"Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade."

Way to cherry pick the data. Bush was responsible for the biggest increase in federal R&D funding for science in 30 years (the biggest increase prior to that was under the elder Bush). The vast majority of that increase was for biomedical research. So it's not at all surprising their funding has dropped a bit in the last decade. Their funding was more than doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000-2004. The federal government has been concentrating on shoring up other scientific fields in the decade since then.

While you're mostly correct, voice is more latency-sensitive than regular data. The voice channels used when you make a phone call are designed to minimize that latency, whereas generic data channels do not. Eventually data service will improve to the point this doesn't matter (arguably, LTE already meets that standard). But you can't just broadly say that voice is just data.

Speaking of which, why is this suddenly a big deal now that Apple has announced their new phone has VoLTE? Android handsets supporting it have been available for years (Galaxy S3, S4, S5, Note 3 among them). It's the carriers who have been dragging their feet enabling it. T-mobile is the only one who has openly embraced it. The other carriers have been tepidly testing it out. All it usually takes is a software update.

The problem is the U.S. uses MPG to measure fuel efficiency. MPG is not a measure of fuel efficiency. It's the inverse of fuel efficiency. Consequently, the bigger MPG gets, the less it matters. Consider a truck, SUV, sedan, econobox, hybrid, and research vehicle which have to drive 100 miles:

5 MPG truck = 20 gallons used
15 MPG SUV = 6.7 gallons used (10 MPG better, 13.3 gallons less than the truck)
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons used (10 MPG better, 2.7 gallons less than the small SUV)
35 MPG econobox = 2.9 gallons used (10 MPG better, 1.1 gallons less than the sedan)
50 MPG hybrid = 2 gallons used (15 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the econobox)
100 MPG research vehicle = 1 gallon used (50 MPG better, 1 gallon less than the hybrid

See how there's a non-linear relationship between the MPG improvement and gallons saved? That's because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Passenger sedans and econoboxes may gain the most MPG from fuel-saving technologies like hybrid engines, but that's just an illusion created by MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. They're actually the worst place to be using these technologies. If we were really serious about saving fuel, we'd be working on putting hybrids into trucks and SUVs first. Basically every SUV you can turn into a hybrid is worth 2 econoboxes turned into a hybrid.

All this becomes crystal clear if you look at the first figure - gallons used per 100 miles - which is the proper units for fuel economy:

Truck = 20 gal/100 mi
SUV = 6.7 gal/100 mi
Sedan = 4 gal/100 mi
Econobox = 2.9 gal/100 mi
Hybrid = 2 gal/100 mi
Research vehicle = 1 gal/100 mi

You can see how once you reach about sedan-sized, you rapidly enter the point of diminishing returns, where even a tech which cuts fuel use in half saves very little fuel per 100 miles traveled. (Yes there are a lot more cars on the road than trucks. But if you developed a tech which cut fuel use in half, why outfit a million sedans with it, when you could outfit just 200,000 trucks or 250,000 buses with it and achieve the same fuel savings? Yes eventually you want to outfit all vehicles with it. But you should start by outfitting the vehicles where it will give you the most bang for the buck - the vehicles which use the most fuel per year.)

The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, and so doesn't have this misperception that's prevalent in the U.S. Consequently, they've been working on improving cargo truck efficiency, instead of hybridizing tiny passenger vehicles so marketers can advertise a meaningless big number for MPG.

Nuclear power has already been tried on a merchant ship.

The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship. The reactor itself scales just fine and performed admirably (used about 163 pounds of uranium or a hair over one gallon, instead of 29 million gallons of fuel oil during its 10 years of operation). But the additional manpower and training needed to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor instead of a diesel engine killed its cost-effectiveness at transporting cargo. You're basically using the same amount of trained staff as needed to operate a reactor to power a small city (a few hundred MW), except you're only powering a ship (74 MW).

