You'd think that...

Many subway trains are now automated. Expect all other vehicles to follow eventually.

Yes, no, and no, in order.

With proper representation, taxation would not be so odious. But the will of the people is being soundly ignored at every possible turn...

What I actually want is weak central government. I don't know that we need less government (well, in certain areas we certainly do, like military) but what we certainly need is less centralization. Pare the feds back to handling disputes and actually defending the country, making treaties.

I also want representative democracy, and for the people to ratify bills directly. If that makes it harder to pass laws, OK. We have too many already. Let's get rid of some before we make more.

I'm more likely to get my unicorn.

Right, and with government "protection", you also get fucked. They take our money and then spend it oppressing us. I don't know that getting secure banking out of it is all that great a trade.

Sure, theoretically. But is the currency you're getting worth the currency you're getting? And are you actually getting equal protection?

If there's missing millions then there's missing fraction-of-millions in taxes. So there's a motivation to go looking for it right there. And then, also, once it's in their hot little hands they can always decide to keep it. Even if all they do is sit on it for a while and then eventually cough it up, it can make them money.

No rush.

It means I'm fat, kind of like you're a bit of a douchebag.

Yeah, it's also like, "In order for the update to full take effect and work correctly, we need to restart a bunch of services and applications. You should save all your work, since various things might close or stop working for a little bit." You can explain that to users, have them not pay attention, and then get pissed off because the update closed their document that they didn't save. Or you can just tell them that you're going to reboot.

Users understand rebooting better.

Double selection bias. People who are good at walking will tend to continue to do it for fun into older age. Meanwhile, while you're hiking, you tend to meet people who hike. Walking is of course great exercise, however. I have asthma and I'm a bit heavy but I'm a good walker, I can walk all day as long as the way isn't too steep.

"All it takes is the one company that is designing and building the installation to hide the real issues and, because it is "green", the installation get built. No conspiracy necessary."

That IS a conspiracy, because it assumes the company can hide that from everyone, or keep it hidden from everyone. It assumes the company has an extraordinary power to prevent any external focus or criticism, and they can keep every environmental aspect of the plan firmly under their control. It would require that the company can deny all access to the proposed area to prevent anyone having a look to see what species are there, and to see what might change, or if they do, having the power to silence them. This is frankly nonsense and the proposed Severn barrier not so far away was evidence enough that there's enough people in the area willing to examine the impacts and as I said already, guess what? they're really not concerned by them - it's not the company making the proposal saying that, it's the very people that have scrutinised the proposal saying okay, where the same people have said no to numerous other previous projects in the region. That means there is a conspiracy and they've all been bought off or silenced, or it is what it is - they're actually okay with it and see no real impact.

"Lets throw another variable into the grid balancing act. Engineers on individual production projects just don't care what issues they cause the grid and that is a problem."

Again, where is the evidence for this? Have you got evidence that we've had cases of too much power or too little power for the grid to handle? The only issues we've seen on the grid have been the unexpected shutdown of numerous base load plants due to a series of unfortunate events at those reactors, but even with that shutdown of a number of major plants we're still doing fine.

Tidal isn't unpredictable like wind, it's incredibly predictable, so factoring it into the grid is far easier. In fact, it's even more predictable than hydro, because even hydro can suffer drought or heavy rainfall problems- the seas levels and tidal patterns remain far closer to constant.

Spock in Amok Time is good Spock, just rageful and murderous. Evil Spock (with a goatee -- that's how you can tell he's evil) was from episode 33, "Mirror, Mirror."

Time shifting is typically something that the end-user does. Tivo, like Sony before it (The original time shifting lawsuit was against Sony for their Betamax), merely makes the machine. So long as there is at least a potential lawful use for the recording function of the machine, they can go on making them. The Supreme Court found that at least some time shifting would be fair, and that was enough.

Space shifting is another example, the original case was against Diamond for their Rio MP3 players, but Apple's iPod relied on it, as did basically everyone else.

No, the purpose of the use for time shifting, while not precisely commercial, is to simply use the work in the way that an ordinary user, who did not time shift, would use it. It's not strongly against fair use, but it certainly doesn't weigh for it in the way that an educational or transformative use would. At best it is a wash.

It does.

(Though the question of parodying a mark directly is different from parodying a work which happens to contain a mark. Parodying Star Wars, which includes X-Wings, and the Millennium Falcon, and Lightsabers, and so on is different from parodying the Star Wars logo all by itself)

Also, remember that trademarks are inferior to, and cannot be used as a substitute for, copyrights. And that trademarks themselves are subject to various limitations to allow for certain types of unauthorized use.