Because if you're paying too much to go fast, you probably also don't mind paying too much to fuel the trip. It's a non-issue.

I am a big believer in the politics of spite -- spite being an under-appreciated force in human behavior -- and I still can't figure out how governments work in this crazy little scenario you've concocted. The MPG requirements are a problem for manufacturers. It doesn't affect that state at all. And even if it did, it still doesn't in any way say "fuck you" to the requirement. Again, it's a complete non-issue.

Texas doesn't even ALLOW currency anymore, or have toll booths. You drive through with TxTag (a radio transponder like EZpass for you Yankees out there). If you don't have one, you're mailed a bill based on a photo of your license plate. And a fine. And you better hurry up and pay before that $2.50 bill becomes $125.00. Regardless, I can assure you that the true speed will be at least 85 (because that's the speed we all drive on 70 and 75 mph highways).

Toll roads between cities in Texas are relatively new. Large cities like Dallas and Houston have had a few toll lanes to ease congestion, but that was it. Nobody wanted them, except for Rick Perry.

Toll roads make no sense in Texas, because pretty much everyone on a Texas road has already paid taxes to cover the road. The number of non-commerical non-Texans on Texas highways is negligible. It takes a solid day of driving to get out of the state starting in Austin. No one is going to "cut through" Texas on their daily commute the way they might New York or Connecticut. The only way you would have drivers regularly using a Texas road without paying taxes would be if they were working in Texas but living in another state, as Texas has no income tax. (It all comes from property and sales tax.) Again, the number of people doing that is negligible.

The sad thing is, this is actually pretty consistent with how the courts have worked for a long, long time now. (IANAL, grain of salt, etc.):

There are essentially two arguments here. First, the cellphone pings off of cell towers to identify nearby towers with best service for hand off. Even if this process wasn't wireless, your agent (the phone) would be actively attempting to engage the agent of a publicly-available private service (the tower). This is similar to how it may (and has) been argued that you have no expectation of privacy to traffic between some servers, or to emails that are stored on a third-party server, because that third party can read any of them at will. For phones, the content of a call is protected by wiretapping laws. But the connections used to establish quality of service for a future call which may never be placed? This ruling states that that is not protected. This is ultimately similar to the question of how private are the ADDRESSES printed on your private mail are (which, since they need to be public for delivery, is not very).

Second, the connection is wireless, and the phone does emit a signal. This is a second way the ruling states that a phone may be tracked. If you're just tossing your private radiation out into a public space, well, then it's fair game for anyone who can detect it. This is pretty much the same logic that makes radiation detectors legal for counter-terrorism uses, and thermal imaging legal for tracking down hidden grow-houses. (Note that some jurisdictions have passed separate laws specifically illegalizing such practices, but some still let it fly.) The logic on this isn't too far out there, either: it's just an extension of a physical argument to technological space. In particular, it's an extension of the question of how much of an expectation of privacy you have for private goings on that are visible from public land. Can you expect your pot farm to be somewhat hidden by privacy laws if you have it on private land? What if you have no fence? What about a fence that's just too short to block the view from a building across the street? What about the case of a passer-by in a helicopter near your property? What about satellite imagery?

Another old ruling that was in the news recently upheld the container interpretation of a cell-phone's data. It was argued that a cell phone's data is not protected from search because it is similar to the data of a pager, which was previously decided to be unprotected. Pagers were not protected because they are simply containers of numbers, akin to an address book, which was also searchable. (The earlier analysis overlooks the fact that pagers are not address books, since they record reals numbers traceable to people who DEFINITELY DID try to contact you, as opposed to numbers that may or may not be real, for people that you may or may not try to contact at some point. The newer analysis just ignores how many non-phone-like things a modern phone does.)

The main issue here is that if it's legal for a human to do something, a group of humans using technology to do the same thing 100 times better, then 1000 times over is still legal. At the point where quantity becomes a quality all its own, legislators need to step in and acknowledge that the game has changed, because jurists will almost never do that on their own. Another issue is that jurists often work from precedent, and try to apply the general, technology-agnostic case to the modern, technology driven case. Generally, that's a pretty good idea, but you have to be careful to recognize when a preceding metaphor no longer represents reality (e.g. a smart phone is like a cell phone that is like a pager that is like an address book that is not that private).

Another huge problem is that implementation and application are important, and a sound decision from general terms can mean a lot of grief in the real world. For example, consider locks. Locks do not protect your house. Most of them are too flimsy to offer real resistance, especially on a wooden door about to meet the business end of a hammer. No, your house is protected by the fact that breaking and entering is a punishable crime, and locks are a legally-recognized sign that the person with rights to a place and things doesn't want other people near it. Once it became widely accepted that data is private and valuable, and that computers storing such data should also be protected, you get the notion of a digital lock. It may not offer much real resistance to intrusion, but tampering with it is illegal so it offers some protection. Unfortunately, digital locks come up most often these days in unpopular DRM. The underlying metaphor of the lock is sound. The real question is "should a vendor be allowed to lock what I buy or lease?" So digital locks as a concept catch flak because of misuse.

