Since I have a need to transport 6, I guess I'm just screwed.

You're getting ahead of the story. The openly self-loathing phase where the nuts start to agitate for us to off ourselves in order to save the planet is next decade.

Price discipline creates better solutions over time but we don't care about that too much these days. We just want action now and a great press release. Screw results, we're not interested in the age of Brown and Obama.

You left out a bit of the story. After the data came in, the 55 mph limit was found to be a marginal saver of both fuel and lives (the other reason why advocates push the law) while it was a big waste of time for all those people stuck driving those extra hours across the country.

The drastic measures included sponsoring fuel initiatives for $90/bbl equiv synthetic fuels in a major boom/bust initiative that was completely unnecessary (deregulation of oil prices fixed our supply problems). Now that the technology has more naturally progressed, we can do synthetic fuels for maybe $30/bbl equiv extraction costs except the greens won't let us (too much CO2 release).

Fuel savings v. exploration for new sources v. switchover to entirely new technologies involve tradeoffs that government has proven over decades that it sucks at. And that's the direction that we've chosen.

Rah rah, yeah!

It's not the purchase but rather the injection of politics into the economy after the purchase that's the main problem. Let's say some blogger works for Chrysler engineering and pisses off the White House. It just got much more likely that he's going to get fired if his real identity is discovered. That sort of thing is how free speech sickens and eventually dies.

I've been told to do something illegal or clinically stupid by my managers in the past. That's about the time to get a bit slow and just 'not notice' things. Didn't happen here and that's a shame. Let me be perfectly clear, what happened here is a bit of a pattern of jumped up US authority figures lying about the law and creating discomfort and fear for the general public. The wailing and threats are the public's means of pushing back and trying to restore normalcy after a nasty security shock in 2001.

I believe the store's lost a great deal of custom and if I were a retail establishment with one of these ATMs in my premises, I wouldn't renew permissions and clear these bozos out before they scare some of my own customers away. In short, by yelling loudly, this guy's probably improved things for the next amateur photographer.

In most industries, I can buy land or rent a building and create a competing business across the street. Hospitals are regulated creatures at least in my neck of the woods. You have to petition the state for permission to open a hospital and all the competing hospitals get a say on whether you are allowed to open.

Any normal person put in the same situation of having a smirking evil maniac responsible for thousands dead and giving you cryptic bs about follow on mass casualty attacks aimed at killing thousands more civilians would have pulled out the car battery and jumper cables.

The US did its best to walk right up to the line of torture but not to go over. In the sort of circumstances we had in 2001-2003 that's about the best you can hope for. In cases where interrogators did cross the line in an obvious way, there generally have been prosecutions. That's the way things should be. As we fixed the massive FUBAR that was US intelligence on Al Queda we walked away from the torture line.

Screw the Tier1 providers, I want an application that tells me where I'm vulnerable and a marketplace where I can privately arrange for redundancy sufficient for my needs.

There's money to be made for some smart engineers on this issue.

For physical attacks, not wearing uniforms, hiding among civilians and other war crimes give you a combat advantage and massively up the death toll among civilians. It is very moral to make a distinction between illegal combatants who don't follow the laws of war and get many more people killed and those who do follow the laws of war and get compensatory better treatment when they are captured and/or defeated.

The Pirate party in Germany apparently is not only legal (and thus not a problem for German law) but also has an elected official, a mayor, who switched to their banner.

Your US analysis is amusingly bad and entirely off topic, kudos.

Since, unlike white supremacist or Nazi parties, the Pirate party seems to be legally registered in the FRG, maybe you're not dealing with the real world here.

The FRG denies the registration or bans extremist groups. The Pirate party has passed legal muster, just not the private opinions of some power mad sysadmins on a social network. Who are you trying to defend?

Maybe a link to the US pirate party platform would be helpful for those who are incapable of googling.

The problem with Godwin's law is when somebody actually is emulating Hitler, Godwin's law hampers honest discussion of Middle East political phenomenon (Mein Kampf is still a best seller there), corporatist economics, and a number of other areas where Hitler and co had novel positions and should be analyzed. For instance, the total mess that was hitlerian economics forced a timetable of invasion and looting on the Third Reich that drove a lot of the events of the 30s.

Ok, and who gave you the rights to name somebody else's party? The right to self-label is fundamental.