Minor collision? The BusinessInsider source claims the pursuing officers had to be hospitalized. That doesn't sound "minor" to me.

Or, basically if you're going 100mph, sideswiping the median, while normally a recoverable incident, becomes one where you can get hurt. Physics! (Remember, the energy in an object increases by the square of the velocity - go twice as fast, energy in the system quadruples).

I get what you're saying, but if the "high speeds" were "nearly" 100MPH it's not unreasonable to wonder just how the car got literally ripped in half. I do wonder about the safety of a car like that. A lot of the US's top Interstate speed limits are between 70-80MPH. You're not talking a huge difference in speed at that point, so it's not unreasonable to at least question the safeness of the car and ask for some additional testing/data.>blockquote>

The problem is energy. It increases with the square of velocity. (you know, (1/2)*m*v^2).

The survivability of a crash drops greatly going from 35mph to 50mph, going to 70mph drops it even more. Plus, given it's a city street not designed for such speeds, the chances of surviving go lower still.

Next, he was ejected from the car - usually because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt. Seeing as the car split behind the front seats, that would indicate he was an idiot, and people can die at 35mph being ejected. I don't think it's even survivable at 100mph when the fundamental safety system in a vehicle isn't used (all the others, airbags, etc., derive their benefits only when seatbelts are worn).

Hell, cars split in two all the time, usually going no faster than 55 or less.

They just need to register ONE of them to reestablish contact. They might even be able to use "domain tasting" to register a bunch and then cancel within 5 days.

Domain tasting is no longer possible - ICANN started charging 25 cents per domain registration years ago to counteract domain squatting where they'd register a bunch of domains, see if they make money, and return them if they don't.

By charging 25 cents always, it seems to have cut down the practice immensely because you need to register thousands of domains at a time, and that costs real scratch.

There's no need to spend that much. A lot of motherboards have S/PDIF outputs, and with a good coax/TOSLINK DAC (like the ~$40 FiiO D3), pristine noise-free stereo sound is both easier and cheaper than buying an expensive sound card.

If you want only two channel audio.

To get surround sound you need to move up in interfaces, and the only available one is HDMI, which has a bunch of issues in and of itself when you only want it for audio, and not video.

Or USB.

All that needs to be said is to compare woot.com after it's been taken over by Amazon with the new site the Woot founder started up - meh.com (yes, it's called meh).

Hell, if you remember woot's website before the takeover, it bears a closer resemblance to meh than today.

As for Amazon's awful ToS? Amazon is Apple-lite. They have an approval system just like Apple, and that's where Amazon's value-add is.

Remember how we keep asking for someone to do a curated app store to help get rid of the iffier apps found on Google Play? Here's Amazon.

Well, the real reason is when you're on top, there's only one place to go and that's downhill.

Samsung's dominance in the Android market is legendary - it's what, 90% of all Android phones? (take Google I/O's 1B unique devices in the past month, that would be 900M of them Samsung. And given sales figures, ~20-30M (2-4%) are SGS5's, 80M or so are SGS4 (9%). All the rest are thousands of lower end models (SGS3, 2, and all the Galaxy S variants that are really just cheap phones with fancy branding).

Like how Apple rode iPod up the growth curve, Samsung rode the Galaxy family (low end phones to high end flagships) up the consumer smartphone curve.

And when you're #1...

Samsung can still be a luxury brand, they just need to act like one and use materials that speak "high end" - get away from the plastics and into more interesting stuff. Metal, for instance - try some more exotic metals.

What do they do if you don't supply the desk key? They brake into the drawer. What should they do if you dont supply the encryption key? They should brake into the..

Sure, they could do that. And in the meantime, they'll hold you in custody until they do.

Given the length of time it would take to brute force AES and the like, that would effectively mean jailed for life with no parole. And I'm sure that would make the government's life much simpler.

Instead, the kid gets 6 months

Don't want your nudes to end up in public? Don't take nudes that you wouldn't want the public to see. Then you can be a true victim. The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."

We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.

Technically true if she posted the photos on Facebook or something.

Instead, what happens is she and her boyfriend do stuff like sexting and sharing rather private photos that way. They break up, douchebag boyfriend decides he's innocent and posts those private photos online.

It's why the German courts I believe say if you do that, you're not only responsible for any damages, but also for taking it down (ha, ha) since those photos were not posted with permission.

Basically, every teenager with a cellphone and a camera is vulnerable to this (I think the numbers were what, 60% of all texts and other messages were of a sexual nature?).

It really is a modern technology thing - if you took nudie pictures of yourself, you had to get them developed, etc., and you mailed them off. If your ex-boyfriend wanted to embarrass you with them, it would take a lot of work to get them published widely. These days, digital photos make it easy to share with your friends, and ex-friends.

NASA needs a passion project on which they can fire on all cylinders and do something big.

No, the American people need a passion project for space. The space race happened because it was "Us vs Them" and when you got the people behind you, politics generally gets out of the way.

But when you don't have the people behind you, politics gets in the way and you end up with stuff like the Shuttle and people opposing you on purely ideological grounds.

Hell, try doing any pure science research, and it's heavily politicized.

