Amplify it and call it a feature. A deafening blast of screeching feedback noise every time the kids misbehave would be a hell of a deterrent.

So? That doesn't make his complaints about what's wrong with the cheap, crappy smart phone he bought any more insightful. We know cheap smart phones tend to be crap. It's not news.

There's a long history of this sort of thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Except that doesn't happen. A 100 ounce bottle of Tide weighs about 7 lbs and sells for $10. Your friendly neighborhood drug dealer would need a fucking U-Haul to carry away the detergent equivalent of one afternoon's sales.

It's a dumb urban legend that isn't even remotely plausible.

The Tesla S has a keyless ignition. The key just has to be in range of the vehicle and you can press the start button and take off, even the key isn't in the car with you. Only after you park the car will it refuse to go any further. All the guy had to do was get into the car and that's not that difficult even if the door is locked.

Tesla wants to examine the wreckage because it's an unusual accident and could provide insights into ways that they could improve the structure of the car, not because they can't figure out how someone started it and drove off.

Would you rather have all of your email history made freely available to anyone who asks for it? I wouldn't.

Avast is a corporation. Corporations tend to be conservative in their use of language (outside of the porn industry, at least). Using the term "penis" in a press release isn't going to happen.

First the Nest thermostat is said to be enough to make the Stasi blush, then insurance companies are compared to the Panopticon and now a birth control device is supposedly a government plot to control population levels?

This is supposed to be news for nerds. Not news for delusional paranoiacs.

Cost. The wikipedia article says that the cost is similar to the cost of synthetic sapphire. For a cell-phone sized sheet of sapphire, the cost is apparently 10x as much as the cost of a similarly sized piece of chemically hardened Gorilla Glass (source). Most customers would rather save 90% of the cost and get a slightly inferior product that they have to replace sooner.

The article is written in a way that makes it sound like they might be talking about one case, but there are two separate cases. The case you referenced, where they compiled evidence for seven months, was in Warwick, RI. The case the person you responded to referenced, with the USB stick hidden in a tin in a metal cabinet, was in Connecticut.

Chances are that the Connecticut case was similarly investigated before a warrant was issued and the USB stick found, but the article doesn't give any details on the case.

That's the problem. You take one every day, yet you can't say how long a subway car is. It's not something that a normal person ever thinks about or notices, so it's a useless comparison that is lost on virtually everyone.

I believe that would be Senator Strawman who was quoting his Aunt Sally from the UK.

Do you think that economists are incapable of analyzing trends? Or that they're so narrowly educated that they can't have any interest in anything outside of the field of economics and that accident rates have no economic impact?

What's your point?

Perhaps they got confused because nichrome melts at 1,400C, which makes it seem a bit improbable that it can "heat quickly and reliably to temperatures as high as 2,200 C."

But really, they aren't confused. You and the authors (Nathan Myhrvold & W. Wayt Gibbs) are.

1,200 C just happens to be extremely close to 2,200 F (2,192 F to be precise). Most likely they read somewhere that nichrome heating elements can reliably reach 2,200 degrees and assumed C when it was actually F. Since they're usually limited to 1,200 C, they assumed incorrectly that there was a massive amount of extra capacity for heating, not realizing that the 1,200 and 2,200 values were actually the same number.

Wrong.

If you're allergic to bee stings, you're far more likely to die from a bee sting than statistics indicate. If you aren't allergic to be stings, you're far less likely to die from a bee sting than statistics indicate.

Statistics based on the population as a whole do not represent the actual chances for a specific individual to die in a specific way. Individual behavior and risk factors tend to average out over a large population and can be ignored, but they can't be ignored when speaking about a single person.

It's ironic that you should say that....