Typically, taxi medallions aren't sold by the government anymore. They're typically sold by their previous holders and the high prices reflect their scarcity and perceived value. The market decides this value (even when they're auctioned off by the state), so there isn't any guarantee that they'll maintain that value. Any contracts that exist say nothing about limiting the supply or compensating medallion-holders for any speculative prices they paid. Buying a medallion for $800k is just as speculative as buying an $800k house or $800k worth of stock. There are no government guarantees that they will maintain value.

tl;dr... The economics of the taxi medallion situation are extremely similar to shares in a company. The "contracts" that you're referring to don't exist (at least in the form that you image).

In our contemporary world where any sort of "promise of quality" is seen as quaint and most companies see their established brand names as something to be cashed in for executive bonuses, people are trained to not give any weight at all to brands. See the AC response for a great example of that.

You would very much like to see relevant & useful ads, or you would very much like to stop seeing irrelevant & useless ads?

Because while the latter is true for me and most of the people that I know, the former is not quite so popular and doesn't necessarily follow from the latter. A much more palatable way to see fewer irrelevant & useless ads would be to stop seeing so many ads altogether. The more Google's hand touches things, the less likely that is to ever happen.

Perhaps a huge component of "politeness" is the ability to personally identify with the people around you in a significant way. Most of Northern Europe has a remarkable cultural homogeneity. Denmark, for example, is occupied by around 90% people of Danish descent, and even the 10% is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even the religion of Denmark is homogeneous, with the census reporting 80% belonging to Church of Denmark. The rest of Northern Europe is similarly homogeneous, even including the UK.

The rudest people I've ever met in my life have all been European. I'm a very polite person, so I presume it's because they knew that I was American and were unable to stir up any empathy for somebody so culturally different and "other". Perhaps it isn't valid to take your trans-cultural interaction as an accurate representation of intra-cultural interactions.

"Average score" is a stupid metric for comparing ratings anyway. Here's a little discussion about several different utterly wrong ways to make sense of ratings, "average score" being #2.

Your "average score" would rate a product with a single 5 star rating higher than one with 45,000 ratings averaging out to 4.999. Their "proprietary algorithm" is likely to be more useful to everybody than a bunk rating system like "average score".

Anyway, if all of the ratings go up, then you just continue to compare them to each other like you did before. It's not like anyone bases purchases on the absolute star rating of any particular product.

That's not entirely true, at least in the long term. Domain ownership verification could be done entirely through the configuration files or through access to the served content. They claim to handle revocation and reissue of certificates through their site as well, which is going to require at least some sort of polling from your server.

Can you just request certificate signing from them, though?

It looks like they really want to run their software on your server. Software which, while open source, has access to much of your system and a continuous connection to their server.

What exactly do you think connects the intestine to the liver?

When Linus has been piped into the great dev-null in the sky, I for one will welcome Lennart Poettering as the new Emperor of Linux. We'll call it Lenux!

What, too early to start a flame war?

Depending on the mission and compared to the alternatives, yes they are very lightweight. Solar panels can quickly become much heavier once you start outfitting outer solar system probes. Also, if you need continuous operation without solar exposure, you start needing heavy batteries and power-wasting heaters. Large arrays require supports and actuators to deploy and present more failure modes.

The RTG used in Curiosity, for example, is only 45 kg, which sounds like a lot, but Spirit and Opportunity carried nearly half that mass in just batteries and panels, produced less power with them, and still needed to carry a radiothermal heater.

Distant missions like New Horizons would have been prohibitively heavy had they not used an RTG.

Yikes, fair enough. I, of course, didn't read TFS and was operating off of the poor summary.

Publishing a blog called, "Evading security systems for cat burglars: a vocational manual," sounds just as sketchy and well-past-that-line.

Is imparting (academic, general) knowledge really "aid", though? And where do you draw the line?

"Hey, I'm going over to Syria to kill westerners and enslave Christians for the raping and whatnot..."

"but my car broke down Ms Librarian. Do you have a book on automotive repair?"

"but my car broke down Mr Mechanic. Can you point out the distributor for me?"

"but it costs money to get there. Do you have any investing advice?"

"but I have no idea where Syria is. Can you point me in the general direction?"

At some point, you can't be held for responsible for the intentions of others, even if they tell you what they are.

The DEA's MO on all drugs, beyond just marijuana, consists entirely of overhype. Have you ever looked at the schedules? Schedule I, which consists almost entirely of psychedelic drugs is described as such (hilarious emphasis added):

Of course, Schedule II drugs are by far the most abused drugs, including things like prescription opiates, methamphetamine, cocaine, ritalin, etc. But Schedule II is described as having "less abuse potential than Schedule I drugs". It's BS all the way down.

So you do have a problem with reading comprehension.

Here's a tip for successfully debating with people: argue against what they are actually saying, not against whatever nonsense you assume someone idiotic enough to argue against you would say.

So in addition to not understanding the human sense of humor, you're also incapable of reading and comprehending a simple post. Do you really not understand what I said, or are you just too offended and outraged to think straight? I hope you're happy with the trashing that you gave to those strawmen.