I don't use Adblock, but I've been using this for years. I rarely see an ad unless it's served directly from the site I'm visiting, and it blocks a lot of malware as well. It has something like 16,000 entries, but doesn't seem to slow things down at all.

It's not like CO2 is some unwanted and avoidable by-product of burning hydrocarbons in oxygen. It's the main product of combustion, along with water. So the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions per mile is get more miles per gallon of fuel. Is that what they're promising?

So... A nationwide broadband monopoly is okey-dokey, then?

At least in bioiniformatics, the correction of p-values for multiple comparisons ("q-values") has been standard practice for quite a while now.

They don't and they know it, but science fiction fans are an important part of the public support that keeps their funding flowing, and this is just the kind of thing that appeals to that demographic.

These sound more akin to fuel cells than batteries. Swapping the things (or a sub-assembly) in an out - like propane tanks for a gas grill - might not be too big a deal if a mechanized infrastructure was in place.

Which marketplace is saying that? Last I checked, interest rates were near all-time lows.

I imagine the enzymes would be recharged whenever the fuel (sugar) is. Not that there aren't other practical issues to deal with, of course...

I don't even know what LogMeIn is or why I should need it over SSH for remote login. Maybe I've really been missing out on something big, who knows? But my first thought when I saw the over-the-top reaction to your post was... The astroturf is really flying today...

Sigh... When I grew up there were 4 channels and if you wanted a video people looked at you strangely, because that hadn't been invented yet. Gaming was big, but it meant going outside and getting some friends together for baseball or basketball (or something that you just invented on the spot). Your parents didn't worry about where you were, as long as you were home for dinner and bedtime.

Alas, now I spend the bulk of my waking hours, at work and at home, sitting in front of a screen. Yes, I do miss the good old days...

> "If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it, period".

To be fair, it was the insurance companies that cancelled substandard policies rather than bring them up to minimum standards. Should he have realized this would happen and refrained from making that statement? Maybe so. He owned up to it publicly, which is more than I can recall ever happening in the previous regime.

More on-topic, though, he's as much a part of the power structure as anyone else. I'm sure the NSA has made clear to him and the consequences of trying to rein them in.

Driver education was a standard part of the (summer) high school curriculum when I was coming up so very long ago. I don't think that's the case anymore, and and as a result it's not as accessible as it once was. It's much less a thing you do automatically when you hit 16.

That, and kids are living more of their lives virtually now. More "tactile" skills like driving and fixing mechanical things aren't as cool as the ones involved in manipulating what you see on your screen.

This is what I love about physicists: They love sanity checks, and they do the math.

I'm in bioinformatics, and where I work we were discussing how large a value for differential gene expression could get and still be considered credible. Well, it turned out that if a single molecule of a typical RNA transcript is present in a reference sample, the value that was under consideration would require several thousand metric tons of it in the comparison sample. This was deemed to be "unphysical", as they say...

> What happens when Bitcoin goes over $X?

The basic problem is that this runup in perceived value is due to the prospect of it becoming an accepted currency, but it can never achieve that so long as its value isn't stable. Who will exchange X bitcoins for Y stuff if they think it will buy 2Y tomorrow or next week?

This whole thing smells like a bubble right now. The value increases for mostly speculative reasons. Bitcoins could never be a viable mainstream currency, because the volume can't readily be increased to match rising demand from transactions involving them. That's the whole point of Bitcoin, isn't it? Money in essentially fixed supply that can't be "printed" at the whim of a central bank? That makes it a deflationary currency, and no one will exchange it for stuff today if the price of that stuff is likely to be dramatically lower next week. And if it's not a viable currency, what is the value based on? Scarcity by itself isn't enough.