My wife's parents own a cockatoo. That thing is definitely dinosaur. On a related note, the idea of a 10+ foot tall cockatoo is frightening!

Which is backed up by that documentary which clearly shows stone age families having a dinosaur as a pet and using various animals as household appliances. Apparently, they also loved saying "Yabba-Dabba-Doo."

This fossil comes from a long time ago in a region Afar away. Cue title scroll and John Williams music.

I've dealt with creationists in the past. Their main argument basically boiled down to "staying the same." They see the unchanging, religious answer of "God did it" as strong because the answer never changes. If you ask now or ten years from now, the answer would still be "God did it." Science, on the other hand, is constantly changing. We see it as a strength because science gets new information and changes theories based on this information. They see it as a weakness, though. Ask a scientist a question now and ten years from now and you could get different answers.

Arguing with a creationist will never work because what we present as strengths, they will see as flaws. We have two completely different methods for determining how good an explanation is.

It's not that we want the FCC regulating network neutrality, but more like we were pushed into that corner.

In an ideal world, the market would work out any network neutrality issues and the government wouldn't need to get involved. For example, if ISP A degraded Netflix traffic in an effort to promote their video offerings and get Netflix to pay them, then ISPs B, C, and D would stand ready to pick up the customers who fled due to bad Netflix connections.

We're not in an ideal world, however, and the market is broken beyond repair (at least near-term repair). Right now, I have a choice of one ISP: Time Warner Cable. Most Americans have only one ISP or, if they are lucky, two to choose from. (Side note: Wireless doesn't count because the data charges make streaming videos an expensive proposition. You can't argue that an alternative to buying a small, somewhat affordable car is buying a $1 million tricked out limousine.) This means that an ISP can do what it wants knowing that its customers have nowhere to flee. If customers can't vote with their wallets, there is nothing reigning in the company from doing whatever it wants to do.

Even with this situation, we could have avoided government regulation, but the ISPs got greedy. They started complaining about Netflix getting a "free ride" (they pay for their own bandwidth fees the same as anyone) and tried charging Netflix to not be slowed down ("that's a nice web service you've got there... It'd be a shame if something HAPPENED to it..."). Needless to say, there was a frustrated outcry.

EVEN then, the FCC tried to enact some weak regulations that would have effectively let the ISPs do whatever they wanted. Verizon sued to get those regulations overturned and succeeded. The courts said the FCC would need to use Title II. Which they just did.

The ISPs backed us into this corner with their own actions. We didn't want to be here but they didn't give us any other choice.

And automated cars will likely just get better every year as better software is written.

Meanwhile, those meatbags will stay at the exact same level of driver quality. (Except, perhaps, for some improvement as bad-driver-meatbags turn over control to automated cars leaving only good-driver meatbags counted in driver quality ratings.)

Look at a traffic jam in a reasonably sized city. There are a lot more cars in them then there are planes in the sky. Now imagine these cars flying through the air instead of stuck in lanes on the ground.

Drivers already try to swerve into non-traffic lanes (side of the road) or lanes that they know will end to shave 10 seconds off their trip. Who is to say that, without full automation, a flying car driver wouldn't just say "why am I hovering in place in this sky lane when I can dive down, buzz the top of that building, pass between those other buildings, and be past the jam in a minute?" Flying car lanes would wind up being violated to shave off "precious" seconds.

This doesn't even get into the fact that a flying car collision would rain debris down on the people below.

Unless we get 100% automation, I hope we never see flying cars.

My method for dealing with those robocalls is to use Google Voice as my main contact number. When they call, I let Google Voice answer the phone and then block the number as spam. The next time they call, they hear "this number has been disconnected."

I can't speak for the court system by you, but I got a ticket once for going through a stop sign. (I did a "rolling stop.") I appeared at the court house and all of the people with tickets were, one by one, being told to speak with the prosecutor at which point they'd come back with a non-moving violation and a small fine. I wound up agreeing to "parking on the sidewalk" which got me a $100 fine and wasn't reported to my insurance company. (My fine was higher than everyone else's and to this day I still wonder if it was because I questioned the validity of the ticket since the officer wrote down the wrong street that it happened on.)

Or you could use non-standard units. And no, I don't mean switch to kilometers.

About 14.6 football fields make up a mile, so...

Them: Hello, sir, you're vehicle warranty has expired. How many miles are on your [insert car here]?
Me: 68,000 football fields.

Not to mention that, when the public hears "alien life", they think of intelligent creatures or, at the very least, something the size of a house cat running around the planet's surface. However, life on other planets could still be bacteria-sized. Even if it wasn't a big life form, finding single celled alien life would be a huge discovery.

That is a danger, yes. If someone is attacking you online, you should be careful if you're going to retaliate in this manner. Still, in this case, the outed trolls admitted it was them and apologized (though it was more of a "sorry I got caught" then an actual apology).

True, but they didn't even want to make the effort. To them, the whole affair of tracking down who stole my identity and was using it to open a credit card in my name was a waste of time.

If they thought an identity thief with the proven capability to open credit cards in my name was a waste of time, they surely wouldn't do much beyond "fill out a report" for Curt Shilling's daughter.

I'm not sure I'd want to work for them no matter how much they offer. Sure, they give you a million dollars and you set up their network. Then, when your work for them is done, you become a liability. After all, you know how their systems work so you can undermine them or turn them in to the police. So you are forced to give them back their money and then you "disappear."

I'm sure these kids will be fine in the long term. They will likely suffer for awhile until they get themselves back on their feet - perhaps at a different job or school. However, they will hopefully learn that actions (including stuff you post online) have consequences and there are actual people on the other side of that screen. Hopefully, other people who would otherwise have engaged in the same actions will learn from this as well and not post horrific "I'm going to rape you" threats (which is their horrid way of saying "you've said something online that I don't like but I'm horrible at debating my position without resorting to graphic threats of violence").

Maybe if more trolls found themselves victims of the consequences of their own actions, the Internet would be a nicer place.