A newspaper may have no liability for the food in an advertised restaurant, but they do have the discretion to run or not run a particular ad. If they regularly run ads for fraudulent businesses, they damage the value of their ads. Similarly with web businesses: the better they tailor their advertising to their readership, the more useful those ads and the less distracting. When I see an ad for MSI on Newegg, or Ars, it's consistent with the content. New product announcements in such ads even get clicks sometimes. Ads for beard trimmers on fibre2fashion or food.com? Irrelevant and jarring. Even at PBS, there's a lot of self-filtering: you won't see them accept funding from nor namecheck NAMBLA or the KKK.

The lack of continuity is probably the worst aspect of 'advertising networks' If you're just getting random, or even tracking-based shit from doubleclick or servedby, then the ads are out of context. Visit a shoe site then a car site and see shoe ads all over the cars. It demonstrates a lack of editorial concern by the website publisher, and implies that their primary interest is selling ads. (which it may be - it's just poor taste to demonstrate it to your nominal audience)

Very few consumers are rational. Pet rocks were an actual thing. People buy stuff because they think it's worth the money, or because they think everyone else has one, or because they're bored.

Have you ever seen a kid when ice cream truck music starts playing? Those kids don't want a popsicle from the freezer - they want the exact same popsicle from the ice cream truck at three times the price. Adults get a little better at suppressing that kind of irrational act, but we're still susceptible to it. Even people who believe they make purchases only after coldly tabulating the marginal enjoyment of one more M&M against the penny it costs.

In a tunnel, air friction becomes really important. Trains (or hyperloops) fit close in the tunnel, and there's a lot of air has to move from in front of the train to behind the train, squeezing through that narrow space. Evacuating the tunnel (ie, hyperloop) is a huge benefit. So is running your train on Mars, where the atmosphere is already a -14.6 psi/ -0.994 bar vacuum.

Now imagine your outlets are in a room filled with 500 people all day long. Still willing to let passers-by plug in?

My guess is, no, and that you would turn off those circuits to prevent 60 W * 200 people * 8 hours...call it 100 kWh/day loss. And that's what the rail company should do. If they don't mean for their outlets to be used by passengers, then they should not energize them. Give cleaning crews or the engineer keys to the breaker box, and only energize the outlets when they're needed. Signage and verbal warning maybe a second best. Signage and arrest? ridiculous.

Then you are uniquely incapable of appreciating metaphor. You see, many writers build their stories around symbolism in order to convey a message that may not be explicitly stated. This makes those stories richer and more meaningful for an audience not simply waiting for the next explosion. Aesop's fables are an extreme where the moral is explicitly stated by fantasty talking animals at the end. These metaphors depend on fictional or fantasy elements within the story bearing recognizable similarity to real world people or structures, and stereotypical caricatures are a millenia-old mechanism for that. Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, The Tempest or Adam and Eve: if you can't see that these stories say more than what is on screen, then you are missing the fucking point.

It's an effect of sensitization. If you wake up every day and someone calls you a lazy moke, you get much better at recognizing subtle comments. It's the reason it's ok for Peyton Manning to slap Marvin Harrison on the ass, but not ok to slap cheerleaders. Stereotypes, like the one about autistic computer geeks unable to recognize metaphor, are propagated by repetition.

Sure. You can spend $120 for a teaspoon of mercury and then try to blow it into a glass tube in your basement, or you can go over to the mill that shut down 10 years ago and pry a "mercury switch" (commonly known as "thermostat") out of the wall.

1 MJ is only slightly more energy than a Snickers bar. (215 kCal = 900 kJ) It's not so much the energy as how quickly it can be released.

Our paramilitary police forces make increasing use of "no knock warrants." It is very difficult to ask to see a warrant when your ears are ringing from the flash-bang and very difficult to be rational when your baby's face is on fire

It depends on what the "readings" and "hazard" meant. Frequently, "hazard" means that the concentrations are above an OSHA or EPA environmental threshold. That is, they're above a level where long term, chronic exposure results in no measurable risk of dysfunction, birth defects, or cancer.

