Everyone uses the slippery slope argument in politics and the media... Even on /.

IMO, this whole fuss on Plan B is kind of a crock. It costs about $50 at a drug store (you can get it over the counter and buy it with a downloadable $10-off coupon) with a $35 generic available. Comparatively, a birth control pill runs anywhere from $10-$100 (but mostly commonly hovers around $20 and mail order saves you about $5) and generally requires a prescription to be covered in a health plan (because they will make you mail order it to save money).

Don't know how often people would need to fork over for plan B out-of-pocket in a year, but I think if a person needed emergency contraception more than a couple times a year (out of 12 months) seems like that person probably should be looking at some other form of birth control, maybe? Of course if someone else is paying for it and such a person didn't have a moral problem with it, maybe people don't really care (but people *should* care because currently existing emergency contraception has quite a few serious side effects for those under 25 or have a high BMI which described a large part of the userbase for these drugs, but of course that's not part of the marketing material and no prescription or consultation is required).

FWIW you can't get aspirin/acetaminophen, cold symptom relief, or acne medicine covered as an over the counter medicine as part of a health plan (unless you get a prescription), but because of politics, emergency contraception has a special carveout in this market. Of course the generics available outside the USA (e.g, I-pill) is only about $10 a dose (about the same price as "emergency" Nyquil or Sudafed which your insurance company won't cover). On the other hand, insurance companies would probably gladly cover it gratis (since it's cheaper than pre-natal/pregnancy for them) and they already have this exact legal carveout for non-profits, but it's more fun to raise a stink and energize the base (on both sides of the aisle)...

When you don't have an answer for the whereabouts of 90+% of the stuff your scientific theory calls for, call it dark and get some grant money to find it...

Money.

But more seriously, this is one of the problems with electing a president with a short political CV/resume. His circle of trust doesn't have the critical mass of folks that can survive a vetting process (any than could have already got their job and gotten out after 4 years), so he has to rely on getting suggestions folks in an extended political operative/Washington insider circle which only knows people looking for a job from the pool perpetual bureaucratic lobbyist ruling class that's pretty much bought and sold themselves to the highest bidders...

Are you willing to go so far as minimum wage and immigration laws? Most folks have a line to draw somewhere. Depending on your politics...

Usually when the paycheck of one's friends/neighbors line gets crossed, opinions start to shift. When it finally gets to your paycheck, that's often a bright red line for most folks... The mentality is like this: first they came...

However, it shall be know in the state of California as CalCoin.

CalCoin will be exactly the same as BitCoin, except that there will be a un-elected, board of political appointees created to oversee CalCoin usage in the state. Each board member will collect a 6-figure salary (+travel expenses) to meet 2 times as year for 20-minutes. The board will oversee the writing and signature collection ballot proposition that amends the CalConstitution to enable it to collect of a surcharge tax on every CalCoin transaction by a CalResident to fund education and the construction of new prisons. Of course after spending millions of dollars on this, the ballot proposition will be declared unconstitutional and a lawsuit will then be filed to *out* the names and home addresses of everyone who signed the ballot initiative so that Anonymous CalCoin speculators can lynch them.

On the brighter side, since it will now be joining the "Cal" family of entities, perhaps CalPERS (Public Employee Retirement System) will now be able to "invest" in CalCoin. No doubt they will be able to crash its value like every other speculative investment scheme they have put money into for the last 20 years...

But, don't you see that that is exactly the value that Aereo was offering? Space for me to put an antenna that would reliably receive the digital broadcasts that were supposed to be so much better than analog, even in the middle of a forest of concrete and steel. How fondly I remember the pre-digital days, when I could get (slightly staticky) broadcasts from 30 miles away. With great anticipation, I waited on the new digital signals that claimed to provide clearer pictures over even greater distances. Imag.....y dis......nt.......it turns out.....digit....sts don......fully.

Are you saying Aereo would have been OK if they'd sold one of those OTA DVRs and colocated them at their warehouse? Aereo's fatal flaw is that they rented people a homogeneous device rather than selling them one of a menu? That, my friend, is a legal Rube Goldberg much more intricate than the technical workaround Aereo intended.