Maybe molten salt reactors or some other tech will be easy enough to maintain that nuclear could supplant diesel for cargo ships. But it isn't going to happen with light water reactors. Even the U.S. Navy sees this lower limit, and uses diesel or gas turbine engines in anything as small as a cruiser (the previous Virginia-class cruisers were nuclear, but the current Ticonderoga-class uses gas turbine engines).

Dedicated left turn lanes are incredibly important to traffic flow. The lack of left turn lanes was the most frustrating thing as a driver when I moved to Vancouver for a job. Most of the larger roads there were only two lanes wide and very few intersections had left turn lanes. So the road basically lost half its capacity any time someone had to make a left turn. I swear Vancouver's rush hour traffic would improve if they followed UPS and prohibited left turns, forcing drivers to instead make three right turns. (Traffic circles would work too, but tend to slow down long straightaways.)

What say the managers and officers running the BBC open up all their finances for the public to see. What? You don't want to? Well then you must be embezzling.

The incentive package Nevada offered Tesla includes $8 million in discounted electricity rates. So it's definitely a net-zero thing, not off-grid. In fact I'm still trying to figure out if it's net-zero in electrical production, or net-zero in electricity cost (i.e. sell solar to the grid during the day when rates are high, buy it back at night when rates are lower).

If you do it yourself, make sure you use a VCR with S-Video output. The regular composite cables (red, white, yellow) combines the chroma (color) and luminance (brightness) into one signal. That means boundary with a high brightness contrast will bleed into the color (and vice versa) and you'll get marching ants. S-Video encodes these two signals separately and eliminates that particular problem. The biggest quality improvement I saw while encoding VHS and Hi-8 tapes myself came from switching to S-Video cables.

For those who don't know how DMCA safe harbor provisions work, it protects a web site from liability if one of its users should violate copyright on it. e.g. Someone uploads a copyright movie to YouTube, and the safe harbor provision protects YouTube from being sued by the studios for copyright infringement. However, in order to qualify for the safe harbor provision, the site has to take certain measures. Most notably, they have to respond to those DMCA takedown notices within a reasonable timeframe by either taking the alleged infringing work down (and informing the user why and how to issue a challege), or with a response explaining why they're not taking it down. If they fail to do this, they become monetarily liable for the copyright infringement of their users.

Regardless of your opinion on celebrities, taking nude photos of yourself, cloud storage, porn, or hacking, this is pretty clearly a copyright violation. The copyright on the photos belong to the celebrities who took them, and they have sole, exclusive control over distribution in any country which is a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to register a copyright for a work to be copyrighted. Any copyrightable work you create is automatically copyrighted. The only thing registering does is raise the damage ceiling in a lawsuit (without registration you can only collect damages suffered; with registration the limit is $200,000 per infringed work). So Reddit may have been premature in quashing the subreddit before they got a DMCA notice, but it was inevitable they were going to get one and they would've had to quash it anyway.

I'd be happy if airlines made seats non-reclinable since the few degrees you get is pretty much useless;

Yeah, most of the time I don't even recline my seat. And when I do, it's usually because the person in front has reclined theirs, putting the video screen too close to my face for comfort.

Anyhow, if you want a few extra inches of legroom and don't care about reclining seats, check in early and get the emergency exit row seats. Because they're an egress route they need a lot of space between the seats to allow passengers to file out quickly, and the seats can't recline. Airlines generally can't pre-book those because they have to see you in person to verify that you're able to open the emergency exit seat (about 40-50 lbs). A few of them have started policies where frequent fliers (who've been allowed to use those seats before) can pre-book them.

Judging by images like these, today's business class is pretty much what economy class used to be in the 70s.

Hoo boy. Do you have any idea how much more expensive flying was in the 1970s, before deregulation?

In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (who worked with Senator Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s) wrote:
"In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268."

Of course that factoid cherry picked the 1974 fare to coincide with the Arab oil embargo. But current oil prices are actually higher in inflation-adjusted dollars, and a cheap ticket between LA and NY is still around $350.

