... is on one hand the AV companies are flagging PUA, while on the other hand offering toolbars and search changes of their own at every opportunity. Effectively they are doing what they can to force their own search on users and then flagging anything that might change it, a very shady position if you ask me.

Hint: you can't, because it doesn't. More likely the contrary (as in: seeing a naked body every now & then lets kids grow up to be healthy adults). As has been shown at least a few times in serious studies

The best way for anyone to see how this is true is to see what goes on at a Nudist park, village, beach, etc. and my direct study (this summer) of the situation confirms your answer. Nudity != sex in spades. Also, people talk about body acceptance. If a nudist camp experience can't give you that with bodies all over the spectrum, then you really do need help.

I joined Cedar Waters Village http://nhnude.com/ this year, after a lifetime of avoiding places like that (except for that one visit to Moonstone Beach (PPTJLC)), and I can only say that I regret not doing something like this sooner in my life. The ability to just walk out of your cabin after waking up - bypassing your clothes hanging in the closet completely - and traipse off to the beach not giving a single flying fuck is refreshing.

--
BMO - Piping Plovers Taste Just Like Chicken

Eh. Don't oversell the old gold standard. For starters, a gold standard was typically a steady and persistent malaise of deflation, as economic output increased more steadily than the money supply.

Yeah, anyone advocating returning to the gold standard needs to read some economic history to really see what things were like when we were on the gold standard. 1800-1933 saw 33 recessions/depressions - every 4 years on average - with declines in business activity or GDP of 10%, 20%, and even 30% common.

Since going off the gold standard, we've had 13 recessions in 82 years, or every 6.3 years on average. And aside from the recessions following the Great Depression and WWII, none of them has seen GDP shrink by more than 5%.

Zero inflation/deflation in a currency happens when the amount of currency floating around exactly matches economic productivity. With a fiat currency, a legit government tries its best to expand the money supply to maintain that balance. With a gold standard, whether you get inflation or deflation depends entirely on the ratio of economic productivity to how much new gold is mined. And don't even get me started on how disastrous it is to set a finite limit on the amount of currency you can mine, like Bitcoin does.

Being on the gold standard doesn't mean you have solid monetary policy based on a physical good. It means your "policy" is effectively determined by how much gold people are finding and mining at any given time - its based on luck and good/bad fortune. Yes it prevents abuse by the government printing too much currency. But it avoids that potential abuse by completely removing the economy's rudder, leaving you adrift and completely at the mercy of how lucky gold miners are that year.

The true fundamental currency is productivity. Whether you use dollars, euros, gold, or bitcoin, avoiding inflation/deflation means increasing the supply of physical/virtual currency to exactly match increases in productivity.

Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

Fortunately, tandomness is easily faked. Any decent semi-random number generator can do so quite easily, and sources of genuinely random noise are quite easily to incorporate in very real hardware if needed.

Half the world is intent on making rules for everything, just because "there ought to be a law" against anything remotely risky or unpleasant. And the other half lashes out by ignoring those rules an doing what the hell they want.

1) If you treat people like children, they will start behaving like them.
2) If you make tons of unreasonable rules, people will start breaking them in protest, and start breaking the reasonable ones as well, especially if it's hard to tell the two apart ("You can't bring your gun on the plane because of terrists, but you also can't bring your bottle of water for the same reason"). Unjust, unreasonable or petty laws endanger all of the law.

Now, having a rule against using selfie sticks in a roller coaster is reasonable, but people choose to ignore that law, or tell others to, because of a whole range of other laws that are silly. And because of the way those laws are enforced (instead of treating them as a means to an end, they are treated as a goal in themselves).

There's good reason to be skeptical of rules. Too often, rules are not honest. The usual tactic is to not give any explanation. When that won't fly, safety is the #1 excuse for a rule. But so often, it turns out that someone profits from a rule, and that is the real reason for it. Even when there are genuine safety concerns, there is often also a profit motive. That seems highly likely with this particular Disney rule. Why couldn't people use electronic devices or carry nail clippers on planes? Why did so many cities try red light cameras? Why can't people bring their own food and drink to the movie theaters? Why can't we play movies on our computers' DVD drives?

Yeah. Don't blindly trust The Rules.

And believe me, on a long trip that difference is critical. He's done several trips (and I've been on one with him) where a 200 mile range just wouldn't have cut it.

I've been saying for years now that unless there's an order of magnitude breakthrough in battery charging technology, using an electric car on a long trip is going to remain stupid. It's telling that the solution closest to working thus far (that doesn't involve stopping for 30+ minutes every 2.5 hours) is swapping the battery pack (all 1200 pounds of it on the Tesla S).

That's a large part of the reason I don't think electric cars will catch on. Not that they couldn't. They could catch on right now if we can break free of environmentalists' pipe dream of all cars being electric. If you can convince people to use an electric car for their daily driving, and rent a gas/diesel car for their few times a year long trips, then EVs become completely viable today. Those long trips probably only represent about 10% of your annual drives, so we could potentially reduce our gasoline consumption by 90% right now.

