Wannabe central planners think they have all the answers.

Here's a crazy idea - stop artificial price fixing of water and let the stupid uses become unprofitable through millions of decisions by people who know about their own business.

"Oh, no," they say, "we know better. Even though they created this mess with that attitude.

Remember, Slate's entire business model is to find fault where there is none and assign blame. Keep this in mind when you read their next inflammatory article and you'll see the pattern.

Open is nice, but the Cyanogen people need to pay the bills.

There's no point to CM if it's not secure. If they're installing Microsoft blobs by default, it's not secure. We know Microsoft openly cooperates with the NSA on eavesdropping technology - I even wonder if this is a subtle warrant canary.

Assuming the least-bad possbility, then if they want to offer an easy-to-use tool to install a tested Microsoft bundle from the CM servers, then fantastic - for people who want to make that trade-off.

fuel needed for the landing is inefficient compared to a splashdown parachute recovery

The barge/ocean is just a temporary measure. The vision is twenty rockets launching a day and returning to the launch site to prep for the next launch.

There were about 120 rocket launches last year. SpaceX's mission statement is to reduce the cost of launches by 100x, and utilization rates go up as costs fall, so it's not just 100x more launches - twenty a day is probably very conservative if they hit their price targets.

Queue the folks who can't imagine what anybody would do with more than 640 launches a year.

But it appeared they could come down slowly. Pretty close to hover.

Yeah, I think that's the inevitable end-game - there is plenty of time to make small adjustments right up until the point of contact with the solid parts of the planet. AIUI, they're so close to empty on the fuel tank after the burnback that they're trying to get it down on the pad ASAP. They can only attempt these landings for now on launches that don't require as much fuel as others - supposedly the next iteration can hold more fuel.

I would be kind of surprised if it was generally noticable

Amazon reviews are quite positive.

Assange is just a SWATing early adopter.

Disinfo is the oldest game in the book. Assange is stuck in a hole in London due to the oldest. :sigh:

It could be a good opportunity to repair relations with an ally.

Yep - let's hope he's a smart enough opportunist to leverage the situation. Remember, the USG thought the Bolivia scenario was plausible enough to take extreme illegal action. So that confirms a willingness.

By the way, has Bolivia asked for (and gotten) an apology from any of those countries?

According to reports, yes.

Assurances they'll never do such a thing again? Hardly. Violate the treaty and send the Ambassador to apologize.

Assange is an ass, and he may have lied, but the stuff that was done to divert the Bolivian presidents plane was flat out illegal according to diplomatic rules.

Assange was at the controls of the F22 that had a RADAR lock on the President's plane.

Created danger. Doncha know. All his fault.

To admit that the leaders of Turkey of the past, were involved might call into question the legitimacy of Turkey today

The past leaders of many countries have been involved in genocides. Heck, current US Law is that racial interment is legal and the wars against the previous nations here are thoroughly documented.

But say that and most Americans will say, "what assholes" (or conversely "Happy Columbus Day!") but the scimitars will remain sheathed. I seems like an awful case of fragile identity. Weird jingoistic nonsense.

Then again, most Americans don't even care that the legitimacy of the governments are called into question every time they violate their operating agreements.

Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.

There's some natural variation. I can see near-UV -- this caused some confusion in high school Chemistry class when I could see some spectrum lines that nobody else could.

I've got the mild form of color deficiency that reduces my total hue resolution from about 10 million colors to about 2 million colors. Maybe my cones register UV better too as a side-effect.

Oh, and I'll happily stick with two million colors if the alternative is a freaking needle in the eye. Eyedrops - let's talk.

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

My bank charges $60 a year for a box - that's less expensive than any of the online services for large quantities of data. The real costs are a function of how much data you want to backup and how much redundancy you want offsite. For instance, for the 6TB drives I'm using, to have two onsite and two offsite costs twelve hundred bucks now, which compares favorably with tape solutions. I tend to upgrade backup drives every other year and trickle down the backup drives to servers and workstations, so it's not a sunk cost necessarily.

I prefer ZFS mirroring over LUKS aes-xts devices, the security of which entirely depends on how good your passphrase is. So don't be stupid and lazy in that regard. If your passphrase is really good, you shouldn't worry about anybody getting ahold of your drive.

Unless you live in a swing state, your vote pretty much doesn't count.

There's so little chance that your vote will count that it's pretty much not worth being informed on the issues. This causes an obviously bad cycle, which is easily exploited by concentrated interests.

If somebody was selling a product with a code-base that operated on rules this good, they'd scrap it for a rewrite. At least in a market that offers anything but a monopoly product.

He's *already* become a generic right-wing kook.

As if there were any other way to gather the requisite delegates to win the nomination.

Let's put it this way - if Murray Rothbard wanted to strategically win the nomination, he'd have to run like Rand.