If you're a famous movie star? Yeah, that might not be a bad idea. Or maybe get some extra security, the way pretty much all of them already do.

Uploading naked pictures of yourself to the cloud is dumb even if you're a fat and ugly nobody. It's completely idiotic when you're a celebrity who already has paparazi constantly trying to snap a nip-slip or crotch-shot.

It's not mayo, but it's also not her. Just because you got a whackload of pics all at once doesn't mean they're all legit. It's been pretty much conclusively shown that the "facial" pics are of some other chick, and were being circulated well before the fappening.

You should have a slashbox on the right hand side with your user details and recent messages. I believe it's the default although it is possible that I turned it on long ago and forgot. Every reply to something that you have posted will appear as a message in the box. In particular old messages and new messages are distinguished by your browser colouring in visited links. The messages are in chronological order so you do not need to skim a whole story to check for replies in different branches. Makes things a bit easier.

I did, but amazingly enough they get kinda touchy about it. Just like the scientists in Project Alpha. Silly buggers. Universities really need to make skepticism and critical thinking mandatory subjects.

Obviously a cheaper car is going to be cheaper; you didn't have to go through the trouble of doing math to figure that out. What I was pointing out is that after the savings inherent in having a purely electric vehicle it's not AS BAD as it seems at first glance.

I'm not exactly rich, but I've been seriously thinking about buying one. I've run the numbers and I can EASILY afford it. Then again, I'm single, and have enough in savings to buy it outright, so I'm not your typical "middle class family". But I can see it being a decent buy even in those circumstances, as long as the buyer makes good choices about financing. That's going to be your biggest problem.

This very much depends on other cost factors.

The average American right now spends over $2,000 per year on fuel. In Canada it's more like $3,000. Europe is even higher. Electric drastically lowers that cost, making it easier to justify a large initial investment.

Vehicle maintenance is another consideration. Electric in general is supposed to require far less maintenance. On oil changes alone you should save $200+ per year. Reduced break wear thanks to regenerative breaking means you breaks and rotors last longer. And so on.

So say an electric vehicle reduces your annual costs by $1,500, and you keep it for 10 years. That's a saving of $15,000. That makes it much easier to justify "a car that costs more than a years salary", especially it it's amortized over a few years. And with fuel costs constantly increasing, the amount saved is likely to be higher over the long term.

That's interesting. Any idea why they're not using G-Suits yet? Seems like it would provide a significant advantage, assuming this is really as much of a problem as you say ...

That may be true, but we know that humans as a species are relatively intelligent and self-aware, even if not all individuals are. If there comes a day when we can say the same thing about chimps, all of them will receive rights/protection even if some of them don't meet those criteria.

Difference being that Jerry was modified. If we can ever uplift chimps to that level, granting them "human" rights will be a no-brainer. Sci-fi in general has done a lot of hand-wringing over such questions (see Data's trial in ST:TNG) but given the current zeitgeist I couldn't ever see it being an issue. The day a chimp can walk up to me and say "Hi, I'm Jerry, could you please stop experimenting on me?" is the day he gets the full protection of our laws. Until then it's always going to be a fringe issue.

Did you know that the word "gullible" was created as a result of a new fusion process?

True story.

I get that. Nobody likes advertising. But the GPS functionality of my phone/tablet is valuable to me, and turning it off makes no sense when "they" have other ways of tracking me.

On my android devices I have XPrivacy installed on the XPosed framework, which does a good job of letting me control which apps can track me. I let the google maps, google earth, and Copilot apps have access to location data; all other apps get fake location data. Right now Facebook thinks I'm in Madagascar.

May want to give that a shot if you have your devices rooted.

Um, you realize that they can track you just fine by doing things like tower triangulation and correlating your position to known WiFi access points, right?

By giving up on GPS you're throwing away your ability to know where you are while preserving "their" ability to know where you are. Doesn't make much sense.

With kid gloves?

Seriously, dude, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. The extent to which the US will go to avoid civilian casualties and avoid violating local customs and sensibilities is astounding. This is a fairly new thing in combat - previous wars were butchery by comparison - yet the US takes more flack for it now than it ever has before.

Of course it did. You had local warlords slaughtering anyone who cooperated with western forces, and terrorizing the rest into submission. You had the same warlords plus related propaganda outlets spewing nonsense about how the horrible crusaders were raping women and eating children for breakfast. You even had lovely useful-idiots (you can guess where my finger is pointing) in the west repeating the same lies and jizzing themselves with glee every time they got to post online about some innocent getting killed or some detainees being abused. And you had 90% of the western population repeating the lie that "we were lied to about the reasons for the war", and claiming nobody gives a shit about the Iraqis and we're only there for the oil. In such an atmosphere I'm surprised that support for the US presence stayed as strong as it did.

The Germans and Japanese in WW2 got treated far worse than the Iraqis ever did, but in those wars we didn't have to contend with an organized resistance, or a grassroots propaganda machine within our own borders working against our interests.

Oh yeah, shooting at American aircraft is like totally not a big deal.

I should try that line of defence in court though. "Your honour, it's true that I violated my parole conditions, but I didn't do it in any way that matters to your interests. Ya gonna let me go, right?"

This has always been the case; the reason you notice it now is:

1. It's gotten a bit more blatant with the advent of the 24-hour-news-cycle.
2. As you grow up you tend to develop a better sense of whether or not someone is trying to manipulate you. Go back and watch some news from the past which you thought was "balanced", and you'll be surprised by how poorly your memory of it stands up to the reality.

That's just weird. My coffee is still as black as ever. Maybe you should stop buying your coffee from the syrup factory?