But you didn't eat it

Well...

Fact: Putting the word "fact" before your sentence does not absolve you of the need to back it up with actual evidence.

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

To quote a commenter above:

reality is there will be collateral damage in fighting terrorists sometimes

if you travel to the middle east, don't be surprise if terrorists grab you and hold/torture/behead you

This shouldn't have been let out of the firehose. WTF is nerdy about this?

You're joking. Liquid mercury? Come on, show of hands: Who among us has not at some point in our lives broken open a thermometer in order to play with the mercury inside? That's a nerd rite of passage.

Hell, I'm old enough to remember when they made little maze puzzles with a blob of mercury inside that you'd try to get from one corner to the other. Those were the days before parents raised kids like veal. We had pocket knives, for chrissake. Can you imagine millennial parents giving their precious offspring pocket knives? I had my own .22 rifle by the time I was 10. All the liquid mercury I handled in my life, it's no wonder I'm half an imbecile.

The pool of people who are knowledgeable about the practices, challenges, and daily business realities of the telecommunications industry (or any industry for that matter) is a small one indeed; good luck finding someone in that pool with the experience necessary to lead an agency the size of the FCC who hasn't worked for the industry at one time in his or her life.

What's strange about any of that?

The carved shells? They were from a Mossberg 500 Tactical Persuader pump action shotgun.

Fuck your aliens.

I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.

Everybody knows it was Anunnaki, our ancestors, the Shining Ones, who gave this technology to humans over 250,000 years ago.

In addition to being cool stuff, mercury also has a very long history of use in gold extraction. I don't know about the people who built this particular structure; but mercury-amalgamation gold extraction is known to have been in use in South America well before the Spanish showed up. Given the human enthusiasm for gold, that's another point in mercury's favor as a funerary good, along with being weird and cool looking.

(Large scale extraction is now usually done by cyanide leaching, since that's somewhat less nasty than mercury amalgamation; but small scale miners often still use mercury. As one might imagine, the 'now heat the amalgam with a blowtorch to drive off the mercury and recover the gold' step is about as good for you as it sounds, possibly worse.)

That's a matter of perspective. I've been there numerous times and have found that the Canadian side has the best views but the American side is less of a tourist trap. The Canadians have done a piss poor job of keeping development in check, in fact, there's a school of thought saying that the Horseshoe Falls are perpetually mist covered (historically they weren't) because of changes in the local wind currents brought about by development on the Canadian side.

Besides, the coolest thing there is the Cave of the Winds, and that's in good ole USA. No trip would be complete without seeing both sides, but there are plenty of people (myself included, obviously) that think the American side is at least the equal of the Canadian side.

Whenever I hear of a story like this, I am reminded of the scene in Martin Scorsese's great movie, Raging Bull, in which Jake LaMotta, played by Robert DiNiro, speaks of an upcoming opponent to an associate:

"I'll put yous both in the ring and give yous both a fuckin' beatin', then yous can both fuck each other!"

Haven't we lost enough to the stupidity of our intellectual property laws? Could it be time to revisit whether or not they're actually doing what they were meant to do?
 

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.

If it's so dangerous to go out, how will he manage supplies? Even the 8' sphere won't hold a year of food and water.