Traffic calming measures have been common for quite a few years now. But I think that Sherman Oaks could take this one step further.

Traffic furniture rearranging.

Every day, get the road crews out there to move some barriers around randomly: dead ends in the middle of some block, random one way signs, maybe just drop a wrecked car in the intersection where the off-ramp exits the freeway. Reprogram traffic lights to introduce 10 minute delays. Make Waze's advice to be worse-than-worthless to the average driver, and just maybe they'll give up on your city.

That depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In some US states, the price marked is the price that must be honored, or the shopkeeper can go to jail. The merchant doesn't get to claim "computer glitch", because there were so many glitches people could no longer tell them from bait-and-switch tactics. So the laws were passed in favor of the consumer, and if the merchant's computer systems aren't up to the task, it's not the problem of the general public.

Doesn't matter if you think it's fair or unfair, it's the law in those places. I think Massachusetts, Michigan, and California all have some flavor of this, with Massachusetts being the most stringent.

Because Flash still works on many old browsers. YouTube wants to serve as many people as they can, and want to avoid as many technical issues as they can. They know there are many people who got something working five or more years ago that haven't upgraded their browsers to anything that can display HTML5.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that point. The virus has no "motive", it has only the genetic predisposition to achieve successful reproduction. The humans, on the other hand, have the motive of protecting society, and the responsibility to do so safely. We may be less than perfect on our implementation, but "do no harm" is at the top of the list. The virus does not have any such interest, and death of the host is a perfectly acceptable outcome for a virus.

Do I mistrust the humans doing the vaccinations? Generally not in this country today, but in pre-AIDS Africa, forced vaccinations there were a terrifying prospect. Army units traveled the rivers by boat, and they would stop you to see your vaccination papers. If you weren't vaccinated, they jabbed the needle in your arm on the spot. They'd ask the next person for papers, and would jam the exact same needle in the next guy's arm!

If our programs were that badly run, I'd not only agree with you, I'd take up arms myself. But they're not.

Here, vaccination programs are stellar successes. Polio? Smallpox? Gone, thanks to strong vaccination programs. And most vaccinations are administered by private clinics, who can be sued into oblivion for making any mistakes. They take care with each patient. I trust them.

I had the same question, so I read the article, then browsed their site. I found out the site is a service that offers you the ability to upload an .STL file, pick a nearby guy-with-a-printer, send it to him for printing, then drive over and pick it up an hour later. So the guide is basically a survey of hundreds of hobbyists who are turning over a little cash by operating their machines.

The market then, is still the "interested hobbyist, enthusiast, or specialized craftsman", and not "average guy who just wants to click the "3D Print" button in his browser and have it spit out plastic trinkets."

Actually, I wasn't trying to be funny or snarky. I do know some people who would take it as a challenge to drunk-post every day; I also know people who sadly couldn't post any other way. And yes, I don't see Facebook voluntarily deleting data on anything their subscribers do.

Vaccines are not 100% effective. Many are only 60-70% effective. Or maybe he's allergic to the vaccine components and can't get vaccinated from the particular virus you're spreading that you could easily have prevented.

I'd agree with you except for one very small detail. A virus pierces your cell walls without your permission. And you shed viruses on other people without asking them for their permission. It's not a choice anyone makes, it's simply a fact of how viruses replicate.

If there was any practical way to stop the process prophylactically, without requiring you to get a shot, I'd say go for it. Wear a giant condom over your body. Sit in the "unvaccinated section" of a restaurant, or a bus. But really, those other solutions just aren't practical or even very effective. Vaccines are.

Allowing people the freedom of choice is effective at protecting society only when enough people arrive at the rational conclusion. But too many people confuse decision making with rhetoric-spewing actors and pandering politicians, and they confuse the "right to avoid vaccination" with the mistaken idea that "vaccines are some kind of government plot and should be avoided". And it's now getting so bad that the rest of us are no longer safe in their presence.

As a society, we pass lots of laws that infringe upon our rights: we don't each have the individual right to murder other people, or rob them. We don't have the right to drive drunk; even if we haven't hurt anybody, as a society we've agreed we don't like the risk. Well, I don't like the risk that unvaccinated people pose to me, and I don't think anyone has the right to run around shedding potentially lethal microbes when an effective preventative solution exists.

