So you bring out some examples of crazy people from the past and hold them up as your definitions of everything. Impressive argument.

Race is involved, in that participation in that culture is responsible for the failure of many black people to do well in our society, but the problem isn't race. Race is tangential to the entire issue, which is correcting dysfunctional cultures, and only figures into this because you care more about the color of people's skin than their behavior. There are plenty of white people caught up in thug culture, too, but they don't figure into your thoughts because their skin is the wrong color for you.

You don't seem to understand... you are the racist. You are the one who is making everything about the color of people's skin, even when it isn't.

Your whole post is just a long string of ad hominem attacks and attempts to associate the opposing viewpoint with something nasty that it is not. Are you the same person who always jumps into debates about Israeli foreign policy crying "antisemitism"?

It's people who think like you who will forever keep us from addressing these problems.

Race is not tied to culture, and criticizing a dysfunctional culture is not racist, bigoted, or an action to be shamed. Your need to tie the self-destructive culture that is held by some urban people (of all races) to a specific race, and imply that they are unable to change their culture, is what is racist.

Thug gangsta culture is not a productive and viable culture, regardless of the color of the practitioner's skin. My saying that is not racist, but your implying that thug culture is an intrinsic part of being black is racist. We get to call out dysfunctional cultures and your attempts to make everything about race and shut down the conversation only make the world an uglier place.

I don't think it's human nature that kicks in, because that is always present even if it's not acted upon. I think it's the lack of accountability and the amount of available power that kicks in. It's too much for the sociopathic politician types to ignore.

In, ah, 1997, just before I moved out west, I went to the campus SF convention that I'd once helped run once last time. The GOH was Vernor Vinge. A friend and I, seeing Vinge looking kind of bored and lost at a loud cyberpunk-themed meet-the-pros party, dragged him off to the green room and BSed about the Singularity, Vinge's "Zones" setting, E.E. "Doc" Smith, and gaming for a couple of hours. This was freaking amazing! Next day, a couple more friends and I took him for Mongolian BBQ. More heady speculation and wonky BSing.

That afternoon we'd arranged for a panel about the Singularity. One of the other panelists was Frederik Pohl. I'd suggested him because I thought his 1965 short-short story, "Day Million," was arguably the first SF to hint at the singularity. There's talk in there about asymptotic progress, and society becoming so weird it would be hard for us to comprehend.

"Just what is this Singularity thing?" Pohl asked while waiting for the panel to begin. A friend and I gave a short explanation. He rolled his eyes. Paraphrasing: "What a load of crap. All that's going to happen is that we're going to burn out this planet, and the survivors will live to regret our waste and folly."

Well. That was embarassing.

Fifteen years later, I found myself agreeing more and more with Pohl. He had seen, in his fifty-plus years writing and editing SF, and keeping a pulse on science and technology, to see many, many cultish futurist fads come and go, some of them touted by SF authors or editors (COUGH Dianetics COUGH psionics COUGH L-5 colonies). When spirits are high these seemed logical and inevitable and full of answers (and good things to peg an SF story to); with time, they all became pale and in retrospect seem a bit silly, and the remaining true believers kind of odd.

OK, good. The ribbing is a contractual obligation, of course!

Hypermiling is as far from driving safely and responsibly as is the videogame style driving you're imagining. It's just as antisocial, self-centered, and dangerous, but the goal is saving gas and not arriving sooner (or having fun or whatever).

You know that the expiration date for this certificate was set on 20 Apr 2013 and has been printed on the certificate for over a year, right?

You don't have to wait for the certificate to actually expire and fail before you renew it. It looks very amateur, and this is coming from an amateur.

This is the part than non-Europeans likely have a hard time understanding. Withdrawing consent for something that happened in the past is an alien concept for Americans, for sure.

Withdrawing consent for something that is ongoing makes sense, but retroactively deciding that you now disagree with something you previously agreed to and expecting history to rewrite itself to cater to your whims is bizarre. It reeks of refusing to take responsibility for your past actions.

They were recovered via a trapeze system. It's mentioned on the wiki page, and in a little more depth here. Pretty interesting stuff.

The number and diversity of test takers has increased dramatically since the 70's, also. The raw average is not a very useful description of data that aren't uniformly distributed. There's a reason why box plots are used, but the tiny variations year-to-year are likely to disappear if they analyze and present the data better. I'd be laughed out of the room if I tried to point out differences between two sets of x when the error bars are 4x wide, but I guess I'm not trying to make policy so my standards are higher.

Keep in mind that I'm not arguing against the trend here, just the presentation of the data.

She's not in the California state legislature, though. Back to civics class for you!

Does it really save that much gas, though? I know that the power required to overcome air resistance increases at the cube of the velocity, but transmission gearing and available engine horsepower influence fuel consumption at cruising speed more than aerodynamics.

It's not completely scientific, but I used to have to repeatedly drive a 100 mile trip in northern Colorado, where the speed limit is 75 mph. I tried an experiment, with n=3 of making the same trip at 55 mph (which really pissed everybody else off, but it's science!) and 80 mph. I used cruise control, changed my speed as little as possible, tried to control for as much as I could. Filled up the tank before I left, filled it up on arrival, and compared the total fuel consumed. I actually used less fuel overall at 80 mph than 55. My late 90s Honda Accord got 37 +/- 4 mpg at 55 mph and 45 +/- 2 mpg at 80 mpg. I was amazed at both the fuel economy in general at high speeds and the better economy at a higher speed.

A better, more controlled experiment could probably be done, and I'm only claiming that this seems to be true over a relatively small range of speeds ( 100 mph, maybe?), but it's not altogether surprising.

Not really because of technical reasons, either. If there's no speeding revenue to be collected, there's no reason to keep the speed limits absurdly low.

Speaking of RC and amateur devices, I'm surprised that they didn't just use APRS to keep track of the balloons. The power budget of a GPS and VHF transmitter are tiny and they can tie into the network (almost) no matter where, or how high, the balloon goes.

The transmissions aren't commercial in nature, so as long as there is a licensed ham there is should be all legal.

Probably, but Google's whole thing is always connected, cloud dependent appliances. Searching, streaming, and advertising/tracking wouldn't consistently work, which would make that whole market less interesting to them.

They don't really sell many physical products, like Apple, so there's no big push for Android on standalone devices. Then again, in the 2.x days they were still desperate for Android market penetration, so it is a little surprising that they didn't chase any market they could.