Seriously are we back in the 90's? Some of the most valuable things on earth only exist in the digital realm, see microsoft office and windows, google, and everything produced by the television and movie industries.

We get it. You have an enormous hard-on for Bitcoin.

Too bad I cannot use Bitcoin to pay my taxes, my mortgage, my children's school fees, my grocery bill, any gas station, the parking meter, or anything else that requires interaction with the physical realm around me.

The value of Bitcoin is what I can buy with it, which is very little beyond mail-order luxuries that, let's face it, are better ordered via and protected by my credit card.

We do not care whether you have some anrcho-capitalist obsession with Bitcoin. Counterfeiting does not affect us. Inflation and a central bank is not a concern when compared with a "currency" whos value fluctuates far more against real world goods than the US dollar has in decades, if not longer. Using Bitcoin to trade with the Chinese has the fundamental problem that nobody in the private sphere wants a public and de-anonymizable record of all curreny flows in international and intrastate trade -- it's a surveillance state's dream, but a citizen's and a business' nightmare.

Go troll somewhere else.

Troll somewhere else.

Of course the huge difference is that progressives are concerned about real problems, and the ignorant conservatives are concerned about imaginary enemies and preserving superstition. There's really no comparison with the conservatives completely off the rails from hate-radio, wingnut blogs, and Fox News.

Exactly. progressives are right, conservatives are wrong, and there's absolutely no need to address anyone else's issues because Truth. Which is exactly what the GP was complaining of, but with respect to both extremes.

Meanwhile the people actually involved purchased a hybrid before switching to an SUV, which suggests that they're neither stereotypically conservative nor stereotypically progressive. There's valuable objective information embedded in that problem, yet you want to focus on which of the stereotypes is superior to the other.

Way to miss the point, as well as a shining opportunity to address the real world concerns and behavior of the 'middle.'

Although thought by some to be an acronym of Light Detection And Ranging, the term lidar was actually created as a portmanteau of "light" and "radar."

Go fuck yourself.

Although expressly used by many as an acronym of Light Detection And Ranging, the first usage of a term magically enshrines that usage, and no other, as the exclusive meaning of that series of letters for all time.

Or not.
Portmanteau, noun, plural portmanteaus, portmanteaux [pawrt-man-tohz, -toh, pohrt-, pawrt-man-tohz, -toh, pohrt-] (Show IPA). Chiefly British
1. a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.
2. Also called portmanteau word. Linguistics, blend (def 10).

Lidar was certainly not created as a case or bag of "light" and "radar," and your intended reference to a second meaning is obviously irrelevant because FIRST!

By making intrusive surveillance devices available inexpensively (perhaps by showing hobbyists how to build their own), such devices could move (as planes have) into "general public use" and then be usable by police without a warrant to surveil areas normally off-limits to them without a warrant.

I cannot fault your analysis of that particular sentence since I'm certain that some lawyer somewhere will eventually argue that when the "not in general public use" criterion is absent it somehow becomes a "reasonable" search.

On the other hand, simply because a technology becomes available to monitor something formerly private does not mean that that technology will stay available and become something in "general public use." The now classic evolution-begets-prohibition example is radio frequency scanners. Making or using scanners to listen to analog phone transmissions for fun or profit became a bad idea, not something in general public use.

If you consider that merely listening to something that people voluntarily broadcast, in the clear, was deemed illegal, what do you think the reaction is going to be to your nosy neighbor bathing your home in artificial radiation for the purpose of peeping at things going on that are not ordinarily visible from the outside? That everyone will accept that shielding their home is impractical and simply shrug? Not once some git uses the technology to surveil a politician it won't.

He submitted the book voluntarily for review. What did you expect the people who reviewed it to do? Declassify stuff just because he had it in his book? Why did he do that? I'm guessing Streisand Effect.

He submitted the book for review because if the book was cleared, the government would have a very difficult time prosecuting him for anything included in the book after it was published.

However, he was not actually obligated to follow the recommendations made in the review, nor can the government prevent initial publication of the material by his publisher regardless of whether he followed those recommendations.

What the government can do is attempt to prosecute him after the manuscript is disclosed or published by proving that the book violated the law or the non-disclosure agreement that he signed for his pre-1953 government work. The fact that the information is already publicly known would greatly affect that. There's also very little that the government could practically do to his publisher. You should read up on the Pentagon Papers to see how this works in the real world.

If you're miffed, [libertarian bromide redacted]

Be miffed at yourself, and the fool who thinks that properly researching your own major purchases is a "libertarian bromide."

So sayeth this democrat to the fool.

Even if withholding that information only slows down a terrorist by mere days or hours, it's worth it.

No, it's not.

In addition, our Constitution lets the author make that decision, not the government. We have a whole theory concerning "prior restraint" that cannot simply be tossed away because "why make it any easier for a would-be terrorist bomb maker to find it and make use of it." You only get to challenge the author for allegedly disclosing critical secrets after they're published. That helpfully prevents the government from suppressing embarrasing, non-secret information by fiat.

The First Ammendment doesn't trump and never has trumped public safety.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagrees with you. The author would have to be inciting imminent lawless action. Reporting on the history of the hydrogen bomb is neither inciting nor likely to produce imminent 'safety' effects.

You bought a Haswell-based MBP knowing full well that Broadwell had been released and would work its way into the MBP line shortly.

You also ignored the fact that Apple has been updating the Retina MacBook Pros like clockwork.

If you're miffed, be miffed at yourself. Nobody hid this from you.

Companies in other states that buy CA produced crops should have to send the watere equivalent back to CA.

Yes, because California imports nothing from other states, and there's no logical way that other states could 'charge' for rest-of-US produced products, CA is sure to come out a winner.

Hint: CA had better become even more vegan, since it's only 4th in beef, and pretty much in the bottom tier of poultry and pork.

First they invented SecureBoot, but that was OK, because you could turn it off.

Then they prevented disabling it, but that was OK...

Because they didn't. "No worries, because Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a UEFI configuration setting to turn the protection off, allowing booting other operating systems. This situation may now change. At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said the setting to allow Secure Boot to be turned off will become optional when Windows 10 arrives."

They didn't prevent disabling it. They no longer mandated providing the option to disable it. If your device manufacturer suddenly decides to remove the previously mandatory "off" setting option, that's on them, not Microsoft.

We're still back at "first."

Shouldn't have said molten. This is what I was thinking of. Partial melts. You have to get to the base of the inner mantle to reach molten.

...then up and out the other side (*eye twitch*).

Already noted, but irrelevant since making it down 150 miles and passing through a molten inner mantle are required well before antigravity.

Sorry, I was writing actual content rather than obsessively thread monitoring. Too bad only one other post actually mentions the melting/dilution issue, using Wikipedia no less.

What on earth is "an Uruguay syndrom", and why does google have no idea either.

An attempt to be cute with the concept of the "China syndrome," but since the reactor is in Japan you name somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. This is actually a marginally better form of cute since China and the US are both in the Northern Hemisphere, and Japan and Uruguay are actually separated by the equator as well. Your seemingly self-sustaining molten nuclear fuel melts its way through the earth - then up and out the other side (*eye twitch*).

The problem being it's utter bollocks. Anything that becomes molten will mix into the fuel and dilute it, lowering the reaction rate and moving you further and further away from a self-sustaining reaction.

The real concern is that you melt through the containment vessel (apparently not likely; but then explosions within the containment vessel and seismic activity aren't helping you any), through the earth, and down to the water table so that there is a steam explosion. That potentially scatters the nuclear fuel and fission products out the containment vessel.