I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm sure environment plays a part. But have you considered that one of the reasons why these things were "unheard of" until recently is that advances in communications have made it much easier for news of rarities to be widely disseminated?

The same kind of argument applies to cases of botulism from home canning. Prior to the 20th Century, if someone died from botulism due to home canning, it happened on a farm in the middle of nowhere and didn't have much effect outside of a family and some neighbors. It just wasn't on the radar unless you personally knew people who died that way. Even a doctor might only see a case once every 10 years, so it's not a big deal, right? Plenty of other things to worry about.

But when health records started being compiled for millions of people, it stood out as a problem. The government started programs to educate farmers and gardeners about proper canning methods. It wasn't that suddenly all the home canners got lazy, it was that information networks brought a relatively rare but deadly issue to light, and so we did something about it.

And look, there ARE more cases of allergies in cities. There's millions more people in cities than not, after all.

Do you know many parents? Everyone I know with kids is overly protective of them.

If my sister suspected her kid had a dangerous peanut allergy, there is NO WAY she would try this at home. It's not like bricking your favorite phone, the stakes are ever-so-much higher.

Well, that depends on the why, doesn't it? Sometimes a thing is only worth doing if it can be done on the cheap and easy.

Cordova gives app developers a fallback for clients who can't afford a native app, or who need to get a prototype up and running yesterday as proof-of-concept or to fund the next stage of development. It's also great for novelties and one-offs that just wouldn't exist if the development process was more expensive than coding a small website.

It also creates a business opportunity that shouldn't be sniffed at: "Hey, nice web app. Do you wish it was faster and better? Let us re-create it as a native app for you."

You don't need land, you need space with light.

You do need water, which often falls from the sky (or can be teased out of the air). It doesn't have to be drinkable water.

And you need nutrients for your plants, which can be made from recycled plants plus bacteria (which are free), aka compost.

The biggest problem is space with light. And I see a lot of parking lots around here that would be perfect if we switched to Johnny-cabs and don't need parking lots any more.

I live in a universe where food and shelter grow on trees.

Seriously, though, if you have a hard time imagining what an economy with free subsistence could look like, read _Diamond Age_.

Basic, bland, subsistence-level food and shelter are not difficult to create from infinitely recyclable materials once you can remove labor from the equation. There is still an energy cost of course, so maybe the price of your house is 1000 kWh on a stationary bicycle. Yes, it's a grind. But you can play video games while you generate, so it's actually kind of fun.

Just don't think about what was recycled in order to make your dinner...

Build up. Dig down. Viola, built real estate. Robots can do that.

I live in a high-rise in NYC, built by human hands in 2009. It leaks like crazy, and I sincerely wish it had been built by robots. If we wait long enough to fix it, it may be fixed by robots! At least a robot would follow the engineer's specifications.

Who do you suppose owns these tracts of land, now? I guess I'm just assuming that the 250 acres of woods wasn't literally your back yard, but maybe it was.

Anyway, there should be property records for all of the fields "discovered" in the LIDAR map. When the farmers abandoned their farms, were they purchased by the state as watershed or open space, or by developers who never did anything with them, or what?

And if you take pictures of your kids with that phone, you're a pedophile terrorist.

But why bother with the charade? In other police states, people disappear with no reason. There is no secret court. There is no "process". They just do what needs to be done. Opposition politicians, investigative journalists, enemies of those in power, and, in many cases, friends of those in power are arrested one day and never heard from again. That hasn't been happening. Stupid cowboy shit like bugging the phones of world leaders, yes. Compelling the secrecy of secret surveillance, yes. But as far as I know, the Feds aren't shredding the Bill of Rights (outside of airports, but that's a special case of its own--you can fly anywhere without being searched, just not on a major carrier).

So are we at the end of a 12-year transitional period that spans two administrations? OR is all of this cloak and dagger stuff considered genuinely necessary by a law enforcement apparatus that really really wants to operate legally but feels that tipping off criminals will make them impossible to catch?

Gag orders are as undemocratic as it gets, and way too blunt an instrument for a society that can and should have come up with a more refined successor to the PATRIOT Act by now. But there isn't anything reported so far that is inconsistent with the law -as written-. Declaring the Constitution null and void based on the actions of the NSA and FBI to "Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" is a bit premature, given that they are doing so with the blessing of Congress.

No, you can't sue the government.

Because if you could, we could shut down NSA wiretapping in a heartbeat by bringing a massive class action suit against them, where every victim of a crime that could have been prevented by NSA surveillance between 2005 and 2013 would be a member of the class.

If you ever watch "Person of Interest" that's exactly the kind of crimes I'm talking about -- the "irrelevant list" of criminals that are ignored because they don't touch national security.

What the hell good is a police state if we still have violent crime in our everyday lives? The government should be held accountable for not enforcing the law if they have the ready means to do so.

And yes, this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because of course that kind of society would be *monstrous* without real reform of many areas of law. But the fastest path to reform is when rich, powerful people (and their children) are arrested with the same frequency as poor, powerless people. Wealth and power provide the means to hide from traditional law enforcement, but not from the kind of data mining that the NSA is (theoretically) doing.

Then again, imagine how much safer it will be to skate, skateboard, cycle, fly kites, walk the dog, or participate in just about any other form of exercise that happens to take place on or near a roadway. If cycling deaths drop with the same rapidity as automobile deaths, cycling will become A LOT more appealing to risk-averse people. Walking/cycling/etc to music will also become safer, and music encourages more strenuous activity.

There is also every chance that you'll get more casual exercise, just by having more free time and less stress.

This is a really interesting point.

But the fleet could simply drive itself back out of lower Manhattan to areas with cheaper parking/storage facilities. After all, the "reverse commute" is usually pretty light. Also, a large percentage of driverless cars would make multiple inbound trips since people's workdays start at different times. The problem is not dissimilar to what already happens with the taxi and limousine fleet.

Now, if you wanted to own your own driverless car, then it gets interesting. Since you're going to pay for parking for the car, you have an incentive to send it back out of the city to your home garage, or at least to a cheaper parking space across the river. There is absolutely no reason for you to park your car, er, have your car park downtown just because that's where you work.

This seems really complicated. Why not just track the RFID signature generated by the various parts of the car which are tagged? Tires, replacement parts, items in the trunk, ID badges on the passengers....

Except for the part where if you control the domain registration you can have a new SSL cert issued within minutes.

Oh, and I get it now, duh. The idea is that if GRC's server sees the same fingerprint you do, then you're good. Nice hack, and something you could do yourself with your own cloud server.

But what if it doesn't, and the reason is that Google is using different certificates for different regions?