How they've managed to make so many people believe that's the way coffee is supposed to taste is something I'll never know.

The best explanation I've heard is that darker roasts stand up better when you add stuff to the coffee. If you drink your coffee black, you probably want a mild roast or it will be too bitter to drink. If you dilute it with a bunch of milk, flavored syrup, and maybe drink it cold, you won't be able to taste the coffee unless it's roasted almost black.

To clarify, the goal is to be rich enough that I won't need to borrow money. I'm not implying that I insist on some sort of draconian no-debt stance. If I fail in my goal then sure, I'll borrow what's sensible. But I'm not starting out with debt as a goal. I can't see how car loans make sense under any circumstances. The basic purpose of a car is to get me from point A to point B safely and reliably. Such a car, used, costs well under $5000 in almost all localities. This is not a useful or interesting enough amount of money to be worth taking on debt.

That's kind of my entire point. The market rate is the correct rate for economic optimality. A rate below market rate attracts far too many borrowers who would normally not merit a loan.

That simply isn't true. The 4th Amendment says that:

no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

IOW, they can ask for a warrant when they have a strong reason to believe that something contains evidence; they don't have to be absolutely certain. That's what "probable cause" means: enough evidence to convince a skeptical individual that something is probably true. It's a fairly strong standard- the person asking for a warrant needs to present some kind of evidence rather than just a hunch- but it doesn't demand certainty. That's why people who ask for warrants are not routinely punished when the warrants don't pan out; they only get in trouble if it can be shown that they materially misrepresented facts they used to support their warrant request.

The approach mentioned here may get you into college, and it may cost money, but it is not old-fashioned. The old-fashioned way to get into colleges with money goes something like this: "My dad is a trustee at Princeton, so I knew I would get in." If you have 2 million dollars to spend, endowing a faculty chair at a university is a much better bet than paying for high-priced consulting services.

Need based tuition scholarships do not come close to explaining the extraordinary rise in tuitions. The real reason is decreased state funding (for public universities) and government-guaranteed student loans (affecting all universities).

Without student loans, colleges would only be able to charge what the market can bear. No entity can violate this ironclad law of economics. If families can't pay the amount of tuition that you charge, you're not getting that amount of tuition, period. Loan availability increases the amount that families can afford to pay. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this idea, and in fact if the free market were allowed to determine loan availability, the system as a whole would quickly converge onto the optimal amount of loan availability. Under this hypothetical free-market scenario, banks wishing to make student loans would have to vet their students properly and make sure with reasonable confidence that they will be repaid. If the free market were at work, there would be a natural market-based limit on the amount of loan money available, simply because not every student is going to represent a good investment.

Unfortunately, what we have right now in the student loan market is not even close to a free market. The dominant lender is the government, and even in the case of privately held student loans, the laws and regulations governing student loans are highly and artificially favorable to the lenders. To give just a few examples, unlike any other form of loan, student loans (including private loans) can almost never be discharged in bankruptcy; cannot expire from statute of limitations; allow the lender to garnish wages, tax refunds, social security, and disability payments without a court order; and repayment is guaranteed by the government, even if the borrower defaults (but the lender can still pursue the borrower for repayment even after the government makes them whole). The result of such amazingly biased and favorable laws is exactly what you would expect: lenders throw money at students far out of proportion to the actual amount of money that it would make economic sense for them to lend under ordinary circumstances. Having this much money supply available in the system is then the primary factor that enables and allows ridiculous increases in tuition.

I don't have school age children yet, but I will soon. I have no intention of taking out loans or making them take out loans, no matter how hard it is to achieve this goal. I would love to compete on a level playing field with other similarly responsible parents, but unfortunately I'm not going to have that chance. Instead I'm going to have to compete with irresponsible borrowers who have borrowed way more money than anything that remotely makes sense for them to borrow.

You're thinking about the 4th Amendment right to avoid unreasonable searches and seizures, but cyborg implants potentially invoke the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. If the implant is actually a part of the person, some lawyer will argue that forcing the person to divulge the information on it is forcing them to testify against themself. When does the information in the cyborg implant stop being like information on a device like a phone and start being like information in your brain?

If you're using client certificates for authentication, and an attacker obtains the server cert, then the attacker can successfully fool you into thinking that you have connected to the real server, but the attacker cannot successfully fool the real server into thinking that you have connected to it. This kind of "half-MITM" attack is not usually thought of as a full MITM. The authentication protocol uses a challenge/response protocol which incorporates ephemeral keys and hence is not portable even between two entities both holding the same server cert. That is, if A and B both have the server cert, and A challenges C, and B obtains C's response to A's challenge, B cannot then impersonate C to A, since B does not know either C or A's ephemeral DH keys. Even if the attacker just blindly proxies between the real server and the real client, it won't work; in this case the communication would just be a real connection that the attacker can't decrypt or alter in any way thanks to forward secrecy.

Having all their traffic to and from one server is not as devastating an attack as having their password. For one thing, users tend to re-use passwords across multiple sites. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other reasons why client certs are at least *slightly* safer than username/passwords.

The idea is defense in depth. If server cert validation fails for any reason and you're using passwords, the enemy learns all your secrets. With client certs your master secret remains safe even if a single session is compromised.

They measured multiple things! The statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith" was measuring attitudes about science, and neither the article nor the report present it as an example of scientific literacy. Here is what the article stated as proof of scientific literacy from the article:

The executive summary of the report goes on to list some tests as an additional assessment:

Commenting to undo accidental moderation. But since I have to say something anyways...
It makes since that they would draw 9-5 on the graph, for easy comparison and that they would label it the standard workday, since that is what is traditionally been considered as such. But I have no clue how they could look at that graph and come to the conclusion that most people still work from 9-5, as the article text claims.

Perhaps I just need to get used to them, but the "better looking fonts" on windows don't actually look better to me, they look worse. I'm not really sure what it is, but there definitely seems to be something slightly off about them.

Sure, I assume that all cars will have something like that. Heck, since the car will be doing navigation it will likely have found a gas/charging station and pulled over long before it even got to that. But regardless they will never be perfect. What if it sprung a leak and couldn't pull over in time because it judged that there was no suitable shoulder (mountain road, narrow bridge), and this info wasn't in it's database to enable it to plan ahead?

We have been mass producing cars for over 100 years, and by all reasonable measures they have never been as reliable as they are today. Yet they still break down on occasion. Self driving cars will have all the same mechanical and electrical problems that we have today, with software problem on top of that. You can mitigate some of these hardware problems with additional sensors, and fault-tolerant design of the driving computer, but only to the point where the sensors and software are significantly more reliable than the hardware they are monitoring, and only for the situations that are programed for.

There always will be situations where things break down in unexpected ways that the car isn't capable of handling on it's own. And based on the historical rate of reliability improvement, those situations won't be uncommon for quite some time.