The USPS gets a tax break and preferential treatment, like a monopoly on your mailbox and increased penalties for harassment of their agents vs. a slightly more private carrier like UPS or FedEx, but they are not themselves "the feds". They're just a business with protected status which is dressed up to look patriotic, and they're hardly the only one. I know that when I was a kid, I thought Federal Express was affiliated with the postal service. Given what I see around me on a regular basis, it's probable that many adults still believe that. And like any large corporation, FedEx has to some extent grafted itself onto the federal government, e.g. (FTFL) "In 2001, FedEx sealed a $9 billion deal with the USPS to transport all of the post office's overnight and express deliveries".

Who the fuck are you, coward? You're only capable of bullshit.

Irrelevant. This is an idea already proven viable.

Irrelevant. Not the only technology.

More irrelevancy.

Already proven viable.

Not a conspiracy theory, this was a deliberate attempt on your part to paint me with that brush. Also, conspiracies are the norm, not the exception. If two people team up to defraud a third in a way that breaks the law, that's a criminal conspiracy.

Cognitive dissonance is not pop psychology, and you also don't get to suggest that I'm suffering from it while also insulting the concept.

Yes, very simple economics: The entrenched interests have lots of money, and have been using it to manipulate the situation so as to remain in a position of power, as our corporatist system is designed to enable. No spooky invisible hands are needed to explain what is happening.

because being so irresponsible is easier than being responsible enough to do the research to determine whether the products are safe. But don't fool yourself; this is still irresponsible behavior. Society encourages it by taking away your farm and throwing you into the street where it's illegal for you to live if you have a bad season or two, which is just another reason we need MGI. Then people can better afford scruples.

The glycol is the corrosion inhibitor. That's its job as much as anti-freezing. That's why we use it even in climates without freezes, and not just a smaller package of corrosion inhibitors. You have to substantially change the properties of the water to retard corrosion.

You wouldn't drink the water in your engine even if it didn't have anything added to it, because with or without a corrosion inhibitor you will still have corrosion, and you don't want to be drinking heavy metals. Iron is not too bad, but Aluminum is fairly horrible. Many engines are still made of both, and the ones that aren't are generally all-Al. Regardless, you can check coolant condition with a voltmeter. If your coolant is making more than about 0.1v, then it's doing damage through corrosion and you need to change it. If it's making more than 0.2v, then you're definitely suffering ongoing damage.

Of course there is. There's a way for data service to be free. It's called mesh networking, and all it takes is for enough of us to care at the same time to spend a few bucks (okay, maybe a couple hundred) on a fancy WAP and maybe build some decent antennas if we live in the sticks. Problem is, even here on Slashdot people will bitch and whine about how the uplink bandwidth has to come from somewhere and refuse to get involved. Well yes, no kidding. But we also have to start somewhere. Forget Internet2, we need Internet3. For me, since I do live in an area of low population density, there's no point in messing with it since I have no one to mesh network with, hence my endless campaigning.

The only thing that's ever going to solve this problem is open mesh networking. That brings a whole new set of problems, but we need to tackle them sooner rather than later because centralization is getting stronger rather than weaker.

Not really. This is a step closer to having a more useful grid. Right now, the grid isn't much of a grid, it's more like a loose net with lots of big holes in.

What would get more houses completely off the grid would be batteries that last forever and are relatively inexpensive. They don't need to be space-efficient, they just need to last effectively eternally, a human lifetime at least.

Ever enabling autorun was something they did wrong. And disabling it should have been a simple checkbox in the drive properties where it would make sense.

Probably, since the job they will be doing is easier. More sustained charge and discharge cycles, less start-and-stop.

There's no reason to believe it will last only 10 years. The 10 years number has to do with suitability for automotive use.

This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes — and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.

People want to believe that they are smart and moral, and therefore they justify their poor decisions and the FUD they've spread by continuing to attack ideas long after they have been proven viable.

You can't separate the social and legal deterrents.

Yeah, right. You're just afraid because you believed the propaganda about sperm count and tiny nuts, and yours are already minuscule. Anyone who wants to smoke pot can do so and get away with it, if they care even a little. There's lots of states where it's legal now.

We don't really care if people create unless they are driven, because we want them to do their best. And yes, they can release their songs into the wild if they want, or not. If they don't share them with anyone, then nobody can copy them. And their ideas can die in obscurity with them.

Are you ignorant, or trolling? It's hugely important that we lack the original manuscripts of the bible.

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.

Right, but then the USPS was claiming that they simply threw away all of the resulting data when they were done with it. That's a ridiculous claim in every way.

So what? They don't have to OCR anything that has a properly printed label; they just can it for bar codes. Those pieces of mail, which are the bulk of what passes through the postal system, never has to be photographed at all because they already know where it's coming from, where it's going, what it weighs and whether the package weight was reported accurately. The scans of the remaining minority of mail could quite reasonably be saved ten years ago, especially if you were not picky about resolution. Today, it's trivial.

But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail, so even if they were throwing away all of those scans, they would still reasonably be storing the metadata. Why would you ever throw that away, unless forced? It's small, and it's valuable. But moreover, one of the Snowden revelations was that they are in fact storing all of that OCR data, it all gets handed straight to the feds. Before Snowden, it was generally believed (heh heh) that this data was simply flushed, and only the fringe believed that it was handed to the feds as a matter of course. Now we know that to be the case.