Except that by the time I get to vote in primaries, the nominees are often already chosen. The real way to have lots of choices is to live in New Hampshire and Iowa.

It is indeed like a runoff election that is executed very very poorly.

The winner take all system for awarding electoral votes has caused us to only have a few "swing states" that actually matter.

Not to mention the fact that the parties now control the debates (rather than a nonpartisan organization like the league of women voters). They get to decide who is allowed to participate in the debates. They often change the criteria in order to specifically exclude/include particular candidates.

If you are a 3rd party or an independent candidate, good luck getting anywhere near a debate run by democrats and republicans.

They don't need to know you work for uber. They need to know how much you drive regardless of who you work for.

I don't know why anyone still develops in Aging Perl.

Although, if you can make a convincing argument that, had you not pirated the movie, you would still not have purchased it, then the damages due to lost revenue are actually $0.

What's wrong with Elizabeth Warren? Biden just seems kind of stupid to me. I would still take him over Hillary, but I doubt he could beat her.

It's a prerequisite for inventing the next addictive cell phone game.

You can't build a space craft if you don't know how airplanes work.

Any time you spend doing something you enjoy is not wasted. Playing cell phone games is a better use of your time than spending it with your friends and family if you enjoy it more. But if you enjoy your friends and family more, spend those 6 hours talking to them. If the thing you enjoy most is upgrading gas pump software then do that. By making your process more efficient, you can do the thing you love 4 times as much in the time you have.

Phones used to have buttons. Now they are touchscreens with virtual buttons. We still have the same fingers. How is it possible that something usurped buttons given that they were clearly the ideal method for humans to input information to a computer?

By this logic we shouldn't be able to type either.

The path: "brain -> fingers -> keyboard -> machine" can certainly be improved

"brain -> brain reader -> machine" eliminates one hop.

Your contention that the problem is peoples' brains is ridiculous considering that the brains are the things ultimately controlling the keyboards as well. Your typing speed can not exceed the speed of thought, but the reverse is certainly possible.

Energy and transportation are run at the state level, so I would expect that it would take some governors with courage and integrity (and lack of strong opposition).

It might be nice to have this stuff controlled at the federal level when we have Mr. hope and change running things, but that's a bit scary since I don't have much hope for 2016. I think I have more faith in California's Governor Moonbeam, than Hillary or whoever wins the Republican primary.

I hope Elizabeth Warren decides to run.

We already have laws that enforce contracts. And I already said I am not opposed to laws which guarantee minimum coverage provided by auto insurance. I would just have this be for everybody rather than only certain categories of licenses.

I agree that taxis and uber drivers should pay more for insurance. I don't see the point of a law mandating the solution that the market will naturally arrive at anyway.

This is like making a law that fast computers need to cost more than slow computers. We don't need a law like that. People selling fast computers can decide what to charge people, and people selling slow computers can decide what to charge people.

Why on earth would you want to do a solution that uses 16 laptops? In addition to being expensive, and inconvenient, it requires keeping 16 laptops maintained.

Using advanced routing techniques isn't trickery. It's how networks are supposed to be used to solve problems. This is the benefit of a network interface over something like a PPP serial connection. It sucks that all the pumps have the same IP address, but due to the versatility of network technology, that's not an insurmountable problem.

Buying a single 24 port smart switch will be much cheaper than buying 16 laptops.

Like a keyboard?

Maybe they do, I don't know. I am just ranting on what I think is the right solution regardless of what anyone is actually doing.

It was my understanding that heavier vehicles do more damage to the roads, but maybe that's not true.

My general solution is this. Figure out where the costs of road infrastructure come from (is it 99% repair done by big rigs? Is it 99% making new roads that everyone uses equally?, etc). Come up with a scheme that charges people based on how much cost they incur to the state.

For example, if the only cost was damage by big rigs, then have a big rig tax. If roads only get damaged by the weather (i.e. not by use), then have a per mile tax. I suspect the actual breakdown is more complicated and nuanced.

But my basic message is that it should be evidence based, and it should put the incentives in the right places to minimize costs. (e.g. disincentivize driving vehicles which damage roads, or incentivizing conservation of resources, etc)

Basically, get economists (rather than politicians) to come up with the policy

Network address translation.

The most elegant way to do it, is to buy a potentially expensive smart switch that can do all this for you in a compact and efficient. You may have to do some research on how to configure it properly.

The next best way would be to build a PC with a bunch of NICs and basically build the switch from my first suggestion. It's probably even more effort to configure it. It may be even more expensive if you need to buy all the parts new, but you are more likely to have these common parts or know someone who does, and they can be old.

The way that requires the least technical know-how but might be the most MacGyvery, ugly, and fun, id to get a bunch of old routers (one for each pump). Set the DMZ address of each NAT router to be the fixed IP of the pumps. Configure the wan addresses to something like 192.168.0.1 (for pump 1), 0.2 (for pump 2), etc. Then hook all the wan ports on the routers to a big switch along with your laptop. And hook up each pump to one of the lan ports of it's corresposnding NAT router. And bingo, you are on a network where each pump has a different IP address.

The downside with this last one, is that you have a lot of points of failure. Old routers are not known for being very reliable. The good news is that they are cheap, and you don't need the wifi to work. You don't even need them all to be the same make/model.

I've seen plenty of people bork things 16 times in a row manually. I would rather have the potential to fix 16 borked pumps in parallel.