It is a lot like driving with one hand verses two at the ten and two positions. Many people can safely drive with one hand but it is safer to be in the ten and two positions with two hands which is why we need to do it to pass most driving tests.

In theory (one, anyway) 10 and 2 are the best positions, so DMV examiners have been insisting on it.

In reality, it turns out, 9:30 and 3:30 are safer.

In theory, talking on the phone is distracting.

In reality, it's been shown that drivers who are a little bit tired are much safer if they're also talking.

In theory, texing bans will reduce traffic accidents.

In reality, people in those States text below the steering wheel, completely taking their eyes off the road, to avoid cops seeing then, while those in States without such bans tend to text with the phone at the top of the steering wheel, so they can at least keep half an eye on the road. Paradoxically, texting bans are deadly.

Tibbit's "solutions" work in theory, but reality is far more messy. To assume otherwise is hubristic.

I hadn't heard of it, and I have been an Amazon Prime member for a few years...

Same here, which means they never advertised it on their own site, which means they didn't want it to succeed for some reason.

Lord knows they've have no problem advertising the Fire Phone or various Kindles over the years.

Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.

Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.

There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.

For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.

Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.

(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)

Right. Especially since, when you're looking at your smartphone, it's looking back at you.

This would be valuable for vehicle driver speech input, which has to reject a lot of noise.

There is a difference between a simplified overview and a dense fact-regurgitation. The difference is that I expect to get an understanding from a simplified overview, while I dont expect to get an understanding from a dense fact-regurgitation.

"Simplified" does not mean "simplistic" unless you dont understand how education works.

Richard Feynman. End of discussion.

If we don't get it, the terrorists will get it first.

Grow a big moustache.

Doug Stanhope, "You were born free, but you got fucked out of half of it."

Wont make them any more OR less safe, which means that the regulations arent about safety at all. Do you think regulations that arent about safety but are sold to you as if they were about safety is a good thing for you?

We are talking about contracts, and people do "slavery" contracts all the time. For example, employment contracts.

Contracts, unlike the "slavery" that you want to imply, can be broken. Broken contracts go to civil court, where a judge decides how the harmed person is to be made whole again (typically with a money judgment.)

I'm sorry that you dont understand anything at all about the world of contracts but insist on acting like you do anyways.

"Describes the rules you agree to when using our services." Most sites have something like this, and they all start out with "By using this site you agree to..."

And they're all bullshit, like any one-party contract. There has to be an offer, consideration, and acceptance at a minimum.

An "I agree" button _might_ be enough to make that legal, but if somebody has never read those terms they are certainly not bound by them. Google could very easily make somebody sign in to use their service, but they choose to make it completely open instead.

Technically, no.
You are bound by the treaties your country signed.

You mean mean, 'in theory', not 'technically'. If the local jurisdiction does not enforce the laws, then on a technical basis you are not bound by them. On a theoretical basis you may be, but who cares.

That's the law. That you choose to be a space pirate, is your own problem.

You can't take the sky from me!

What if you just charged what it cost to get the material, shipping, and such? Who cares who it belongs to as long as you are the one mining and transporting it (for an exorbitant fee...)

Son, the pixels arent 14-bits each. They are 42 bits each, which is rounded to 48 bits each. 6 bytes per pixel.