Dollars are not shares which pay dividends either, but BoA has somehow assigned as value to those, too.

WOULD HAVE been stolen equally? Science without actual experiments is not science, Mr. String Theory!

Nice experiment. Which side of the bag is stolen the least often?

Shouldn't the usual liability laws that we've had for the last couple of centuries, already perfectly handle everyone's concerns (whatever they are)?

If this gets me cheaper pizza, then why the fuck not? And if the drone's lower operating cost plus the increased (assuming it really is increased) liability insurance premiums makes it cost more, so that the pizza company continues to use humans instead, then .. again, what's the problem?

Or similarly, If the delivery vehicle gets lost less often (or more often) so that the companies that use it have different customer service reputations, WTF does it matter to me? I have maybe one night where I don't get my pizza and have to cook instead, and vow to not order from siliconpizza inc again, and that's that. WTF is the big deal? Anyone who is getting bent out of shape that a new tech might disrupt one of their orders some day, is such a pampered pussy princess that we're all better off anyway, if that person just freaks out and kills themselves right now over whatever else internal neurotic drama that that like to bring upon themselves. But if they want to wait for the robot pizza delivery to go bad first, then fine. Let's let them have their rant

I was sooo hungry. They promised I would have the pizza in 20 minutes, but there it was, 7:42 and I still didn't have my dinner. I glanced across my desolate empty loveless apartment at the kitchen area, the sink piled high with dirty dishes. Did Silicon Pizza expect me to cook? What ridiculous barbarism. They can put a man on the moon and serve him a perfectly targeted ad, but they can't deliver a pizza. God damn I was hungry, and I deserved to be fed now. I looked out the window. There it was. It was over by the neighbor's trash can, moving back and forth six inches, over and over again, its pathfinder algorithm confused. I could walk over to it and collect my pizza right now, but no. I won't give them the satisfaction. YOU DID THIS TO ME. Good bye, cruel world. [found on a blood-spotted scrap of paper]

and then check out. Good riddance.

The good news is that these will only cost $70.

The bad news is that the lenses are used up after 2 months, and cost $65 to replace.

an injection of capital from outside the country

Ergo, my country needs to invade and pillage another country.

But (sorry, Republicans!): do it cheaply. If you spend more money on the aggression than you pillage, obviously that's not going to count as a net injection of capital.

One thing you've gotta admit about Tor, is that it's an inefficient way to get packets from point A to point B. If we had Tor built into the all Internet protocols, don't you think one of the first things you would do, would be to look at some case where you didn't like the performance you were getting, and then you'd "invent" a shiny new protocol that directly links two points, providing massive performance improvements at the cost of making traffic analysis easier? And don't you think there are shitloads of applications, where that tradeoff would make sense? Inventing not-Tor would be the biggest thing, ever.

Crypto is good. Modern CPUs can handle it effortlessly, nearly for "free." There are some cases (e.g. shared caches) where you might not want the tradeoff, but overall it's turning out to be a no-brainer, almost always worth the compromise. You just can't say that about onion routing, though. It's subjectively good, at best.

BTW, also: here in America, a lot of us have asymmetric connections for the "last mile."

Yes. Remember that scene in "Annie Hall" when he said he sometimes fantasized about turning his car into the oncoming lane, dying in a fiery crash? Remember what happened at the end of "The Deer Hunter?" That wasn't acting; that was him talking from the heart. He was suicidal, and it was only a matter of time.

It's fairly accepted that just because a car is left unlocked doesn't mean anyone's allowed to go in and take what's inside it.

Unfortunately, it's also fairly accepted that there are such things as "attractive nuisances."

Classic example is the swimming pool on your private property, where you ruthlessly shoot and kill all trespassers whenever you see them climbing the electrified barbed wire fence around your pool. As long as you successfully kill each one of them before they get to the pool, you're safe. But if one of them makes it to the pool, jumps in and drowns, his family is the new owner of your house. Then you have to spend one of your family member's lives in order to get it back (tip: have cement trucks idling out in front of the house before your family member's counter-suicide-sacrifice, waiting and ready to fill in the pool, the instant that you re-acquire ownership).

It gets worse.

Suppose you're on patrol in your car, driving around the perimeter of your property, looking for pool-suiciders before they get too close to your pool. Suddenly you see a mob of them pushing against the fence on the east side. You take the M16 from your car's gun rack, go stand by the fence, and shoot them all. Now you've got this stinking pile of rotting corpses over by the fence, and you know you have only 10 minutes at the most, before Municipal Zoning Enforcement comes over and condemns your property. So you put the M16 back onto your gun rack, take the shovel out of the trunk, and start digging a mass grave.

Little do you know, that the mob you just massacred was TEAM A. That's the decoy team. Meanwhile, upon hearing the sound of the gunfire, TEAM B and TEAM C put on the bypass clips to reroute the current on the north fence, cut through the wires, and advance onto your property.

TEAM C immediately heads toward the pool area at maximum speed, while TEAM B stealthily sneaks toward your car, parked over by the east fence. They peek around from behind your car, and see you digging the mass grave. Now is their chance! They break into the car, and take the M16 off your gunrack. Just then, you hear an alert siren and your radio crackles to life. "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" your wife in the tower yells, in a panic, over the radio, "People are jumping into the pool!" You hear the distant sound of rifle fire (she is now shooting at TEAM C).