Some argue that flying has become too cheap. I beg to disagree: flying in a humane manner has not become cheaper, it's just that you'd have to book business class nowadays.

Of course that's exactly what happened. Because back when the LGA-LAX ticket cost $1442, very few people flew. The fundamentals of weight on an airplane and fuel use means the more people you can squeeze on a plane, the cheaper it is (per seat) to operate. So when federal regulation fixed the lowest airline price at $1442 making it inaccessible to the vast majority of people, the planes were emptier and the airlines could get away with fewer seats.

Air travel is in the state it's currently in because passengers prioritized lower fares over seating space, and the airlines found a way to deliver upon passenger desires. If passengers had demanded lush, business-class seating as you suggest, then that's what airlines would have delivered. Most of the seats on airplanes would be business-class sized, and a LGA-LAX ticket would still be around $1442 (actually, probably higher since current real oil prices are higher than in 1974).

i.e. It's not that current seating is "inhumane", it's that your definition of "humane" differs from what the vast majority of people buying airline tickets consider to be acceptable. Many airlines have premium economy seats offering an extra 5-6 inches of legroom at a higher price. A few people are willing to pay for those, but not many. If more people were wiling to pay for those bigger seats, the airlines would put more of them in - unless you're a monopoly, you always make more money giving people what they want.

The fundamental problem with air travel is that it's too fast. People look at that tiny seat and figure they can deal with it for a few hours. If air travel were slower and you were stuck in that seat for a day or two, people would demand more room.

Basically they're providing insurance that pays out based on the odds that you don't get into a college they say you can get into. The fee they charge is the premium for that insurance. It doesn't affect your odds of getting accepted in any way compared to if you'd applied on your own. The only thing the information they provide you may change is which schools you decide to apply to. It's actually a pretty clever way to monetize on the risk and uncertainty of applying to colleges, though I suspect the steep price to play will discourage most applicants.

To put it another way - they're letting you place bets on whether you'll be rejected by a school. And like all good bookies, they've crunched the numbers to make sure that statistically they come out ahead. But based on those odds they've crunched, you can drop or add schools you apply to to increase your ratio of acceptances to rejections, making it a marginally useful service whereas just plain gambling would mean on average the client loses.

Me: Hi. I switched to Verizon, cancel my service
Comcast: Why do you want to cancel?

Yeah. Unfortunately that doesn't work if you're part of the huge chunk of the population whose only choices for Internet are a single cable company (hopefully not Comcast), 1.5 or 3.0 Mbps DSL, or wireless.

The idea of municipal governments granting cable monopolies was founded on good intentions. By holding out the carrot of a monopoly, they got the cable companies to agree to concessions like providing service to remote and poor areas which otherwise would've been tagged as uneconomical and ignored. But at this point I think we can all agree that the drawbacks of these monopolies far, far outweigh the benefits. They either need to be banned outright, or treated like the other government-granted monopolies - utilities whose rates and service are carefully monitored by a public utilities commission.

Merriam Webster
transitive verb
2: to put an end to scotched rumors of a military takeover>

Oxford
verb
1 [with object] Decisively put an end to: a spokesman has scotched the rumours

The problem is the way "Scotch" used in the headline, it can be either a verb or an adjective. This is compounded by "Court" also working as either a verb or an adjective. I was scratching my head for a minute trying to figure out why it was worth forging documents intended to court a review of an alcoholic drink.

The USPTO really needs to insist that patents be for an implementation of an idea, not the general concept. That was the problem with the Wright Brothers' patent - it basically covered the concept of moving surfaces as flight controls, even though the Wright Brothers' implementation via wing warping was something nobody else did nor does today. It hindered U.S. development of aircraft enough that by the time WWI came about, the U.S. was technologically behind the rest of the world partly because of the patent.

Likewise, if Bezos wants to patent an implementation of landing a rocket at sea, by all means he should be free to do so. But he should not be able to patent the concept of landing a rocket at sea.