Well, they've talked about making Roadsters again eventually. And then there's the X coming.

At least you can mostly escape the latter. Get yourself an introductory eye exam someplace, or hell even pay for it, and use the numbers to order lenses online — fit in some frames you picked up anywhere you like. There's lots of good ones out there at flea markets and yard sales.

That's maybe the biggest question here. The US hands over control of the internet. Ok. Fine. Sounds good on paper. But who gets control? And please don't say "nobody". Like it or not, certain things need to be policied by some entity. The two things that immediately spring into the mind are domain name control and IP address assignation. Pretty much anything where "globally unique" is a key feature will have to have some kind of controlling entity.

And the very LAST thing I could possibly see as beneficial is if that control was handed to certain entities that would all too eagerly take control of it. Namely corporations with an interest in controlling those resources. Can you imagine what it would be like if a for-profit organization takes over certain aspects of the net? Especially the "globally unique" ones? If you thought domain name turf wars have been problematic, you ain't seen nothing yet.

I'm certainly not someone who thinks it's a perfect solution to hand the control of an important resource to a single country. Far from it. If anything, handing it to the EU sounds sensible, considering how much infighting is going on there and how much bickering, the chance that they could use it against the rest of the world is sufficiently small. Ok, I'm kidding. But I guess it is easy to understand how it's hard to find a good governing body for something like this. Who should take over?

The UN? Please. Take a look at how much success they had with world peace and world hunger and ponder how much more important those two things are compared to the internet. Then consider how much success they'd have policying and governing the internet.

A multi-national consortium? Where's the difference to the UN?

The EU? As I said, considering how much in-fighting and bickering is going on there, it probably carries the lowest risk of anything bad happening. But also the lowest chance of ANYTHING happening when something needs to be done. Plus the highest chance that it will eventually be sold off to the highest bidding corporation.

Decentralize it? Good idea on paper, that was essentially the basic idea behind the internet, but it has deviated from that a long while ago. It's very unlikely that this can still fly. Most likely we'll be running into severe problems before long. Especially when certain countries decide it's a good idea to do a few things differently so they can more easily avoid doubleplusungood ideas to reach the plebs.

Who should take control? I can't really think of many good alternatives, but I'm eager to hear suggestions.

They don't actually deserve to do that. Their first function is to overcharge you as much as possible for a commodity product that is available from many different sources. Their second function is to try to milk you for service revenues. Typically, dealerships depend on service for a significant portion of their income and automakers depend on parts sold to those dealership for a significant portion of theirs. The parts themselves are grossly overmarked and a tidy profit can be made selling them at 60% or less of the list price in most cases, especially from everyone but the base Japanese brands.* The Germans exemplify this but Ford and Chevy are right up there. If you manage to locate a scrupulous dealership you can actually get the parts at reasonable prices — which, of course, the internet has already enabled. The hilarious thing, though, is that the really good prices on many of these parts actually come from dealerships. This is notably true in the Audi parts market. Audi Marin? Evil right down to their black little hearts. Won't work with you at all on parts pricing. But I can go to any of several sites online and get a nice quote from a dealership that has precisely what I need for somewhere half to two-thirds the price they want around here. On the other hand, back when I was buying Nissan parts, my local dealership would give me parts at reasonable prices. And back when I had a local Ford dealership, they would also modify the ridiculous Ford list prices down to something sane and based on their cost for me. Obviously, I buy my Mercedes parts on eBay.

So basically, given that the dealership's job is usually to fuck you over, why in shit would I give one tenth of one fuck about them today? The ones that are worth a crap will continue to exist, because they already fulfill a valuable function. The ones that don't won't be missed. Am I supposed to care about the jobs? Because I assure you that those people don't give a shit about IT jobs lost to outsourcing — another part of a natural process which I call progress. And I say this as an on-again, off-again IT professional.

* And maybe the Koreans, I haven't dealt with them yet.

San Francisco is peopled by the self-entitled and the disenfranchised and very little in between. This is a natural factor of the immense property values. Sooner or later there will be a big earthquake and it will all slide back into the sea and we can all have a good laugh. In the meantime they will continue gentrifying the last vestiges of personality out of it.

I heard once about this thing called the crusades...

Maybe we oughta just burn down all the churches

You will probably be able to go to userscripts and find several scripts provided by someone else. Some of them will even be maintained. Perhaps adblock plus will include a feature to do it.

Detecting an element and hiding an element containing it shouldn't take anyone capable of doing the job an hour, unless they have to learn enough Javascript to do it in the bargain. But I agree, it is an annoyance.

My point was that people do not in fact have to do what you say they have to do before they can "shop". They only have to do that before they can get spammed. Therefore, you were incorrect at best.

Funny, that's almost all I do, too. I also make sure I don't see links I probably won't like. Because if people are spending money annoying me by helping google poison my search results, I probably don't want to give them money for that bullshit anyway — I prefer not to fund my own annoyance.

Based on what you're saying, it seems very possible to me that there are ranges at which the transponder signal can be receive but the skin paint has not.

Signals in both directions will attenuate according to the normal square-of-distance law. Suppose that the aircraft is at a distance from the radar such that the signal is attenuated to just below the detection threshold. That is the radar can not get a skin paint -- but barely. However, the strength of the radar signal that strikes the aircraft at that range is 4X (in an ideal world; in reality its probably even higher) the strength of the signal that arrives back at the radar receiver. This is because doubling the distance (which assumes perfect reflection; in reality it's not quite that good) will quarter the power.

Therefore, the transponder can very likely detect the incoming radar signal -- and respond to it -- at ranges beyond which the radar can get a skin paint, since it receives 4X as much power.

The question, then, is whether the transponder replies with greater energy than the reflection at those long ranges. If so, then there is a zone in which the transponder signal can be detected but the skin paint cannot. Turning off the transponder in that zone would make the plane instantly and completely disappear from radar.

Suggesting that industry has given workers better tools and requires them to be less trained is asinine. They need training just to use the tools. They're expected to know more today than ever before.

I'm not in love with unions, but worker productivity has increased by orders of magnitude, and you're using a threefold increase in workers as an excuse as to why we don't pay our workers commensurate with their productivity? Your math doesn't work out.

It's not compensation unless you receive it. You don't get to count things like payroll taxes or compliance costs as compensation. Those are expenses. However, those expenses are far less than the increases in productivity, even counting the ones which are compensation. It costs only about 40% on top of a worker's salary for all that stuff. Maybe 50% or even 60% now, let's say. That's still less than one order of magnitude, so it's still a stupid and invalid argument.

Is it really that hard to slap a Metro interface on Firefox? And if so, does that tell us about Metro, or Firefox?

How did you get an insightful for this? It's not even vaguely close to true. When is the last time you depended on sponsored advertisements to find a product? Intelligent people shop online by reading articles and reviews first, not by going to the google results for whatever the name of the thing they're looking for might be.

Well, that's something else I didn't say, or even suggest.

What else have you assumed that I said when all I said that was the problem was that we're not controlling our government enough?

Run around and point a video cam at a cop.

Or ... better don't.