This is not customer protection. The users have not in fact brought any custom to google. They're receiving a free good or service and should not be entitled to anything.

Car, not missile. Velomobiles are convenient in that they provide conveyance and coffin in one attractive package, however.

I can, but that wouldn't be his fault — at least, not entirely. That would be at least as much the fault of whoever runs the background check system, and whoever uses it and trusts it. And meanwhile, at least some of the people he did this to did likely mistreat him, and at least some of the others will have been complicit in that mistreatment, if only by cooperating with it if not directly contributing in some fashion. That obviously doesn't make what he did right, but people rarely snap without being victimized.

I don't know what went down on the forum you moderate, but if you were moderating a forum in which someone was abused, then you were part of what happened to them. Responsibility, it's not something you can put aside as convenient. Sure, legally you can do so, but that doesn't really change the facts.

If a bad guy "jumps you" then unless you're Aikido dude or what have you, you're probably already fucked no matter how you intend to defend yourself. Initiative is massively important, and I don't mean that in a dungeons and dragons kind of way. Often, the first shot decides the fight.

On the other hand, most people aren't carrying around long sheathed knives, if the knife is big enough to need a weapon to defend against it then it's probably a folder and you very much can draw a gun, point it, and shoot in about the same kind of time.

At a shorter distance, guns are still massively deadly. Point blank is scary for a reason. I don't want to be involved in a close-quarters fight with someone with any kind of weapon. The best defense is to be somewhere else. Yeah, blaming the victim, but if you have the opportunity to be somewhere [relatively] nonviolent, take that option.

Today, the US military fields equipment which can tell where a gunshot occurred, and what kind of firearm was responsible, and what kind of ammunition it uses. Granted, it must require training, but since cops have to qualify with their sidearm that's an ideal time. Let's get some of those into the field rather than MRAPs.

It Cuba had had oil, the embargo would have been over really fast. Today, if Cuba had oil, TERRISTS! TERRISTS ALL OVER CUBA! WE MUST BLOW THEM UP!

Okay, smart guy, tell us what the problem is. Gevo doesn't see a problem.

We already have bacteria which can, given any organic matter, split it into butanol (a 1:1 replacement for gasoline) as well as acetone (an industrial solvent, which burns clean and can be used to alter the octane ratio of the gasoline replacement) and ethanol ('nuff said.) Practical commercial exploitation was worked out at a public university and therefore partially with public funds, but the patents are owned by Butamax, a shell company owned by GE and DuPont. They have sued Gevo to actually prevent them from producing and selling fuel to the public, something in which Butamax apparently has no interest. They've been sitting on the technology for years.

The truth is that if someone did come up with such a bacteria, a patent would be assigned to a corporation by hook or by crook, and it would either be exploited or be buried to preserve profits for other industries until such a time as those profits become harder to come by. But the already-inconceivably-wealthy seem determined to ride this pale horse until they run it down... Right down our throats, until we choke.

time to do some hacking. you can diddle your uh, shit, this post would be a lot cooler if I could remember what the file was called... [googling] ah yes, /system/build.prop. There are various build.prop editors, and you can actually change your phone model there.

There might even be an Xposed module which will let you lie to apps about what kind of device they're running on, but I haven't looked into that at all. Just musing.

And that's why this government will fail, regardless of what We The People actually do. It will become too paranoid to function effectively. You don't think the most creative minds go to work for government, do you?

Nope. As it turns out, gasoline-burning engines emit more soot than previously believed, as the measuring technique formerly used was incapable of detecting the finest soot particles. The particular irony of this is that the smaller the particulate matter, generally the more hazardous to one's health. PM2.5 (particulates below 2.5 microns in size) are considered to be the most hazardous, largely because they're smaller than cilia. This means that it's difficult for you to expel them from your lungs. Gasoline engines produce more PM2.5 than diesels do! They produce about the same amount of soot, but the soot they do produce is more dangerous.

Supposedly, a great deal of the pollution involved is actually in shipping, much of which goes away when the gigafactory gets built.

The last one I used was minetest, which had just added mobs.

It's massively extensible and had a mod with CPUs which ran code before mc did

If nothing has changed, then EVs are still cleaner than gasoline cars by some 40%, so that's still a win.

If we used technology proven by the USDoE at Sandia NREL in the 1980s, we could be capturing CO2 emissions from those plants and using them to grow algae as a biodiesel feedstock — improving yields by as much as 80%. So while EVs are only part of a comprehensive attempt to improve transportation efficiency, they're a completely valid part, provided that we do the other things that we need to do — which we know how to do already. We're simply not doing them, because money.

Oh, you mean fracking? On with the water wars!

You'd better not.