This kind of presumes reason is the basis of our drug laws.

Easy-peasy. I don't even have to google it. The Interstate Commerce Clause. All you have to do is find some pretext that says the regulation affects interstate commerce in some way and the feds can quash it.

In this case the issue to use is plain as a pikestaff. By preventing municipalities from providing high quality internet service the state is hinder access by out-of-state vendors to consumers in that community. That justification is WAAY stronger than other that have held up to scrutiny.

Finally, proof that we are the product.
But if we are the product, can we sue for our share of the payout?

From the FTC's perspective, you're not the product, but your information is a business asset.

Your information would already go along with the business in any change of control or merger -- the privacy policy did not preclude that. And yes, your information has value in that context, just like any customer list, but you do not have any claim upon that value. You gave the business the right to use it in its business.

The FTC's perspective is that your information should not have independent value from the business as a separable asset. They're seeking to substantially enforce the promise in the privacy policy -- that the asset is tied to the business and its operations, and not freely alienable to anyone willing to pay for it.

Since only coprorations are now people and people are not people, we'll all have to form little corporations of course, in order ot get our due.

Forming a corporation won't save you from the consequences of your negotiating skills (or lack thereof).

Sure, but the laser beam itself is less than ideal too, as it its targeting. We're talking about hitting a moving target from another moving target with a less than perfect beam dispersed through whatever's in the atmosphere between them. Adding reflected waste energy to that equation and mirroring might not be perfect protection, but I'd bet it could make the attacker's job a lot tougher.

I have no doubt that at short range under laboratory conditions lasers can burn through any mirror conceived by the mind of man. In real world conditions I suspect it'd be a lot harder to get to work even without an intelligent enemy dreaming up countermeasures.

Why not? The point seems to be that a people's view of their constitution is a myth-making process. This idea is of course anathema to Americans, although clearly long-held interpretations of the US Constitution certainly color what we see as the "plain meaning" of the document.

But you can see see this consensus myth thing clearly over in Britain, which doesn't have a written constitution. That doesn't mean they don't have a constitution; it's in what nearly everyone agrees traditionally can or cannot be done. The Queen can't veto a law by withholding her assent, because it's just not done.

My wife was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic when Bobby Ballard found the Titanic. You know what his colleagues there talked about? How he wore a baseball cap on TV to hide his bald spot.

I'll bet it costs a bundle to make sure it works as well as it is politically necessary for it to work. It's a matter of marginal costs and benefits. Train travel is already extremely safe; adding safety measures to an already safe mode of travel is bound to be challenging.

Imagine a world where half the train engineers were stoned out of their mind,and train derailments were an everyday occurrence. It would be cheap to design and install a safety system that would be a huge success by cutting down derailments from a twice a day occurrence to a once-a-month thing. But we live in a world where passenger train derailments, though terrible, are exceedingly rare. They're not even a once-a-year occurrence. This is the first time in a very long time an Amtrak train has derailed for speed. In the past five years the vast majority of Amtrak accidents have been things on the tracks that shouldn't be there or freight trains colliding with Amtrak trains. The last accident a system like the one we're talking about would likely have prevented was in 2011, when an Amtrak train went through a red signal and collided with another Amtrak train.

In our hypothetical scenario if the new system caused one accident a year that'd be a non-concern because of the hundreds of crashes it prevented. But in real life if the system caused just one accident a year that'd represent a tripling of the accident rate ove no system.

You have to have confidence that an automatic system outperforms humans by an order of magnitude before it is accepted by the public, underwriters, investors etc. Otherwise self-driving cars would be a commonplace option already. They already work, probably better than drivers and certainly better than some.

OK, here's the author's analogy. A PC was hardware that ran software. By choosing a third party operating system, the IBM PC's designers turned it into an interchangeable commodity.

These days a car is a hardware that runs software too. By choosing third party dashboard OSs, the manufacturers are turning them into interchangeable commodities.

Really? If the same dashboard OS ran in a Mercedes C class and a Ford Fiesta, they'd become interchangeable?

The simple answer is, who cares? Why should we be trusting science to a bunch of arrogant people that cost too much, live to short, and have such an inefficient method of programming anyway? Science itself is something that should be automated, to create a world where everyone gets to know exactly how to do whatever they want to do, without all the whiny political bs about it? Wah, women can whine about being unemployed just as much as automated men increasingly are.

I take your point, but I'm addressing the attitude that because Muslim countries are different from us that must mean they're incapable of doing impressive things. That's just wishful thinking.

Of course "formidable" is a relative term. Iran's industrial capability isn't formidable compared to Germany, but it sure is compared to Iraq. Their automotive industry builds over a million cars a year.

Because you brought up automobile design.

And how do you know they have "zero know how"? Know how isn't a property of nations, it belongs to individuals who can be hired for a reasonable price.

If you mean "zero indigenous know how" that's something we can't take for granted either. The UAE is small (9 million -- just a bit larger than Switzerland), but it is very rich and no doubt has its share of talented individuals. What's more if they reached out to other Arab countries (as well as hiring a few key non-Arab personnel -- like we had Germans in the 50s and 60s), I don't doubt they could put together a reasonably "Arab" space program, which I see as a positive development. Such a program wouldn't build every jot and tiddle of their hardware right down to the nuts and bolts, but then we don't do that either.

