Or to the rooftop mail room chute in a large office building that might contain hundreds of Amazon business customers. If you're picturing suburban doorstep delivery to un-prepared recipients, you're imagining the wrong scenario.

Or even with a cheap shitty coax cable like the one that you got for free in your wheaties 20 years ago to connect your VCR to your TV. Its a digital signal after all - communication either works or it doesn't.

Yes, we're barely competitive. We can vastly improve our competitiveness by using outsourced labor. What do you think we should do?

Martians notwithstanding, nobody had any idea what the far side of the moon looked like before 1959. Sure, 55 years may be "a very long time" for some people, but we're not exactly talking about something that puzzled Hipparchus here.

Yeah, except that we've been using energy from powerful nuclear generation reactors for decades, and if all of that effort had gone instead into the incredibly inefficient solar technology of the day, we'd have had to burn a huge pile of coal or volume of natural gas to make up for the enormous shortfall. You seem to think that time travel is available, and that somehow even somewhat better, but still very inefficient solar tools available today could have been magically manufactured decades ago, and in enormous grids blanketing (where, exactly?). And of course you're probably also suggesting the use of the same time travel machine to send back the scientists who are only just now - despite the availability of huge amounts of capital, decades more accumulated research, and more - figuring out how to make batteries and other storage devices that kind of, sort of make sense relative to things like powering homes, let alone whole cities.

It's a shame that you're wasting all of that energy on such an angry rant when you don't have the patience to educate yourself a bit. The enormous swaths of chopped-down rainforest aren't being allowed to grow back. They're being used to inefficiently provide lumber (once) and then provide development and farming land - activities that in turn also produce more CO2, not that you actually care.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the the fact that their enormous and rapidly growing population is completely overtaking their ability to produce energy, clean water, and enough farmable land to keep up. Hence their steady importation of oil and food from everywhere else.

How is it that you think lying is helping whatever point you're trying to make? The UN has recently pointed out that sub-Saharan Africa has an exploding population, and that the population on that continent will likely quadruple before the century is out. Africa's population is the fastest growing in the world. You know this, everyone else knows this. So the fact that you're pretending it's otherwise, and lead your post with "moron" and "racist" ... well, I guess I should know better than to feed an obvious troll. I've always found that the ones who start their posts by screeching "racist!" are themselves the ones with the race problem. You certainly seem that way.

Hilarious. You're the one fantasizing about population trends that are the opposite of what the UN reports, that imagines time-traveling to solve energy issues, and who sees everyone who doesn't play along with your imagined alternate reality to be morons and racists. Print your post out, on paper, and set it aside someplace safe there in your mom's basement. You'll still be there in ten years, so make an appointment with yourself to read it again, and compare it to each of the next ten years' worth of UN population reports. Not that you'll have the intellectual integrity to actually do that.

If you think you have nothing to hide, you should probably spend a bit of time studying the history of the FBI. Leading an exemplary life has never been a protection from them, if they suspect you may be part of whatever conspiracy is popular at the time. A few decades ago, it was Communists, and having no connection to any Communist organization was never protection from them or their colleagues in organizations like HUAC. It's quite clear that the "anti-terrorist" push nowadays is no more concerned with whether you have anything to hide; if they need a scapegoat and you're handy (perhaps because your name is vaguely like some name on one of their lists), they'll go after you and make your life a hell on Earth.

Having "nothing to hide" is one of the most naive misconceptions going around, and has been for at least a century. Dig into the history of the FBI and assorted other similar organizations. Google can find a lot of it for you. Then come back and tell us again whether you have anything to hide.

(And they probably already have a copy of your pron collection, added to their own. ;-)

Nothing we could have done in the last 100 years would have made a bit of difference with respect to what you mention.

Well, except possibly for doing something to reduce eastern population booms by a few billion people. The couple hundred million people in the west with the economic latitude to pursue the type of stuff laid out in TFA won't make a bit of change, relative to four billion people digging coal in China, sprouting up on the subcontinent, overgrazing in Africa, and plowing down rainforest in Central and South America.

You want any of this to change? Stop having so many babies in places that can't afford them.

Dashcams were introduced much later. About the only changed factor was a much larger risk pool.

Reminds me a little of some work done by Terje Mathisen, an expert assembly language programmer. Not exactly that same as the exploit, but probably interesting to a few slashdotters. I'll let him describe it:

"The most complicated code I have ever written is/was a piece of executable text, in order to be able to send binary data over very early text-only email systems:

"Minimum possible amount of self-modification (a single two-byte backwards branch), a first-level bootstrap that fits in two 64-byte lines including a Copyright notice and which survives the most common forms of reformatting, including replacing the CRLF line terminator by any zero, one or two byte sequence. This piece of code picks up the next few lines, combining pairs of characters into arbitrary byte values before flushing the prefetch cache by branching into the newly decoded second-level bootstrap. (Everything uses only the ~70 different ascii codes which are blessed by the MIME standard as never requiring encoding or escape sequences.)

"This second level consists of a _very_ compact BASE64 decode which takes the remainder of the input and re-generates the original binary which it can either execute in place or write to disk.

Premiums went down in NY where insurers had to offer the same premiums regardless of your health. And of course, insurers have to raise the premiums to cover high-risk people that they earlier simply kicked away. I certainly prefer to pay more and always be able to get insurance then to live in constant fear of losing insurance _forever_ in case of a serious illness.

That's the beauty of large numbers - they average out. And a small insurance pool has to have larger premiums because of the possibility of multiple insurance events.

As I've said, I had a personal example with mandatory insurance. Russia had absolutely no mandatory liability car insurance prior to 2000 and the optional insurance was pretty expensive. As a result lots of people were losing their savings and even houses to pay for damage. A libertarian paradise, in other words.
In 2003 a law mandating car insurance had been enacted. During the first two years, insurance premiums were regulated and only a little bit lower than the optional insurance rates that had been paying before. Then in 2005-2006 premiums fell through the floor - lots of competition and large risk pools.

Out of $54 billions of earned premium. I.e. they are about 8% profitable - that's considered a decent margin, but not at all great.

Incorrect. And I had a personal experience with that - Russia introduced mandatory accident liability insurance in 2001. Prices for car insurance spiraled down in a couple of years after that.

Yes, it has. Prices has gone down in those states that had non-discriminatory mandate before. Prices went up in states where companies had to cover a lot of previously uninsurable people.

Actually, it's like $12.74B in 2014, at least according to the inflation calculator at http://www.bls.gov/data/inflat... .

Christ, folks. It's numbers. It should be easy to validate the numbers you use before you randomly vomit them on the interwebz.