robotrout

At 0.1c, that 40 years will just whip by for the travelers themselves. To them, it will only seem like ... 39.8 years (doh!) No help there.

I used to travel with a Chromecast so I could cast in my hotel room. I finally gave up, since it never worked in any hotel I stayed in.

Censorship seems to be coming from the left. I think it makes sense for everybody to maintain as much privacy from .gov as possible.

Radio Shack used to always want a bunch of information from you for their database, whenever you would buy anything, cash or not. It was good training in refusing to participate in data harvesting that, 30 years after my first nervous "No", is more relevant and necessary than ever.

Most people in the west have no idea the holodomor genocide of millions by the Bolsheviks (much of whose leadership and financing was from New York) ever occurred. His downplaying of it is doubtless partly responsible.

The original income tax was also promised to be only a tax on the rich. These things have a way of finding the non-rich eventually.

Also, remember in 1970, the bank secrecy act put in place a $10,000 threshold for deposits or withdrawals, that were not reported on a "suspicious activities" list. This is also where we got the $10,000 travel disclosure rule. You will note that in 50 years, that threshold has not budged, putting non-wealthy people and transactions under the microscope. These laws are not adjusted for inflation, and we all expect there to continue to be inflation at the current or even an accelerated rate.

In the vastness of a universe as large as ours, polka dotted unicorns are probably very likely. But it's still unlikely to actually encounter one ... you know, because they're polka dotted unicorns and because the universe is so big...

What I mean is, your argument doesn't make any sense. Just because the universe is big, doesn't make unlikely events more likely to be stumbled upon.

If they're all like this one, that would be puzzling indeed! Well done Mr. Spock!

So, two masses were close enough in relative velocity and vector, that one of them didn't careen off the other one, and instead, allowed the weakest of all known forces to bond them together as they hurtled at high velocity through space.

This object(s) seem statistically unlikely to me. I'm not saying it's artificial. That would be even more unlikely, by orders of magnitude. Just saying "Wow!".