The GOP realized that this is not a policy that’s going to help them keep the Senate in 2016. Right now the GOP is dominated by old Republicans who want the party to attract young voters, so ginning this issue up into a war wasn’t worth pissing off the young voters. The other important group in the GOP are the sham libertarians who are trying to bring wealthy techies into their camp. Going to war over net neutrality would halt Rand Paul’s advance into silicon valley. All the money the telcos and cable companies can throw at the GOP isn’t really worth pissing off all the people who want uninterrupted streams from Chaturbate and Russian pirate TV streams.

Unless you’re retired it’s almost impossible to live in the developed world and not interact with computers on a daily basis. So computer literacy is an important part of daily life in the USA. So everybody needs to know something about programming or they’ll be incapable of understanding basic and important concepts that are relevant to daily life.

But that doesn’t mean that we need to reshape our entire educational system to crank out more software developers so that tech companies can pay lower salaries, which is really what’s behind many of these big efforts to push coding into schools.

Solving problems like war and climate change pretty much requires getting into politics. If you were a nobel laureate would you want to spend your time dealing with the idiots people vote for?

“Safety features have also been enhanced, adding "adaptive cruise control and the ability to read speed limit signs, stop itself if a crash is imminent, stay in its lane, and even park itself in a street spot or in your garage."”

I need that right now in a two ton all-wheel drive SUV so I can drive sanely while yelling at my kids in the back seat. Please Elon, hurry up and take my money!

“That means, if life is at all common in the Milky Way, astronomers could soon detect it.”

No, it means that if, thousands or even millions of years agao, some other life form happened to be broadcasting monster radio waves, in the direction of Earth, astronomers might detect it.

The issue is that in California they have to sell a certain portion of their fleet with zero and low emissions. He is saying that in order to convince people to buy the zero or low emission vehicles in adequate proportion, they have had to subsidize the price by $14,000. He does not expect that they will "sell too many" â" they picked this price because it's the number they expect will sell exactly the right amount.

The 2nd SOMALGET country was first leaked by defense contractor resume. Hinted at, in any case. Defense Contractors put all the illegal shit they do in their resumes to get more jobs doing those things.

Christopher Soghoian's tweet on the subject.

Erica A's resume

Erica A spent December 2012 to October 2013 in Afghanistan, is an expert in "Somalget Retro GUI" and is available for hire immediately.

Exploded from hatred of Open Source?

Well, we're talking types who think they absolutely need a loaded gun everywhere they might be in the house, including racks by the bed and whatnot. And that their life WILL depend on it any day now, when squads of evil government black muslim communist ninjas will burst into their home to confiscate their bible and replace their medicare with an evil socialized one. And their kids who think that playing cops and robbers with daddy's gun, presumbaly in between eating paint chips and being homeschooled in how many dinosaurs fit on Noah's arc, is a good idea.

I dunno, it certainly is tragic, but their noble sacrifice to improve the species' gene pool will be remembered.

Actually, you probably don't want an appliance powered by a black hole, because those convert matter into energy via Hawking radiation and the energy output actually ramps UP as the size decreases. A very small black hole, say, 1 kg in weight (a little over 2 pounds) would convert itself into energy in about 84 attoseconds and release the same energy as a 21 megaton nuke or so.

You'd need a pretty big one for it to be stable, and I doubt you really want a vacuum cleaner weighing as much as the Everest :p

On the other hand, if we ever tame one, it would make an awesome source of energy for something that needs a lot more energy. Such as a continent. Or a warp-capable ship. Hmm, the Romulans were up to something.

Of course, it would still be a Tamagochi that blows up with the fury of a supernova if you forget to "feed" it, but, hey, it's all good as long as we call it a warp core breach. Right?

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Romulan singularity warp cores though... I hear the Tal'Shiar are nastier than the NSA and CIA put together ;)

It's not carpooling. These are cars and drivers that would not be on the road without the service.

It may not purely increase congestion - the riders might otherwise use a car of their own. But it's basically a taxi with 10x better service (in function, not just attitude), slightly lower prices, and total dependence on GIS for knowledge of local geography.

There are a variety of reasons to regulate taxis, but the original one was that otherwise, taxi drivers would run a ton of scams. This isn't a problem with Lyft, specifically. Now we have additional concerns about traffic congestion and ecological impact. I don't know whether that is a problem with Lyft, but it's not crazy to suggest regulation.

True story, at some point in the past I had to work on a company's internal application for data entry. Well, it was a lot of data and, as requested by the PHBs, pretty much half the fields were needlessly mandatory. (Which brings us of the fear of working for incompetent people;))

Most of them were pretty much impossible to validate too, because they were stuff like city or street names, and even in telephone numbers people tend to use letters. So the only real restrictions were field lengths and that they're mandatory.

So then comes the request to basically make reports and searches on that data.

And I kid you not, half the records had stuff like "n.a.", "I don't know", "no idea", etc in at least one of those fields.

And these were internal users, not some 6 year old over the internet.

Well, duh, they'll just run an electroplasma manifold between it and the warp core ;)

Why not spend that time trying to produce a replicator?

Or am I to expect a "Replicating food is killing farmers, and it's illegal!" response?

There was news recently that NASA _is_ paying someone to develop a 3d printer that prints food, for their spaceships. Which I suppose is as close as we can get to a replicator with the tech level we have for now.

Err, no. Both kinds were called deflector shields, in the canon. See: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield

The lower level one emitted by the navigationa deflector (a.k.a., deflector dish) dish was nothing else than a lower intensity force field, but still a deflector shield. (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Navigational_deflector)