Nuclear still exists. People seem to forget.

You are making a fundamentally flawed assumption that the government cares about false positives. I think our no-fly lists, jails, and police militarization are a pretty good indicator that a low false positive rate does not figure into calculations as far as the NSA, TSA, DHS or other TLAs are concerned. A cynical man (or woman) may also wonder about whether true positive rate figures into their calculations at all as well, or whether a power grab is the sole purpose of these agenices.

You're asking the wrong question - the correct question is this - how have we wound up in a situation where he have so many offenders, of so many laws, that there's not enough resources to lock them all up even if we knew every last one of them.
The answer is simple - if you create a job which comes with money and power, and where the job description is writing laws - you are going to have more laws. It's inevitable. And in a society where as a lawmaker you are rewarded for being "tough on crime", each subsequent law will be nitpickier and more punishing than the last.
That's it - our own system is going to bury us all in petty crime.
Freedom is the ability to break little rules. Rule of law is when you get caught when you break the big rules. A police state is when everyone is guilty, and it's up the police to decide who gets caught at what time.

As someone who was born behind the Iron Curtain, I promise you that the latter is very very scary.

So what the enemy needs to do to win is to get disable codes?

Given Pentagon's contractor efficiency and reporting requirements, the choices will probably be in a plaintext file accessible from the internet, in a budget report.

Well, you have a few stumbling blocks:

a) While the mechanism for AGW is pretty obvious and indisputable, the actual predicted value of climate models has been lacking. That's just a fact. They are getting better, and they will get better, but it is fact that they are inaccurate today.

b) The private sector is already pricing risk due to climate change into models for various natural disasters. Right now this is just best guess based on the models, but as the models improve, so will the risk models based on them. So, the "cost" of climate is something the market is working towards deciding. Until that actual cost is well known and understood by all parties, it will be politically impossible for anyone with any degree of skepticism towards the government in general to agree to let government decide what that price should be.

c) Since, the price of doing nothing is not even agreed to yet, it follows that any mitigate response must be viewed with suspicion, because, you can't compare the cost of action with the unknown cost of damages. A tell tale sign that there is a perceptual agreement on this issue by everyone, purported denier, and believer, is that, most believers remain anti-nuclear power, and I've seen little evidence this administration has even considered increasing research into nuclear fusion.

d) If the climate is always changing, it doesn't matter in the minds of some, if man is changing it or not, when something else will change it just as well.

So, the actual dollars and cents reality is that the proponents of climate change reform are asking everyone to make some rather radical changes in their life, to let there be new winners and new losers, when it is not at all understood how much the winners will win and the losers will lose, if we choose to do nothing but let fossil fuels exhaust themselves or deal with doomsday when it happens. Sure, there's denialism, but by casting opponents of your point of view into that camp, all you've done is basically positioned yourself as someone who is advancing a political agenda with climate change as its mask, rather than fixing any problems of climate change itself.

There is nothing particularly unusual about our local weather station's story which hasn't been repeated in most cities around the world. So it is not surprising that noisy long term time series need to be cleaned up before being fed into sensitive predictive models. It would be dishonest not to if you know there was a change in the sampling history which required it.

But at that point, aren't you really basically just making it up? Granted, even satellite temperature sensors drift, but it seems that the real long term answer here is to just accept that the historical data is going back in time, and we're really just "guessing" at previous climate, as we simply didn't have the foresight to measure it correctly for the way we want to use it.

It's not a bad business model at all. After all, that's what internal combustion engine companies have been doing for over a 100 years. They call it "General Motors", and not cars, for a reason.

There's actually an international treaty that prohibits countries from claiming property rights on celestial bodies due to their being in space. By signing that treaty, countries agreed that the property of space effectively belongs to the United Nations or whatever treaty body controls claims for it. But yes, suing for space is ridiculous, but, is noise pollution for airlines flying above your house as ridiculous? What about drones flying 500 feet overhead, or even 100 feet? I think as a property owner you should be compensated for that. It's your land, and you are entitled to "some" of the airspace above it, and I wouldn't be so quick to just hand that value of that away to another corporation to make money off of. I mean, would you let someone set up shop and frack in your back yard? What's really the difference?

Why are you so quick to give away for free something that a major corporation will make tons of money on? That transit conduit has a value and it is only because of government that I cannot get some value out of it. You can call me a hick all that you want, and maybe I am, but you're the one advocating a system where people are going to use a resource that you possess, for free, and without even a shred of protest. "Here Amazon, go ahead and make billions of dollars flying drones 500 feet above my house, for free." Yep, that's what you want. I think that's stupid.

It's bad enough that someone can fly over your house at high altitude without you receiving any compensation, but, a bunch of drones added to the mix just undermines your own property rights.

Thanks for this, so accurate it made me actually laugh out loud. I'm sitting at my desk drinking coffee, reading a year of the Linux desktop story and thinking about the "good old days". I raise my coffee to you, cheers!

Logged in for the first time since 2012 to write this :)

Streaming media is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth.

This has nothing to do with their network infrastructure, and everything to do with the fact that they would like you to pay out of pocket to stream media on their network. With a 10gb monthly limit on my 4 user plan, if I go away on a trip and watch 3-4 netflix movies in HD, I've used up my entire monthly allowance, and then streaming becomes pay-per-view at $10+ per movie.

They are annoyed that they have customers who still have an "unlimited" plan, and they are effectively converting those users to having a usable 5gb plan.

I know it sounds vain but it does also have practical applications for people with muscular deficiencies owing to immobility. From what I've gathered, no one really knows what happens, precisely, to cause muscles to "grow". Sure, there's a hundred different theories tossed around on body building forums, but a lot of sounds more like pseudo-biological nonsense rather than real science. There's precious little experiment in the field and my lay understanding is that it is because the only method of looking at muscles is biopsy.