I don't know if this is nuts. I'd have to see the full arguments on both sides, and so far what we have to go on is a one-sided summary.

If the *only* effect of the proposed regulation would be to increase beer prices, then sure, I agree with you 100%: government is being stupid. But if there's a good reason for the regulation, then I'd disagree with you.

Reading the article, it seems like the idea that this regulation will cause beer prices to spike dramatically seems a bit alarmist. The regulations would require brewers who send waste to farmers as animal feed to keep records. It seems hard to believe that this would significantly raise the price of beer or whiskey given that alcohol production is already highly regulated. On the other hand, it seems like there is no specific concern related to breweries. They were just caught up in a law that was meant to address animal feed.

If you want an example of a regulation free utopia, look no further than China, where adulteration of the food chain is a common problem. If the choice were a regulatory regime that slightly complicates brewers lives, and a regime that allows melamine and cyanuric acid into human food, I'd live with higher beer prices.

Fortunately, we don't have to live with either extreme. We can regulate food adulteration and write exceptions into the regulations for situations that pose little risk. Since presumably the ingredients used in brewing are regulated to be safe for human consumption, the byproducts of brewing are likely to pose no risk in the human food chain.

I love that logic. By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.

We knew they had poison gas because we kept the receipts. We knew they didn't have poison gas any more because they had already used it, and it was very old.

And the rest of us deserve some of whatever it is you're smoking. Or drinking.

So now you want the breweries to pay to have it sent to a processor, and have the cost go up dramatically, even though this stuff is food which was approved for human consumption and it's been boiled, so there's just no reason for that to happen. The breweries can legally make it into bread on the premises and sell it to humans but you don't want it to be fed to animals.

You'd probably want to use a pretty fat piece of fiber, because automotive cables get flexed and abraded and you'd want protection. Ideally, you'd make a loop, and it would be fault-tolerant. On the plus side, you don't need much in the way of data rates; infotainment needs to be on a separate bus anyway. But it's a great idea, for sure. I'd prefer one fat wire for power, though. Everything can ground through the chassis since all the signals are going through the fiber.

The sad thing is that there's an easy way to save weight on wiring. It's called moving to a higher voltage. Audi is already unafraid to make your battery expensive. A simple regulator provides 12V power to systems that require it, and moving literally all of the lighting to LED solves the lamp availability problem and is long overdue in any case, on any vehicle where it is not present.

Another way would be to distribute networked controllers more throughout the car. This just doesn't have to be expensive any more. It does complicate repairs, but Audi is unafraid to complicate repairs, as well.

Wait, what?

But we're talking about this in the context of Heartbleed, where pre-patch mitigation involved disabling critical services... A patch is what was needed here, and nothing else would suit.

I have found a shitpot of broken COPPER wires on my 1997 A8, in places like the wiring leading to the left side knock sensor which doesn't even flex much since it's attached to the fuel rail. I guarantee you that it will go badly.

One? Just one plant? Even if you are just talking about Detroit itself, ignoring the suburbs, there is a GM plant and 2 Chrysler plants in Detroit. But when people talk about Detroit and auto companies, they mean the entire metro detroit area. And in that area, there is:

Ford: (Wayne, Flat Rock)
GM: (Detroit, Orion)
Chrysler: (Detroit x 2, Sterling Heights, Warren)

So that's 8 auto assembly plants in metro Detroit. Yep, just one plant here.

The most wear sensitive part of a laser printer is the copy drum. If I recall correctly the old LaserJets had the drum integrated with the toner cartidge, so you replace to most quickly wearing part of the printer four or five thousand pages. It's no wonder they lasted so long. The mechanical parts that move the paper through the printer are pretty robust, so I wouldn't be surprised if the printers go until the capacitors in the electronics dry up, or the internal power connectors go bad.

That would be interesting, if it were true. Here's what TFA says:

"Del." I assume is short for "delegate". According to their website, the American Tradition Institute's tag line is "Free Market Environmentalism through *Litigation*" I assuming this means they aren't pals with Greenpeace, or even The Sierra Club, any more than the National Socialists in Germany were pals with the socialist Republicans in 1930s Spain.

Depends on what you consider "hiding the research". A fishing expedition through a scientist's personal correspondence is an invitation to judge his work on *political* grounds.

In science your personal beliefs, relationships, and biography are irrelevant. There are evangelical Christian climate scientists who believe climate won't change because that would contradict God's will as expressed in the Bible. These scientists may be regarded as religious crackpots by their peers, but that hasn't prevented them from publishing in the same peer-reviewed journals as everyone else. Since their papers invariably are climate-change skeptic, clearly they are publishing work which supports their religious beliefs. But their motivations don't matter. What matters is in their scientific publications.

In 1988, Gary Hart's presidential bid and political career were ruined when he was photographed cavorting on a yacht named "Monkey Business" with a woman that wasn't his wife. Now I didn't care how many bimbos he was boinking, but a lot of people *did*, which made it a political issue (albeit a stupid one in my opinion). Do we really want to use the coercive power of the state to dig through the private lives of controversial scientists?

It's a pretense that that would serve any scientific purpose. Maybe Mann is intent on overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist utopia. That would be relevant if he were running for dogcatcher, but it's irrelevant to what's in his scientific papers. Scientists publish papers all the time with ulterior motives, not the least of which is that they're being paid to do research that makes corporate sponsors happy. As long as what's in the paper passes muster, it's still science.

What about acting? Or fiction? These are artificial experiences that evoke real emotional responses. Once the right buttons in your brain are pushed, most of your brain can't tell the difference between what is real and what is synthetic.

Granted, authenticity in human interactions is important, but it's overrated. Fake engagement often is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Situations where people put considerable effort into *seeming* pleasant usually *are* more pleasant than they would be if everyone felt free to paste their indifference to you right on their faces.

So this is a very interesting technology. What's disturbing about it isn't that people might be fooled into thinking the user is truly interested; it's that the user himself no longer puts any effort into creating that illusion. What if that effort is in itself something important? What if fake engagement is often the prelude to real engagement? Maybe you have to start with polite interest and work your way up to the real thing; I suspect the dumber parts of your brain can't tell the difference. If that's true, taking the user's brain out of the interaction means that interaction will automatically be trapped on a superficial level. This already happens in bureaucratic situations where employees are reduce to rules-following automatons. Take the brain out of the equation and indifference follows.

I suspect that the researchers are well aware of these issues; I believe that I discern a certain deadpan, ironic puckishness on their part. People who truly view engagement with other people as an unwelcome burden don't work on technologies that mediate between people.