I'm pretty sure "viable" doesn't necessarily mean "viable in every locale on planet Earth" - New Mexico might be able to do it while Minnesota may not be able to - that doesn't mean the technology is a wholesale failure.

I'm also pretty sure that indiegogo isn't an ideal way to fund it, but otherwise, it likely wouldn't get funding due to entrenched interests, so I'm all for it.

"Your is totally terrible, look at this one" - links to a $40,000 printer.

You need to give them your name and address anyway for a credit card transaction, and you were being subject to fraud prevention. That's an excuse to pirate, not a reason.

I see that as the main use for automatic driving in the near future anyway. Going around the corner to the grocery store? No big deal, just drive it. Taking a road trip from NYC to Florida, or a commute from the suburbs into your local major city? Set it to autopilot and go, take control once you're in the ballpark of your destination. You're still going to need a license to use one of these for a long while, so that kind of limitation isn't crippling.

Um, aren't literally all of their search ads above the search results? Why should they exclude their services from advertising in the same exact spot as everyone else who would be buying ads?

That's just not true. There are sub-launched ICBMs. The definition doesn't require that they're launched from land, just that they have a very long range (5k+ miles or so) and are primarily designed to deliver nuclear warheads.

That's just not true. AT&T's monopoly already existed when the government agreed to let them be a monopoly. The government was investigating them for antitrust violations, and then agreed to stop their investigation in exchange for them doing a few specific things, like requiring them to allow independent networks to connect to theirs in relatively limited circumstances.

Also, it was 1913, not the 30's, when this happened. Over the subsequent decades, the federal government basically gave AT&T everything they wanted - they approved 271 out of 274 buyouts of independent companies between 1921 and 1934, the government did not require them to interconnect their local services to independent local services, they did not require AT&T to interconnect with other long distance providers, and more.

That's the exact opposite of "heavy handed regulation" - that's the government rolling over to everything a corporation wanted.

Not at all. It's absolutely not OK. But even if we do everything we can to lower those numbers, unless it's at effectively zero, there will always be more incidents in NYC than (insert random town whose population is an order of magnitude or more lower than a rounding error compared to NYC's).

Of course it happens more frequently in NYC than elsewhere. It's a city with 8.4 million people, and 35,000 cops. The number of cops alone is larger than most towns. As an example, Ferguson, MO is only 21,000 people - there's 14,000 more cops alone in NYC, plus another 8.4 million people. Ferguson's entire population is literally a fucking rounding error relative to NYC's population.

That's pretty much irrelevant. Want to get a decent education? You're taking one of those tests if you do anything beyond an associates at a community college. That alone makes it so that the most common models, like the TI-84, will continue to be the standard and not be improved, let alone the fact that teaching materials, even in high school, are geared towards them as well.

You can't use a tablet on the SAT, probably not on the ACT, and definitely not in the classroom.

The strip isn't what I was talking about, actually - that strip was Democrat-controlled. There were a bunch of other districts that were redrawn at the same time, and only the Democratic one was found to be infringing. Here's a map of the districts after they were struck down. They're still just as fucked up, but unlike the 23rd in my original image, none of them can be considered to be racially drawn - which was the only reason the 23rd was struck down.

According to just one map, how the fuck do you think people are being represented fairly when their votes are being combined with votes that are hundreds of miles away and absolutely not a part of the same community? This one instance literally shows Republicans added 4 seats by calculating their ability to win districts if they were drawn in a very specific way, and used their power in the Texas legislature to make it happen. That's what happens with gerrymandering, and any study you've seen that claims this doesn't have an effect on Congress is bullshitting you. Even when parties come together to agree to redistrict in a given way, they're specifically looking to ensure incumbent victories in as many districts as possible.

The two party system is fine, until the parties have the ability to redraw their own districts without any rules as to how those districts should be shaped. Over time, they have to continue pulling farther and farther extreme from each other in order to compete within their own parties, and end up with guaranteed general election wins, which ends up leaving everyone with representatives who refuse to compromise. When you have to appeal to a wide variety of voters in the general election instead, parties end up electing the most extreme they can get away with in a general election instead of a primary - someone who has conviction yet who can compromise. This ends up being a moderating influence in multiple directions - it prevents the parties both from becoming too closely aligned and collude or too far apart to work together.

The solution is to limit the way district boundaries can be drawn - no more districts with a giant tail to add that group of republicans on X highway or the democrats on Y side of the city. Unfortunately, I'm not sure Congress is up to the task right now, which is a massive problem since the problem will continue to get worse, which makes it even less likely to happen...

They're only bad for keeping people working if nobody else has the same restrictions. If every other state had the same level of restrictions, California would be in contention without having to waive rules. If the entire world had the same restrictions, jobs wouldn't be outsourced to third world countries with near slave laborers.

That's the real problem with rules like environmental or worker protections - if only a subset of countries are onboard, companies move to those places where they have more power. If they have the same amount of power everywhere, the laws have no effect on the state of employment.

Your statement, and the sentiment many people hold towards regulation, is ignorant to the facts. You present it as if these companies are choosing between creating jobs and not creating jobs, when the reality is that they're creating the jobs anyway, and they're just choosing where to create them, with a substantial basis in the regulatory environment. Tesla is building a battery factory, they're just not considering California because it's easier to create them elsewhere.