This kind of presumes reason is the basis of our drug laws.

Easy-peasy. I don't even have to google it. The Interstate Commerce Clause. All you have to do is find some pretext that says the regulation affects interstate commerce in some way and the feds can quash it.

In this case the issue to use is plain as a pikestaff. By preventing municipalities from providing high quality internet service the state is hinder access by out-of-state vendors to consumers in that community. That justification is WAAY stronger than other that have held up to scrutiny.

Sure, but the laser beam itself is less than ideal too, as it its targeting. We're talking about hitting a moving target from another moving target with a less than perfect beam dispersed through whatever's in the atmosphere between them. Adding reflected waste energy to that equation and mirroring might not be perfect protection, but I'd bet it could make the attacker's job a lot tougher.

I have no doubt that at short range under laboratory conditions lasers can burn through any mirror conceived by the mind of man. In real world conditions I suspect it'd be a lot harder to get to work even without an intelligent enemy dreaming up countermeasures.

Why not? The point seems to be that a people's view of their constitution is a myth-making process. This idea is of course anathema to Americans, although clearly long-held interpretations of the US Constitution certainly color what we see as the "plain meaning" of the document.

But you can see see this consensus myth thing clearly over in Britain, which doesn't have a written constitution. That doesn't mean they don't have a constitution; it's in what nearly everyone agrees traditionally can or cannot be done. The Queen can't veto a law by withholding her assent, because it's just not done.

My wife was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic when Bobby Ballard found the Titanic. You know what his colleagues there talked about? How he wore a baseball cap on TV to hide his bald spot.

I'll bet it costs a bundle to make sure it works as well as it is politically necessary for it to work. It's a matter of marginal costs and benefits. Train travel is already extremely safe; adding safety measures to an already safe mode of travel is bound to be challenging.

Imagine a world where half the train engineers were stoned out of their mind,and train derailments were an everyday occurrence. It would be cheap to design and install a safety system that would be a huge success by cutting down derailments from a twice a day occurrence to a once-a-month thing. But we live in a world where passenger train derailments, though terrible, are exceedingly rare. They're not even a once-a-year occurrence. This is the first time in a very long time an Amtrak train has derailed for speed. In the past five years the vast majority of Amtrak accidents have been things on the tracks that shouldn't be there or freight trains colliding with Amtrak trains. The last accident a system like the one we're talking about would likely have prevented was in 2011, when an Amtrak train went through a red signal and collided with another Amtrak train.

In our hypothetical scenario if the new system caused one accident a year that'd be a non-concern because of the hundreds of crashes it prevented. But in real life if the system caused just one accident a year that'd represent a tripling of the accident rate ove no system.

You have to have confidence that an automatic system outperforms humans by an order of magnitude before it is accepted by the public, underwriters, investors etc. Otherwise self-driving cars would be a commonplace option already. They already work, probably better than drivers and certainly better than some.

OK, here's the author's analogy. A PC was hardware that ran software. By choosing a third party operating system, the IBM PC's designers turned it into an interchangeable commodity.

These days a car is a hardware that runs software too. By choosing third party dashboard OSs, the manufacturers are turning them into interchangeable commodities.

Really? If the same dashboard OS ran in a Mercedes C class and a Ford Fiesta, they'd become interchangeable?

> Men's rights and white power groups and other groups that "fight" for the rights of an already empowered majority exist only because they choose to ignore history.

The fact that you automatically assume that it will always go the man's way is exactly why such groups exit. There is a protective double standard that exists in our society that will drown out men that complain in general. Never mind if it's a man vs woman conflict.

The whole Jessie Ventura libel thing was a perfect example of this.

Again with the McDonalds metaphor.

"Everyone else" loved Interstellar. My wife (who is a real engineer) could tolerate about 10 minutes of it. I quickly gave up on the content of it myself but would have continued watching just for the visuals.

Call it cinematic junk food.

Most Americans have no taste.

It doens't matter. That studio isn't getting anything out of me. I'm not going to see it first run and perhaps I will see it as a Netflix physical disk rental. Beyond the fact that it comes off as more tired rehash, I'm simply out of action for awhile. Missing what is likely yet a another tired retread won't make me feel the least bit deprived.

It doesn't really matter who's whining about the flick.

The SJWs here seem bound and determined to give these MRAs far more exposure than they would have otherwise.

I take your point, but I'm addressing the attitude that because Muslim countries are different from us that must mean they're incapable of doing impressive things. That's just wishful thinking.

Of course "formidable" is a relative term. Iran's industrial capability isn't formidable compared to Germany, but it sure is compared to Iraq. Their automotive industry builds over a million cars a year.

Because you brought up automobile design.

And how do you know they have "zero know how"? Know how isn't a property of nations, it belongs to individuals who can be hired for a reasonable price.

If you mean "zero indigenous know how" that's something we can't take for granted either. The UAE is small (9 million -- just a bit larger than Switzerland), but it is very rich and no doubt has its share of talented individuals. What's more if they reached out to other Arab countries (as well as hiring a few key non-Arab personnel -- like we had Germans in the 50s and 60s), I don't doubt they could put together a reasonably "Arab" space program, which I see as a positive development. Such a program wouldn't build every jot and tiddle of their hardware right down to the nuts and bolts, but then we don't do that either.

Thought experiment. Suppose you're in charge of setting up a UAE and they give you a huge wad of cash to set up a space program. How would *you* go about doing it to maximize national scientific prestige?

Sure, but you've heard of King Saud University, right?