OTOH, some of the mid-range Android stuff is quite good, and much cheaper than iPads. There may be better edu software for iOS, though, as another commenter claims.

An SUV plus a utility trailer does fill the role of a pickup truck.

The cost of a minivan plus a pickup plus the fuel to commute in the pickup is greater than the cost of an SUV plus a small sedan plus the fuel to commute in the sedan.

Depends somewhat on lifestyle. If I'd had a minivan, I'd also have needed to buy a pickup truck. An SUV fills both roles. Neither quite as well as the ideal vehicle, but well enough that it makes more sense than two vehicles... actually three since we also needed a commuter vehicle.

Agreed, unless you also need to tow stuff and/or go off road. Even if you don't do that stuff very much, renting an SUV or truck for those occasions isn't feasible, because as far as I can tell all rental car companies prohibit towing and off-road use. I do tow stuff regularly (boat, camp trailer, ATV trailer, utility trailer), and need to seat at least six people, which has made an SUV the practical and logical choice.

Now that my kids are moving out I no longer need so much seating, so a pickup truck is becoming the practical and logical choice. I'd like to upgrade to a bigger camp trailer, so one with a powerful diesel engine is looking particularly attractive.

While I don't 100% agree with Keynesian explanation for the Great Depression, the events leading to the Depression, and the immediate monetary responses to it were anything but Keynesian.
You are talking straight out of your asshole.

Keynesian economics took off after the Great Depression precisely as a way of preventing it from happening again, and still largely holds today on several of its tenets. Did you see monetary *deflation* during the recent recession?

The Great Depression was a result of unregulated market speculation going batshit crazy over the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, and government and monetary laissez-faire reactions to the sudden massive contraction of the money supply caused by the bank's responses to the crumbling market value. It's pretty goddamn hard to get *further* from Keynesian economics than that. The cascade of events was practically a fucking advertisement for a change to Keynesian economics, which isn't much of a surprise, since he formulated it *right in the middle of the Depression*

Private banks formed buying cartels in an attempt at keynesianesque bailouts of the failing stocks, but in the end, their pooled resources weren't enough to add confidence in the market and stop the collapse, but they did stave it off.

Is it any surprise to you that Keynesian economics are starting to come into favor again after 2008, after almost 30 years erosion to their mind-share?

Interesting how we forget, indeed.

Do you ever search for stuff?

You don't need a formal declaration of war (i.e. to put the nation itself in a "state of war") to be engaged in a war, but I do agree that there is not a one-to-one correlation between military engagements and war. Saying we've been engaged in 13 wars with Congressional approval since 1945 is bit of an overstatement on halivar's part, since many of those were minor encounters in the grand scheme of things, but your seeming suggestion that none of those military engagements were also wars is a misstatement on your part. We may not have made a formal declaration of war against Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we were still engaged in the Vietnam War, Korean War, Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, all of which were done with Congressional approval.

Suggesting otherwise is just playing semantics and missing the point, since the OP's implication was that the President hasn't received Congressional approval since 1945 for these sorts of things, which is patently false.

With the small difference that in the Third Reich those who failed badly enough at the politics ended up with a bullet in their brain.

It sounds a lot more like career politics in most corporations. Not all, certainly, but most.

Except that this fictional exchange you've created, in which Level 3 is extorting Verizon for more, is easily refuted by using either blog post. For instance, from Verizon:

Which is a nice way of saying, "Level 3 is refusing to negotiate rates for more capacity with us, so we've refused to give them more." Level 3's blog post also affirms that the issue is Verizon's refusal to act:

Even without the blog posts, it should be obvious your notion makes little business sense. Level 3 is in no business position to play hardball like you've suggested. If they sacrificed on performance as a ploy to double-dip (i.e. get both Netflix and a lower-tier ISP* like Verizon to pay), Netflix would simply take its traffic to a different Tier 1 ISP that doesn't play those sorts of games, since the double-dipping would be hurting their bottom line. Or, at the very least, they'd be calling out their own ISP, rather than calling out the customer's ISP.

On the other hand, as a lower-tier ISP, Verizon has a monopoly on its own end users: if you want to reach them, you MUST go through them. If Verizon tries to double-dip by getting money out of both the higher-tier ISP and its end users, the end users won't understand what's going on, and in many cases they lack any viable alternatives anyway. Meanwhile, the higher-tier ISP can't switch out for a different peer, since Verizon is the only way to get to those end users.

Besides which, it's not like Netflix's switch from Akamai to Level 3 took Verizon by surprise, as you suggest, since it happened way back in 2010 and has been working fine for most of that time. If there was a problem resulting from the switch, it would have come up before now. Which is to say, this isn't a "Wow! Level 3's traffic is suddenly skyrocketing and we can't keep up!" situation. Rather, it's almost certainly a, "Hey, that Comcast company had a good idea to try getting money out of both sides...let's see if we can do it too!" situation, given the timing of it all.

* A quick aside: I'm well aware that Verizon also maintains a Tier 1 network, but Tier 1 networks rarely connect directly to end users. That's what lower-tier networks do. Moreover, the defining characteristic of a Tier 1 network is that it enjoys free peering with other Tier 1 networks. As such, the Verizon network being discussed here is clearly not their Tier 1 network, but rather a lower-tier one they control (e.g. a Tier 2 or 3 network) that has direct access to their end customers.

If the bad guys are installing system-level software, or -- even worse -- plugging hardware into your box, you're sunk. There's basically no defense against that. Two-factor auth helps, but only for sites that support it, and even then a real-time attack can get in.

And you're right- I just wanted to dispel the idea that representative democracy is somehow a sub-form of Democracy. It's not. What you're calling "full democracy" is direct democracy. Both forms are a full democracy.

There's been a lot of people yelling that we're not a democracy lately, and it makes me cringe, because it's usually done by people trying to justify laws that haven't been struck down yet that still favor oppression from when they were the majority. Sure we're not a direct democracy, but who the hell is? We have aspects of direct democracy incorporated into many of our state constitutions, though, and people should never be discouraged from thinking their votes matter. Otherwise, we get into situations like today, where people think they don't matter. And in the case of Democracy, if you think they don't matter, they don't.

No need for any special remote control. One of the laws the driverless car will obey is the rule that requires you to pull over and stop when emergency vehicles approach with lights and siren. Emergency vehicles like, say, police cars.

Whoever at the FBI said this really didn't think it through.

Your argument would work if the fuel taxes funded the construction and maintenance of the interstates. They don't. If we wanted them to, we could get there without raising the fuel taxes paid by passenger vehicles, in fact those might possibly be reduced (though the reductions should probably be replaced with carbon taxes, used to fund carbon sequestration). Taxes on the fuel (or whatever) paid by trucks, however, should increase several fold, since they cause the vast majority of the highway construction and maintenance costs.

I really wish we'd fix up our highway funding so that it is usage supported, ending the massive subsidy we give the trucking system. Doing that would cause most of our bulk freight to move from the highways to rail, which is more energy-efficient and would make passenger highway travel safer. Unfortunately, it would also cost a lot of jobs in the trucking industry which wouldn't be offset by jobs in the more manpower-efficient rail industry, and that makes it politically impossible.

You mean unless I thought Kjella thought otherwise, since that's who I said it to.

Some would say that, sure. I wouldn't, and neither would many others.

One password which is never sent anywhere from their device, plus you also have to get their device.

I don't think that word "moron" means what you think it means.