

Well, if you can manage it, the blast can be mostly linear.

I picture it like this: There's, say, a one degree angle between the trajectory of the ship and the trajectory of the fuel pallet. The explosion can happen arbitrarily far before their courses intersect. This means that the blast can be (arbitrarily far) * (sin 1 degree) away from the course of the rocket.

But that [Edit: the fuel pallet] transfers a small amount of sideways momentum to the rocket. To counter that, alternate fuel pallets from the left and the right.

Nice, but the small powered pallets would have to catch up with the ship and quickly won't be able to even if given initial momentum

What's the name of the anime?

Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's an older anime (90s) but it had a series of movies afterwards that expand on the ending. It starts as a typical "big robot fight" style anime but quickly evolves into much more.

Thought doesn't have mass. I see no reason to discount superluminal communication.

Superluminal communication breaks causality regardless of whether mass is involved, and we have no evidence that effects can happen before they are caused.

Fair point. Another argument in favor of multiple one-ness is that of monocultures. In general things that become a monoculture are more vulnerable to sudden death. For long term survival diversity is good, and I imagine that planet-level conciousnesses would spawn daughter conciousnesses as they expand to other planets. Those daughter conciousnesses would further evolve and reproduce rather than being strongly tied to the parent.

Photons don't have mass either. Yet they cannot exceed the speed of light.

Are you sure about that? Bits have mass.

The underlying substrate on which bits register has mass but do they?

There are more electrons in your RAM if you set bits to 1.

I'll take that as a compliment. I think.

I like the analogy to neurons but since we are sentient being this is a second order collective and I think we will know, at least to a degree, that we are merging.

I imagine many people will feel the same way. Do you think the Oneness will let you alone or pull you in for your own good :-)

Reminds me of http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-long-chase/

Loved it! Thanks for sharing!

If you can communicate with it at all, you have already been pulled in.

It was all over the news - all over the world. I guess if you ask a random person on the street he'll tell you he heard ISIS hacked the US military :-)

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your comprehensive and insightful comments. We have a great team at LogDog and a product that can really help people. I agree that this is a complicated field and that the "bad guys" are really really smart. But you must agree with me that that is no reason not to push forward with ideas and technologies that can help people better protect themselves.

In the short time since we launched, our system has already made several confirmed catches - where we were able to warn users of unauthorized access to their accounts.

We put tremendous effort into securing the privacy of our users' data. We have undergone an external security audit and will continue to do so periodically.

We look forward to a fruitful discussion with the security community and to providing a service that we know to be both necessary and important.

I agree with you whole-heartedly, absolutely whole-heartedly - my concern is with pushing too far, too fast, out-pacing one's knowledge or capabilities, and making things worse.

My two greatest concerns reflect this: Without sufficient forethought, planning, and implementation, 1) your servers will be compromised and that anonymized data stolen and misused, and 2) users will have a false sense of security, especially the naive who have no reason to doubt the bold claims.

Think of the recent attacks on CurrentC systems after participating retailers disabled NFC to prevent use of Apple Pay: That brought them a lot of attention and that attention revealed that they were not ready for prime time, they simply did not grasp the enormity of the threat environment in which they hope to operate.

If you have the DevOps experience for defense-in-depth and PDRR, excellent! Hats off to you for attacking an interesting problem in an interesting manner.