Neil deGrasse Tyson used to be a scientist. Now he's more a science reporter and commentator. And he has to be somewhat tactful in how he expresses his views so that he doesn't upset people who can determine whether he works or not.

I think we both agree that laws should be interpreted by what's considered reasonable. One problem is that the term "reasonable" is highly subjective. You say that that no reasonable person would interpret the law that way, but what Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas thinks is reasonable is often very different from what Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer thinks is reasonable. And reasonable or not, justices often fall back to their default position, which is the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.

That's the other problem. The judiciary gets to define reasonable, and they tend to be long on law knowledge and short in other areas. Nobody can be an expert on everything, but we expect our justices to have wide ranging knowledge so they can make a judgement between two adversarial views that are often diametrically apart on highly subjective issues. As many have said, going to the courts is often a crap shoot.

You call my views bullshit. You have that right. But I believe you are incorrect on both reasonableness and Obamacare.

I hope you aren't suggesting that Republicans do care about science - there seems to be ample evidence to the contrary.

And why would Democrats want to destroy capitalism? The stock market has done much better under the last two Democratic presidents than under the last two Republicans who held the office. Heck, when Clinton left office we had a net surplus and were actually reducing the national Debt.

Are you completely sure it's bullshit? Are you certain that no group impacted by a ruling will not use every possible way of undermining a negative result, valid or otherwise? Have you so little imagination?

Just look at the news today. Republicans are using four words in Obamacare to remove healthcare subsidies for 15 million people. While the act is completely clear, these four words were poorly chosen, and on that basis they want to throw out a major provision. It's no exaggeration to say that people will die if this challenge is upheld.

The problem is that ALL the data must be public. For example, it means that medical studies that do not publish the raw data (including patient identities) cannot be used by the EPA as the basis for rule making.

It also requires the EPA to use reproducible results, which means that a number of studies are required and each must come to exactly the same result. Imagine the situation where study results have the same conclusion, but slightly different results (say one says 64% of people will die from smoking and another says 66%). Industries could then argue that the results are not reproducible and these studies should not be used as the basis for restricting cigarettes.

My wife used Uber once. The vehicle was not clean, the driver was (in her words) creepy, she didn't like his driving, and he insisted on playing music she thought obnoxious. All in all, she quite unhappy with the whole experience. She insists that we'll be staying with taxis.

Send an email to someone with employee type click-bait (juicy info about your company or a major competitor, whatever) and get drive-by malware that installs some VBA code in Outlook.

When that employee emails others in the company, the VBA is included and installs itself, tells the user his Outlook session has expired and puts up a dialog asking for the account and password. Employee enters the data and it is sent to a command and control server. That user is now pwned.

Send messages (seemingly from a pwned employee) to the CEO, CFO, Finance and Legal departments with VBA attachments that are installed. The VBA sends all their email to the bad guys. Not saying it's the way it was done, but that's one way to do it.

How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware? They don't write the games. Both AMD and Nvidia have extensive outreach programs to developers and make engineers available to game studios, and obviously those engineers will make suggestions on how to improve game performance on their hardware. But I doubt that game studio staff would be willing to cripple their games on either platform at the behest of Nvidia or AMD engineers.

Would you like to provide citations that they bribe sites? And how would that hurt game performance? How can using certain benchmarks (as you suggest) make games run slower on other hardware? And even if they did, are you saying that sites would accept Nvidia's suggestions and ignore AMD suggestions?

AMD fanboy much?

A component manufacturer is unhappy that someone else is using his product id so he puts code in a driver that sets the product id to zero. This prevents the fake component being recognized by his driver or any other driver. The license for the driver explicitly states that using the driver with a fake component may irretrievably damage the component.

If the component manufacturer doesn't want the fake product to work with his driver he can code his driver to ignore the fake. Modifying the product id to brick the component is another matter entirely.

This doesn't hurt the people who created the fake, or even the people who purchased the fake and used them in their manufacturing. It only hurts end users who have done nothing except purchase a product in retail channels. Deliberately destroying equipment because it uses a fake component goes to a whole new level of nastiness.

It really is insulting to give a Nobel prize for an improvement to a revolutionary idea, and ignore the person who did the original work. Without Holonyak's original work there would be no basis for the improvement.

It took me all of 5 seconds to hide the album in iTunes. All gone, I'll never see it again (unless I choose to unhide it).

Such a hardship.

I agree that pfSense is a great solution but I disagree about the tinkering . pfSense fits well in the mantra of "simple things can be done simply but complex things are possible". It needs little tinkering if you have a reasonably standard setup - say an internet connection plus a local network. It has decent defaults.

If you have a more complex setup (I have a LAN interface, a DMZ, a guest network, and a VPN interface as well as several additional software packages) then some tinkering will be needed.

I have pfSense running on a Soekris net6501 for my home network firewall. I have set up OpenVPN - configuration took only a few minutes and it has worked perfectly.

The Soekris Net6501 is more than sufficient for my needs but pfSense scales well and will run on many types of hardware. When I was testing it I ran pfSense as a VM without any problems - in retrospect I should have left it that way permanently.

This isn't patent trolling. nVidia literally invented the GPU and much shader technology back in the 1990s. A lot of graphic stuff now considered basic was developed and patented by nVidia.

These are probably legitimate patents that other companies are using without a license. One of the reasons that Intel graphics technology is still far behind is that they are coming late to the graphics game and have a patent minefield to avoid. It looks like Qualcomm and Samsung decided to ignore the minefield and hope that they didn't step on a patent mine - or at least not step on one that would be noticed by nVidia.