I'm the same, my fingers don't reach and arthritis makes it hard to stretch. I was not talking about physical limitations though, I meant the mental capacity to understand and master the concepts.

Bingo. You are not the product, your personal information is. You gave that information away for free, so don't get any compensation. Due to the special nature of the information it has some special protections, but that's it.

Next time some company asks for my data I'm going to offer them a subscription service.

The author also vastly underestimates the Iranian navy. They have some fairly advanced subs that would cause major problems for any attacking navy. They also have some of the fastest and deadliest torpedoes in the world, and some effective anti-ship missiles. Dingies would be the least of the US navy's worries.

Yeah, they used them in the past, because they didn't need any more. They were not trying to start a war, and lasers would have been a huge escalation.

You don't have full control, but you have a very tight control and recourse available should you get stung.

As a designer you shouldn't be pissed about this. As an end user you definitely should.

Also I disagree they should have ignored the issue. Fake parts are the scurvy of the industry and should be eradicated. I'd much rather a part that produces a predictable but bad result when connected to the computer (bricks), than a part that I'm forever debugging because it doesn't seem to work quite right. Bricking may be a bit extreme but the do-nothing approach was no better.

you know what they do on the ISS? float around and run experiments every day! the only reason to not run the experiments via ISS is because you are specifically doing weapon development. there is no part way anything being worked on isn't weapon related because that's what the military does, make weapons and kill people.

Maybe a stupid question, but can't you modify the port driver/settings to broadcast data on the RX pin for most systems?

This kind of presumes reason is the basis of our drug laws.

Easy-peasy. I don't even have to google it. The Interstate Commerce Clause. All you have to do is find some pretext that says the regulation affects interstate commerce in some way and the feds can quash it.

In this case the issue to use is plain as a pikestaff. By preventing municipalities from providing high quality internet service the state is hinder access by out-of-state vendors to consumers in that community. That justification is WAAY stronger than other that have held up to scrutiny.

A good idea 20 years ago. Today, the farmer has a choice of death vs life due to the fully mature gang culture that has grown up around illegal drugs.

Best to just legalize it - let the gangs convert to legal families with less income.

Just on the IED front the ingenuity, sheer amount, and the different types of IEDs that have been found should get any pyro/electronics nerd excited. How the different tribal and religious militias interacted with themselves, the government, and the coalition is interesting as well. Hell, my Master's thesis was on the efficiency of using militia in counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd call that topic pretty nerdy. And don't forget, politics(Especially international politics) affects all of us, from the price of gas to the strength of your economy.

I see that you still have the illusion that the politicians are not totally bought and paid for by business interests.
I believe that George Carlin said it best:
"Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you.they don’t give a fuck about you they don’t give a FUCK about you.

They don’t care about you at all at all AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

It's called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Mainly the land was worthless because no one could find work there any more. Demand for the land dropped precipitously as thousands of people left the area and moved elsewhere. The world is littered with similar ghost towns.

There is not much value in unmanaged woodlands. Perhaps in 20 to 30 years they could grow trees there that could sell.

It could be worse: It could be running Android.

Honestly, is more competition in this space a problem? Is your objection to "Smart TV's" in general or the OS specifically?

It's not like you can't just use a Matchstick or Roku box if you want. At worst, smart TV features are harmless.

I must be missing something.

Aircraft operate in 3 dimensions, trains operate for the most part in one - which implies that there is much less of a chance of 2 planes being at the same place at the same time than 2 trains being at the same place a t the same time. The airplane autopilot flies at certain altitudes depending on the path, and if the plane stays at the assigned altitude, there is almost no chance for crossing paths. Trains going in different directions share tracks in a lot of places, and they can't move out of the way of each other - timing is everything in train safety (hence we have a few time zones rather than hundreds of local times)