At the start of Bruce Sterling's novel "Schismatrix", there's an assassination via a swarm of genetically modified moths.

Obama's laws made most existing policies illegal. Increasing expenses made still more policies illegal. The government is the aggressor in this cluster-f***, and insurance companies are complicit in that they allowed themselves to be bribed by the Democrat's Fascist plan.

Or do you think that it's insurance companies that vote laws into existence?

I've seriously started to wonder whether the Chinese don't have the right idea--keep social media on a tight leash, or just ban it outright.

There is no real APK.

not really

I think it is safe to say that in most jurisdictions in which a referendum takes place and you lose you don't get to keep voting on a question until your side finally wins. Normally it is one and done.

So no more using universities for education?

Nice theory, and if it works for you I'm happy for you for it. But personally, if I had the willpower to turn the internet off for a day and leave it off, I'd have the willpower to just leave it on and not use it. I expect I'm far form the only one.

tl;dr version: A quarter century after the birth of the WWW, a web publication discovers that text on the WWW contains embedded hyperlinks to still more text, which in turn contains still more hyperlinks and so on ad infinitum.

Define what "audio is fine" means to you. The 3.5mm audio on my smart phone is superior to Bluetooth. The audio quality on the Bluetooth is not as crisp and sharp (especially low frequency sounds) as the 3.5 mm audio. There could be a couple of reasons for this, I admit, (1) the 3.5 mm speakers are better quality than the Bluetooth speakers and (2) I'm using Bluetooth 4.0 which is two generations behind current specs. Even with the newer Bluetooth 4.2 specs I'm still reading complaints of audio quality. It's a shame that we are still debating the merits of Bluetooth audio, which is digital, in comparison to analog 3.5 mm audio. I think one of the issues with Bluetooth is the signal is lossly and too compressed to gave high fidelity. I'm sure that will change in time with better hardware and advancements in Bluetooth technology.

No, it’s a play on ‘disgust’, as in the commenting system that keeps logging you out of your account on a site at random unexpected times. And when you find yourself logged out, generally after hitting ‘Reply’ and composing a beautiful rejoinder to some clueless moron who could benefit so by your crystalline reasoning, you find that the Disqus login pop up just flashes by, disappearing without letting you enter anything.

The bright side is that a site that uses Disgust is at least not using Livefyre.

Even if that was feasible, and ignoring cost, that's still a bunch of dongles that aren't otherwise necessary. In my office, for example, I may plug my headphones into 2 or 3 other devices (laptop, stereo, etc) where a dongle wouldn't be used. It's just another adapter to lose that provides no actual technological improvement.

What if all cellphones do it? :( Wait, cellphones? You meant smartphones. ;P

Testing to show that a drug is safe and effective is a tad expensive, Be a pal, and cough up a couple of billion so we can test one or two promising chemicals, won't you?

Burying power mains is ungodly expensive compared to above ground, and it takes much longer to install - how much longer should Puerto Ricans wait to get electricity and how much more will they be willing to pay for that electricity?

. . . are you suggesting that coconuts migrate . . . ? What would be the wind velocity, and could they grab it by the husk . . . ?

The article talks about Amazon's desire to compete with pharmacies, but the Bloomberg title (echoed verbatim by Slashdot) states Amazon wants to 'enter the prescription drug market'.

That wording is confusing. It implies Amazon wants to make AND sell prescription drugs -- the prescription drug market -- which is only half true.

Why not just say: "Amazon: Your Next Pharmacy"?

And the planes land where?
And they load the aid material on to what trucks?
And drive those trucks down what roads?

Aside from the above issues, your plan sounds marvelous.

What's amazing to me is how people - regardless of their political affiliation - always know exactly what happened in any situation from a brief news account.

I believe the process is the territory petitions Congress, who votes on the statehood request.

There has never been, AFAIK, a resounding vote in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico by the Puerto Ricanâ(TM)s.

Wow, unsecured IM protocol!

"A White House spokesman said..."

Really? Shall we go down the list of other things "a White House spokesman said"?

1) President Trump has full confidence in James Comey
2) President Trump has full confidence in General Michael Flynn
2a) President Trump has full confidence in Sean Spicer
3) President Trump has full confidence in Reince Priebus
4) President Trump has full confidence in Steve Bannon
5) President Trump has full confidence in Secretary Tom Price
6) President Trump has never spoken to Russians
7) President Trump was not planning to build a hotel in Moscow
8) Frederick Douglass is doing a great job
9) President Trump is the only thing separating the United States from chaos (this one just today)
10) President Trump is not golfing, he's taking meetings (before the photos of him golfing leaked out)

Shall I go on?

You really want to come here and use something a "White House spokesman said" and pretend it is evidence of anything other than the opposite of the truth? Seriously. Before you quote a "White House spokesman" as evidence, maybe you should give us a date in the past eight months when a "White House spokesman" has not told a lie. Seriously. just one date - one - where there was not a lie from the White House, and I will rule your absurd claim as admissible.

