I know the water is fine, but if I lived in Portland and they hadn't emptied the reservoir I would have been looking at the tap water a little more suspiciously, and if I was someone who sometimes bought bottled water I probably would have been a little more likely to buy some. I have no doubt many of you are the same.

Someone peeing in the tap water is icky, it doesn't matter if it's irrational, we are irrational, and as costs of irrationality goes emptying a single reservoir is pretty damn cheap. There's times to stand on scientific principal, this isn't one of them. There's no point in grossing out an entire city, reducing confidence in the municipal water supply, and impacting human health and the environment by pushing people towards bottled drinks, just because it's irrational. Sometimes the most rational thing you can do is accommodate your irrationality.

If you take off your "Electric Companies are TEH EVIL" hat for a second, it's pretty interesting that they have the same issue that states do with paying for roads in relation to electric cars. That is, someone generating electricity or using an electric car is making use of a resource where the cost of access is subsidized by something you are no longer consuming.

I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.

You believe this so strongly you refuse to put your name to it!

Really big talk for a bunch of Anonymous Cowards.

Snowden didn't help anyone. Anybody who was unaware of mass surveillance by 2013 is an idiot. If you weren't taking affirmative steps to protect data you wanted kept private on the internet, that's your problem. Get over this idea that protection your privacy is somebody else's job. Don't expect governments to protect your privacy -- you wouldn't trust a fox to guard a hen house, right?

Except the people did directly support politicians who changed the law retroactively to make warrantless wiretapping OK in 2006. When faced with "your intelligence agencies did illegal things so we changed the law to retroactively make them legal" the American people basically yawned. Just because you're too ignorant to remember recent history doesn't change a thing. The American people have had many opportunities to scale back domestic intelligence gathering. Pretty much without exception they have chosen to keep the politicians who push surveillance in power.

Here's a hint -- all of these things were problems long before 9/11. The PATRIOT ACT basically codified a number of existing practices and allowed the government to use them at greater scale. Pretending "privacy" is some thing you had and just recently lost is nothing but ignorance. If you want privacy you have to take affirmative steps to protect your privacy. Anything else is just blaming others for your own laziness.

I have always thought a small car-mounted drone could be incredibly useful. Even if it could not be used above say 10MPH, just something that could pop up a few hundred feet in the air to give you a quick overview would be awesome.

Especially for finding parking.

I wish my car had a drone for instant scouting of traffic-jam alternates.

You do, it's called the Waze user that is ten minutes ahead of you down the road, mixed with many road sensors reporting traffic flow rates.

If you are using navigation many mapping applications automatically route around traffic issues (including Waze). I personally just have it up while driving, not really using navigation but just to keep an eye on traffic rates and issues. I've turned off many a highway before to avoid a Waze reported issue and taken a pretty obvious alternate route you could see at a glance on the map.

For anyone that has not tried leaving modern mapping applications open with traffic status enabled, I highly recommend it - just get a decent car mount so it's easy to see the display. I recommend Waze in particular only because it's one of the best at taking in user reports as to police or road hazards (like chair in right lane! just one example of something I have reported in the past).

It's probably impossible to know until you are actually in the same situation.

It's possible to know because you know how it is from the side of people noticing things. I find artificial hands immediately obvious, as much so as a robotic hand would be.

I think either would fare just as well in terms of not attracting notice when covered by a glove. Why not, then you would just look a little odd in summer...

You need to point the finger to understand why they're fighting.

The Palestinians in 1948 had a valid grievance, for decades while the British ruled Palestine they allowed European Jews to buy up huge chunks of the country with the goal of creating a friendly Jewish state in Palestine, then the UN partition made it official with a split they didn't agree to. The Palestinians (and sympathetic Arabs) also had a valid grievance in 1967, after the war in 1948 they fled or were expelled from huge portions of Israel and weren't allowed back in to their land or property. The current Palestinians in addition to those previous grievances are now also dealing with the occupation, an occupation stemming from a war they didn't actually start (Egypt was threatening war but Israel launched a sneak attack) in addition to active land thefts.

There's times when both sides are to blame but not so much in this one, the Palestinians are obviously doing bad things but the ones instigating the conflict are obviously Israel.

I have no love for Healthcare.gov, but honestly just about every site is sending out notices that people may want to change passwords. Heck, Yahoo *made* me change my password.

Like everyone else they don't know if anything was taken. And frankly, Heatbleed is probably the least of the security issues Healthcare.gov has... I'd be way more worried about backbend systems, and then it doesn't matter what your password is.

Well, ok, but then again, in Europe, you don't need a car. Not even to "get away".

I've lived there. Yes, you do. You can get around any U.S. city just as well by public transport, but you can do a LOT more with a car in the U.S. or the EU...

The expense of food in the Netherlands is what prompted me to post...

I was living in Amsterdam for a few months a few years ago and I thought food was damn expensive (raw or otherwise) compared to the U.S. Perhaps in the 90's that was true but I think taxes have gone up substantially since then, also the fuel costs used to transport the food.