A five ton delivery truck can be quite lethal also. Taking your child to pick something up or leaving them unsupervised while you go to the store creates additional risk. Accidents involving multiple passengers and multiple vehicles compound the lethality of single points of failure. Even if the drone dies unexpectedly, it's going to have significant probability of having a non-lethal descent, being over a building or open terrain, compared to a vehicle which is specifically restricted to an area with other people moving at high velocities. And if these are battery powered or have a clean burning fuel, we can consider the general health effects of reduced pollution as well.

Safety is important, but the setup we have right now is pretty dangerous. I wouldn't suggest missing out on even a moderate improvement by demanding absolute perfection at the start.

Jesus, the guy who would always do what you would do.

Despite an oppressive Roman occupation, Jesus never had much to say about the Romans. He outmaneuvered questions designed to embroil him in the local politics. He refused efforts to crown him as king. He refused to defend himself when he stood accused before them.

If I may be so bold as to guess, I would say no, Jesus would not vocally oppose this bill. Nor would he endorse it. Jesus did not see government as a means to achieve his objectives. He taught in the synagogues. He clashed with religious leaders. He went to the oppressed and ministered to them directly. He would not be interested in your politics (or mine). But he would be strongly interested in affecting the compassion, selflessness, humility, and general godliness of the people involved.

While you're linking to youtube, you might checkout the homemade flamethrowers. I can't claim to have made one but plenty of my friends have (including my school physics club). The mechanics of a flame thrower is just a squirt gun + a match. I can buy propane "flame throwers" as is at the local hardware store (used for burning weeds).

Why are people making all these flame throwers? Because something that shoots jets of flame is freaking cool. As far as I could discern on a quick google search, none of them have been used to commit murder.

What I personally find horrific is the idea that anyone would be so afraid of their fellow citizens that their first assumption on hearing they have access to a projectile shooter/flame maker/etc. is "OH GOODNESS HOW ARE THEY GOING TO USE THAT MURDER ME?" I realize unhinged people are out there, and will do bad things, but there are also bears in the woods which could find their way to my house and easily maul me to death. But the statistics are low enough that I don't worry about. I suppose my luck could run out some day, but trusting my fellow citizens not to murder me has worked so far, and I wouldn't care to live any other way. I like the idea of a society and a government that assumes I have good intentions until proven otherwise and I consider it worth some risk to have it even if I am not personally a person who is interested in owning a weapon.

What about a limitation on the locking mechanism that causes the door to unlock during significant course corrections and descents at low altitude? (If you really want to cover contingencies there could also be a date-based override code for keeping the cabin locked which the pilots would have to radio for.) That leaves the pilots free to secure themselves in case of an internal upset during a normal flight, but the passengers would be able to mob the cabin in most of these scenarios. You could also add, e.g., buttons in the back of the plane which have to be pressed to unlock the cabin. Not terribly difficult to do if all the passengers see the point of getting in, but might make the logistics of a hijacking significantly more complicated (and impossible for a lone actor).

Is me offering to give you something that I have in exchange for something that you have really an "artificial construct of society"? Certainly, we've come up with things like corporations which fit that description, but the mere act of making a living by running a shop is the most basic form of some person using their own resource and ingenuity to put food on their table (through consensual exchanges). I would be okay with saying, e.g., a corporation is a 'public entity' which must therefore, if it exists, serve the entirety of the public. But I find it difficult to believe a self-owned proprietorship should not be seen as an extension of the individual.

Note how this legislation continues to be directed at you and me. The solution to corrupt policians involves threatening *us* with fines and prison for not doing our proper bits. It's not as if our elected leaders can help it, they're practically victims! Just going on with the system they've been given by a degenerate populace. No point in cracking down on the way they behave. But eventually in spite of us they will obtain their utopian society, I suppose -- just have to keep restricting us until we get into our thick heads to behave the perfect way they have envisioned for us, and then everything will be swell.

