You think that Cook should support bigoted laws? You think that a corporate CEO shouldn't speak out against a law that is plainly discriminatory in his own country? You think that Apple should stop doing business any place that has a law that the CEO personally disagrees with?

So, he should oppose laws that harm gays in minor ways, but not worry so much about the laws that hurt them in major ways? Because if the Indiana thing is an indication of how much he opposes laws that harm gays in minor ways, then why isn't he upset by Saudi (or most of Africa, for that matter) laws that harm gays in major ways (I'd think imprisonment or death is a bigger problem than where to get your wedding cake made, but that may just be me)?

Which, basically, is what whatshername said - that he got his knickers in a twist over a minor issue while ignoring major issues....

3) Its density, 1,056 g/cm

I'm guessing European from the "," instead of ".", but since when does anyone measure density in mass/length units?

I woner if the real opponents of this aren't people who make money charging $10 for cocktails to captive audiences. How much money do they stand to lose when people start bringing a half-dozen packets to the big game?

While this may be an issue, I'm not sure it's a significant one.

If you can afford to blow a couple hundred bucks for a seat in the stadium, I doubt an extra twenty or so for booze is going to be a show-stopper.

Where I see an issue is minors, who can't buy the overpriced booze at the show/concert/game/whatever, wanting some way to sneak some alcohol in....

Not just Fox News.

Read recently that Harry Reid, when Romney was running for President, said that Romney had paid no income taxes for the last ten years.

The media ran with it. Without checking. Turns out that it was false, and that Reid knew it was false when he said it.

When he was asked whether that sort of thing was justified in politics, his response was "Romney lost, didn't he? Of course it's justified"....

If the Tesla was $10,000 I bet that 50% of cars on the road would be a Tesla.

They'd be more common than half if they were that cheap. Though it would probably be ten years after they reached that price-point before all the gas cars that were going to be replaced by them were actually replaced....

Umm, no. Do remember that "workplace sexual harassment" was a big issue then. And that getting one of your employees to give you a blow job pretty much fits the definitions in use at the time.

It was funny watching the Clinton supporters justifying Clinton getting a blow job from one of his flunkies while insisting that that sort of thing was vile beyond belief otherwise.

Note that in 1938, Germany hadn't been an economic leader for about a generation. The Treaty of Versailles made sure of that.

Likewise, Germany hadn't had a colonial empire for a generation. Treaty of Versailles again.

Which made Germany in 1938 strictly a regional power (and not even much of one - France was still there, and the Polish Army was larger than the Wehrmacht). Which Iran is now. Different region, but a regional power nonetheless....

Valuing device longevity rather than having all devices being disposable after 2-3 years seems like low hanging fruit from an environmental perspective that gets very little attention.

Valuing device longevity seem like abject stupidity when you're talking about a device that is obsolete within a few years of introduction.

Yeah, we could build computers and such that lasted twenty years. So, anyone still using a computer made in the mid-90s? Yeah, 200 MHz & 200 MB RAM machines were pretty awesome back then, and we all should still be using them still, right?

Now, you might argue that they could have made the PCs upgradable. Which is true. But it's the RAM and the CPUs and MBs and such that are making for the toxic sludge, not the shell that old PC came in. So "upgradable" just means "polluting just as much as replacable does"....

Now if we could just get Georgia into the mix somehow - they're worse drivers than Texans, believe it or not.

This comment made me curious. And it's not true. When measured by fatalities per vehicle mile travelled or fatalities per person, Texas is worse than Georgia.

And Montana is worse than either of them....

The 9th circuit is the largest court with the most cases. So of course it has more overturned. When viewed by percentages they're one of the least overturned courts. The whole "9th is the most overturned court" meme is from Republican wishful thinking trying to downplay importance of cases out of there,

Umm, no.

First, it must be understood that the reversal rates for ALL the Circuit Courts of Appeal are too bloody high. Like ~70% of decisions are reversed. Note that once upon a time this wasn't such a problem, and that there is a certain amount of selection bias in that the only cases considered are those where there are contradictory rulings in two different circuits.

The Ninth Circuit tends to run about an 80% reversal rate, and still holds the record for reversal rate (27 of 28 cases reversed in one term about 20 years ago). But an 80% reversal rate doesn't make it the highest in recent years (that goes to the 8th Circuit, which had seven of eight cases reversed one term). It does make it rather higher than average, though.

So I have to wait for someone (something?) to pick me up?

Not if you're smart enough to schedule the car's arrival ahead of time. Call/Text/Web/whatever the car, tell it you'll need it at the office (or wherever) at 3PM (or whenever), done. At the requested time, you walk out, and like a miracle, the car is sitting at the curb waiting for you to get in....

I doubt the parking bit. Many people will choose to use a driverless cab

Yes, many people will choose not to own a car. But even if that doesn't happen, parking problems will go way down. SDCs can park themselves, after the people are out.

A driverless car can also just drive back home and spend the day there, coming back in the afternoon to pick you up from work.

Which means less need for parking downtown/at-work/wherever.

And it means less need for extra cars. Rather than one car per driver in a family, you can cut down to one car per person driving at the same time to different destinations. Drive to work, then send the car home for the wife or kids to use during the day.

Chernobyl: a crazy design with a strongly positive void coefficient. No one else has ever made such designs, even before Chernobyl because it was always known to be dangerous.

When discussing Chernobyl, one must always keep in mind the proximate cause of the incident.

Specifically, the version of the NRC decided it needed to know how much energy they could extract from a meltdown in progress to deal with the meltdown. Perfectly reasonable notion - it makes a meltdown easier to deal with if you don't have to rely on dozen/hundreds of (relatively) small emergency generators for lights, pumps, etc.

So, they picked an out-of-the-way reactor, and pushed it as far toward a meltdown condition as they considered safe to do, and started measuring the energy output of the plant in that mode.

Unfortunately, they were wrong about how "far toward a meltdown" was "safe to do"....

So, the largest nuclear disaster in history happened because someone made a goof while trying a Real World (tm) SIMULATION of the largest nuclear disaster in history....