We need to protect people from doing stupid stuff

No, we don't.

New cars tend to be much, much heavier. If it is true that performance is about the same, then it would serve as a testament to the increase in both engine output and efficiency.

They don't need the data.

They already don't have control over distributed demand.

Therefore they don't need control over distributed supply.

Joe stuffing 2kW into the local grid in a not-monitored-in-realtime, not-centrally-controlled fashion simply helps to offset Fred's not-monitored-in-realtime, not centrally-controlled air conditioner, or Tim's arc welder, or a concert venue firing up on a Saturday night, a 500-ton factory press, or...

Of course someone has to distribute this power, and that someone is "the power company." And that's what Joe pays them to do with the difference between buy/sell electric rates.

The only real story here is "Monopoly turns greedier; demands more cash." Everything else is complete unrepentant bullshit.

I use Waze for predicting travel time. It knows the speed of every regularly-driven segment of roadway with half-hour precision, and knows about (many) road closures.

It also tells you about traffic cameras, and active speed traps, and road hazards, and does a pretty darn good job of rerouting around sudden traffic jams and accidents automatically.

(Yes, this is spammy. No, I don't work for Waze. But I do edit their maps for fun, for free.)

It seemed to have plenty of thrust, to me: The amount of deceleration was remarkable.

Meanwhile, it's not a matter of getting the rocket vertical after touchdown, but before: Once it "touches down" with one or more of its feet, the dynamics instantly change (surface friction becomes a thing, and a tall free-floating object grows a fulcrum) and all bets are off.

Go play some Lunar Lander and try again. :)

You mean PCI-E 3.0 x4, SATA 3.0, and/or USB 3.0. Native, with pins dedicated to those purposes. (There's currently 5 different M.2 card keyings standardized.)

Also, from your own link:

I found stumbled across the Delock SATA to Thunderbolt adapter through a Google search, and I was hopeful that it might perform as well as it looks on paper. Unfortunately that's not the case.

The biggest issue is how difficult it is to get a drive working with it. After plugging it in and attaching a drive, it's hit or miss whether that drive will actually mount on my Macbook Pro Retina.

A secondary issue involves hot swapping disks. Once a drive is ejected from the Mac's interface and another is inserted, the Delock will not mount the second drive. I had to disconnect everything, re-attach, and go through the same hurdles I had to go through to get the drive working in the first place.

When it does finally mount the performance is far below the stated 6 gigabits per second potential, with benchmarks on a high-end SSD capping out at 3 gigabits per second even though the drive can go faster than that.

The bottom line? This product needs work. I can't recommend it.

The difficulty stems from the fact that Thunderbolt does not include SATA, requiring funky PCI-E to SATA chips that barely work, whereas M.2 supports SATA natively.

I can plug a SATA SSD into a USB adapter on my router and connect that with a serial cable to an ancient laptop with TCP/IP and NFS using SLIP or PPP or some other thing, and transfer fucking 1s and 0s. That doesn't mean that the serial port on the ancient laptop somehow groks SATA.

(Now are we done yet?)

No, not the same at all.

Thunderbolt has PCI Express and DisplayPort. It is used as an expansion bus for external peripherals.

M.2 has PCI Express and USB and SATA. It is used an an expansion bus for internal peripherals.

They're practically very dissimilar. Of the four electrical interfaces supported amongst them, they share just one in common. These aren't crazy words that only an engineer would understand.

I can't drive a DisplayPort monitor with M.2, and I can't connect a SATA drive to Thunderbolt.

SATA and eSATA are practically the same thing. M.2 and Thunderbolt are not.

In other words, Thunderbolt is NOT to M.2 as eSATA is to SATA.

In other words, both apples and oranges have a few things in common, but a lot more things that are not. At the end of the day, it's still apples and oranges.

(Are we done yet?)

Thunderbolt is essentially the external version of M.2.

Thunderbolt and M.2 are alike in that they both have an implementation of PCI Express. They're otherwise rather dissimilar.

So, they're essentially PCI Express.

Because a drone could never deploy a simple parachute, and/or have redundant propulsion (which can be done in software, today), and/or simply disassemble itself with a bang before falling out of the sky in small, low-mass chunks with terrible coefficient of drag and low terminal velocity.

Also: Delivery trucks are always perfectly safe.

Did I miss anything?

It's OK when you do it, too.

I don't care if you block ads, or use CSS overlays to give your Youtube experience an OMG Kittens theme, or molest yourself with a bristle brush.

What would not be OK is if my ISP or some other third party blocked ads on my behalf, used CSS overlays to give my Youtube experience an OMG Kittens theme, or molest me with a bristle brush.

Do you see the difference?

There is a third category in the form of an Xposed module that eradicates Youtube ads on Android.

I use Adblock Edge on my PC, but also have a script that periodically downloads a magic list of hosts, tucks it into a format that dnsmasq likes, and runs on my Tomato-based router (there are a million variations on this).

The latter hosts-hacking always catches Youtube ads on the PS3 and Chromecast, and usually* gets rid of them on other devices on the network.

*Usually as in I see an ad so infrequently, and only on my Android phone, that I can't be bothered with doing anything more about it.

Because AT&T didn't happen, etc.

Right, got it. Is there any more history that you'd like to re-state for the annals?

Typo: $5k in service and repairs, but whatever. If you want to pick on my old and awesome car, you'll do so no matter what, +/- $1k.

Here's my own progression:

I used *I forget what* under MS-DOS to establish a PPP (SLIP? whatever) connection, ~1992, to a *nix host. It worked as well as MS-DOS could (and still does) allow.

Later, I used Telemate under MS-DOS to talk to the local Delphi dialup, to talk to Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati Online FreeBSD boxen.

Eventually, a local ISP showed up. I used Winsock on Windows, was disappointed: Things barely worked, which is saying a lot compared to all of the "barely worked" above.

I installed OS/2 on a 486SX with 4MB of RAM. The GUI loaded enough to see it, but then I discovered that OS/2 could run without a GUI: All command-line. It was fast. The TCP/IP stack robust enough to knock random other Internet users offline with a simple ping -f, all while my own connection was still useable: The pings would get longer and longer, and more and more infrequent, and then stop...even if I was on a different port of the exact same terminal server that they had been connected to, and even if asymmetric modem speeds said it shouldn't be that way.

Eventually, I got a Pentium 100 ("arguably overclocked" to a P120), and had 16MB of RAM on that board (16x1MB 30-pin SIMMS on carefully-stacked adapters). Worked a treat: I could finally use OS/2's GUI, and it was usable despite using 4x the RAM and about twice the CPU.

I used Linux after that, starting with Slackware 2.

I put on Windows 95 OSR2 after a then-employer handed me a copy of it and told me it was my job to do email support for his Windows-based software: I still did most of my work with a telnet/ssh session to SJ Games' io.com FreeBSD hosts.

As you can see, OS/2 was a blip on my own radar in those early days. But the Winsock days were really, really bad: Worse than the MS-DOS days.

And OS/2 was as solid as Linux, or the FreeBSD (then a mature thing) hosts that I paid by the month to use.

And OS/2's solid TCP/IP was included. With Windows, it was an extra, fickle (and not cheap, IIRC) third-party add-on.

95 OSR2 did OK, but meh. Nobody cared unless they were trying to get their new Packard Bell online, and then AOL by then the easiest answer. (They didn't get the money to buy Time Warner by accident.)