Well, that is where the instruments are.

IFR isn't an automated landing. The pilot is still flying. They're just using various beacons and displays instead of their eyes to see where they are.

I'd really like to see a stovetop with a thermostat. Bains-marie have recently become popular for certain kinds of low, slow cooking, but they're not common and they're unfortunately pricey (and usually require a vacuum sealer that adds even more to the cost).

I end up doing a lot of things in the oven instead, where I can simmer a pot roast at at a reliable 150F. But it's not as precise or consistent as I'd like, especially at the low end.

Getting the stove top to do both precision heating and ultra-high temperature blasting for searing would be a bit of a challenge, but I'd like to see it.

Something cookbooks harp on: most ovens do very poor temperature regulation. Baking books in particular recommend getting a separate themometer, and adding thermal ballast (such as stones) to your oven to get it to keep an even temperature.

That's not just for ultra-high-end stuff; that's for just making good bread. Bread is fairly sensitive to temperature, because you're trying to orchestrate a complex set of reactions including yeast production, internal steam, setting the internal protein structure, and browning the crust. Swings of 25F are enough to throw off that balance, yielding loaves that are too high or too low or too brown or other problems.

Most home ovens do it very badly. It seems to me that's a much more fixable problem without spending a fortune on the ultimate oven.

I could imagine, say, pastry chefs, who are already famous for being control freaks. Producing truly great pastry, reliably, is an extraordinary feat of both science and art. I could imagine them wanting this for a high-end patisserie.

But beyond that, it seems to be a solution looking for a problem. This is Myhrvold, who already wants to see you a $600 book containing a recipe for a hamburger requiring several thousand dollars worth of tools you don't already have in your kitchen (including a dewar of liquid nitrogen). To make a hamburger. I'm sure it's a very, very, very good hamburger... but in the end, it's a hamburger, and I do a pretty fine burger with a cast-iron skillet.

I guess the real question is going to be "how similar is similar?" Aereo won't want to pack up and go home; they're going to want to tweak their business model to see if they can get it just different enough to be not "extremely similar".

If they were a big company, I suspect they'd just make some trivial change and wait to be sued (and wait even longer while it works its way up to SCOTUS again). "Narrow rulings" tend to favor those with the power to claim that they don't apply. And I find it kind of annoying that SCOTUS never seems to recognize that: they pretend they're not laying down general rules, but since it takes so long to get them to issue specific rulings it acts like a general rule anyway.

Super PACs predated Citizen's United by some time; it's just that the term wasn't coined until then. People had been doing it for a while, including the group after which the decision is named. CU just made it legally certain and thus increased its popularity.

You are absolutely right about the way Super PACs work. Real change comes only from a concerted, long-term effort. Campaign finance reform is going to be a very hard sell, not just because of entrenched interests but also because it's easier to get people to agree to "something should be done" than "let us do this particular thing". It will take a steady, well-thought out effort.

I'm slightly less cynical about the ability to get media. The media sell air space, and they don't much care to whom they sell it. Capitalists will happily sell you the rope to hang them with. They do so because (a) they don't really believe you'll hang them, and (b) they know that if they don't, somebody else will. Their success won't impact this quarter's bottom line, or even next year's, and they're simply not going to worry about anything further afield than that. Too many other things change too quickly for them to forego cash on the barrelhead.

I've always wanted a unicorn. We'd play together, and I'd get to ride it. It would have much better gas mileage than a car, and because unicorns only poop rainbows, it would be much better for the environment.

My proposal has about the same chance of passing the Republican-led House as theirs does. This is an election year, and no Republican (and few Democrats, for that matter) is going to vote for a tax-raising bill in an election year. (Note: all years are election years now.)

(Besides, this is a revenue bill; they have to start in the House anyway. What gives?)

iPhones do have the advantage of being particularly distinctive. Android phones come in a stunning array of models and colors, but iPhones are rather restricted. If you're going to invest brain cells in "Don't take that phone" it would be easiest for it to be iPhones.

If so, it sounds as if you'd need a fair bit of "herd immunity" to make other phones safe. Either that, or some highly distinctive branding, which is not the way Android manufacturers tend to work; they make their living offering everything to everybody.

Certainly it would be to your benefit to know if the device you're risking your freedom for is worth the effort. But I had thought that phone thefts were largely crimes of opportunity: you see the phone unguarded and you take it. I wouldn't think you have all that long to judge what kind of phone it is.

I suppose maybe these are just professionals, good at their jobs, who have heard that the fences aren't taking some brands any more because it's not worth it. But I wonder if there's some other factor besides the kill switches that accounts for the data.

Irritatingly, laptops have speakers built in; worse, phones have to have speakers on. But I still like my desktop and the certainty I get from having a physical switch. I don't care what games you play to try to subvert my settings: I am not going to have to hunt down your noisy tab.

At 200 miles up, it's further from Starbucks than any point on the planet.

You're right about the vacuum, but I think you should consider this: the government raided the treasury (or rather, borrowed with the treasury's backing, which can be the same thing if you really insist on looking at it that way) in order to keep unemployment from skyrocketing. As bad as it was, there was serious risk of a domino effect, where the failure of one industry resulted in job losses that reduced overall national income, putting strains on other industries.

As bad as the recession was, the goal was to keep it from becoming far, far worse. "Creative destruction" would have resulted in years to decades of destruction before it ever got around to any creativity, with vast misery in the process.

The bankers may well have taken advantage of that for their personal benefit; I'll leave it to others to make the argument that they got screwed over. There was plenty of screwage to go around: the economy was crashing because the musical chairs of highly leveraged money came to a screeching halt, and everybody scrambled to insist that their paper gains were more real than other people's paper gains. Everybody felt screwed over and there was no way out of this that didn't leave the vast majority of people feeling like they got the shorter end of it.

Everybody will always be able to insist that the economy would have been just fine if we'd just done it their way. It wasn't great, and I'll never be able to prove the counterfactual of how much worse it could have been. But I think it merits consideration: jobs and industries don't bounce back instantaneously, even when there's need, because of inherent friction in the economy, and I think the government acted correctly (at least in the broad strokes) to prop up the existing economy. That gave us time to hopefully put it on a sounder footing. Whether we will or not...

They do, in some states. I believe Ohio has a Libertarian party ballot at the primaries; there may be others.

The Tea Party isn't registered as a political party; they are a movement within the Republican party. They may well be able to gain separate primaries if they wanted them, but as far as I can tell their goal is explicitly NOT to do that. They don't want to run against Republicans in a general election; they want to replace Republican candidates with those more to their liking.

If they were to run it as a third-party race (or if Cantor were to run a write-in campaign) it would open up a huge opportunity for the Democrats. (Something like IRV might prevent that, though there are other ways to subvert IRV.)

Arguably, yeah. When Constantine "donated" the western Roman empire to the Church, it basically turned Christianity into a (known)-world-spanning empire in one fell swoop. It's not as easy as that, of course, but it was a massive leg up that led to Christian domination of Europe, and from there to the Western Hemisphere during the Age of Exploration.

Jesus was only indirectly involved in that, unless of course you believe that he actually did give Constantine the victory at Milvian Bridge.

Now, that's all kinda BS, since the "Donation of Constantine" is a forgery and the real path to Christian domination of the Roman empire is more complicated. But he did pave the way for Christianity in both the eastern and western Roman empire, so while he might not be more important than Jesus to the domination of the religion, he's surely way up there. (And anyway I'd argue that Paul was more important than Jesus when it came to setting up the religion as we know it.)