Pretty much all engineering can be described as, "will solve second order differential equations for food."

I agree completely, even though I'm part of the group for whom the browser is much more toy than work. Here are some pet peeves I've had with Firefox:

1) inconsistent UI design across platforms.
The browser was supposed to be cross-platform. I've found that phrase is quite broad. That can mean it compiles in different environments, that the code is general enough that it can be compiled to run on different hardware, that a version can be run on any major operating system, and that the user experience will be consistent across operating systems. They did a really good job with the first three points, and dropped the ball on the last. At one point I had similar versions of Firefox on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu boxes, and all were slightly different. They were trying to conform to user expectations for each given system, but it made Firefox a headache for people who moved between systems. The good thing about browsers is that they're your gateway to the internet, and the good thing about the internet is it's as platform agnostic as anything we've ever made. It's probably only irritating to a few people like me, but it's seems pointless that the UI for Ubuntu would have different colors, different icons, different menus, and different text for the same piece of software. Is there really any point to giving "options" to Windows users, but "preferences" to Ubuntu users?

2) inconsistent UI design across versions on the same platform
Every time a major update came out, they changed the icon set, and changed enough of the underlying CSS markup for the interface to break a good number of extensions. Most of the time, the changes were so superficial that there was no reason for them to be made. Later changes were more dramatic, like the star system for bookmarks that they cribbed from Flock, but those also tended to break other things than display. More than anything, it tended to piss a lot of us off.

3) Feature creep/Bloat
Firefox started to pick up a lot of features that just don't need to be in most people's browser. For example, the Google-driven anti-phishing whitelist and/or URL-checking service. Sure, you could disable these things with preferences, but the code is still there, the CPU cycles still need to be spent to check the preferences, and you still have to take the time to lookup and disable them. Pre-fetching is another feature of dubious value. Other features, like "ping" died on the vine. (For those who don't remember, Mozilla argued that the ping feature was valuable because advertisers were going to track users no matter what. For the good of the internet, the ping feature would allow webpages to embed a silent callback address, allowing advertisers to track us in the most efficient, low-traffic way possible. Isn't it great how Mozilla looks out for us?)

There are more services now than I care to keep track of. As an experiment, go to about:config and filter based on "http". Did you know that the browser may interact with all of those sites? Do you know WHEN it interacts with all of them?

Most of the services they add are unnecessary for the majority of users. The extensions system is the crown jewel of Firefox, and there's no reason to bless dubious features like safebrowsing and force them on everyone, while very popular extensions can be broken at the drop of a hat. Firefox should have official extensions, and removing dubious features should be as easy as disabling an unwanted extension. Most AV systems already interface with Firefox this way.

4) No respect for add-ons
The typical open-source movement "f*** you" is "if you don't like it, why don't you change it yourself." It's somehow reasonable for everyone to learn to code in addition to their real job, rather than ask the people whose real job IS coding (most Mozilla contributors are paid) to justify themselves. Also, ignore the fact that Firefox is a huge moving target, that addons theoretically have to be updated as often as the browser, and that developers have to support multiple firefox versions (because they can't give half their customers the middle finger with every new release like Mozilla can).

But it's more than just their tendency to break addons: addons are the best thing about Firefox, the ONLY distinguishing element, and they never seem to acknowledge that, much less make use of it.

For example, each new version and system had different, slightly tweaked default themes, but you can't find any of those themes in stand-alone form. You can't easily carry your version 3 theme forward to version 7, or get an "Ubuntu feel" on your Windows install. They keep adding new niche features to try to distinguish themselves, and make the entire codespace larger for everyone. But an extension mechanism exists SPECIFICALLY to let developers built niche features without bogging down the code. Extensions are good enough for mere mortals, but not the Mozilla developer elite. It might be good enough, of course, if they could make the extension system more stable. As it is, "turn off extensions" is the best diagnostic tool they have, and hardening the system to guarantee extension stability is more work than they actually want to do.

These are all philosophical problems of what the browser should be doing. This doesn't even touch on how it should do what it does WELL. Memory management, threading, and sandboxing are all important. But they're all under the hood. So long as they're done right, the user doesn't even know anything's being done at all. Getting Firefox to a level where that's true is important, but it won't fix the bigger issues that drive most people away.