To properly understand what Obama means by the undue influence of money, you have to unpack the political dialect a bit. Obama was ushered into his latest term on a >$1 billion campaign, and has turned his back on statements about lobbyists and public financing, so it's not that he abjures the influence of money in politics. But it is bad when money is wielded to effect by the other party. (The other party is in fact the only one capable of corruption, one's own party might have some rogue individuals who make regrettable decisions, but their political principles are, if anything, redemptive.) This statement comes on the tail of the 2014 election, in which Obama's party was routed, due largely to poor turnout. In general democrats fair better from greater voter turnout. So this would be a nice fix to that, and probably would decrease the influence of money in politics, at least in the sense that it would not longer be needed to mobilizing voters and could instead be spent in focus on telling them which way to vote.

Of course, any electoral change is going to benefit one party or the other, and they will decide their allegiance to it accordingly. But I think it's sound to say any idea that comes out of party leadership is not going to be about "reform" it is going to be about consolidating their own power. Changing election mechanics is not going to be the means of rebuffing them and kicking them out of power. It is going to be the thing to do once we've built up the spine to kick them out ourselves.

Your car has a circuit breaker? Do you drive a Vector, replace your fuse box with a breaker box, or something else that I don't know about? Seriously - I've always wanted to know why cars use fuses and not breakers, and if modern cars are switching over for some applications.

Depends on your perspective. From a national security standpoint, if you really thought Saddam Hussein was going to be unleashing terrible modern weaponry, I would say job well-done. ISIS can probably keep that region from developing nuclear weapons any time in the next thousand years.

But from a humanitarian standpoint, what is worse than the prevalent rape, torture, murder, forced conversion, and the kind of oppression that outlaws any opposing thought? The oppressive leaders in the region such as Saddam Hussein have deserved credit for holding back the tide of lawless extremism, but what evil is it that ISIS could be credited with standing in the way of? Being as evil as possible is pretty much their objective. Saddam tried to conceal his atrocities. They literally publish theirs in their newsletters.

I can't wait to be able to get an @bigbrother email address.

Since the government can eat loses indefinitely, it's going to be fun to see people whine and complain and demand more taxes so their internet can reliably work.

Speaking of roads and public schools...

The XKCD plot just makes me see gold and white at different levels of brightness. But I did find this color illusion featuring yellow and blue. The dogs are actually the same color, which you see if you look at them individually through a small aperture
http://i.imgur.com/sh5NwCK.jpg

Make it pretty obvious that at some point your brain switches from wanting to see blue to wanting to see yellow based on the color context. It would appear some of us are slightly different in where transitions like that occur.

There are a few reasons. First, a federal solution makes sense because the problem is systemic throughout the nation. Further, these abuses of local/regional monopolies are happening at the hands of a handful of national companies. Finally, I don't think that local PUC's are able to understand and manage the issue at hand.

Those are *really* antiquated, but they're not government regulations. These government regulations are even more antiquated than the common carrier Title II regulations, and we (Americans) are still forced to live by them.

The rules have only been modified only twenty seven times in over 200 years.

Silly, antiquated regulations.

Yep, found that. Apparently a lot of Python programmers aren't aware of the """ thing because I've only ever seen the obnoxious escape character used.

And people keep harping on the forced indentation just like they keep harping on the lack of a start menu in Windows 8 because it's really annoying and adds nothing.

And exactly, it's the noobs that don't indent properly. I'd like the language to not force it so they can be spotted easily. Having to force the indentation issue tells you you're working with a lot of noobs.

All the Python I've seen used an escape character rather than the """ which is a pretty silly way of doing it. But at least it can be done.

C# uses @"

But no, it won't change my mind because forced indentation is a non-starter. It's just an aggravation that doesn't add anything.

"End" just reminds me too much of BASIC and Visual BASIC.

Forcing indentation and not having multi-line strings (without the need for escape characters) are the two biggest oversights of these hipster languages. C# finally realized that SQL is a big part of modern coding and you need multi-line strings to make inline queries readable. Not every query needs to be a stored proc and you often need to write inline queries to do what you want for testing before you kick it over to the DBA to make it a stored proc.

It's like MS releasing an operating system without a start menu.

It's incredibly annoying, completely unnecessary and not that difficult to implement.

DBA's do not appreciate having to remove your stupid escape characters rather than simply copying and pasting the query you wrote.