Clearly you have not actually experienced this first hand.

First, there's the google bus, then the yahoo bus, then the apple bus, then the facebook bus and then the ea bus, and then the ebay bus, and during rush how it's a mess (according to a friend of mine who used to live near Van Ness and worked near the Financial district and used to take Muni)

In the southbay, in Sunnyvale near me, a particular Gbus is parking in a VTA bus stop and waiting for a Caltrain connection nearly every day. Sometimes they get their early and wait jamming up traffic while they wait for googlers to try to get off Caltrain and attempt to make a timed transfer** I've seen VTA busses stuck in the long line of traffic behind me and I wonder if every time they did this they might cause a VTA passenger to miss their Caltrain connections. I guess it's tough shit for the VTA bus rider in this situation, because they Gbus schedules aren't public knowledge...

AFAIK, SF is currently charging $1/day for a stop. If you happen to be an uber or a tour bus operator, you would have to pay a $279 dollar ticket for doing something like this. To scale this, it's $2/person to ride muni, but only a $100 fine if you are caught by one of the 2 fare inspectors checking 1000 busses (okay, that's an exaggeration). Not that $4/stop would break their bank, but to say they these busses paying their fair share is a bit farcical, they are getting a golden deal that most uber and tour bus operators could only dream about...

The VTA (in the south bay) hasn't started charging google yet. Probably because google bribed Mountain View with some free shuttle busses (however, they only agreed to pay for the shuttle busses for 2 years). I imagine that will turn out to be even net worse because now people will get used to the shuttle, and demand that it not be terminated after the 2 years is up leaving MV footing the bill. Meanwhile, google is probably banking that all the furor of the busses will die off by then...

FWIW, here's a purported map of the problem areas on the SF side...

***note VTA doesn't have timed transfers, so if Caltrain is late, you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. Likewize if you bus is late...

Before the US picked up the abandoned French effort for the Panama canal, the US was seriously considering building the Nicaragua canal*.

The Nicaraguan government was historically worried about British colonial aspirations in the area and basically invited the US in as a preemptive action to deter the British from action. By 1884 a treaty was negotiated to build the Nicaraguan canal and a US based canal company established to build it, but the company didn't accomplish too much before going bankrupt. The US was going to restart work on Nicaraguan canal, but whole Panama thing changed the US direction. It was only after the US financed the Panamanian revolution and the newly formed country of Panama decided to accept the terms of the previously negotiated Hay–Herrán Treaty (not actually ratified by Colombia) which discounted the French bankruptcy sale price from $100M to $40 to take over the French project.

Interest revived in in 1914 with the Bryan–Chamorro Treaty, but that never panned out either...

* see Sánchez-Merry Treaty and read this book...

That's an unfortunate reality of their economic power of the people, not the currency they use for transactions...

Of course if they returned to their own currency, they could devalue it to temporarily improve the lot of their poor (if you don't save money and don't have any capital and live day-to-day, devaluation doesn't hurt you as much), but ultimately that is another level of hell that they just got out of...

Local currency manipulation might be able to smooth over the rough patches, but improving the economic power of the population relative to the rest of the world is really the only way out.

I suspect the benefit of a digital currency is mostly to improve local liquidity of money given the country's current crushing sovereign debt load and critical need to preserved hard cash to finance it (as they've defaulted on bonds). A parallel virtual currency is much cheaper to deploy on short notics than a parallel physical currency.

This vaguely reminds me back in the 80's when I went to china, with their two-currency system (RMB vs FEC or foreign exchangeable currency). Nominally they were the "same" value, but of course their value in real life was quite different. I suspect the same will be true here...

I dunno, but letting humans decide where an autonomous vehicle should go, might still be a recipe for unsafe operation...

* Teenagers
* Elderly people with dementia
* Naïve people unfamiliar with local gang activity patterns
* Suicidal depressives
* etc...

We should always be concerned when you have human decision in the loop of a potentially dangerous machine (car, airplane, nuclear power plant, etc). It doesn't mean autonomous operation isn't valuable assistance (ABS, ATC, etc), it just means it isn't a total panacea for the safe operation...

Actually I would say that they should take one class on the principles of security...

Most of the problems with web security are not really novel to web program, but are systematic security issues that permeate all levels of software. For example, execution privilege (e.g., cross site), parameter checking (e.g, including buffer overruns and sql injection) aren't really novel to web application security.

Most folks seem to think that security is some sort of discipline or retro-fit on existing code, but it's really more similar to a style of programming (like an orthogonal axis to procedural vs object oriented vs functional programming), because most of the difficulty behind security relate to auditing/testing code and behavior.

Sadly and predictably, when you start talking about programming styles, you come up with all sorts of resistance from inflexible programmers and heaps of legacy code so security things generally things get avoided/overlooked/dismissed, and well, the predictable happens.

