If no one pays taxes, I live in a lousy infrastructure.

If everyone pays taxes, I live in a nice infrastructure, but had to pay taxes.

If I admit not paying taxes, no one else wants to pay taxes either.

If I make everyone believe in paying taxes, while I secretly do not pay taxes, I benefit from the infrastructure for free.

Dang. Didn't realize this was a Ph.D thesis material!

That's all this is, it's balancing the laws protecting citizens against credible threats vs. the free speech rights of the person making the threat. Whether it rhymes, is set to music, or is in iambic pentameter is irrelevant. Threatening speech is like pornography, judges have to know it when they hear it.

Could we robotize the baggage handling system first? Driverless luggage carriers and robots won't need background checks, won't pilfer, and don't interact with third parties out in the tarmac (less likely to encounter ambulance chasing lawyers out to sue Google for fender bending).

Surviving the estimated 1000 degree centigrade reentry temperature is impressive. The rest of the test - a suborbital flight of 780 seconds - is less so. But I would have expected the seconds of heat to be more deadly to the DNA than light years of cold, so it's still interesting.

There's actually a fairly cool and intelligent discussion that could be had about volcanic activity's role in the history of world climate, and how forecasting of volcanic activity can play a role in climate modelling. Too bad I can't anticipate actually having that discussion without an eruption of troll commentary. Merely discussing it amounts to flamebait due to the polarizing of opinions on the issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Besides the effect on lawmaking (or failure to pass laws under gridlock), gerrymandering gives people on both sides of issues a sense of majority. "I won in a landslide, I must be right", combined with polarized news programming, has been demonstrated to make people dumber. Harvard Business Review has an interesting article this week on opinion reinforcement and groupthink this week [ https://hbr.org/2014/11/making... ], which compares focus groups from liberal Boulder CO USA and conservative Colorado Springs USA. The researchers documented the negative effects of grouping like-minded people in political discussions. I think gerrymandering has the same effect on political intelligence. Their own conservatism or liberalism appears validated by landslide elections in their districts.

This is the big thing. Not just NSA, but retailer cameras selling stuff you literally "browse" by foot in the aisle. According to this article, Google and Facebook have the biggest "face banks" for the facial recognition software. Can they be told to forget that, too? If not, you aren't really "forgotten" just because you don't appear in a search engine. I don't think Europe could pass a law making Google delete the information. http://www.fastcocreate.com/30...

It isn't "crazy" to suppose, as de Tocqueville does, that the free market (like the fisherman of 'rude attainments') may have thought of something we didn't think of. Of course you are right about buildings being several stories tall and not expandable are made of stone. Therefore... the free market makes city buildings out of stone, even in the ignorant USA. Big city buildings are stone, big ocean ships are metal, small homes in countrysides are wood, and small small boats are still made of wood, even in the USA. The broader point is that someone as intelligent as Alexis dT could be surprised, for all his education, that the free market had made a rational decision. The original post is the equivalent of saying that small fishing boats should be made of metal. The argument is whether building codes and other social engineering will outperform the free market. The question is especially dangerous when the code developer has a quasi-religious approach, a moral certitude. It would be an environmental waste to make small boats out of metal boats. They'd be sturdier, but the amount of carbon and fossil fuels wasted by mining and refining ores to make heavy, slow, small metal boats would be a waste (though probably supported by the metal mining industry). USA has other problems with its wooden structure model, such as "urban sprawl"... I don't think the free market is perfect, but "command and control" scares me, especially when it's promoted by factoids and math that dazzle non-engineers, and are used to support a pompous argument over homebuilding material. Your math of finite resources is exactly on point... But you are using the math on finite resources to promote the theory that European command and control will protect those resources better than the free market. That's the argument central to TFA... Was the free market stupid, or would "solving" it just as likely lead to stone buildings in the countryside and small metal boats?

Valid points. But generally, the cost of entrenching is a bet against innovation. Maybe you're right and it's a good bet to bury several billion dollars of copper. I wasn't thinking the innovation would eliminate cable, the analogy to DSL in the home walls was that I'd paid to entrench what turned out to be the wrong kind of cable.

As an American married to a European, I've often been asked by puzzled Europeans as to why Americans build houses from wood. Alexis de Tocqueville probably said it best (Democracy in America Vol II, Chapter VIII):

"I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. In these words, which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a man of rude attainments, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people directs all its concerns."

Americans regularly get second mortgages and put additions and improvements to their homes, expanding and adapting them. The less this is true (inner cities) the less likely the home is made of wood. And that may turn out to be true of many high-line wires. I'm not sure about power lines, but would assume we'd pay for telephone cables to be buried at the same time, and that seems incredibly wasteful. If the USA paid to put all the telephone cables underground, how will it pay off if everyone goes wireless, as has happened in most rapidly emerging market cities? When I had my home rewired in 1998, I thought it would be wise to pay for double phone lines, put in for DSL cable. I wish I could get that money back and put it into a savings bond.

Who can worry about Kitty Cat Memes, with all the Evil Clown crime? http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

My friends in Denmark and Norway tell me that the word "Friend" in the north is much more reserved, and it has held Facebook back. But like Halloween, differences in culture have a way of being only a generation deep. My mother in law, in southern France, is no slouch with the LOLs.

Great news on the glass, all for it. But it's still too difficult to repair and replace the glass (and batteries) on these phones due to the adhesive.

What works is the "tinkerer's blessing" (opposite of the curse of natural resources). Chronicled in Yuzo Takahashi's history of Japanese radio technicians https://muse.jhu.edu/login?aut... , development is best done through normal trade with geeks and technicians. South Korea, Singapore, Guangdong, Taiwan, etc. all developed from refurbishing and reverse engineering used technology. Benjamin Franklin was engaged in buying used surplus printing machines and textile machines for reassembly in the USA, Technicians, nerds, repairers, fixers tend to be smart quiet truthful people, and when economies grow from talented knock off (Shanzai in Chinese) to outsourced contracting to ODM, you wind up with Terry Gou, Simon Lin, and Lee Byung-chul.

What has tragically happened in Africa and India is that do gooders and celebrities like Annie Leonard have found a recipe of white guilt and created a bogus "e-waste" crisis which puts African geeks and nerds in prison. FreeHurricaneBenson. Forums like Slashdot, where repair and tinkerers gather, have been important places to assess the ewaste hoax. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... I lived in Africa in the mid 1980s and have been finding win-win trade with display devices for almost two decades, and see Africans getting increasingly furious at the people making up fake stats, taking pictures of kids at dumps, and making money without sharing. Search Heather Agyepong's "The Gaze on Agbogbloshie", or read Emmanuel Nyaletey's "My Reaction to The E-Waste Tragedy" http://www.isri.org/news-publi... Emmanuel is an electronics repair technician who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the scrapyard in a city of 4 million people (Ghana). currently on scholarship for coding at Georgia Tech. I'll put my money on geeks like Emmanuel and the free market over anti-trade rantists and celebrity AID show Bob Geldoffs all day long.

Mrspoonsi appears to have copied the wrong link. But it's an interesting wrong link about hacked Foscam cameras showing up on a spy website http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...