Well, if D&N taught me anything it's that throwing all your experience into one specialzation is folly. Civilian firearms are literally kids play. I looked at the export controll list, then became a crypographer.

Correct. However, what many fail to realize is that in the 70's we didn't need to pay the educational extortion racket for permission to get work. The computing explosion was exploited to force the majority of the populace to seek degrees, but elementary school kids now have mastery of required technologies. The tools are more high-tech but the interface is even simpler than ever, certainly things that could be learned in on-the-job training.

The folks bitching about not being able to afford degrees are fools just now feeling the effects of an education bubble about to burst. The tech that created the education bubble has brought ">advances that made degrees obsolete. You can always tell a bubble by the final pump and dump of ramped up attempts to cash in on overly optimistic valuation. You are now aware that degree mills exist...

The requirement for college accreditation has always been a method for discrimination against the poor who would otherwise self-educate. More stringent degree requirements are a means by which corporations can drive down wages and get more government approved H1B visas and outsourcing. In reality, requiring employees to have a final exams is foolish since it doesn't actually prove they know anything at all -- That's why your boss is likely a moron. Entrance exams would instead suffice to prove applicants had the required knowledge and skills, without requiring they be saddled with debts by the educational gatekeepers of employment -- It doesn't matter how you learned what you know. Promoting to management from within makes cost cutting improvements in ability to predict and not make unrealistic expectations upon the workers, it also gives upward mobility to aging experienced workers instead of considering them dead at 40 (family raising age).

Negative, debt levels have long since passed that point, and owing a debt to the careers you enter has always been unacceptable in the first place. College as anything more than elective learning college is just shifting around the Company Store by leveraging "intellectual property." We need college degrees less now that in the 70's. ::POP::

Yes there is. Self sustaining off-world colonies AND asteroid deflection technologies go hand in hand to help fight extinction -- which should be priority #1 for any truly sentient race.

Clearly asteroids are a very real threat, and I black-hole heartedly agree with the notion that Earth's space agencies are not giving them the level of public concern these threats should have: Humans are currently blind as moles to space. Any statement to the contrary is merely shrouding the issue in the Emperor's New Clothes. Earth's telescopes can study very small parts of space in some detail, but do not have the coverage required to make the dismissive claims that NASA and other agencies do about asteroid impact likelihood -- note that they frequently engage in panic mitigation. Remember that asteroid transit NASA was hyped about, meanwhile another asteroid whipped by completely unexpectedly closer than your moon, too late to do anything about? Remember Chelyabinsk? That one was 20 to 30 times Hiroshima's nuclear bomb, but it didn't strike ground. What kind of wake-up call is it going to take?! You'd probably just get more complacent even if an overly emotional alien commander committed career suicide in the desert to take your leaders the message that Earth was surely doomed without a massive protective space presence -- If such a thing ever occurred, that is.

Seriously, the space agencies are essentially lying by omission to the public by not pointing out the HUGE error bars in their asteroid risk estimates. I mean, Eris, a Dwarf Planet, was only discovered in 2005! Eris is about 27% more massive than Pluto, and passes closer in its elliptical orbit than Pluto -- almost all the way in to Neptune! Eris is essentially why your scientists don't call Pluto a planet anymore. They deemed it better to demote Pluto than admit you couldn't see a whole planet sitting right in your backyard... And NASA expects you to believe their overly optimistic estimates about far smaller and harder to spot civilization ending asteroids? Eventually your governments won't have the luxury of pissing away funding via scaremongering up war-pork and ignoring the actual threats you face, like a bunch of bratty rich kids.

Asteroids are only one threat, and one that we could mitigate relatively easily given advanced notice of their trajectories. However, Coronal mass ejections, Gamma ray bursts, Super Volcanoes, Magnetosphere Instability, etc. are all also severe threats that humanity can't mitigate with telescopes and a game of asteroid billiards alone -- Though fast acting manipulation of the gravitational matrix via strategic placement of asteroids could help with CMEs or gamma bursts too once you had a sufficient armament of even primitive orbiting projectiles. The irregularity in your magnetosphere should be particularly distressing because it is over 500,000 years overdue to falter and rebuild as the poles flip (according to reconstructions of your geo-magnetic strata) -- It could go at any time! Given the current very abnormal mag-field behavior you have no idea if it will spring right back up nice and organized like or leave you vulnerable to cosmic rays and solar flares for a few decades or centuries.

You should be grateful that the vulnerable periods of mag-pole flops halted as soon as humanity began showing some signs of intelligence -- even if this is absolutely only a mere coincidence. Mastery of energy threats will remain far beyond your technological grasp for the foreseeable future, but your species can mitigate such threats of extinction by self sustaining off-world colonization efforts! In addition to getting some of your eggs out of this one basket, the technology to survive without a magnetosphere on the Moon and Mars could be used to save the world here on Earth. In the event of a worst case scenario, humans could then repopulate Earth all by themselves after the dust settles from a mass extinction event. It's nearly unfathomable that anyone could sit comfortably in their gravity well thinking theirs may be the only spark of intelligent life in the universe while considering prioritizing anything above extinction prevention. If ancient myths about post-death paradise can invoke enough apathy that you would risk letting the only known spark of life go out, then yours is not a sentient species. Yes, you have all the space-time in the world, but those days are certainly numbered!