Good points. For now, perhaps maybe, but in the long run we'll have to do better than that if we don't want to double the cost of solarizing a house over the lifetime of the cells. Then there is zero advantage -- hell, negative advantage -- compared to just buying power from a utility that makes more and more of its energy with cells that don't need the battery.

Remember people evil enough to steal kidneys of unsuspecting strangers will take only one kidney not both and be kind enough to leave you in ice with a phone nearby and instructions to call 911. Such kind evil people you have never met before.

I have no idea either, but I am willing to speculate: In Colorado, the transition from prairie to mountains is abrupt, and migrating birds will often follow the front range. Migrating insects are not known to navigate using geographic features as guides, and instead tend to follow wind patterns. The birds tend to be strung out in a N-S direction, and the insect swarm is more likely to be a "blob". So maybe that is what makes the pattern look different.

...local high school car washes set fundraising records.

The barrier to entry to compete with AT&T was: "Put in telephone poles and/or tear up the sidewalks to put in cabling along every right-of-way in every city, county, and state in the entire country. Wire up every home, office, and factory in the country for your new service. Then invent and manufacture the switches and exchanges to go with them, buy the real estate these require, and install."

The barrier to entry to compete with Facebook or Google is: "Have a good idea. Get some VC. Open an AWS account." If you want to be really cheeky, you could even run your Google competitor in Google Cloud.

I'm still using ICQ, and so is my Bulgarian pen pal!

Actually it is quite popular in eastern Europe.

neither MSRP or release dates are laws signed into being by treaty arrangements between governments.

The Fed, you are talking about the Fed and questioning their motives to lie and to distort? ))) that is pretty good humour!!!

I will put my freezer, fridge and the wi-fi router on a long lasting battery. Before cost effective batteries, the ICU determined the minimum level of service that should be guaranteed by the grid. With batteries, easily 80% of the load can accept low grade power with 99% up time and tolerate power outages lasting a day or two. Now ICU, data centers and freezer need to pay for their demands unsubsidized by millions of others.

Make Pancakes Tennis Again!

You can "believe" what you want, but it was damn obvious at the time it was Russians. You could see that just by looking at the arguments that got modded up. 1st priority was suspiciously over-the-top ridicule of any mention of Russian involvement in the election (back when few people were even talking about that), followed by assertions that Putin was a reasonable guy and Ukrainians were Nazis, with a distant third being pro-Trump (usually specious, and sometimes using logic I've never heard from an American).

It was only later that it became known that there was an active campaign to do this all over the internet. If you think this should have been a low-priority target for them, I guess that should show you just how extensive the effort was. Either that, or you can go take their target priority list up with Putin.

So your problem is with the Leaf's implementation of Bluetooth, not Bluetooth. You should complain to Nissan.

I have the same scenario in my cars (Teslas), and do not have the problems you describe. My phone hooks up to my wifes car just fine and hers hooks up to mine just fine. The only problems we have is priority - and again, that's a Tesla implementation problem, not a Bluetooth problem.

So he doesn't use the phone much but we don't know whether the hackers could listen in when he was carrying it - let's hope a proper analysis of it has been done. I wonder whose malware it was.

Did he ever use it for official business? The statement didn't categorically deny it. Fingers crossed he doesn't go in for mistresses, insider trading, rent boys, coke deals or any other compromising activities (or if he does, at least uses a burner phone).

I'm also confused by this. The butterflies were headed South to Mexico (self-deportation does exist!), and shouldn't any migratory birds traveling through Colorado en masse in September or October also be heading South, more or less? Something isn't adding up here.

More importantly, it was filled with air, and the beeps would let people know if it got punctured. There was a real concern that space might be filled with micro-meteors, in which case satellites would not be practical. That there were no micro-meteors was the important discovery.

(These days, we are doing our best to create mico meteors of our own.)

It was worse than that, and yet, not even that bad. Because this is no longer a 20 or 30 year event. Get used to more of the same. Might take a couple years, but it's coming back around. You can't pretend nothing has changed.

You fix it in software, not the standard. Decent devices already implement a delay on the video signal so that it matches up with the audio. I suspect the implementation isn’t much different than what’s necessary with TVs and AVRs that support an Audio Return Channel (a.k.a. ARC, i.e. allowing you to plug a device directly into your TV while having the audio signal get routed to your AVR via the HDMI cable coming from it, and then on to your speakers).

For video games you’re kinda screwed unless the manufacturer implements proprietary extensions to the standard (e.g. Apple’s AirPods do some custom stuff to make pairing and latency less of a problem, which I think they’ve said they plan to share), but this is already a solved problem for watching video footage.

The claim for the "War on Drugs" was the prevention of the use of some drugs already demonstrated to degrade mental performance. Efficacy or toxicity are dealt with by other laws.

True about airspace, but not the real reason.

The real reason was simply that the soviet atom bombs were heavier than the US ones, and so they needed bigger rockets to launch them. Those rockets could easily be modified for space. And the US certainly did not wait for Gagarin to launch, they simply did not have any rockets big enough.