Thats one of the most moronic statements I have ever seen.

Aside from the whole "its already subsidized" thing, people bought those cards because they were cheaper, not because they were at some magical "correct" price point.

Whoa slow down there, I don't think it's fair to compare immigration to something as heinous as minor copyright infringement. At worst it's a lesser crime like first degree murder or human trafficking.

In order for an activity to be illegal, it needs to be one wherein a court case would have an aggrieved party. In the case of assault or theft the aggrieved party is obvious, but if someone plays blackjack there is no such counterpart. In the case of prostitution allow me to paraphrase George Carlin "If selling is legal and sex is legal then why is selling sex illegal?"

To address your gambling losses comment, consider the following. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US, losing a parent is a terrible blow for a child therefore by the same logic you presented shouldn't parents be prevented from driving or riding in cars?

As I said pretty much everyone agrees on the no aborting humans part, we just can't agree on when that occurs. Third trimester abortions are banned in 36 states there is pretty broad support even among pro-choice advocates that it's not appropriate except in cases where the life of the mother is threatened. Your anytime before actual birth rule seems excessive.

Current world-wide ammonia production is mostly going to agriculture and is only about 130 million tonnes. 130Mt * 1000kg/t * 4318 Wh/kg * 3600J/Wh ~ 2 x10^15 Joules.

However, the goal is not to replace oil, but to replace gasoline for cars. Natural gas production, has plenty of scale (4.3Tm^3)*** and ammonia production generally scales easily with natural gas production. Also, only about 1/2 of oil production you quote is for gasoline for cars and trucks.

The question is if it is worth diverting natural gas to cars or not (vs converting it into electricity or using it for heating/cooking). Even if it was desirable, it's not an easy question on exactly how to do this because for cars, alternatives to ammonia production are to compress or liquefy natural gas (CNG/LNG). The benefit of ammonia is really is in industrial CO2 containment, but CNG/LNG would be easier to do at a large scale...

However, if there were an economical way to create ammonia from atmospheric Nitrogen w/o using Natural gas, there might be something to all of this... People are working on it, but nobody has got anything commercially viable yet...

***To convert natural gas to barrels of oil equivalent: 4.3Tm^3 * 1BOE / 170m^3 = 25MBOE

Drugs, prostitution and gambling are a no brainer since they're victimless crimes.

Abortion should be legal up until the point we consider the fetus to be a human being, which is generally what all the arguing is about. For me personally I'd define that as being roughly in the late 2nd trimester when the thalamocortical connections are formed, a requirement in order for it to have a nervous system developed enough to feel pain. Obviously there other opinions on that issue.

Although the energy density of ammonia is less than gasoline (about 1/2 as I recall), the efficiency of an internal combustion engine is like 20-30% where a fuel cell can be closer to 50-60%. It's probably a wash from that point of view...

The price of ammonia tracks that of natural gas (since it essentially all made via the Haber process). Right now natural gas is cheap relative to oil (thanks to all the fracking)..

On the plus side, using ammonia as fuel has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions. Since all the CO2 is happening in an industrial setting when natural gas it converted into ammonia instead of inside your internal combustion engine...

On the negative side, the biggest problem is what to do with all that Nitrogen. Any catalytic process isn't 100% efficient (I think they claim 60% up to 90%) and even if it was, it involves heating of the NH3 (up to 500C) which presumably creates hot N2 and H2. Developing a practical process that carries away the hot N2, but still prevents hot N2 from forming bonds with atmospheric oxygen creating NOx photochemical smog will be another challenge. This is a general problem with heating things up in the presence of air (which has both N2 and O2), but even worse with NH3. Photochemical smog in the form of NOx isn't technically a greenhouse gas (since it's atmospheric lifetime is generally short), but it is partially responsible for acid rain, so it isn't really a clear "green" option...

You tube videos? And analysation on block level?

Won't the fact that the video codec has a direct timeline (with predictive frames, etc) override the rsults?