Odds are the so-called "secret-serum" is called ZMapp manufactured by a small biotech company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical...

Odds are this treatment is an optimized cocktail combining the best components of MB-003 and ZMAb (both appear to be three-mouse monoclonal antibody produced by exposing mice to fragments of the Ebola virus and extracting antibodies from their blood)...

Odds are these particular antibodies are actually manufactured in a plants, specifically Nicotiana, not extracted from animal blood.

Odds are you could find this information on this internet in less than 1 minute w/o suggesting or consulting a poorly researched, highly politicized book written in alarmist form.

Unfortunately, odds are many people are unable to use the internet effectively...

One advantage of vote-by-mail is that any large-scale fraud (enough to tip an election) takes quite a bit resources and people
One advantage of on-line voting is that minimal resource and people (e.g., as small as one person) can likely perpetrate such an action.

Two people can keep a secret (if one of them is dead). This is the difference.

I vote for the go-poorly-more-or-less-forever...

The current state-of-the-art hotel security fail has pretty much flew under the public radar after a brief buzz, and apparently was so forgettable that it was even forgotten by many of the readers of slashdot...

I suspect you mean Erin Andrews...

Okay, what is 'inadequate' (other than full disclosure)? What is 'irrelevant' about most of the information that is requested to be removed? Is information actually ever 'excessive' (e.g., TMI)? 'Inaccuracy' of course can be determined in a court (don't need DCMA-like takedowns requests for that)...

Seems like much of the information requested to be removed would be quite relevant to certain people in certain situation (although perhaps not most people in most situations)... So exactly how would such a person go about finding information relevant to them, if it was removed from view the general masses? It's quite a slippery slope there, right?

The name 'Gigafactory' is a shortcut for a battery factory capable of over a gigawatt-hour of annual production capacity.

In the case of Musk's proposed factory, it's projected to be capable of producing enough battery cells to store 35GWh of energy in a year. Since Tesla's Model S have 85kWh batteries, if you want to make a new line of car that sells more than 10,000 cars/year you can probably use a factory with the capacity of a Gigafactory (or multiple production lines of a smaller factory).

Some folks estimate Panasonic's current battery factory production capacities (multiple lines in multiple cities for multiple car companies) as being only able to support slightly north of 28K cars/month where the proposed single Gigafactory should be able to supply batteries at the rate at a similar rate to all existing capacity. Presumably there is some economy in scale (Tesla is estimating ~30%) which is what they are counting on...

Who exactly is disadvantaged? The person that may or may not act for their own personal self interest w/o full disclosure about another person or the person that conceals some information about themselves to prevent other people from acting in their own personal self interests?

Of course the 64-thousand dollar question is who exactly has the right to decide what information is personal enough to withhold? Certainly not the person (because they would withhold all negative information about themselves). Some faceless entity? We can see how that works out on things like internet dating sites (I'm thinking about the recent OkCupid fiasco)...

We can throw out examples ad-nauseum. What about hiring a caregiver for a child that unbeknownst to you is a binge drinker and tends to break speed limits? Is being a binge drinker or a speeder a matter of privacy (it probably isn't a legal issue)? What if the child was your kid and you needed your caregiver for transport between school and home? Maybe that person shouldn't be a caregiver anyhow? How about those folks that have AIDS and are deliberately reckless about spreading it around? How about that privacy in that case?

You can always find specific examples for both side of this argument, but what is the principles to decide? It's arbitrary and capricious to anyone stuck on the wrong side of the line, but clearly the only "pure" strategy is full disclosure, and exceptions should only be made to that on a case-by-case basis (if at all).

Take the first person that filed the lawsuit in Spain against Google linking to an article about being evicted from his home. I'm sure a future landlord of his might have found this relevant information even though he found it embarrassing... It's only the fact of some arbitrary determination that this information was no longer relevant to any future landlords that it was required to be removed. That's a real scalable principle... NOT!

So much for the right to be forgotten...

In Central Beijing (a very large city), most people live in large apartment buildings which have central heating. Although historically coal was used for these central boilers, most have been transitioned to coal gas. In smaller buildings, coal burning ovens have been transitioned to electric heat (where the coal is merely burned somewhere else)...

However, the biggest change is that has been made recently was to require new homes to be metered. Historically, residents simply paid heating bills relative to the size of their apartments (~20rmb/m^2) which gave little incentive for any efficiency (power company losses were generally subsidized by the government), but with metering and improved insulation upgrades, coupled with the natural gas and electric conversions, things in Beijing are looking up...

In the suburbs and surrounding cities... well, let's just say air pollution is usually not a local thing and the average pollution level hasn't seemed to have changed too much...

On the other hand, you can't really dismiss the whole idea of centralization being a potential solution to part of this problem. The infrastructure in China (esp Beijing) is quite centralized and the Chinese are generally quite good at getting things done when they have an incentive to do so...