Yeah, those morons

Please drop the auto insurance argument. You don't have to buy a car, you don't have to drive a car, and you only have to get insurance if you do one of those two things. This is very different in that your existence is the necessary and sufficient condition of being eligible for the mandate.

Sorry, I don't think I'm understanding you. The assertion is: "voter participation of those between 18 and 34 (what I would consider to be the net generation) has increased, in many cases markedly". The numbers then show that the voter participation among those age groups has increased. What "controlling for any other contributing factor" is needed to reach the conclusion that the thesis is correct based on the data?

If you're referring to the next paragraph, he clearly starts with "One could argue". Not even remotely the same as claiming statistical correlation of any kind, just another thesis presented based on the (successful) validation of the original thesis.

I'm running smokeping on my home computer in order to show Comcast that their service actually does drop out at regular daily intervals and that it is not internal. The interesting trend that I see is in pinging the DNS servers. A ping to the comcast DNS server, presumably internal to their network, has a rtt of ~50ms. A ping to a Google server, presumably external to their network has a rtt of ~20ms. This has been consistent for about four months now. So how can they claim internal is easier?

I think your premise is right, but for the wrong reasons. Driver-less cars likely will eliminate car ownership, however, it will be in the form of a public commodity. Instead of hopping in my car to drive to the nearest mega-shopping extravaganza, followed by a restaurant, then a movie, I would just hop in the nearest available car, have it drive me to the first destination, then repeat for each subsequent destination. There's no need for the car to park, it can simply join a queue nearby, or head off to the next waiting passenger. You could keep a large portion of the fleet on the road with no reason to ever park anyway. The roads become your vehicle storage area and parking lots go away.

Driverless car = no need to park and wait for me = why not give a ride to someone else originating from my destination = on-demand carriage = very few personal cars.

Driverless is safer = politicians mandate use = no driving for you anyway = why own a car if I can't drive it? = no ownership

There's always the desire to be able to hop in a car and go with no pre-planning, no waiting, no calling for a car to come and waiting until the next available one can arrive, but we're already seeing strong social pressure to forgo some of those conveniences for the sake of reducing emissions and fuel usage. Given the rather large profit motive of being able to effectively charge per mile, the ease of scheduling cars to congregate in areas of high demand at proper times (a lot of cool statistical data modeling that Google is pretty good at doing), and the necessary communications infrastructure to make it all work, it seems the commercial application will be to provide fleet vehicles equivalent to taxi cabs. Taken to a logical conclusion, laws will eventually be passed that prohibit human drivers (since it's the human that adds most of the uncertainty to the equation), and it will become easier and cheaper to simply summon a driverless cab to go anywhere you want to go.

Cross country road trips can also work on the same principle. The logistics become interesting, but not insurmountable. Considering the cars can always drive themselves back to their origin if they aren't needed in the destination city, and you have a simple one-way rental method that simply includes the cost of the return trip as well.

Of course, this entire scheme will have to be nationalized at some point and fully regulated. That would allow cars to be shuttled from city to city and state to state as demand requires. What politician wouldn't love to be able to control how the entire country transports itself? I could see them outlawing "dumb" cars simply so they can hand out goodies in the form of more cars for cities that will vote for them. Imagine the politics then.

I leave it to the reader to decide if this is utopian or dystopian.

I stand corrected. Here's more discussion to include some FAR references since the parent relies on his own authority.

Unfortunately, that's true of almost any certified 4 seat airplane.

Not true. If you build the aircraft yourself (51% rule), and you apply for and hold the aircraft repairman certificate, then you can do whatever you want to that plane. If you buy it from someone else, you cannot obtain the repairman certificate for it, and any maintenance that would require an A&P on a certified aircraft would require that same A&P on your experimental aircraft.

You go on to say that in the next few sentences, but I thought it was important to be very clear on the difference since most of the people reading this thread don't know the difference between a C-150 and 747.

FTFY

Not to mention unconstitutional and illegal Oh wait, Obama's continuing the Bush policy? Never mind. Totally different then.

I call BS on the summary. It says "The process has no fundamental experimental boundaries and it is thought it will transform sub-atomic scale transmission imaging". But TFA actually states "A typical electron or X-ray microscope image is about one hundred times more blurred than the theoretical limit defined by the wavelength. In this project, the eventual aim is to get the best-ever pictures of individual atoms in any structure seen within a three-dimensional object."

If they're measuring the wave diffraction as it passes through the atomic structure, then the diffraction limit is most definitely a "fundamental...boundary". If the addition of the word "experimental" means that they found no boundaries in their experiments, that just means they haven't gotten to the diffraction limit of the atomic aperture for those wavelengths yet (i.e. we're not even close to the fundamental boundaries, so we'll say our results are not limited in any way in our experiments). Either way, not a great way to talk about the results - too much sensationalism, not enough science.

How the US funds the UN

FY2011 - CIPA - $1.887B, CIO - $1.518B, Regular Budget - $516M

At the very least you could have looked this up in the 11 seconds it took me. Also, the US accounts for 22% of the UN funding, which is almost twice that of the second biggest contributor (Japan). We were in arrears for not paying the full assessment, not for withholding the full amount. I can't find data on it, but the maximum amount we are quoted to be in arrears on is a little over $1B. That's less than 1/3d of what we paid in 2011 even though we've been in arrears since 1995, so clearly we're still funding a very large part of the UN, just not at the full rate they think we should fund. Most of this comes from our assertion that 25% assessment is too high, so the UN has dropped it to 22%. I'm going to guess that we were not paying the delta between those two, but can't confirm it. I'm sure someone else will provide the needed data.