Well, some people, and by some people I mean the people who have been pushing the panic button for the last decade, say the spooks are routinely looking out for up to three degrees of separation. Three sounds like an entirely plausible optimal number.

There was a relevant facebook study about the small world theory a couple years ago, and IIRC, the average distance between any two people (globally) on the network was 4.6 or some such. Of course, you have the people who have to friend anyone and everything even if they don't know them; probably skews the idea somewhat.

The idea that you and I could be as few as 1.6 additional degrees of separation from some suspected individual is...unsettling. How much longer until the lidless eye wanders further?

Thing is, they aren't too interested in the contents of the envelope at all, at least until you're a person of interest. What they really want is use all that juicy metadata (outside of the envelope, i.e. headers) to establish ties between everyone.

Maybe everyone starts out roughly the same, maybe they develop at a similar rate, and enjoy similar learning capacities. However, civilization has changed more in the last 100 years than it has in the last 3,000. I'm not even sure how you could quantify that statement.

If you told me that a London taxi cab driver, a jet fighter pilot, a race car driver, a farmer, a hunter, a world class table tennis player and a secretary all have the same overall brain 'data throughput', I'd say you're silly. Some of these professions have a strong tendency to weed out individuals who just cannot cope with the particular demands of the job.

Right now, we can measure reaction times, structural changes and activity in the brain. Until we have a much, much better idea of how the brain processes and stores information, I think this question is approximately unanswerable.

The human brain can only process so much information at once.

I agree, and I imagine it's a highly individual trait, to boot.

Anyway, do you suppose that's the reason why when I notice someone driving very noticeably slow compared to the normal flow of traffic, it's nigh invariably the person with their hand up to their ear? i.e. It's the same effect of turning down the radio: turning down driving stimulus because that other slice of brain is busy.

That's the thing... I'm willing to accept that perhaps statistically, the cell-phone drivers might not experience more accidents. I doubt it, but I'm open to the idea. However, I sure as hell bet they cause more accidents, and that being in proximity to a cell-driver is relatively more dangerous than otherwise.

Well, considering the ATF - in its infinite malice - has banned solid copper and brass hunting projectiles

I'm no friend of some aspects of the ATF, but let's be honest; that was congress's doing, and it applies only to handguns. The ATF isn't responsible for creating laws, even though they are sometimes tasked with figuring out how to apply them.

Oh, yeah, wanted to clarify; the storm drain service is billed as a fee, not as a tax--which would have to pass on a ballot. So, the county commissioners basically enacted several millions of dollars worth of tax without following the statutes and by-laws, no less the state constitution.

Some places in the US west also have taxes on impermeable surfaces, but we also have peculiar laws which dictate that one cannot collect said rainwater into a cistern (because all of that water is owned for use downstream), unless rainwater is your only source of water (i.e. they won't grant a well permit).

I actually had a tiff with one of the state water engineers about the very subject. In my county, all new developments are required to install runoff ponds with permeable bottoms, so as to allow rainwater to drain into the groundwater basin. To get a permit to built a new garage and driveway, I had to dig a rather huge dry hole, and install hundreds of feet of pipe and concrete leading to it. It all had to be engineered to account for all of my runoff in a 100-year storm (including that from a preexisting home).

Am I still taxed for the unnameable surface on my property? Of course! To add to the insanity, the state engineer actually had the gall to say that the very idea of a detainment/retention pond which is required by the county for every new development was illegal water catchment. So, according to him, by law, I cannot attempt to reduce or eliminate my negative impact on the public storm drain system, but I have to violate the law to actually use my property. And I'm still taxed for an externality which I arguably do not create. Lovely.

So, what we have is basically a property tax by some other name created in lieu of adding to property tax increases which need to be voted on.

Legislators' plates such as these are registered to a person, not to a particular vehicle, which is what we all expect. If the legislator has 1+ daily drivers (car / truck), he may receive more than one set.

I'd never argue that /. and the various forums and boards I troll are anything but statistically insignificant outlying, niche places. You postulated that there would be a large overlap of people who think the idea of the app is wrong i.e. presumably mostly conservative gun owners who don't want to have their privacy violated vs. gun owners who don't want their privacy violated, who also think Snowden is a traitor.

The point was, in my experience that assumption is wrong. Sure, it's just anecdotal evidence, but if you're so bothered about it, you can go to any large forum and search out Snowden threads, and you might see that significantly more than the parroted national average support the guy. Drawing inference between this subset of people and the national mob? Are you straw-manning?

Wanna bet there's a substantial overlap of people who can simultaneously believe Snowden is a traitor while believing this database and app are wrong?

I think you'd be surprised just how wrong you are about this idea, if you'd simply look into it. Among many such people, governments aren't trusted nearly as strongly as by other groups. The recent uncovering of nationwide spying? The non-privacy of internet activities long been assumed both at /. and various gun related forums; if not that these sites are at an elevated risk for such activities. It's not universal, but the sentiment many share in these places parallels your own.

As for Snowden, the legality and morality of the snooping and of the leaking, well, the common thought I've seen is this: some people are conflicted about it, but most think he has diamond encrusted testicles, most think he upheld his oath the only way he could, and that POTUS, both the current and former are a far greater threat to liberty and the American Way than a bunch of pissed off goat farmers 5000 miles yonder.

Also, I'll leave you a parting thought: I think the whole popularity of the zombie apocalypse meme and being prepared at some level for large scale disaster (pervasive in this community in particular) can be appropriately described as a subconscious cultural / political allegory. Given the context, I'll let you work out what it symbolizes.

As far as I can see, their innovation can be accurately summed up thus:

They've decoupled the power turbine (the one which provides power to the rotors via a gears and such) from the engine, and mix cooler air into the exhaust stream. They've done away with the transmission and drive train by forcing this much cooler exhaust stream through a power turbine directly coupled to the main rotors, and they have also eliminated all of the complexity of a tail rotor and associated drive train by going with co-axial counter-roating rotors to provide necessary anti-torque.

It's the laws of thermodynamics I'm most concerned about, since most thermodynamic cycles suffer when cold fluids are introduced. Maybe eliminating the losses in mechanical transmission and weight offset that? Who knows, but if it works like they claim, that's pretty cool.

Yeah. Better tell Capt. Sullenberger how a flesh and bone based craft 1/5 of the weight of this drone can't cause catastrophic failure of an airliner.

Maybe we could have Danny John-Jules play The Cat Doctor, an extravagantly dressed and infinitely more vain Time Lord stranded from an alternative universe. I'd watch it.

Presumably all of the designs have so far only been pistols because they're going after the 'liberator' philosophy of having a semi-concealable type of a thing. Having a longer barrel compromises that idea, and plus they're at least trying to be legal.