Why do we still have these antiquated data caps?

To help find antiquated caching bugs!

LOL. This is the intelligence world we're talking about. There are no courts.

This particular complaint will be heard by a special tribunal that meets in secret, makes secret decisions, and has ruled against the intelligence agencies in less than 1% of all cases it's heard - they do publish the fact that a hearing took place, mostly, we think, of course if they didn't we'd have know way to know so the real number is probably much less than 1%.

The UK has much worse accountability structures in place than even the FISA court, and that's a kangaroo court that's a fucking joke. So this complaint will go exactly nowhere. I have to assume at that point they'll try to go to the EU level, but of course nothing really ensures the outcome will be any different there either.

Bitcoin is deflationary in a world with increasing population. Also BTC has made land grabbers and early adopters rich - it doesnt look like the currency of the future to me.

No - if you're talking about money supply then Bitcoin is inflationary until it stabilises. What happens to prices in the meantime is anyone's guess. So far the price has gone up, it's gone down. Over the long run it's got a lot more valuable, but that's a temporary artifact caused by the novelty of an actually working e-cash system. Nobody really knows where the value will end up, but one day Bitcoin will be boring and all the issues it raises will have been resolved. At that point the price should be stable unless the Bitcoin economy is growing, in which case falling prices is the behaviour you would intuitively expect had you not been propagandised by central bankers into believing that as a society gets wealthier everything is supposed to get more expensive.

With respect to "land grabbers and early adopters", yes, it has made some of them rich. It could also make them poor again if the price collapses. If it doesn't, then it's no different than the internet which also minted an entire generation of nouveau riche, but that's OK, we can tolerate a temporary increase in inequality in return for something like the internet. It gets balanced out eventually anyway, as none of those new millionaires fancy the idea of establishing a dynasty.

Here's an idea: let's form a religion (or teaching within an existing religion) which mystically believes that insurance should be based on hedging against risk of catastrophically-large expenses, rather than dealing with small predictable non-emergent expenses. The key is it would be based on dogmatic belief in a supernaturally-conveyed (and impossible to disprove) command that we must only use insurance that way. Whenever anyone asks you why insurance should be about spreading risk, we'll always use our faith in paranormal phenomenon to explain.

NEVER will we discuss game theory, limiting overhead, common sense, etc. Let's keep this religious.

Q: "Why do you think insurance shouldn't cover these $10 pills?"

A: "He wrote it thus, when his arm was moved by the will of The Noodly One."

Q: "Do you think it is more efficient that the patient directly pay the supplier of the pills rather without going through a middleman or filing a claim to get reimbursed?"

A: "I have no opinion about that. I do not know nor do I care."

Q: "But don't you at least agree that if the patient shops around, the might be able to get the pills for $8 here instead of $10 there?"

A: "The questions is impertinent. You're missing the point: the cost is irrelevant. This is a matter of good versus evil, and recognizing the essential basil oil in our souls. We transact directly with our sellers because we must, not because it reduces cost."

Q: "What if you don't? Suppose I could reduce claims processing overhead so that--"

A: "Overhead is irrelevant!"

Q: "Ok, but what if I had you file a claim for an $8 bottle of pills?"

A: "The horror!! No, please, no. That is the Shadow Sauce speaking through you. I cannot transact a drug purchase in such a manner!"

Q: "Wait a minute. How do you know all this?"

A: "I just do."

The big question is: do you think you can handle doing this? Mystics make this stuff all look so easy but you have to understand, they train this behavior their whole lives, guided from the time they are children. It's a way of life.

Handling water may possibly become my first Arduino or RaspPi project, if I can get through my newbie ignorance, and learn some new tricks as an old dog.

We have flood irrigation that comes in from an acequia every couple weeks (used to be every week, but times are changing) at an irregular rate at irregular time-of-day. (You can't deal with this, just using timers, and the amount of water pressure is tiny compared to what you usually have on a typical garden hose, so lots of cheap ubiquitous gadgets don't work here.) I leave a floodgate open (i.e. remove a coffee can from the end of a tube), go to work, go back home for lunch, go back to work, go home at end of day. For various reasons that you can probably imagine, it's bad to leave the floodgate open after we have collected a certain amount of water. Things work out fine if it happens to finish at lunch time (or if it's so slow that it hasn't finished until end of day), but otherwise, someone has to leave their workplace and go home to deal with it.

That is lame, in a way that really does (slightly) matter.

Thus I'm tempted to either build a sensor (or just cheeze out with a webcam, though that's less geeky) and some kind of remote-controllable motorized floodgate.

AFAICT nobody sells anything for this; it's up to me. As it happens, there are lots of guides online for building this kind of stuff, but they're all within the context of Dwarf Fortress! Yeah, right, as if I want a gate that'll remain stuck open just because there's a butterfly or elephant carcass in the way.

Lower tech solution: find retired neighbor to do it, in exchange for beer or something. This is actually the cheapest/smartest way to do, but rubs me the wrong way. I'm sure you all understand.

Wait, when did stopping work on old projects become arrogant?

Jesus. If that's now arrogance then I must be far more arrogant than I ever realised, as I've worked on many projects over the years and presently work on just one or two ...

This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.

Sorry, I clicked the links but I think I might have missed an important part of one them. Could someone please tell me what the word "this" in the above quotation refers to? What is about more government control, taxes and regulations?

Google was originally going to show that message only on pages that had results removed. But that would make too much sense so the EU banned it, because then you'd know someone was trying to hide something! So now they just put that message on every query that contains a name.

After the cookie law that broke my browser settings by displaying a stupid nag on every website I visit, I thought the EU couldn't fuck over internet users even more, but yup they found a way!

How? That sounds like a pretty apt description to me.

Anyway, the real problem with this ruling isn't that it's stupid (though it is), it's that it's unenforceable without building a Great Firewall of Europe, and when people realise that they're gonna be pissed off that their new "right" doesn't really exist or work.

It should go without saying why a GFE would be a disaster of unspeakable proportions. It effectively means partitioning Europe into its own internet. And I don't think that will happen just to defend this stupid "right" of people who don't like what appears when people search for them. They have a much better solution - either put better information about themselves online, or go after the people who uploaded the original information, and if neither of those appeal, then learn to deal with it.

No, it is not bigoted or racist to assume that someone of a different skin color may have had a different upbringing than you

It is certainly racist.

You are using race as the determining factor to make a presumption about an individual human.

What other useful definition of racism could there be?