Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.

Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.

Like all esoteric fields of study, we outsiders can't understand it because we don't have The Right Stuff.

(Presumably that's something they smoke.)

Your entire elaborate argument is based on a false premise.

As I said, the road damage is exponential with the weight. It is proportional to the axle weight to the fourth power.

Fuel economy is roughly linear with weight, or even less than linear (big rigs get much better MPG per ton than smaller vehicles). Therefore, fuel taxes don't begin to recover the extra costs of heavier vehicles.

Who has made the stupidest argument you've ever heard now? You might look in the mirror.

Your hypotheses that road damage is caused solely by the pressure on the top few millimeters of the road is highly questionable. The Prius is not going to be pounding down through the structure of the concrete nearly as much as your super-duty pickup hauling a huge boat.

I do agree that big rigs should be paying drastically more in fees than they do. However, industry lobbyists will always trump common sense.

Since road damage is exponentially proportional to vehicle weight, heavier trucks *should* be paying more in fees.

My first cynical thought was "shoot them down if they blow up". But one bomber claimed to be on board, so they could have reasonably been concerned that the planes would be hijacked and used as missiles.

Yeah. If you make threats on Slashdot you get picked up by men in white coats instead of black helicopters.

Normal in a race.

"Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt."

Looks like you need to get a bumper sticker with Calvin pissing on a Honda.

Your car is trying to tell you that you're about to roll it.

You do realize that most cars sold in the last couple of decades have computers that can override your inputs and monkey around with your brakes whenever you're trying to speed up or slow down the vehicle?

Slower photons in fiber optics means a slower, more relaxed pace for my web browsing.

It means no one had died yet, as far as they know.