And here I was thinking we'd finally killed defacto indentured servitude/slavery via company scrip.

This is a stupid act, and it's going to have very real consequences in the future before long.

And Bitcoin will still be just as irrelevant regardless.

So we'll spend some or your tax dollars on this which will help us ensure the tax department is efficient and TAXES? TAXES ARE THEFT. DOWN WITH THE GOVERNMENT!!!

These problems don't just happen, and don't require conspiracy. It's been plainly obvious the IRS is underfunded since it returns 7-to-1 on recovered revenue when they get a budget increase.

You should probably go read the article of "objectivity". If you need to start out labelling your informtion as "something-ism" then it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.

Moreover, Wikipedia's stated goal has always been to be an encyclopedia, not an archive of content.

Encyclopedia's are meant to present a reasonably concise overview of all topics, with links to further in-depth information. They're a starting point not the totality of one.

Wikipedia is built on a foundation which works "on average". If you want a different system, you're asking for a different type of thing. It's always going to be a problem.

You can design a metal contact based port which is dust and water proof. We just currently don't but it's hardly an insurmountable challenge.

God no, the trend to wireless only is the worst.

I want a high-speed wired interface on my phone. Like, if you can fit a 10g ethernet port in there, I want that. I also want a mini-display port connector.

Radios are for differential transfer and continuity. If I need to move data on and off the device, I want that done as fast as possible.

It was C4.

You do realize we can do both these things. They are both worth doing if they save money and lives. But we do not have driverless cars yet - and their are different obstacles to their implementation. If we can build a wall and go "yep, that'll save us 3 times it's cost" then we absolutely should do that.

We do not need to tear down one in favor of the other. My point was solely that there are very sensible reasons to think tornado prevention with giga-engineering would be economically viable.

What is with this policy? We've killed it - repeatedly and it just won't stay dead.

I mean we know they're doing intercepts of some sort anyway, and we know they retain probably quite a bit, but the big benefit at the moment is none of this can be used in court.

And for the types of things it's worth stopping, you don't need to use it since if you grab some terrorists with a couple kilograms of fertilizer and diesel in a truck, then you've got all your evidence.

What seems way more likely to me is that this is being pushed hard by the copyright lobby, who, once they can legally obtain the data, will want to use it to go after people.

What's the economic damage of shutdowns due to tornados?

A lot of talk about a city's traffic problems essentially focuses on the fact that a major car accident can wipe out productivity for an entire morning or day in a metropolis. How much productivity is being lost due to tornados? If you could prevent them entirely, then it could easily pay back many, many times the construction cost.

The Slashdot armchair physicist brigade is out in force I see...

...kaiju protection.

Mythbusters debunks this. Every single pressure vessel explosion they've ever done has involved having to disable 2-3 different safety features in dramatic ways, and then subjecting the whole thing to absurdly extreme conditions before anything happens.

Which would be relevant if SUV's were remotely safe...

As it stood for a long time, SUVs were big...and little else. Any car with a decent roll cage and side-airbags was likely going to come out of all but the most disasterous scrapes much better, since it wouldn't be rolling and caving in the roof on it's occupants.