Thought experiment. Suppose you're in charge of setting up a UAE and they give you a huge wad of cash to set up a space program. How would *you* go about doing it to maximize national scientific prestige?

Social liquidity is very low in the U.S. so if you are born poor, hard work will not be enough to bring you out of it, you also need luck.
[...]
what we need is a system that isn't stacked against people based on what family they were born into.

My family immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s with only $1000 and the clothes in our suitcases (our (Asian) home country feared mass emigration, and limited how much money you could take with you to the equivalent of about $500 per adult). For years we lived in low-income housing, bought staples from the local Salvation Army, and rummaged other people's garage sales trying to find bargains. We were basically lower class, except we had no preconceptions about what we were "supposed" to do. Nobody telling us like you are that "the system" was stacked against us so it wasn't worth trying to fight it. We fought tooth and nail to better our lives.

Today we're in the lower fringes of the upper class. Most of my extended family immigrated shortly after, and most of them have "made it" into comfortable middle-class lives. A few are upper-class (including one who owns a multimillion dollar cell phone store chain), and one is still stuck in low-income housing. So we are not an outlier. This is what you can really do in this country if you don't have any preconceptions about breaking out of the lower class, and really try to succeed.

If you have the willpower and the ability, you can succeed in this country regardless of what circumstances you were born into. Hard work can in fact bring you out of poverty. If you believe it when others tell you otherwise, you've already given up on the game of life. You cannot succeed if you don't try, and telling people it's not worth trying is consigning them to their current state for the rest of their lives.

In general society would benefit a lot from funding all or part of everyones education with taxes. Even if you don't intend to study more yourself you benefit from people around you getter more educated.

The U.S. already spends more on education per student than any other country. The problem isn't funding for education.

IMHO the problem is a lack of desire to take advantage of that education to better yourself and your circumstances. My parents were flabbergasted at the quality of education that was being provided "for free" by the government here, and made sure my sister and I always kept up with our schoolwork. It was an opportunity they never had when they were kids (unless you count forced indoctrination into Imperial Japanese philosophy that all other Asians were put on Earth serve them). And they made damn sure we took full advantage of it. That's the main difference I saw between myself and the other students. I never took public education for granted because my parents emphasized how fortunate I was to even have it.

Also the sonic boom issue was more FUD by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed than the real issue. Back in the 80s, before the oil crisis, these companies wanted to stop British Aerospace and Aerospatiale from establishing a bridgehead at the luxury travel sector using Corcorde and its derivatives. But thankfully the Arab oil shock stopped Concorde.

Out of curiosity, how old are you? I was a kid in the 1970s. 1970s jet engines were LOUD. When we were playing during recess and a jet plane passed overhead at 30,000 ft at the right orientations (certain directions were noisier), we basically couldn't hold a conversation without yelling. That's how loud they were. They were a great way to demonstrate that sound was slower than light because it was so damn loud it was obvious exactly where the sound was coming from. Your ears could indisputably pinpoint the sound as coming from several hands-breadths behind the plane.

The concerns about the Concorde's sonic boom being even louder were very real. The planes we have today where you often don't even notice they're passing overhead are a poor point of reference, and a testament to how great a job the engine manufacturers have done at reducing noise.

Compare that to 54 kilowatt, total maximum possible power output of those two turbojet engines. 100,000 kW for 10 mph wind vs 54 kW for Concorde. Our eardrums and instruments are sensitive enough to pick up the sonic boom over 10mph wind, but thats about it.

Total energy isn't as important as the spectrum. If all that energy is directed into a narrow low-frequency band, it'll be a lot noisier even at a lower energy level, moreso at the lower frequencies (the atmosphere absorbs higher frequencies more rapidly). In fact that's mostly what the engineers have done to make today's jet engines quieter - changed their noise profile to spread that acoustic energy over a broader spectrum of frequencies and into higher frequencies. The scalloped cutouts on the trailing edge of newer engine cowlings does exactly this.

On the occasions I forget a charger I have to minimise running Windows or I'll be running out of battery at least twice as fast as when using OS X. I can get work 7 Hours using just the battery on my rMBP with occasional excursions to Windows to check mail but or use corporate windows only tools but running windows will only give me 3 hours.

The 15" rMBP has a 95 Wh battery and lasts 7-8 hours. The Dell XPS 15 with similar hardware and a higher res screen has a 91 Wh battery and lasts 6-7 hours under Windows. If you're only getting 3 hours in Windows on your rMBP, that's more an indication that Apple has put very little effort into optimizing their Windows drivers. Not an indication that Windows sucks.

If you want to compare the 13" rMBP, it has a 75 Wh battery and lasts about 10-12 hours. The Dell XPS 13 manages 9-10 hours with a battery only 2/3rds the size (52 Wh) and a higher res screen (3200x1800 vs 2560x1600). If you get the lower res screen (1920x1080) it'll go 15 hours.