But environmentalists' penchant for insisting that anything short of a 100% green solution is unacceptable is going to be their undoing. Just like with hybrids when they were first introduced - environmentalists initially hated hybrids because they generate all their energy from burning gasoline. They tried to block approval for hybrids as a way to meet California's LEV and ZEV standards, in hopes of forcing automakers to develop EVs.

I'm not sure if Force Touch enough to convince an Android user like myself to switch, but there are definitely some interesting possibilities for app developers.

Why would it make you want to switch? Android apps have been doing it since at least 2011. Android's touch API communicates sufficient information to implement this if you wish.

But this being Apple, they will give it a fancy name, everyone will think they invented it, and they will pretend like they invented it. Just like Siri, which came out after I'd been doing searches, sending texts, and starting apps by voice on Android for at least a year.

There are some features that could tempt someone to switch. Apple's fingerprint scanner wasn't the first, but it was the first one that was (almost) seamlessly integrated into the phone's usage pattern. Plenty of Android users told me they'd love to have that on their phones. But the thing is: they didn't have to switch, they only had to wait a while; today there are a few Android phones with non-sucky fingerprint scanners, and as far as I know the OS now supports it as well. If Apple turns force touch from a gimmick into something actually useful, then it won't be long before other manufacturers follow suit.

If anything, us Apple users are at a disadvantage here, Apple focus only on certain things and are slow to develop others. One thing I'd love is a water resistant iPhone, but as yet there are only some rumours that Apple is actuall working on this.

They came very close, twice. And both attempts failed because of mechanical problems, not because it can't be done. Watching the video of the 2nd attempt, I'd say that they have control authority to spare. I think the lesson from both failures is that landing their first stage is in fact very doable.

While the planetary alignment was convenient, it isn't exactly necessary on RTG-powered spacecraft. Pioneer 11 visited Jupiter, then flew to almost the opposite side of the solar system to visit Saturn. Longer travel time (and greater chance of equipment failure during that time) is the only drawback.

Another factor working against a Pluto encounter was the lack of sunlight that far out. During Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune (which was slightly further away from the sun than Pluto at the time), sunlight was so dim that NASA had to reprogram the cameras to take longer exposures than they were originally designed. Then someone calculated that Voyager 2 would be moving so fast that the photos of Neptune would be blurred just by the changing parallax between the spacecraft and Neptune. So they programmed the spacecraft and cameras to rotate slightly during the exposures, effectively panning the camera to cancel out the changing parallax.

All this happened so quickly they got just one shot at it, and they had to do it blind. By the time the first near photos reached Earth, if they had turned out to be blurred, any correcting instructions sent to Voyager 2 would have arrived after the spacecraft had passed Neptune. So NASA wasn't even sure if the closest Neptune and Triton photos would even be aimed correctly. Heck, they weren't even sure they were going to make it to Triton (Voyager 2 flew less than 5000 km over Neptune's North pole to get to Triton). But as it was the last major destination and they'd recently discovered an atmosphere on Triton, they figured what the heck and rolled the dice. As it turned out, they got everything right, and Voyager returned some spectacular Neptune and Triton photos.

A Pluto encounter would've run into the same problem. Except Pluto is a much smaller target than Neptune, whose mass (and therefore gravity) is much less accurately known so properly aiming the camera is even trickier. Even New Horizons (with newer, more sensitive cameras) is going to have to use the same panning trick Voyager 2 used at Neptune. New Horizons is moving fast enough it could cover the distance from the Earth to the Moon in less than 8 hours, so all the close-up photos and measurements of Pluto are going to be over in a matter of hours. And it's basically guiding itself - providing the most accurate measurements we have of Pluto's mass so we can fine-tune its trajectory as it approaches Pluto.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

I'm guessing you live in the US? If so, erhaps you should petition your local person of power (senator? congressman? whatever) to address the pitiful consumer laws in your country. In Europe such things are legally bound, in terms of products being fit for purpose for their intended lifetime. In the UK this is implemented in (amongst other things) the Sale of Goods Act which gives you significant ammunition in terms of demanding it be fixed for a period of (I believe) up to 5 years.

Genuinely not trying to be a smart ass; you could be in Europe and be unaware of such laws - hopefully you are. Companies, as a matter of course, will conveniently forget to mention these rights until you beat them around the head with them. But then, that's business - deny deny deny, until you're banged to rights.

This seems like one of those cases where the FCC rules limiting frequency interference take a back seat for the greater good. Put noise generator aboard the firefighting planes which jams the control frequencies commonly used by hobby drones and RC aircraft (any drones used by the firefighters can be adapted to use a different frequency - probably military). After these idiots lose control of their precious drone and watch it fall into the fire, they'll learn pretty quickly not to fly them around firefighting equipment.