Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

What he's talking about is tabletop gaming design. He just uses FreeMind and MySQL to track what he's doing with it. It's no different than building out skill sets in a spreadsheet and writing up the actual books in a word processor.

When I was young, I played games from SJG, TSR, Palladium, R. Talsorian, ICE, FASA, and a bunch of one-off studios I can't remember now. Some of the systems worked really well, some required some tweaking, and others were essentially unplayable. But it was easy to see links between systems. Despite the occasional legal threats, there seemed to be a lot of borrowing each other's ideas. Palladium clearly was influenced by TSR (and I think they've admitted that the first version of their rules was essentially heavily modified D&D rules), and R. Talsorian's old D10/D6-based system seemed to have some influences from FASA.

When you're designing a game, what external influences help shape the game? How far can you adopt someone else's ideas before you have to start worrying about lawyers getting involved, and has that changed as the pen & paper RPG has waned in popularity?

It wasn't that long ago that celebrities were blamed for making the sex tapes in the first place. That seems to be changing now, and for the better.

This will expand as people look around and see that we have foibles. Some people are still going to be jerks about it by not hiring someone because there's a picture of them from 20 years ago holding a joint or by hiring someone because they found the nudies posted a couple of years back and want the chance at seeing it for themselves. But past drug use isn't going to be nearly as much of a deal-killer as it is now, and even current drug use (at least for marijuana) is probably going to subside as a major concern as long as someone isn't high while on the job.

There will still be reasons people don't get hired for things that end up online. Posing while hanging out with the local Klansmen, for example, is going to make someone wary about hiring them for fear of having to deal with racism in the workplace. But being caught toking, flashing a nipple, or even engaging in sexual activities isn't going to be as important.

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

My wife and I test drove one recently when we had to get her a new car. Aside from a visibility problem for her over her left shoulder, she loved it and we would have bought it. We had it for about a half-hour, and she put it through some good paces, testing acceleration, braking, and essentially slaloming through a mall parking lot. When we got back to the dealer, we realized that the car wasn't even in performance mode. Had that visibility issue not seriously bothered her, we would have bought the car right there instead of getting the Prius-V (which is certainly more practical but a lot less fun).

I'd love to get one, but I work from home and drive *maybe* once a week, so there's no sense in dropping $35K on a new car that will get a few hundred miles put on it each year.

On the other hand, if they're doubling capacity, then you only need half the number of cycles (it actually even works *better* than that, as li-ion cells prefer shallow charges and discharges rather than deep ones - but yes, fractional charge cycles do add up as fractional charge cycles, not whole cycles). If you have a 200km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 10% of a cycle per day. If you have a 400km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 5% of a cycle per day.

Top commercial li-ion capacities are about 30% more than they were 5 years ago. And today's batteries include some of the "advances" you were reading about 5 years ago.

I'm sorry if technology doesn't move forward at the pace you want. But it does move forward when you're not looking. Remember the size of cell phone batteries back in the day?

In the short term, we're still struggling with embarrassing things that we did 5, 10, even 20 years ago. But as time goes by, there is slowly growing acceptance that people do things in private that are publicly considered to be taboo, in bad taste, or crude. One of the interesting things I observed when the Fappening was in the news is that the subjects of the hacking were, by and large, not blamed. The blame was placed on whomever stole the pictures, and few calls for apologies from the various victims were made, and I'm not aware that any of them did apologize for taking the pictures in the first place. Someone is likely to bring them up should any of them run for office, but I don't think voters will care. If anything, it makes them look a little more normal.

When Clinton's reported past drug use was reported (where he claimed not to have inhaled), people made a short fuss and then shrugged their shoulders. Less was made of the younger Bush's drug use, and even less of Obama's. Character imperfections that are shared by a significant minority (or even a majority) of the population are looked past. Where once there was a fear that the only candidates that could run for president were those best able to hide the skeletons in their closets, I think that will fade over time as many of those skeletons won't matter. Within my life, there's a good chance that someone in the White House will get there despite a sex tape being available. A fuss will be made, but ultimately, most people will care more about other matters than that someone recorded their sexual activities.

If you mean the puff toward the top of the stack around the time it went supersonic, I think that was just a vapor cone from the transition to supersonic flight.

Possibly, if it was programmed to do so. But they probably don't program for that because no recovery ship would have been available anyway.

It's initial incident analysis that doesn't need quarterbacking from people who don't have access to internal data. With SpaceX, so many people are anti-Elon that within minutes, people were declaring the company a failure and wondering how long it would take for the entire company to collapse. Orbital Sciences has the advantage that far fewer people even know who they are and they don't have legions of people hoping for them to fail, so being more open up front doesn't carry as much of a downside.

I woke up to the news of this (I usually watch but entered the time wrong on my calendar), and the first thing that I thought of was the docking adapter, IDA-1. I imagine an IDA-3 will be built and flown, but I wonder how long it will take to build and if the delay will impact future missions.