Clinton 1992 due to Ross Perot splitting Republican vote. Clinton 96, again due to Ross Perot. Bush 2000 due to Nader splitting Dem votes in Florida. Only three straight contests, 2004, 2008, 2012. R 1, D 2. That is the score now.

The conflict of interest between the customer and the consumer is very big. For example a physics simulation company would sell design analysis tools. Its customer is the company that buys those tools, your Intel, Apple, BMW, Toyota... whatever. The consumer is an employee of that corporation. The customer wants the tools to be easy to use, and produce accurate reliable answers all the time. But the consumer wants the product to be easy to use on some parts but very difficult to use in other parts. He/she wants a tough learning curve to create a barrier to entry, and the results to get more accurate using less resources depending on experience. Customer wants even newbies to learn to use it quickly and produce as good a result as the veterans. There is a conflict of interest between customer and the user.

They have been blasting Its a small world after all (the planets) for ever to the waiting line for Magic Mountain or whatever is their roller coaster ride.

Look electric car is not like health insurance. Health insurance must be sold across the state lines and nationwide. Healthcare companies should be able to find states with friendly regulators. They need to set up shop at a place where the judges, juries and arbitrators would be friendly to the company not the claimants. So that is why we should support healthcare being sold nationwide.

But the electric car is a very complex product. Most users don't know how to drive a car. They need to be trained and licensed to use one. Remember you don't need a license to be a patient to a doctor or in a hospital. Shows you how complex the automobile is. And you add on top of this electricity, which you can't see. They say Tesla runs on electricity. But I don't want to cars trailing miles and miles of extension cords. They will tangle up in the road and create fire hazard. So electric cars must be sold only via authorized dealers and you should not even be able to buy one across county lines, leave alone state lines.

There is an instance of elegant code that solves a real life engineering problem that beats the competition by orders of magnitude in speed, resource usage, robustness and accuracy.

Unfortunately my employer thinks it belongs to the corporation, because they paid me something they call salary to me when I wrote it. They would not let me show it to you all. But this much I can tell you. The key to writing such wonderfully elegant code is to avoid exaggeration, stay away from bragging, and most importantly eschew snark.

I hired a guy who was in a small time band for 20 years after high school. Traveled all over US. No one ever paid an admission price to hear them. Hotel lobby. Restaurant. Etc. Decided to get a degree at age 40. 20 years of travel showed him the cheapest place in USA. Upper peninsula of Michigan. Mich tech or some such place. Finished degree in three years with summer session. Started as entry level coder at age 44. One of the smartest guys I have met. He joined and enjoyed our London times cryptic crossword puzzle group. So go north young man.

You are confusing the term "mining" with some kind of digging the earth to find gold or coal. What they call mining is simply the process of validating a large block of transactions. To provide an incentive for validating these transactions they provide a transaction fee. That fee is paid in bitcoins. They used the term mining to "jazz" up the work.

The plan is to make the transaction fee paid to validate the block go to zero at some point in the future. It is expected enough people will be using bitcoins to exchange. And it is in their best interest to validate large blocks of transactions and they will do it for free. That is what is meant by "there will be no more coins to mine".

At that point there will be a fixed number of bit coins and they will be exchanged freely between other currencies. It will be almost like the gold standard. But with one difference. There is some outside chance a suddenly a new gold field might be discovered. Or some sunken vessel of gold discovered and salvaged. Or there could be really El Dorado and it gets discovered. But in the bitcoin universe, you are guaranteed there will not be a sudden influx of new bitcoins. The number of coins are fixed. Their value floats up or down.

Today the private companies and the corporations have more power than the federal government. Yes, they can't arrest you and throw in jail, yet. But they can ruin your life so much it is just as bad as being thrown in jail.

We get all worked up about the government data collection. But what LAPD is doing is perfectly legal for a private company to do. There is already a huge industry of people with license plate scanners to scan every car in a parking lot and tip off repossession companies for the tip money. Private investigators collect such data to use in divorce cases, child custody cases. Stalkers and creeps could use private detective agencies to access such data base of collected license plate scans.

I am not saying, "So we should let LAPD scan license plates". What I am saying is whatever argument you use against LAPD is valid an order of magnitude more for private companies too. And any solution, change we propose should also prohibit such private companies from consolidating such data into some kind of national data base queriable by private detective agencies, repossession companies, divorce lawyers, etc.

Touche' [takes a bow]

When it comes to building mock-ups, there is no one to beat India.

It seems to have built a complete mock-up of a democracy, complete with a mock-up judiciary, a mock up legislature and even a mock up of a functioning economy.

Huawei had stolen the code from Cisco. So it is no big loss for them. They are laughing at NSA for not getting the source from the source.

Your name is apt. You must be smoking gunja. Taxation is simply dividend paid by the beneficiaries of government investment in infrastructure, education, peace and security. Some people make full use of it, they make a ton of money and they have to pay a hefty dividend. People who did/could not make use of it pay less. But no matter how poor one is, that person has the potential to create and nurture future American citizens. We must take care of them to get a healthy viable growing next generation.

All that tripe you hear from the right wingers arguing for lower taxes is just the winners of the current generation destroying the ladder they climbed.

Earth is emitting energy in the 300K temp range. Sun is emitting at 6000K range. Classical thermodynamics defines the maximum possible efficiency of conversion purely based on source and sink temperatures. With earth emitting at 300K which is nearly the ambient, where are we going to find a sink? The sun/earth ratio is 6000/300 = 20. To get the same efficiency as the present solar collectors, you need a sink at 15K.

For all this theoretical work, we could think of putting a huge thermocouple with one end in deep space pulled up by the space elevator. Hey! Let us build the space elevator using two different metals and the rungs using non conducting material. Dual project both space elevator and a space thermocouple! It is totally useless except may be it can sell one more issue of Popular Mechanics with cool graphics.

Both the libertarian ideal free markets and the general evolution of species are governed by the same dynamics. Optimize for short term versus long term, rigidly follow what worked before without trying anything new/seek novelty, hedgehog vs fox, etc. And both evolution and free markets do not foresee anything, they don't design for anything. They just keep creating variations and whatever survives survives. Neither evolution nor free market cares who wins or who loses.

That is how natural selection and evolution works, but we don't accept it as the natural thing and resign ourselves to the fate. We constantly use artificial selection. We domesticated plants and animals, we constantly create new cutlivars and breeds. Same way we need not accept the libertarian ideal completely unfettered free market. We can shape the fitness landscape. Government should not pick winners or losers, but Government should stop the race to the bottom. We could demand certain level of resilience, certain level of redundancy in the systems, certain standards. As long as these rules apply to all players, the playing field is level and the free markets and the competition would work.

This is nuanced defense for government regulations in the abstract, but I don't think I would be able to convince anyone. Takes too long, and too many people with vested interest disrupt the communication channels.