The value of a Stradivarius lies not in the sound it produces but in its provenance.

But the provenance is only of value because of the superior sound. Paintings by my grandma are 'rare,' but not valuable.

Of course this is all old news in the art world. Painters are "great" because of their great works. Their works are valuable because they are by great painters. Yet forgeries are indistinguishable from authentic works on artistic merit, so verification is turned over to chemical composition of paint and canvas, documented history, etc. In other words, it's all completely irrational and merely an consequence of some particular biases that humans have.

You are dead wrong. Commercial aviation is FAR safer than civil aviation. The difference is so large that baggage inspections and terrorism in general aren't even significant to the discussion.

The abuse of medical and press credentials is really bad. It subjects actual professionals to accusations of spying and troublemaking, and restricts their access.

Amen, Japan would have at least cultured the savages.

You seem to have read The Rape of Nanking backwards.

No, no, it was ME. I was the one who didn't invent the correct algorithms and share them with the inventors of the Internet. I didn't do it at all!

Keep in mind words like "no harder" are pretty misleading to a non-theorist, since the known classes of computational complexity are so loose in the first place. IIRC the transformation need only be polynomial, right? So, two problems could be of "equal" difficulty when one is literally a zillion times harder than the other (since a zillion is only a constant), or even n to the power of a zillion (since that's "just" a polynomial). Computational theory is practically blind to constants, but you know what, there are a lot of particles in the universe, they could conceivably brute-force some awfully big problems.

You are muddling together millions of people with a bunch of different motivations and ideas.

Yes, and it would be so trivial to conduct a controlled study for this that there is no reason to release it at this point, when it is merely a correlation that popped out of a relatively small amount of data.

Not to try to discredit your opinion, but I bet you would if you were rushed and didn't know or realize it was a Tesla.

Well exactly. A lot of us here write software. There is not one of us who would look at a bug when pointed out to us and say, "yeah, I'd do it just like that!"

That really depends on workload. RAM disk cache doesn't help any with writes. It also doesn't help if you have any programs that read or write very large files, as the cache just fills up with that one large file. Even 18 GB is only a couple hours of recorded broadcast TV.

Some of this "fraud" is simply compensating for the distortions imposed by the TV (or whatever medium) in the first place. For example, it is very hard to understand speech recorded with a normal level of background noise. Why? I'm not sure, maybe because the viewer then has background noise in the TV sound, PLUS real background noise wherever they are sitting. Or maybe our brains just can't tune out sounds if we can't look over at the source to confirm they're irrelevant and non-threatening.

Lighting is the same. If you just haphazardly shoot video or photos with natural light it looks awful - you can't make out nearly the detail (especially in shadows) that you would have if you'd been standing there. Maybe because the cameras and TVs have less dynamic range than your eyes. So, artificial lighting (or careful use of natural lighting) looks more natural.

I don't use the heart rate strap on my Garmin watch too often either, although I use the GPS every day. Like you said, after a while you have a pretty good idea of what it would be saying based on how you feel.

So, I think successful gadgets will combine something practical that people will always need, with something new and "exciting" that may or may not have long-term utility. Millions of people already wear watches, so I think smartwatches have chance if they aren't too much additional hassle to charge. Just screening calls and texts would be a useful addition.

the real problem is that though out the lifetime of this plant, the expected costs for decommissioning have gone though the roof by a mass of changing rules, laws and policies which have conspired to not only raise the costs but shorten the useful lifespan of the plant.

What you call the "real" problem is actually re-stating the GP's point - that is, during the lifetime of the plant, some of the externalizations mentioned by the GP have been internalized through the rules you mentioned. Is that unfair? Perhaps, only in the sense that the gaping externalities of fossil fuels, by comparison, have not been internalized whatsoever.

I already cited an example of a specific improvement in sensitivity for a given sensor size.

I don't get it? If the person is is 'reasonably believed' to be a terrorist, then the FISA court would rubber-stamp a warrant so quick it would make heads spin. So why not get the warrant?