I'm thankful for that. The failure mode of most mechanical problems with an average car is that it gently rolls to the side of the road. The failure mode of most mechanical problems with an average light aircraft is plummeting to death, and likely destroying something below you in the process.

Think of all the nitwits you see on the freeway, and then imagine them with hands on stick in a Cessna. No, thanks.

Burning wood is far better for the environment than burning coal or oil. Planting new trees will pull the carbon out of the air to make the tree grow, and trees replenish many orders of magnitude faster than coal or oil. It also doesn't release nearly the chemical filth that burning oil and coal does.

Wood may not be as energetic as oil or coal, but not exactly "bad."

It's because the electrons aren't actually allowed to pass over the border - they end up just getting agitated and wait in line. Like I do at the airport.

(Joke is meant for AC interties only.)

Okay, I'm thinking about Houston and it's suburbs. Can we flood it and use it for power generation?

10%? Check your math.

One dam on the Columbia puts out 6.8GW by itself.

It's more a problem that pretty much any river in the US that is suitable for a large hydro project, already has large hydro projects built in the 1930s through 1960s.

We weren't afraid of mega-dam projects in the past - look at some of the dams on the Columbia as proof, specifically the Grand Coulee Dam which holds back 9 km^3 of water and produces 6800 MW of power - over 3x what Hoover Dam puts out. And it's one of 14 dams on the Columbia.

There's a reason why we have both the words "renewable" and "sustainable" - they do not mean the same thing.

Costa Rica will get more rain, which will "renew" the reservoirs behind the hydro dams. It's not raining 100% of the time, and the hydro dams release more volume of water than the rain provides in the same unit time, so it's not completely sustainable. But it is still a renewable resource.

No, but then some government body has a list of people that were so concerned with government eavesdropping that they went out of their way to prevent it. Sounds like a target list for investigation / abuse of power to me.

Well, it would no longer be mobile except for the couple million gallons of water they hosed over the whole thing. I imagine that made some of it mobile in ways that people don't appreciate.

That's not the only reason it's complete horseshit - once you actually get to the center of the planet, the melting whatever that magically never dilutes would be moving opposite of gravity.

The whole concept is patently stupid.

Isn't it though? I remember when iTunes actually wasn't a completely fucked up pile of shit. It's been a long time.

Wait, are you saying that if you buy two devices from the same manufacturer, that they might work better together than two devices from wildly different vendors?

CRAZY TALK.

I haven't plugged my iPhone into anything iTunes since the iOS 5 release that allowed over-the-air updates and iCloud backup.

iTunes is a complete non-factor, and has been for years.

Apple clearly doesn't make a product that satisfies your requirements.

And you know what? That's perfectly fine. They don't need to. And you don't need them to. But the overwhelming vast majority of the market doesn't have the same requirements you do, and the products that Apple makes does meet their requirements.

I don't understand why Apple's products have to be everything to everyone - no other company is thought of this way. Do people get up in arms because BMW doesn't make heavy duty work trucks? Should people not buy Ford because they don't make motorcycles?

More than that, I want there to be at least two viable platforms out there. A healthy Android stack puts pressure on Apple to make iOS better. A healthy iOS stack puts pressure on Google to make Android better.

Who wins? We all do. I'd even like to see a better offering from Microsoft just to keep the other two honest. In a 3-way fight for my money, I'm the ultimate winner.