You know... we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters.

You're just complaining that they're too expensive and difficult to use.

Perhaps this is a naive view, but if matter and antimatter *did* exist in similar quantities, wouldn't they *have* to "chunk"?

If it didn't, significant quantities of it would annihilate at the boundary, creating an outward force that would tend to keep the two apart, would they not?

Now, I don't see any reason why there wouldn't still be interactions, and consequently why we wouldn't see the proper gamma rays, so it seems unlikely that that much antimatter does exist, but...

Actually, I think the people that are thinking about these climate engineering approaches are just more pessimistic (or realistic, depending on your viewpoint). They simply don't think there's any chance at all that we will be able to convince people to stop emitting greenhouse gasses in time to make a difference.

Once you have that viewpoint, then climate engineering becomes the strategy of "do something rather than nothing".

Gah! If you're going to use the Constitution as justification for something, please *read* the damn thing.

Point 1: Supreme Court Justices can be impeached the same was as presidents.

Point 2: "Treason" has a very specific definition in the Constitution that doesn't include making bad decisions.

That problem already exists in spades with absentee ballots, and few people are complaining about that. In practice this seems like a marginal problem to worry about, and even if it weren't it could be resolved by having a personal repudiation code that could be entered if your vote was being coerced.

On the one hand, turning your own white blood cells into cancerous killing machines has a certain justice to it. On the other hand...

What could possibly go wrong with programming T-cells to multiply by a factor of 1000 upon reentering your body?

Ummm... can I just say that having a random website generate your passwords, even if there are "thousands" of possible options on the card, might not be the smartest security approach?

Now, if you download the source code, check the algorithm carefully for real randomness (preferably by having a crypto expert look at it), and generate it yourself on your own computer, it's *probably* pretty safe.

Other than being a pyramid scheme, you mean?

The difference is that they only have to do that with the products that they inventory and sell. Amazon, if it had to collect sales tax on all purchases, would have to do this for the thousands of companies selling through it (as it is the one placing the order and collecting the money). The liability of ensuring that the proper sales tax was specified by all of their sellers is likely a significant consideration. Of course, the biggest reason is they want to keep their price advantage, but don't discount their other concerns.

What, exactly, about the unremitting string of states Amazon has cut off from their affiliate program for passing dumb laws like this, makes anyone in the legislature think that this will add a single red cent to the state budget? Oh, California's "too big"? Ask New York how that argument worked for them.

Constitutional issues aside, this does nothing but decrease the revenue of California Amazon affiliate businesses, resulting in lower tax revenues.

Volume discount.

He said an *operating system*.

</karmawhore>

Actually, if you want the *real* rationale, allowing interfaces to be copyrighted would be a violation of the purpose and intents of copyright. Interfaces are *functional*, not expressive. If anything should cover them it's patents, not copyrights.

I've always thought this distinction is without a difference, because how do you *describe* an implementation. It can only be done in abstract language, at which point it *is* an idea.

"Have a machine first do A, then do B, then do C". That's an idea. That's all it can ever be. That's all patents can do, protect ideas.

If you want to say that patents should only cover exact copies of a specific implementation, fine, but just call for all patents to be repealed in that case, because that's useless.

Actually, the *reports* of it happening to Toyotas occurred more often. However, the frequency of those reports is highly correlated to the news reports of the problem with a time offset that implies the causality is news->reports rather than the other way around.

This problem *does* occur with considerable regularity to all brands. Some get attention at some times more than others, that's about all you can say.