I confess to not reading TFA, though I did read TFS. I fail to see how the cabbie can get LESS information than specified in TFS - he needs to know your name in order to identify his passenger, cellphone number is displayed whenever someone calls me (and I'm not even a cabdriver), and home address is (more likely than not) where you're being picked up OR where you're being dropped off....

A POS car that could only go 75 if you turned off the AC.

Your first car had an A/C? Wow....

Even wikipedia says that Russell gave her credit after he had arrived at the same answer using a different method. So how is this news?

The US imposing military will is hardly the same as countries FORCED BY INTERNATIONAL TREATY TO NOT REARM expecting defense from its allies..

Remember that little thing with all the jewish people going to camp? well germany's not been allowed to have a military build up.

Umm, Germany has the eighth largest military in the world. Or were you unaware of that?

Japan has the ninth, in case you were interested.

Aside from the Big Three (US, Russia, China), Germany is behind India, UK, France, and South Korea. Which puts them about where they were in 1939 (what, you didn't know that the Wehrmacht in 1939 was smaller than the French Army, much less the combined Anglo-French forces they faced in 1940?).

So, everyone expects to be perfectly anonymous at a Customs Checkpoint, eh?

Really? Going to a place where the guards on both sides of the border check your identity routinely, and people expect anonymity as a matter of course?

Could we perhaps find something more important to be outraged about? Like LSU's baseball team embarrassing themselves last night? Or the morning coffee being cold? Or the birds waking my wife up early (therefore grumpy)?

The average working-poor person I mentioned in my other comment spends 16 hours a day at work, commute-time included. Most of them have two jobs. In welfare-to-work states they often can't get foodstamps if they have less than two jobs. And the work is in the rich neighbourhoods where they can't afford to live so 4 hour commutes are not unusual.

I'm curious...just where is this "average working-poor person" living that this is true? I've never lived anywhere where a four hour commute is normal for anyone...

I'm thinking back in the days when I first got a car so I can go cruising and also for going on dates. With drivers obsolete how would it impact this kind of social behavior?

More time to make out in the backseat while the car drives itself?

I have a stack of long florescent bulbs in an unused corner of my garage, old bulbs from the fixture over my worktable, collecting there since I moved to this house in the early '90s. I never did figure out where to take them or how to safely dispose of them. I guess it'll be my descendants' problem.

You are doing the same disposal strategy I am.

Ditto. I've got that same stack of long fluorescents in my garage. And there they'll stay, I expect....

and free speech doesn't mean you're allowed to insult and provoke at your leisure.

Actually, yes, Free Speech DOES mean you're allowed to insult and provoke at your leisure.

And then you're allowed to bear the consequences, free of GOVERNMENT sanction.

Hmm, wonder if they'll have to block French History sites that mention the Reign of Terror? After all, modern France wouldn't exist without that bit of, dare I say it, terrorism....

Jaysus, can you imagine how high the Louis number would be with a couple more centuries of them???

(Though a block of ALL of Facebook and Twitter would be popular with everyone tired of the "chatter")?

Never had much (for which, read 'any') use for Facebook or Twitter. But likewise, I've never understood what the problem with either or both existing is. If you don't want to Facebook, then don't. Likewise, if tweeting (or whatever it's called these days _twitting, perhaps?) isn't your thing, then don't.

Do try to remember that even if everyone else does it, that's not actually a requirement that you do it too....

To be fair, the EPA can pay NASA to launch/operate satellites.

They'd be smarter to pay SpaceX to do it. SpaceX launches are a lot cheaper than NASA's....

423 000 km^2. One-fifth of 8% of that, to meet the current need, is about 6768 km^2

The tip off that you misread was that 6,768 is nowhere near 1/5 of 423,000. This is the *low end* of their estimate.

1/5 of 8% of 423000. The 8% part is important....

Given that the USA managed it with 40ies technology, I would say that Iran should have no problem with 2003 technology. Maybe they can't build a bomb that powerful, but even the weakest nuke is powerful enough IMHO (as long as it's not a "dirty bomb").

A couple of things:

1) Little Boy would probably qualify as a "dirty bomb" by today's standards, since it fissioned just a small fraction of its uranium (~1.5%).

2) Little Boy was so dirt-simple that even North Korea should be able to manage one if they wanted to. The fact that the NK's haven't managed to set a nuke off with Little Boy's yield suggests that they're either trying to hard to be clever or dumb as posts.

I don't think Iran will have a problem duplicating Little Boy if they want to, and expect that they could duplicate Fat Man as soon as they can come up with the Pu. Note that the hard part of Fat Man is something that can be done without even having fissionables to test with - getting the compression charges to work properly is technically much more challenging....

Revenue from illegal activity should NEVER be used to fund policing. It simply is too big of a conflict of interest. Fines from stuff like parking tickets should be used to fund other things (education, roads, etc) but it should not be available to police.

Have you ever heard the expression "money is fungible"?

If your speeding tickets go to funding the schools, the local government will just lower the school budget (since they're going to get the speeding ticket money), and raise the police budget (since that will let them write more speeding tickets to pay for the schools).