Jason Chen was also stretching the concept of responsible journalism pretty thin. His methods (extortion and dealing in stolen property) might be defensible for an expose on, e.g., massive government corruption (where the public interest in stopping an ongoing crime vastly outweighs the crime of stealing documents). But let's not forget that the story he was breaking was what the next version of some company's fucking phone was going to look like. I may not agree with Apple's method of retrieving the phone, but let's not get carried away and act like Mr. Chen was some kind of folk hero. There were no angels in the Gawker/Apple saga.

Are you dense? The risk is that the person you are trying to impersonate has already voted and the election officials call the cops. Or that that they will try to vote after you did. Like you say, most people carry ID all the time, so it will be easy for the person you are impersonating to prove who they are and for the election officials to do something about the false ballot. You may not have to provide an ID to the voting officials, but just try that when you're sitting in a jail cell.

If impersonation is such a serious problem, then why don't we ever hear about the little old lady who didn't get to vote because someone voted under her name earlier in the day? Why don't we ever hear about the sketchy homeless guy who sprinted out of the polling station when the election official looked at him funny after noticing that the name he was trying to use had already voted?

Here's the thing: The type of election fraud that voter ID is intended to prevent is REALLY FUCKING EASY to detect. And yet we never hear about it. Haven't you ever wondered why that is? Try applying Occam's Razor: Is this because it almost happens, even without voter ID, or because of some massive big media / big government / big whatever conspiracy to keep the plebs from finding out The Truth? With all the partisan media on both sides, you'd think that someone would have run a story about it by now (and how it's The Other Side who's committing election fraud).

I'm not sure I buy that: Round-trip flights between LA and New York can be had for under $300 and take 7-8 hours, including time at the airport. So what price premium is the public willing to pay to get there in 1/3 the time (assuming it takes some time to get on and off the train)? I have trouble believing the capital costs of a vacu-mag-lev passing through two mountain ranges is going to have a lower per-mile cost than the current California HSR (currently ~$100 billion for ~500 miles, or $200 million / mile).

Do you think you can really charge a big enough price premium to cover the extra capital and operating costs of such a thing? I think the Concorde has your answer.

Yes, um, about that... I'm sorry, what were you saying?

I would suggest that one of the major reasons that US still uses Standard measurements in engineering has to do with "network effects" that date to the two world wars. During the second world war, European factories were heavily bombed and after the war they needed to be re-tooled. In contrast, American industry tooled up for the war, (using standard measurements) but was never bombed, leaving a surplus of high quality tools, many of which are still serviceable to this day. When you are making a new mill or lathe, it doesn't really matter whether it is calibrated in standard or metric, but re-calibrating an existing machine for a different system of units is very costly.

On a typical manual mill, for example, turning the traverse handwheel a complete revolution moves the table by an integer number of thousandths of an inch (usually 100 or 200, which are 2.54 and 5.08 mm). To operate the mill in metric units requires either that the operator remember that a revolution is 2540 micrometers (awkward) or rebuild a significant precision part of the machine (the leadscrews and leadscrew nuts). You might think that this wouldn't be a problem with CNC mills, but many use stepper motors to turn the leadscrews. Those stepper motors might have only 200 or 400 steps per revolution (giving a resolution of 1 to 0.25 mils, or 0.0254 mm to 0.00635 mm) which can make it inconvenient to use metric units.

If that weren't bad enough, collets (basically an adapter to hold the "bit" in the mill) come in standard sizes to hold mills (what you call a mill "bit" used on a milling machine. yes, it is confusing) of standard sizes, which are typically fractions of an inch on US equipment. When you are machining a piece of metal, the finite diameter of the mill it usually important. The accessories that go with a milling machine can easily add up to more than the cost of the machine itself. So, to really operate a mill in metric units in a convenient way, you'd also need re-purchase all the little parts that go with the mill.

Someone is probably going to reply that these issues don't apply to modern CNC tools. I'm not familiar with those, but the point is that there are a significant number inexpensive and serviceable tools in the US that can only work with metric units in a very awkward way (or at great expense).

Yes, but after (how many years?) the latest release finally fixes the race condition that would delete an entire class's worth of grades if two teaching assistants (who teach, say, different lab sections for a single lecture section) dared to upload grades at the same time! The same release forces you to triple-click on a cell to enter a grade, but hey, we've almost advanced to 1960's-era databases!

But in all seriousness, I don't know a single professor in the department who would use Blackboard if it weren't mandated for all courses by the university administration.

That's one argument. Another is that they encourage nuclear proliferation because (in some designs) the spent fuel can be reprocessed into either new fuel or weapons-grade fissile material. Other nations might have a stronger desire to start a breeder program if they saw them being used in first-world countries. A rogue nation could, in principle, divert the output of a breeder reactor to a weapons program (which would be bad). Is this a good argument? Heck, I don't know. There are certainly other first-world countries with breeder programs, so I don't think it makes much sense. But, you should at least be aware that it's out there.

There's no 'probably' about it. LS bought spectrum that was specifically earmarked for use in satellite to ground communications (which was why they got such a bargain on it in the first place: no other potential bidder could think of a profitable way to use it). Their problems only began when LS decided that they wanted to use this inexpensive spectrum for ground to ground communications, instead of using a more expensive band like everybody else. They attempted to exploit a loop-hole that the FCC created when it allowed "supplemental" ground stations for sat broadcasts (like for inside tunnels) by launching a sat for an ostensibly satellite-based broadband business (while actually transferring the bulk of the data from ground-based transmitters).

>They can fire you because you have green eyes.

Actually, no, they can't. That one falls under a protected class.

True, but you also have to consider the value of your time. For experimental physics, the mean time to complete a PhD is around six years, and most people in that position could probably earn 40-50k straight out of school (not doing physics, of course). So the opportunity cost is something like $120k + interest on student loans from undergrad.

As for self-funded PhD students: I've never seen one in person, but I hear they exist. And I hear that the entrance requirements are much looser (which is funny because most PhD students should have at least a partial research assistantship after the first year or two)

As someone who has watched from the sidelines (I TA'd a series of physics labs for pre-med students, who. just. had. to. have. that. A.), this sounds spot-on. Med schools make applicants jump through tons of hoops (one of those hoops is getting straight-A's in physics) in order to reduce the size of the applicant pool. The difference in patient outcome between a doctor who earned an A and one who earned a B in $PHYSICS_FOR_PREMEDS would be completely negligible. Yet, it allows medical schools to cost-effectively reject a large fraction of applicants and discourage many more from even applying in the first place.

That doesn't make much sense... using what I think are reasonable estimates, 10 outlets * 100W per outlet * 10 hours per day * 360 days * $0.2 per kWh only works out to a few hundred dollars per year. Surely any one of the electrical appliances (or lighting) in a small restaurant or cafe uses more than that. On the other hand, I could see them wanting to discourage people from occupying a table all day when other customers need seats...

They don't have to. The shipping lanes in the Straight of Hormuz are in Iran's territorial waters, which means they get to make the rules about who's allowed in. If Iran fires an a convoy escort, that's not an act of war. If the escort fires back, it is.

Committing an act of war would give Iran's few allies all the cover they need to continue their support.

Basically, they have us by the balls.

... which doesn't actually matter because Deer actually uses differential positioning.

This is true, but there isn't really any technical reason Xilinx (or any other FPGA manufacturer) can't ship a hybrid IC (one with multiple dies in the same package).