Oh, please -- put down the flag.

As an American Apple user, I hate the fact that Apple doesn't use the same charger / data cable as everyone else and that, worse, my iPhone 5 isn't even compatible with my iPhone 3 charger. It's an overpriced, short POS that has a pointless chip in it to prevent third party cables from working properly. It's also not water-resistant (which is great in case you accidentally drop the end of it into a glass of water on your desk). All in all, Apple's new charger has significantly worsened my enjoyment of the phone.

So, I'm all for standardization on something nearly everyone else has agreed is sane. Apple gets no free pass for being American with me.

Same reason each country has a standard railroad track, a standard power outlet, etc. Letting industries decide on mutually incompatible standards largely serves to lock in consumers and also creates great inefficiencies in the economy due to incompatbility. Standardization would allow business like cafes & airports to offer charging solutions that fit all their customers, and it would produce less physical waste.

Either that or people see cameras on them and are less likely to run or resist arrest. But most likely a mixture of the two. I'm sure there's a lot of misbehavior on both sides when the cameras are off. It looks like the cameras are a big win for everybody.

This is the best part of it IMO. It doesn't matter whose fault the problems were. Was it the suspect misbehaving? Was it an abusive cop? Is it a liar trying to get an officer in trouble after the fact? On the whole, it's a mix of all of them, but we don't need to know the actual mix to appreciate the fact that it seems to be better for everybody.

It's very hard for police unions to fight against something that clearly reduces their physical danger and exposure to complaints. If they save face by pretending that the cameras are making the "bad guys" behave and that it wasn't a police problem in the first place, that's fine by me.

Exactly correct. The right to privacy is also supported by the 10th ("rights reserved to the people").

The only significance of Roe vs. Wade is that it is one of relatively few cases that explicitly recognizes the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights.

Rights retained by the people being, well, retained by the people, no legal precedent is technically required for these rights to exist and be asserted, of course. Further, they can not be taken away by any element of government (not even the Supreme Court).

Unfortunately, some elements in society (the legal profession comes to mind) have a vested interest in not recognizing the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights. Much of the mess in the US legal system (abuse of tort law, the patent mess, the copyright mess, abuse of fundamental rights by government agencies and legal professionals, massively long and complex laws, and so on) that has developed over the past century or so can reasonably be supposed to flow from this ethical conflict of interest causing inappropriate decisions.

In addition to the right to privacy, there's another right arising under the 9th Amendment (and probably a more important right), namely the right to ethical practice of law. The implications of this right are staggering, since it implies much of current legal practice is actually illegal. Think about it.

My wife bought most of our HDMI cables at Ross and TJ Maxx. HDMI cables are exaclty the sort of commodity item with a ridiculous markup that the overflow sellers tend to carry at reasonable prices.

We've never had it better here in fact, than since that monstrosity of a union disappeared, and Russians could have had it just as good, were it not for Putin.

And yet when either old age or an "accident" does Putin in, the next leader will be about the same or worse. Putin might make a passable impression of a supervillain, but he's just a man; he didn't beat people into submission with his superpowers, he rose to power because he's the kind of person who gets power in a country like Russia.

So no, Russians couldn't have had it just as good were it not for Putin. Some details would be different, but the country would still be just as authoritarian and obsessed with domination. Lenin did away with the outer trappings but not the inner essence of Czarism, and added a cartful of "ends justify the means" to the mix, which then made Stalin the best available match for the resulting muderous abomination. The later leaders then renounced Stalin but not the essence of the system, and the ball simply kept rolling until the empire collapsed. But even then only the symbols and forms of Russian institutions changed, while the heart of the system went to live on. Which then led to Putin's being the next behind to keep the throne of Czars warm.

Until something is done to its national psychosis, Russia will always be a country where a leader like Putin is the best people can hope for, since he's the least nasty embodiment of Russian national spirit (which still makes him pretty damn nasty). Did I say leader? Because all decisions of importance are made by the nature of the Russian system, and Putin simply handles the logistics of implementing them, getting his share of the loot as payment.

Every country has the government it deserves, and Russia is no exception.

She's a stupid douche because the fewer people who take the vaccine the more likely people are to catch this disease, increasing the number of people who die from it, making it far more deadly than bee stings. You're not very good with this whole "science" thing, are you?

We don't want to be separated with friends by national borders just because some moron wants a toy state to play with.

National borders don't need to separate people any more than, say, city limits do. In a free country, crossing the border is a formality, and many neighbour states have dispensed with even those. It's empires who make a huge deal of borders; normal nations treat them as legislation handover points.

I don't know what you understand under socialist and dictatorship, but these 2 terms are mutually exclusive. USSR was fascist.

USSR was a secular theocracy. It treated Marxism - or "Dialectic Materialism" - as revealed truth, and as theocrats usually do, made more shit up as it went along. If and when reality disagreed with revelation, it got ignored or violently suppressed. And it never really changed: people got tired and disappointed with their prophet, just like they'd gotten tired and disappointed with the Czar earlier, and abandoned him. But the spirit of autocracy - the myth of divine leader - lived on, thus Putin is now enthroned as the new Czar, just like Stalin before him. Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.

And no, USSR was not fascist. Fascism and Stalinism are both manifestations of something far older and nastier, a sickness that to some extent pervades all human societies. All who try to build a utopia reach the point where it seems the goal is just within range if they only sacrifice a few people to reach it. If they don't, the paradise remains flawed, and if they do, it turns into a nightmare - just like Soviet Union and various fascist regimes did.

Of course, the US also did exactly that to win the Cold War, and it seems the bill is now coming due. Time will tell how far the "land of the free" will fall before what it's unleashed is done with it.

But the fact that electric car advocate geeks will take issue with the above scenario and will make endless excuses for their technology and will dismiss very legitimate practical concerns with electric says a lot about how detached from reality the electric car movement really is right now.

Poe's law strikes again.

Once you can replace an 18 wheeler's diesel engine with an electric drive system, then you've changed the world and made a real impact on emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_locomotive

It's a pity Tesla's wireless transmission of electricity didn't work, otherwise all vehicles would be electric.

The NSA hasn't been cancelled, or even had a major budget cut. Ergo clearly bad government programs and agencies continue. Has even one person responsible for that mess been fired?

Why would they be? The NSA "gets the job done". The job it's doing is dirty, but the fault for that lies on the feet of the people who gave it its mandate - ultimately American people.

Besides, even if the NSA was destroyed, the problem that gave it birth would still exist: taking national security to be a concern overriding all other considerations, including rights of individuals. As long as America is more important than Americans, something like the NSA will always exist.

If Bill Gates is involved, I suspect some devious plot, though not necessarily Microsoft based. Actually, history would suggest that it's also Microsoft based, but he hasn't been in charge for awhile now, so perhaps he's got something else to push.

Every time I've checked one of his "benevolent" actions, it's turned out to be control motivated (or wealth motivated) so I'm now suspicious whenever his name appears.

FWIW, axioms cannot be understood. They can only be postulated. If they are said to apply to reality, then they can also be observed to be invariably true. (Well, actually they can be observed to be true when you are noticing them, except in minor edge cases that can be explained away.)

What *can* be understood is how the axioms interact to describe an instance. (I'm being general here, so that I'm not *just* talking about math, but math is included.)

One useful way of talking about axioms is to use metaphors, some times historic. E.g., the equals sign is a symbol representing a balenced set of scales (as used in Babylon). In this system numbers are mapped to weights. So the scales remain balanced if you add or remove the same number from both pans of the scale. But this is an analogy, and there are places where it breaks down. (E.g., a square root has two valid answers...which doesn't fit the analogy, but does fit the axioms.)