The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body, nor could it even cope with such a task if it decided to seize an opportunity. It is a patchwork of bodies, funds, institutions, and loose alliances. It is basically a loose network of international do-gooders, with a completely useless general assembly and an incredibly important security council. That's why there's so much pressure lately to expand the security council to include more countries, rotate countries out, and have them handle more mundane issues like pollution as a "global risk". They're the only body set up to make a resolution then actually back it up.

And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S. It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy), which have successfully promoted as just good, fully human values in the past century. It relies on the U.S. for a lot of funding, and almost all of its strength. When the U.S. forgets about the UN, both suffer, because the UN has the unenviable task of taking all the good parts of long-term U.S. policy and convincing other countries to go along with it despite how pissed off they get over the bad parts of short-term U.S. policy. They are the sly left and strong right hands of the same philosophy.

What this is is balkanization by the back-door. The long-feared balkanization of the internet has already happened, with countries like Iran and China essentially experiencing completely different 'nets than other parts of the world. And it will continue to splinter. What the movement in the ITU is about is ameliorating the worst parts of balkanization, when reclusive regimes find that the accidentally broke something they would rather keep. They want to be able to censor gracefully, with someone in their corner to get things fixed when their ridiculous schemes bite them technically. While I can sympathize with countries who don't feel entirely comfortable with the net in American hands, dumping this much power into a relatively new, weak body of the UN can only serve oppressive regimes.

IANAL, but can't you just get around this by calling yourself a search engine and falling back on the DMCA's safe harbor rules?

"Introducing myBlock, the web's first completely physically aware search engine, powered by Google! Search for terms that apply to you and get results that apply to your city, town, or state... all visually displayed using Google Maps technology! We're still in beta, but we're growing every day.

"We currently crawl and index up to... [1]... pages! Stay tuned for more!"

Granted, you could catch flack for not obeying robots.txt (which you aren't legally required to do, and which these sites already probably avoid anyway). It's probably also a good idea to see what you can do to establish a business relationship with Google (read: pay them something) to avoid having the rug pulled out from under you on the mapping front. But otherwise, is there even a bar for what legally constitutes a search engine?

99% of the user base doesn't need some given functionality of the PC that the other 1% depend on.

About 80% of the user base can think of some functionality that puts them in one of those "1%" groups. For some it's 3D graphics. For some, it's computing power. For some it's the layout capability that a large screen+mouse+keys offers. For most, it's the ability to type... with all of their digits.

It may eventually get to the point where PC hardware is just a big (very big) tablet with a mount and connections for network, keyboard ,and mouse, but it still will be a PC.

The unspoken argument here is that the complainers are no longer trying to contribute to PHP by providing feedback. Rather, they have determined that PHP is fundamentally terrible at doing the work it's been recruited to do. Fixing it to be "the best possible wrong tool for the job" would not be productive.

Because it looks like it should work, you don't have the benefit of understanding that it doesn't until you've wasted your time using it and have probably committed a good deal of your project to it trying to make it work. Hence, most people using it today are less concerned with improving future iterations than they are with killing the damn thing by warning people away from it. Because if nobody uses it, nobody has to support it.

If this still sounds peculiar to you, remember this is pretty much exactly what happened to kick off the second browser wars. IE sucked, people complained constantly, Microsoft did nothing (because why would they?), and eventually enough talented people were fed up to get the old Mozilla code up to speed.

I remember when Marvel did stuff like this in '90s. Does this company do it better? Maybe. But it's still not that novel an approach, and I doubt the reason these motion comics failed to take off before was because of a lack of good tools. There comes a time when you either want a comic, or a cartoon, but not something that's an awkward combination of the two. When you get right down to it, wants the difference here between the Flash cartoons that have been around for ages (Aside from starting with prettier cutouts drawn by professional illustrators)?

The main problem with comics on a screen (any screen) these days is that humans can focus in close on a printed page fairly easily, but readers suck at zooming and moving around a large image. So you can either see the page art then zoom in to actually read the text (repeated), or you can read panels at a time (zooming in to see, say, 1/6th of the page) and miss the full impact of the occasional full-page or two-page spread. There's still some room for technology to move in and help the issue -- maybe allow publishers to tag pages as "shock spread" so you see the full art first, no matter what, before returning the reader to a close-in panel view -- but screen resolution is a limit to the experience.

Isn't that what already happens when we fail to pay our annual usage fee? (You know, property taxes....)

If I have to choose between competence and caring, I'll take competence. The majority of the people you interact with won't care about you at all. It took us quite a bit of socialization, evolution and technological development to get to a point where we don't have to care much at all on a personal level about the people feeding us, supplying us, paying us, healing us, or even educating us. Everyone can benefit from their expertise no matter how much we may not like them as people (or they us). Bypassing personal sympathies is the root of all progress.