I took the liberty of adding the words that were missing from your anecdote. You're welcome.

I expect you should be pushing hard to ensure all the other children in your child's school are vaccinated so the herd immunity can help prevent future infections in your family. You've gotten lucky twice that your son wasn't seriously harmed, it would be truly tragic if he got it again from some deliberately unvaccinated child.

The problem is you are dealing with people who already refuse to participate in logical discussions. They have religious or other belief systems that teach them "facts come from this holy book and these people, not through discussion or science." They think applying logic means "we have a book, scientists have a book, therefore we both have equal basis for our points." They also have a poor grasp on the concepts of statistics, correlation, and causality, and usually can't explain the difference between a personal experience and a body of data.

You will rarely win an argument with these people on a purely logical basis, and even if you do, it's often only temporary. They'll change their position back if their spiritual adviser tells them to.

I wish it was different. I wish more people would learn and apply logic, instead of learning just enough fallacious logic for the sole purpose of defending their "beliefs". It's just the data shows a lot of people are a long way from improving.

I know I'm feeding the troll, but vaccines aren't 100% effective. Little Johnny Pathogen could still be spewing out a virus he has no effective defense against.

At age 48, I was required to have proof of measles vaccine before being allowed to attend Arizona State University. I did think it was a ridiculous requirement, but only because I was I was enrolled as an online student from Minnesota.

Vaccines don't cure diseases; that's not how they work. They only teach your immune system how to fight the disease without exposing you to a lethal dose, which is why they give you a "weakened strain" or a "killed virus". Because of this, vaccines are almost never 100% effective. Sometimes they are so weak your body doesn't learn how to fight, or sometimes your body isn't capable of fighting. Some vaccines are only 40-60% effective. Efficacy also depends on other factors, including whether or not the disease you're exposed to is close enough to the antibodies the vaccine caused you to produce. And there are about 10% of the population who physically cannot get vaccinated, due to allergies or pre-existing health reasons.

In epidemic diseases, particularly those that readily mutate like influenza, it's hoped the vaccine is effective enough on enough people to keep the spread contained or manageable. A 90% vaccination rate is barely enough to convey herd immunity.

On the other hand you've got ignorant pop stars, preachers, and pandering politicians who promote non-scientific claims from a discredited researcher about vaccines causing autism in toddlers. By allowing those 20% of extremely stupid people to excuse themselves out of the herd, it's become tough to protect the rest of us. If the flu vaccine has only a 60% chance of protecting you should you become exposed, and the herd is unprotected, you still have a chance of dying from flu, even with a flu shot.

As for the rest of your post, there is a tremendous amount of experience and data on vaccines. They know the types of side effects, the rates of side effects, the rate of allergic reactions to the components, and can even predict the expected efficacy of each vaccine. They also know the expected mortality rate of the vaccines, and it's pretty easy to compare that to the mortality rate of the diseases they control. If the vaccine kills 1 in 3000000 people, and the flu kills 1 in 300 people (or 1 in 6, like the Spanish influenza of 1918), what do you think the ethical choices for a society are? Let the superstitious people kill off a bunch of us?

My Sync is terrible at voice control. We were visiting friends at a city we hadn't been at before, and they took us to dinner someplace near the state's Capitol building. We decided we wanted to go back the next day for sight seeing. I repeatedly tried asking it variations of "Find capitol building, find capitol, find state capitol", etc. It replied a bunch of random things like "Finding carpet cleaners", "finding shopping", and "finding pizza." (?) Actually, the last one sort-of helped, because I remembered to ask for the restaurant we ate at that was near the capitol building, and it managed to take us close enough.

That's funny, because YouTube happily rolls over to HTML5 when you don't have Flash installed, and it works just fine.

As much as it pissed me off when Jobs said 'no Flash on the iPhone', it was a brilliant move at weaning the world from one of the least secure software packages in history. It's impossible to change the whole world at once, especially when Adobe is trying so desperately to cling to this albatross, but Adobe has never taken the responsibility for building a new, secure engine and eliminating the backward compatibility holes. They just keep enabling vulnerability after vulnerability.

Flash may not be dead, but it's long past its time to live.