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....

What would be the point? We have no real manufacturing capability, so we'd just end up sending the stolen back IP to China to be made into products.

No, it doesn't.

[listeria bacteria's] presence on a food does not change the taste or smell of the food.

That's a non-issue. The bitcoins are being auctioned in lots of 3,000 which means each lot is worth about 1.7 million dollars. Anyone who can afford to make a reasonable bid will have no difficulty putting up a $200k deposit.

You've fnever been to Hawaii, have you.

The environment and available foods are very different from the rest of the US. About half the population is Asian, too, so there are some pretty obvious genetic differences than the rest of the US.

Now you're just making shit up. Go look at paitnings and descriptions of desirable women prior to the mid 1800s. Fat women were desirable. Thin was equated with starvation and poverty. It was only in the late 1800s and early 1900s that the idea that thin was more beautiful took hold.

And today? We have models literally starving themselves to death and hatred towards fat people has never been greater.

Well, no, piracy is not necessarily a lost sale. "A geat many of us would have paid" is not the same as "every one of us would have paid."

Claiming that piracy doesn't hurt sales is a lie, but claiming that every pirated copy is a lost sale is also a lie.

And you can trust everything an AC says, right?

BTW, you owe me $500 for that bet you made with me the last time you were blackout drunk. You probably don't remember it, but you can trust me. I would never make shit up.

Bullshit.

Even in the most expensive parts of the country, you could barely manage to build an uninhabitable, unfinished shell of a house for the price of a building permit.

Your response makes no sense.

Science involves making observations, but making observations is not science (otherwise every guy at the beach would be a scientist).

Not being able to fully explain how something works, on the other hand, is where science starts. When we start questioning what we've observed, developing theories to explain it and gathering evidence to support/disprove those theories... that's science.