So the teachers don't care. Clearly the parents do, or they wouldn't take the time to home school.
So there's social friction between students. What better place to learn to socialize than an environment where people HAVE to be together and behave, then never see each other again after 4 years?
So you disagree with the teachers views. Maybe now is a good time to teach your child just how few people exist in the world that he will probably like, and how to manage the majority he doesn't... like his boss.
So you disagree with the curriculum. That can be a good way to teach the importance of critical thinking. (The alternatives are to never develop critical thinking skills, or to let them learn strictly by criticizing the person who home-schooled him.)
So you think the schools are under-performing. Clearly, the parents are not doing too well on their own, with even fewer resources.

Unless you have embarked upon a carefully researched plan to realize a new Doc Savage, you are probably not going to benefit more from home schooling than you are from public education. In fact, even a mediocre public education frees the parent up to shore up matters of personal philosophy or touch on what he feels is important. If you believe that pretty much anybody can teach basic arithmetic, or English grammar, or U.S History (or whatever curricula don't seem to upset you), then why NOT leave that to a professional on the taxpayer's dime? If there's something in public education you disagree with strongly, then why not spend MOST of your time with your child talking about that?

I can see no more good reason to pass up a subsidized education of such quality as we have than I can see good reason to pass up a free mechanic, laundry, or grocer.

This sort of surveillance does sound more like what what you would expect out of the CIA -- which is hampered by federal laws limiting them to spying on international communications and foreign nationals -- or the NSA -- which has invested in a huge new facility after admitting that there's just not enough power to come close to breaking a significant amount of encrypted traffic. The big question is why the FBI would jump into something it's never been a major player in before.

Best guess: they're trying to update wiretapping. They've been getting increasingly alarmed and vocal about just how little wiretapping actually buys you now. If you really want to keep something secret, you can just use an https encrypted connection to any one of numerous services that keep no records and have no mechanisms for spying on their users.

They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles. Even if you trust your government, it's much hard to game a system that requires someone to go to a location within the your country and physically connect to equipment owned and operated by a someone else than it is to find an exploit in a protocol that can be prodded by anyone online and which would have to be implement by everyone from Facebook to Club Penguin.

With no widespread support for spying-as-a-service, they're stuck traffic-tapping the hard way: inspect every packet for the start of an HTTPS handshake so you can break the connection, or somehow crack an encrypted stream with incomplete knowledge. They still have no idea how they would reliably accomplish either of these. However they do it, it will probably require new laws to make it feasible. It sounds like the program casts a wide net in an attempt to find something that works, and is trying to keep it quiet because they don't know what solution will rise to the top, or how knowledge gained about the process now could be used to defeat it technically or legally later.

You could just use a kernel password and tag on a date: MyPass112011, MyPass122011, MyPass0112012,.... That's what most of the bank officers do when they're forced to do that same thing.

I agree with your general sentiment that many of these icons are not particularly outdated so long as you accept the underlying metaphor to begin with. For example, a magnifying glass is probably no more or less used today than it was 60 years ago. It was always a very loose metaphor, referring more to a caricature of Sherlock Holmes than anything else. Bookmarks are also quite easy to grok if you accept the notion of the web as a "book" of independent documents (which even in the 90s seemed weird to me, as places in cyberspace metaphor worked much better for the web than the documents in a sequential book metaphor did, even then).

For some of your specifics, though, I have to disagree. First, there is a definite bias towards items a paper-heavy office. That's fine, but the largest consumers of technology don't work in those anymore. Some are not in offices, and others are in offices where all of their work is through a company system on the computer.

Anything that's based on technology from 60-100 years ago is definitely dated, because they have to pic a single incarnation of the technology that stands out as much as possible from other items. Modern design aesthetic is to smooth corners, hide the pokey bit, and as much as possible reduce every device to a rectangle with a screen (which maybe you can touch).

Polaroids look like Polaroid prints. Most pictures look like Kodak prints (rectangles with a picture covering it completely) and pretty much no one prints their photos anymore. They are stored on their computer instead of in an album, or carried on a phone instead of in a wallet.

Many people receive bills in the form of an email saying either, "it's time to log in to the web site and pay your bill," or, "we have deducted the required amount from the bank account you provided. Thank you for using auto-pay."

Microphones used in bars an stages look something like a metal ice cream cone -- a conical grip and an a wire mesh screen -- not in the studio style, like a mesh hot dog suspended by a forked base.

The voicemail icon is wrong on a couple of different levels, because the answering machines that were replaced by voicemail hadn't used a removable reel-to-reel cassette in a decade. They really had to reach back.