It's a very different question to ask whether it's safe to walk into a room long enough to sweep the spilled mercury into a dustpan, or whether it's safe to eat, sleep, and play banjo in that room. In fact, it's even different to ask whether it's safe for the high school chemistry teacher to make a one-time trip into the room to clean up the Hg, or whether it's safe for the mercury specialist, who spends his whole day cleaning up broken thermometers across town, to make yet another trip into another mercury room.

A few years back, a kid at Georgia Tech, Georgia's main engineering school, was arrested and jailed on terrorism charges for throwing dry ice "bombs" out his dorm window.

Georgians like their authoritarians

But the meaning of numbers stamped on a measuring cup is intuitively obvious, and the stamped/molded numbers will last as long as the cup. Painted numbers flake off and add a whole extra step to the manufacturing process, dramatically increasing the cost. Stamped numbers on a measuring cup is a valid decision based on manufacturing constraints. Choosing grey-on-grey, or blue-on-blue (hello, microsoft) for icons and text is 100% arbitrary. It's just as easy to use yellow-on-purple, black-on-white, or red-on-green. Some choices are pretty, some are ugly, some are visible, and some are not. You choose among them only for cosmetic and usability reasons, and grey-on-grey sacrifices usability to cosmesis.

TFA isn't arguing about whether it's possible for people to use these interfaces, it claims that the use obscure metaphors and confusing design to the point that many users feel it's just not worth the bother.

Software/UI authors may believe that their app is the best thing in the world. They may think they've got a great system for getting all 32,767 functions within 3 clicks of the landing page, but this may only be true for people with 60+ hours experience using the software. Here's your first hint: a grey-on-grey list of star, clipboard, privates' stripe, arrow, and doghouse could either be a status display of several inactive features, all disabled, or it could an iconic menu. It's exactly as usable as a list of "M B P D H," meaning useful only as a mnemonic after you know what each button does.

There are a stunning number of "modern" GUIs that are exactly as usable as Emacs. Seriously: 3 horizontal lines - WTF is someone supposed to know that means the same as down-caret (unless the down-caret just toggles between horizontal caret) or as "solar eclipse" (unless "solar eclipse" means run calculations)?

Modern GUIs are more about fashion than function, and if you haven't been following the fashion, then you may not realize that "Menu" has changed from a set of nested horizontal lines to just three identical horizontal lines. You may not realize that last year's "Wrench" for options has changed to this year's "Gear" for the same function. It's not about age - a lot of users are going to upgrade, this year, from Windows XP and IE8 to Windows 10 and Chrome - skipping 10 years of fashion changes. It's culture shock.

That's what banks do. They guess at an organization's ability to repay a loan and set the interest level so that the (likely) sum of interest on good debts is greater than the sum of defaults. If the bank can't do that, it's supposed to fail. We're all sitting here making reasons why, now that Greece can't pay its creditors, they should be loaned more money by new creditors to pay off the old creditors. How are the new terms, on much higher risk debt, supposed to be any easier to meet?

Banks wrote the terms of the current Greek debt, and it seems Greece will not meet those terms. Default, let the banks collect whatever collateral they are due or whatever the default clause allows them, and let's get on with the capitalism. Capitalism only works if bad decisions carry a death penalty.

Maybe losing a wheel. I'm sure you've seen videos (seems like they're always Russian) of some car driving down the road with one wheel missing. You can route around that kind of damage by balancing cargo to unload the missing wheel. Once you've lost 2 wheels on a 4 wheel car, no amount of routing is going to get you running again.

That will never happen for any kind of quantity because of the time required to melt and freeze (or UV activate or whatever other technology) the printed part. It's easy to get an injection molder to produce 1000 parts/hour. This is the point: 3D printing is great if you need a small run of a unique shape, or if you can't adopt a commodity shape. Or if the shape you want is no longer being manufactured. That mostly means toys, art, and legacy repairs. If you're doing anything "real," meaning 1,000 or 100,000 pieces, you'll use a manufacturing process with higher start-up time and lower piece time.