Brackish.

Unlike an earlier simpler version of the system, the infrared curtain can also identify multi-touch gestures such as pinching and zooming.

I'm sorry, but pinching and zooming on a multi-touch display seems inherently incompatible with operating a motor vehicle. For a car, steering wheel mounted buttons, easily accessible knobs, and maybe voice control.

Mucking about with a touch screen? Not so much.

Do the people who make cars not actually keep tabs on things like traffic laws and common sense? Or are they just all trying to monetize your dashboard, and don't care?

I'm not sure this would legally comply with most hands free laws.

Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?

They have a great plan, but they don't have the money. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the SLS flies it'll be in a class of its own we haven't seen since the Saturn V. I wouldn't hold my breath though, while the Falcon Heavy seems very likely that will happen.

So, in this judges opinion, can we make a fake Instagram account for him or the police?

Or is this act of lying purely something they reserve for themselves?

Because, you know, maybe this judge should start sharing his fondness for sheep and Barbie dolls.

Oh, wait ... if we did it, it would be a crime. And, I'm sorry, but if it's a crime for us, then you should have some form of prior authorization.

Otherwise this judge has said "we can commit crimes, you can't" ... which will pretty much confirm that the law deems themselves above it. In which case this judge's new Instagram account should be interesting to see.

Significant figures (as a mathematical term), precision, and rounding are a little different than you seem to think. Significant figures only deal with zeros preceding or following a set of numbers. Which doesn't seem to be what you are referring to. 5.4717696 has eight significant figures. 5.500000 has two.

Obliviously you accept errors much more readily than I do. Granted, I generally don't measure out to quite as far as I did in my examples, but I was simply making a point. Which you apparently didn't comprehend. 3.4 miles in the case I used was much shorter, and simpler, to notate than expressing it in metric. So that's what I used. "Significant figures", as you are describing them are not a mathematical term but an adjective for what you feel is relevant precision.

Rounding 3.4 miles to 5.5 km is off by over 7.7 feet. Happy? I rounded that just for you.I would probably accept 5.47 km in 3.4 miles as it's just shy of five inches difference. Though I'd be happier with 5.472.

I'm not saying that everyone will have to grow their own food; robots will do the planting, tending, harvesting, and transportation.

The elephant in the room is that capitalism will collapse; in a robotic society, the only workable government will be communism.

That sounds strange to me, can you point me to a link? Usually he more popular a thing is, the more it earns. KSHE doesn't have a "deep tracks" show but they've always played them. They also still play whole albums; I sampled ACDC's new one last Sunday. The RIAA would scream PIRACY!!!

If you're writing music that is indeed a concern; I'm sure Seether will be sued for same damned life; its rhythm guitar is note for note identical to the melody to I Will Follow Him (a bad pop song from the early sixties). There's a suit against Led Zeppelin for a guitar riff that sounds vaguely like Stairway to Heaven; I think Zep will win, but it turns out that the guy suing would have had no standing if Zeppelin had never heard the song.

Other art forms don't have that problem.

How is that any different than someone who builds a house and rents it out forever? Or me, after 27 years I'm retired and no longer have to work.

That said, I agree copyrights are WAY too long.

Yes, people buy bottled water, too. The point is you don't HAVE to pay for food, you can grow your own. It's simply less work to pay for it with money.

The best things in life are free.

Well, you have to respect your audience. Since I'm retired, I have no need to monetize my books; I'm just happy people read them, which is the whole point of writing them.

I seem to have written Nobots at too high a reading level for some folks; I got comments such as "can I find those words in a dictionary?" So I wrote Mars, Ho! (may be ready for publication this week) mostly from the perspective of a high school graduate with bad grammar, which was oddly more of a challenge.

I did get some folks saddened when I stopped writing diary-like stuff, but they seem to like the sci-fi even more.

Do you have any idea what the error rate for manual data entry is? Typically about 0.5% of the entries will be wrong. Retyping information is a very error prone process.

Buying? We're talking about a post-scarcity society here. If no one is enjoying your art, it may not be any good. If nobody is using your code, it's probably poorly designed. Find something else to hold your interest, it isn't hard.

I'm lucky, in that people read my books every day, according to site stats, and folks buy hardcover copies and send me fan mail, which is far better than money; I have enough money to live pretty well.

Sales is the worst possible metric for any creative endeavor. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother to repay a debt. Meanwhile, what was selling in the galleries for big bucks is worthless today.

As long as the character they create is entirely fictional and not based on impersonating someone they know is a friend of the suspect, I'm fine with it. Cops running around trying to "friend" people in my name is not.

I have no fear of copyright trolls; I register my books with the US Copyright office. If one fucks with me, I'll wind up with HIS money.

And since I'm my own publisher, I'm my own gatekeeper. You can find my books in bookstores world-wide, and I've posted them on the internet. Site stats say folks are reading them every day.

What I'm doing was impossible twenty years ago. Now that I'm retired I have the time to do it. When the subject of conversation actually comes to pass, everybody will be retired.