Will you take the futures option the other way? That the current prices are going to stay at the level they are for say, the next ~20 years plus or minus 10%?

I don't know who you think is investing in this. People are just buying helium because they need it. The smart people are investing in gas mining because that's always profitable, and the big companies building huge helium liquefaction facilities are absolutely betting the price is going to rise in the near future.

Apparently the free market thinks you're kind of an idiot about this.

Zipping a file takes energy to power the CPU. Unzipping does too. In both cases, global entropy has been increased.

Yes I guess that is why a gas we can only mine tiny quantities of from natural gas reserves is currently being sold off for party balloon use.

Helium is being sold off at any bid price on the assumption that the stockpile is unlimited and needs to be liquidated. It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.

A great watch is expensive and made in Switzerland. That's how watches work. Nothing about them makes any sense because the product is fundamentally not about time telling technology, except in an abstract "it's pretty awesome this is just gears and springs" sort of way.

This is not a good smartwatch at $350. It's a bad sportswatch - because it doesn't standalone from the iPhone, doesn't have GPS, and yet is in the same price bracket.

My personal opinion is that on deeper analysis the whole smartwatch thing is a deadend which is being pushed because it's looks achievable, rather then innovative. But there's some fairly obvious problems with what Apple has on display - and they're the same ones as every other smartwatch.

Seriously, the number of people talking about how this isn't a problem, while simultaneously - gleefully - discussing what they'll do if someone tries to take their room, or someone won't let them take their room, pretty much dismisses any counter-argument to the idea that there isn't a problem.

There obviously is.

If the plane has an emergency in any place that's not "on the ground and stationary" your chances of being a survivor are pretty much zero anyway.

But if we went with the Fifth Element approach, you could design planes which could eject their passengers in parachuting buoyant pods or something.

Yes I'm sure this has never happened to a private company or multiple major financial institutions, or academic institutions, or security companies or IT companies.

Oh wait.

OpenBSDs entire development philosophy is to develop only for BSD, and let porting take place as patchsets on top of it.

That's why LibreSSL has has support for Windows stripped out, despite it being an important SSL platform.

And you have missed all the subtlety of the problem. For one thing, there's no way anyone's fitting an iPad package into a mailbox, or even through a mailslot.

There's no way to distribute or update keys rapidly enough to make them general use for delivery companies and the post.

Which is the entire point: the century of mail was for mail with packages considered the exception. Special case enough to warrant needing to be physically present to receive them, or simply gambling nobody steals them when left on the front porch.

Basically you might want to take your last line there and apply it to yourself.

The drone delivery thing seems like a proxy for the fact that the regular postal system desperately needs a revamp to include more standardization. Basically, we need some system which acknowledges that parcel and package delivery is an increasingly important part of the process, and we want to receive things unattended.

You can only sometimes get this now.

If we had a system where we standardized mailbox sizes to some specification, and then licensed out some NFC/smart card system to let postal workers/delivery companies open them, then we might be getting somewhere. Sure, it's not perfect and it wouldn't be everywhere at once, but if you could simply buy the relevant thing at Home Depot and then delivery companies could be expected to use it, it'd be progress. Then the free-market innovates from there: various multi-tiered security products or the like.

The various flight ceilings on commercial aviation might speak to that, but I seriously doubt any court is going to interpret the law as being about property rights as opposed to public safety / nuisance.

You have all sorts of protections from things that never touch your property, but they're definitely not defined by the property boundaries. For instance you can't demand that soundwaves do not enter your premises at all - instead you can possibly get a neighbours air conditioner moved so it isn't above a certain volume, within the bounds of what's considered reasonable.

So I guess we shouldn't worry about Ebola either coz you don't think you'll ever get it either? Check your hipster-holier-then-thou-attitude at the door mate.

Influenza infects hundreds of millions of people every year, but kills only a tiny fraction of them. To die of influenza you need to have complicating conditions. The type you had are curable with drugs we already have. The type which aren't are the type of lifestyle or age related issues which are a problem no matter who gets them, and regardless of whether you get the flu.

A virus for which we also have a vaccine.

By every measure, influenza is not scary. People who get it do not expect to die of it. But we're also going to be able to bugger-all to stop it being a yearly global epidemic. Which is fortunate, because again, it's very hard to die of it.

Start by letting them turn off the cameras with discretion. If they wind up not recording during notable incidents, that's going to play badly against them in court.

There's no reason to let best the enemy of better here.

Dying the flu generally requires complicating conditions. Most people survive it just fine. Ebola is scary because most people don't survive it.

So has the genetic code of numerous pathogens. That doesn't make them easily created. For a simple example, we currently have an entire field dedicated to bottom-up synthetic life creation (start with a DNA sequence, and bootstrap a cell). That's a hot field, which has required thousands of man-hours to understand.

Terrorists in field laboratories without proper equipment are not going to be accomplishing it. It is a huge expensive project.