The only way to do stuff like mine asteroids or go to Mars is to somehow light a fire that gets people excited enough to actually do it. And that generally takes an external threat. I mean, WWII is an example of how you can do into massive deficit spending and have everyone "suffer" (rationing, wage controls, etc) for the "greater good". Ditto the space race - can't let those Ruskies win, after all, so full speed ahead, damn everything else.

These days we're all engaged in piles of petty squabbles - science vs. religion, taxation, spending, climate change, conservation, oil, etc.

Spreadsheets are actually tools of terror!

You jest, but they actually are - a lot of terror groups use them to keep track of funding and expense tracking (Al Qaeda being one of them), and ironically, for corruption protection. Because they're not necessarily flush with cash, and keeping spending down and wise means your terror group can do more with less.

Basically, a terror group happens to also be a business and businesses need to keep track of their accounts.

The thing that always amazes me is while simple games like chess, weiqi, checkers, etc., all seem to have unlimited playability and intricacy, computer games generally don't.

Tetris comes to mind as a computer-only game (you can really only play it on a computer - a real life version is sorta difficult and messy).

And it's been going strong for what, 3 decades now? (The only reason the rules change is because the Tetris Foundation or whatever needs to keep themselves relevant, but the original is still as fun and addictive as ever).

I'm surprised there are console games that allow you to buy one copy and play on more than one console at the same time, as tepples seems to imply in the GP post.

Two on PS3/4 and Xbox360/One - the "master" console (which can be changed on either) which lets the game play offline, and the subsidiary one, which lets the game play while logged in online (though only one login per account).

But it's true, right? If a cheap Dell off-the-shelf computer was far better than the current generation, that would definitely show how terrible the current consoles are. Instead, you need to spend maybe $800 minimum, you probably want to build the computer yourself and therefor need to have the time and the knowledge to build the computer yourself and then deal with any potential issues...

Are you kidding? Dell's $500 SteamBox entry was a pathetic i3 entrant. And $500 gets you an Xbone with depth-sensing camera. You could save $100 and get a PS4 or Xbone without.

Someone needs to explain to Valve and everyone that if SteamBoxes are to be the "next big thing in consoles" that they need to cost like one. And to be stuck with it because people don't want to upgrade it yearly - if I spend $500 on a SteamBox, I expect to be able to play the latest games on it for 5+ years at 1080p with the same quality (or better - console graphics typically improve through its lifespan as people optimized).

And if a SteamBox is supposed to be a gaming PC and not a console, well, geez, how about selling it more as a PC than as a console.

You know, there used to be a time where there were excellent webmasters that could do both HTML and Javascript great. Where you went to a website and without JS, it degraded gracefully.

Apple's website was like that, maybe about 8 years ago or so. Other than being a bit ugly in parts, it worked extremely well without JavaScript. (turning it on made it prettier and things worked a lot better, though). In fact, I only noticed it when I noticed it rendered differently on two different Firefoxes - on one, I had NoScript set to allow apple.com, on the other, I didn't.

It was a thing of beauty.

Of course, these days, it's gone to requiring javascript, though you may see old remnants of the time when it worked just fine without.

Wait, I was alive during that time -- the smallpox vaccine wasn't made from smallpox, it was made from cowpox. So samples of the vaccine would not be smallpox, dead or otherwise. Samples of smallpox would be from labs specifically testing the disease. (Hopefully, testing for means to eradicate it.)

And only a decade or so ago, smallpox was effectively eradicated from the world - a win for vaccinations.

Of course, then we had the whole anti-vaxxer thing and now, smallpox is back and as infectious as ever. And you thought whooping cough was bad. All these controlled diseases are now rampaging communities again, except instead of in poorer nations in Africa and the like where the lack of medical care derives from corrupt governments and poverty, it's in first-world nations with access to clean water, medical aid, education, etc.

I wasn't ecstatic about all the non-major courses I had to take when my primary worry was getting a programming job after I got my degree, and I might have taken an $100K out if it was available. But now 10-15 years later I'm glad I that my formal education included a psychology class, a statistics class, a history class, and others. Maybe I would have picked all that up on my own, or maybe I'd have a giant black hole in my world view.

  There's a training side to education and there's a wisdom side to education, and they're both important in the long run. Telling young people to get jobs right out of high school because being well-rounded isn't necessary for "smart" people just means it's going to be a crap shoot as to whether their decisions repeat history or learn from it.

Actually, we have a proxy for it a decade and a half ago.

It was called the "dot-com boom" then - where kids fresh out of high school decided to either start their own companies, get hired by startups, etc., and bypass the college route to earn some big bucks early and retire at 35 (the dream)..

We're seeing the effects about now, really and as everyone knows, history repeats itself.

Hell, many of the early millionaires lost all their money because high school home economics courses don't really teach you how to handle money anymore (home ec was really a "how to survive out there" style course - cooking, budgeting, saving/spending/retiring, etc.), so they spent their money on flashy cars and big houses.

And here we go around again, dot-com 2.0. Though, hiring high school kids has the advantage in that they're young and easy to excite with money, while those who have been around or studied at college can take a more critical look at things and see the shiny bauble is nothing more than a cheap exploitive ploy.