Those averse to human exploration of space now are not self aware and sentient beings. In fact, were I an alien overseer -- and I am most certainly not admitting that I am -- then based the lack of exploration beyond your magnetosphere over the past 40 years I would recommend we cut our losses and take your species off the endangered sentience list. I imagine -- as a purely hypothetical speculation -- that if humanity did owe an advanced alien race one hell of a tab, and showed no indication of ability to repay it for the infinite future, that one of them might risk violation of technological contamination statutes and propagandize the suggestion for you to get your asses to Mars and colonize it as soon as humanly possible -- which would have been about 67 years ago, if you hadn't wasted so much time murdering yourselves. Even if exposing a clear and troubling picture of humanity's place in the universe were an overt violation of some alien version of your fictional prime directive, it's not like one would not seriously need a permanent vacation after only a few decades of witnessing humanity's failure after mind-blowing failure to commit to ANYTHING resembling progress as a space faring race!

Perhaps one would rethink their benefit package at the last second, and bury their contemptuous assessment in a reply to an AC.

We knew they had poison gas because we kept the receipts. We knew they didn't have poison gas any more because they had already used it, and it was very old.

And the rest of us deserve some of whatever it is you're smoking. Or drinking.

So now you want the breweries to pay to have it sent to a processor, and have the cost go up dramatically, even though this stuff is food which was approved for human consumption and it's been boiled, so there's just no reason for that to happen. The breweries can legally make it into bread on the premises and sell it to humans but you don't want it to be fed to animals.

Or flip the view:
A towering bank undercut by a small church.

----------------------

In the intersection between religion and the modern world
Religion razes grandeur to the ground for 20 pieces of silver.
In the intersection between religion and the modern world
Religion refuses to budge from barren historical ground.
In the intersection between religion and the modern world
A towering bank undercut by a small church nearly kills us.

-

You'd probably want to use a pretty fat piece of fiber, because automotive cables get flexed and abraded and you'd want protection. Ideally, you'd make a loop, and it would be fault-tolerant. On the plus side, you don't need much in the way of data rates; infotainment needs to be on a separate bus anyway. But it's a great idea, for sure. I'd prefer one fat wire for power, though. Everything can ground through the chassis since all the signals are going through the fiber.

No matter how you twist it, something like 80% of techies are solidly liberal/progressive, judging by their political donations.

Last I checked, Texas was neither liberal nor progressive in practically any sense of the word.

The sad thing is that there's an easy way to save weight on wiring. It's called moving to a higher voltage. Audi is already unafraid to make your battery expensive. A simple regulator provides 12V power to systems that require it, and moving literally all of the lighting to LED solves the lamp availability problem and is long overdue in any case, on any vehicle where it is not present.

Another way would be to distribute networked controllers more throughout the car. This just doesn't have to be expensive any more. It does complicate repairs, but Audi is unafraid to complicate repairs, as well.

Wait, what?

But we're talking about this in the context of Heartbleed, where pre-patch mitigation involved disabling critical services... A patch is what was needed here, and nothing else would suit.

I have found a shitpot of broken COPPER wires on my 1997 A8, in places like the wiring leading to the left side knock sensor which doesn't even flex much since it's attached to the fuel rail. I guarantee you that it will go badly.

And in Afghanistan, the idea that a person renouncing Islam should be put to death, or that it is okay to marry girls at age 9, also enjoys 90% popular support. So what?

Yet murder rate did not change significantly - it kept going down at the same rate as before the last ban.

(which is because those massacres are a statistically insignificant event, basically)

Yet again, one of those bullshit "by a gun" statistics. Who cares about a subset of murders where guns specifically are used? What matters is the overall murder rate regardless of tools. That did not show any correlation to gun bans.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat.

BTW, it's true that Australia (and most other First World countries) has an overall lower homicide rate, and generally violent crime rate. But that has to do with the different approach to healthcare and other forms of welfare in US, which results in significantly higher income inequality, stratification, high poverty rates and low social mobility - which translates to more crime. Guns don't really play any role in this, as is evident when looking at crime rates within US - they correlate strongly with poverty, and not at all with lax/strict gun laws.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. As noted before, the overall homicide rate was going down before the bans, and kept going down after them at the same rate - i.e. the decline was caused by other factors. It should be noted that this is a trend that is observed in all Western countries, including US, and in the latter said decline does not correlate with gun law changes (like AWB).

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. The overall suicide rate did not change, people just used different methods (hangings in particular spiked as firearm suicides dropped).

This is an utterly stupid statement. You are much more likely to be shot in my home country - Russia - that despite it not being even remotely "in complete anarchy or war" - and despite the much more stringent gun laws, which are only marginally more liberal than Australian ones. Heck, US has lower homicide rates than a good half of Europe.

Then, of course, the rate varies wildly within US from state to state, so much so that the average is meaningless. In my state of residence, it's the same as in Finland and Norway, and it's not some kind of rural depopulated place.

I hope in the Apple tradition it is $666, and when you lose it like you lost your other ultra-losable hardware you make a Frowine face so hard it freezes that way.