The body burying can wait. You need to get to the pool area now, to help your wife kill pool-jumpers and then try to pump the pool water out of the lungs of anyone who has already drowned. You throw down your shovel and run toward the car, and that's where you see .. oh fuck, who is that? There's four dudes milling around your car. One of them sees you and and yells "he's coming! Now! Give it to me! Here!" and grabs the M16 out of one of the other thieves' hands. He quickly shoots the other members of his team, and then puts the end of the barrel into his mouth. You're running right at him, and in just a few more seco--pop. He falls to the ground.

You're fucked. That M16 was an attractive nuisance. You are responsible for all four of the deaths around the car, and who knows how many people have already made it into the pool by now. You grab the M16, throw it onto the passenger seat, jump into the car, and hit the gas. One of the members of TEAM B, as he died, fell such that he was partly under your car, and so now your rear Firestone tire drives over his head, crushing it, spilling jellied brains onto the dirt. Bump. The M16 slips down the passenger seat and .. what happened? Did it? You're in shock. It takes a few seconds to register. "Hey, my leg," you say, stunned.

"Oh fuck, my leg." Just when things were at their darkest,this happened! Un-fucking-believable. You don't hear your wife firing in the distance any more. She's probably worried. Totally demoralized and surrendered, maybe even. She doesn't know.

Everything's going to be ok. TEAM B and TEAM C (your liabilities) are totally offset by your new assets, and you can easily afford to buy off all their families many times over. Firestone. You just hit the payday jackpot.

You're laughing now, pressing down on the gas, trying to get to your wife as soon as possible, to share the good news and relieve her. She must be worried sick. "I'm coming, honey," you mutter, not thinking to use the radio. You're too distracted to notice in your rear view mirror, as the endangered condor swoops down on the bodies behind you, to feat on the carrion. Too distracted to notice that it's choking on one of the M16's shell casings.

A man can choose to kill himself. I have no problem with that. On the other hand, the moment the government has a say, any say under what circumstances you can ask to be killed is a big, and enormous no no. Once this door is breached we as a society can never go back.

A lot of us think that you just called the status quo a big no no, and that you're talking about a door that has already been breached (e.g. Kevorkian's prosecution). Doc-assisted suicide is seen as a possible solution to the big no no that we're currently enduring, and legalizing it is seen as closing the unclosable door.

I can't really disagree that he's speaking out of anger and that his comments should be taken with a grain of salt. You're basically right. But:

When you go into threats of killing someone, your political discourse has gone way too far.

I disagree with that general statement. Politics is about government, and government is about force. We all want our governments to sometimes kill people, and all the quibbling is about the conditions within "sometimes."

If killing people is just totally off the table and out of scope, then you're not really talking about politics.

You might even say Civilization is all about limiting death threats to politics, getting the threats out killing people out of non-political discourse. That way, we don't have to threaten to kill people in duals over mathematical or literary or technical discourse, for example. ;-)

People: "FEC, how should we report these transactions?"

FEC: "We will punish you, if you report these transactions."

People: "Ok, we won't report these transactions."

Problem solved.

No, it's perfectly constitutional: if you drive on a road, you might cross a state border at some point, after which the contents of your blood or the blood itself could be extracted and resold, therefore inspecting them clearly falls under the Interstate Commerce Clause.

And even if you don't cross the border or have plans to cross, or have enough gas in your tank for sufficient range to cross the border, your blood's presence still has an effect on the interstate blood market.

Your licence to drive a car on the road is conditional on you being sober / no impaired. This is something you agree to when you get/renew a licence. You make a choice to get/renew your licence. You make a choice to drive drunk/impaired.

Take it easy with that zoom lens. We're talking about everyone, not just the drunks. On average, that means we're really mostly talking about people who are not drunk or impaired. They still got swabbed. They were not suspected of any crime, there was no probable cause to justify the violation of their privacy, and yet still it happened. Why?

There are one and a half failures happening here:

1) [the full failure] We don't enforce the 4th amendment. We simply just don't like that law, we don't value it, we don't agree with the thinking that led to its creation, and we wish that we didn't have that law. Most people think the 4th amendment is some kind of cop-out, intended to prevent criminals from being prosecuted. We don't realize that the real point of it, is to get the fucking government out of all our fucking faces when we're not committing crimes, and that the situation where the 4th amendment is relevant to a criminal case, is overall a rare "don't care" case which is hardly worth worrying about. It's the other 99.999% of life that we should care about, but we're fixated on the anomalous (crime) so we think the 4th is basically a stupid idea.

2) [the partial failure] Your license to drive a car isn't merely conditional on you being unimpaired, obeying traffic laws, etc. In most states, it's also conditional on you "consenting" to invasive searches. That's probably a bad idea, and everyone instantly realizes the problem, when they're asked to be searched for no reason. Sure, the government doesn't "punish" you if say no. Instead, they "withdraw your privilege" (the license to use a car on public roads). That distinction is both fair and also totally bullshit unfair; it's blurry. Part of this goes back to my first point, where if we really agreed with the reasons for the 4th amendment, then this wouldn't be one of the conditions for driving in the first place, so we could just avoid this whole issue. But since we dislike the 4th, we're constantly looking for ways to subvert the values behind it. Thus, the weird condition for driver's licenses.

anything more involved (forms, interactive PDFs, portfolios, etc.) and they both just shit the bed.

It's 2013 and still not a single documented sighting of any user ever wanting any of those things from a PDF. Thus, it sounds like you're saying Chrome perfectly does everything, that anyone might ever need.