The largest hazard with that set seems to be swallowing the parts, in that in addition to potentially choking on small parts, some would sicken or kill you if you managed to choke them down. For mature children though, looks like a cool toy to use under supervision (for educational guidance in addition to safety).

The real problem with that thing seems to be that it was quite expensive, and even more expensive to produce (the company lost money on every unit).

Entries in the no-fly list are sufficiently bare of details that by the law of large numbers, most of the entries probably apply to a US citizen somewhere, even if the entry was added for a specific non-citizen. Hence why there are periodic stories of family vacations stopped by the US Government accusing 3 year olds of terrorist sympathies and soldiers recently returned from duty of being the enemy they were just engaged with.

The trick here is that he was powerful enough to get them to look it up and find out it was a mismatch. You or I (presuming you're not a Senator posting under a pseudonym?) wouldn't get that luxury.

This. Particularly since many print magazines don't print the numbers on a surprising number of pages (ads, the first page or spread of an article, on infographics ...) so there isn't even an easy way to seek to the continuation.

The web has invented its version as well, though, with what would be a six-inch newspaper article spread across 3 pages. "one page view" is now a subscriber-only feature :/

That's easy: If it's an anonymous threat, it's not serious. Much like: "There was a bomb threat today? Statistically, we're safer today than yesterday!"

Solar powered melting devices have two advantages over blacktop from a thermodynamic perspective:
- Blacktop conducts part of the collected heat into the ground, whereas solar collection could hypothetically collect the energy before it gets to the ground, leaving more available to radiate back upward.
- When it isn't snowing, blacktop still radiates into the air above it. These devices could store energy to be released only when it's actually snowing.

That said, implementing these devices as anything other than a billionaire's ruinously expensive driveway seems impractical. The actual devices would be absurdly expensive to produce in that quantity with the amount of semiconductor fabrication and precision assembly. Ignoring materials, installation would cost much more than a normal highway, since this essentially combines the labor-intensiveness of a cobblestone road with the specialized labor requirements of a hardwood floor. Lastly, that energy storage mechanism that makes it remotely feasible would be similar to replacing the fuel tanks at every gas station with the batteries of a Tesla charging station.

You can specify senders whose mail is to not be opened. Basically, it's $5 a month to have someone throw your junk mail away for you.

Yeah, phone is really the only noun that fits in that hypothesis, so their point for a special case is totally justified

The police are allowed to search your phone, your papers, your home, anything, once they go to a judge, present their case, and receive authorization. The person whose property is being searched has no voice in this case, and in fact isn't even necessarily aware it is being made until they are presented with the warrant. It's literally the most trivial of checks and balances, provided you actually do have a need to search that single individual's property. The goal of these warrantless search rules is to allow dragnet searches of EVERYONE's property.

Think of a warrant as similar to those "hash cash" anti-spam concepts: It's really easy to do if you have a single email that you want to send, but if you're looking to send 100k indiscriminate spam messages, it's going to slow you down.

People get into high positions by rising as those above are destroyed in the public eye. Those above are destroyed in the public eye when they fail to respond to every absurd panic with equal panic and alarm. A rational leader is soon removed from power.

I don't think that allowing parents to select their child's traits will ever lead to "clones"; things like Down's syndrome get weeded out in 90% of cases because it's a horribly debilitating condition ensuring that parent nor offspring will never live a normal life. Physical traits, though, are in the eye of the beholder: one person making a designer baby to their idea of beauty will result in a totally different set of traits than another.

Generally when municipalities go after micro-rental users (particularly en masse), it's not to enforce the main tenants' leases, but to enforce hotel taxes. A reasonable analysis would say it's a typical case of a private citizen unwittingly crossing the line into small business, a cynical one would say that real hotels lobby for these taxes and push for their enforcement to inflate hotel rates.

When I first saw that video, I assumed due to the crummy resolution that some joker had voiced it over. I checked the congressional record, though, and that man actually asked those questions in front of the committee where the stenographer could hear him. Page 27: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/C... Props to Admiral Willard for maintaining a straight face?

I actually was able to direct all user home folders to their own partition for the first time with my last Windows install. It turns out that there's a key combo you can hit on a certain page of the install wizard that will drop you to the desktop for the preboot environment the installer is running in, where you can run regedit (which will at that exact tab of the wizard see the registry of the newly installed system) and move the default user folder location (this is before any users have been created, again the magical tab of the wizard). There was some other voodoo to basically "reseal" the install a get back to the wizard. Pretty much the polar opposite of every Linux installer I've ever used, where they (gasp) ask which partition to use for /home. Great to know that it's actually possible though, since even if you know the registry keys to change when moving a user, the account will never work quite right afterward (I assume some user attributes get cached by various services or something).

The other thing with SSDs is that within a given generation, speed correlates to capacity. The 512GB model doesn't use chips with twice the capacity, it uses twice as many chips. Sequential write speed close to doubles because twice as many chips can be writing at any given time (random writes, and the latency of sequential writes, obviously doesn't benefit)