Telling people not to be stupid never works.

And no doubt some people think I'm "stupid". I don't think I am, but the way I get modded sometimes suggest others do.

..the Wilford Brimley special!

You don't seem to get it.

Even if it was supposed to be tongue in cheek, Trump asked for help from the Russians and they gave it. FBI documents have shown that Russia began a spearfishing operation against the Democrats the day after Trump asked for that help.

More basically, a government that wants to see your country fail played a critical role in the selection your country's leadership. You should be pretty concerned about that. They certainly weren't trying to pick the best person for the job.

Exactly. A passenger aircraft should be designed to be as idiot proof as possible, and as resistant to deficient maintenance as possible. Just because you CAN train an expert pilot to overcome a design flaw doesn't mean you shouldn't address the design flaw. Training or maintenance requirements that might be acceptable on bleeding edge military aircraft simply aren't on a basic workhorse passenger aircraft like the 737 Max.

Is Luxottica selling the same lenses/frames that cost $300 in the U.S. for less in Europe?

Exactly. Moreover, even the 3D mask attacks sound like they only work if you rig the system. The first (only?) 3D mask attack that I've actually seen demonstrated wasn't able to be reproduced by any other researchers (at the time; maybe things have changed since then?), and it was later determined to have only worked for those particular researchers because they inadvertently trained the phone on the mask*. When they attempted to prove their methodology's reproducibility by resetting everything and giving the phone a few days of use before introducing the mask (i.e. actually simulating real world conditions), their mask was never able to unlock the phone and they were never able to reproduce their own, original results.

*The iPhone is, by necessity, more tolerant of variations right after it's set up with FaceID, since it continues to refine its understanding of what the owner's face looks like under different conditions (e.g. glasses, stubble, hair cut, etc.). In the case of the successful attack, the owner's face was shown to the phone during setup, then never again, giving it no chance to refine and improve as it normally would during the first few days of typical use. Instead, they immediately started showing it a similar "face"—the mask—which it understood to be a variation on the owner's appearance, thus effectively training it that the owner's face was the mask.

Its really good to see the fine quality content here.

At this stage I need glasses for everyday wear and a second pair just for the computer. I had my optometrist give me a second prescription measured at about 30 inches - roughly the distance from where I sit to my monitor. Zenni provided the computer glasses and they are very bit as good as the overpriced ones in the lens shop. I think I paid about $35 at Zenni vs. about $150 at the lens shop.

From now on I'm taking the prescription with me and shopping online for glasses. The prices are at least 2-3 times cheaper.

And there is a reason Samsung didn't bother with costly 3D imaging. This isn't supposed to be a super secure system. Someone can unlock your phone by pointing it at your face, perhaps while you are asleep, even with the Apple system.

Face unlock is for people who only want to protect against people they don't know stealing their phone. It stops random thieves from getting their data and makes it much harder for them to factory reset and sell the phone on.

It's for people who are so lazy that even fingerprint unlock is too much hassle, let along a long PIN/password.

Here in Europe and as soon as glasses varifocals, we're talking about four-digit EUR figures for ones with good lenses...

There's many steps we can take to fix, as in repair, the electoral system. Multi-round runoff elections sound way better than 2 shitty primaries, for example. Everyone is too scared to even touch that. Hell, we can't even do away with the Electoral College. Or Daylight Savings Time for that matter. Organizational inertia!

Anyway, if the gerrymandering, poll-taxing Republicans were "mad as hell" at the result, they wouldn't be bobbleheaded yes-men for Dear Leader, and they wouldn't nominate him a second time. But it looks like all that is coming to pass.

Savings accounts have paid below inflation since we went off the gold standard. Banks are effectively charging a fee to store your money. Bit of a scam, since you're loaning the bank money, but in the modern world there are no very-low-risk investments that pay more than inflation.

The real question is, when will I get support for trig functions?

Latest news from Reuters suggests that plane suffered some kind of a problem that caused it to emit smoke while in the air:

https://www.reuters.com/articl...

Could be anything from engine trouble to a bad case of Mohammedianism.

Boeing is shifting jobs out of Seattle to cheaper and more business friendly places like South Carolina.

It was a giant tentacle monster. Did you not watch the movie? It was literally a giant tentacle monster.

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

  Mark Twain

Same, reputable normal LASIK goes for 2k (per eye), with wavefront guided LASIK in the 2.5-3k range. I'm evaluating it right now. There is some ways to get discounts, but the only way I see 200 is if your flying to some other country maybe?

Wrong question. Why would anyone assume that if something was being sold with a very large profit margin there would not be new entrants to the market undercutting the incumbents?

In many places you can buy glasses at much closer to the cost price, often online but sometimes in shops as well. Personally I like JINS. I find them more comfortable than designer frames and the last pair I bought was $30 (admittedly on sale but I think only $50 normally).

That quote was about A Wrinkle in Time? I've barely paid attention to the crazed baby fight over Ms Marvel as all this stuff has been making my roll my eyes painfully hard for a while. I thought someone said she said that about Ms Marvel. And my thoughts on that were: "Did she write the movie? Because unless the director says that as well I don't think that the goal of the movie should be considered "ME HATE MEN"

Hell a ton of people tried to say "NO WATCH BLACK PANTHER WHITE MAN" yet the movie ended with T'Challa saying we should all treat each other as the same tribe. Some people tried to say "WONDER WOMAN FOR GIRL POWER DIE BOYS" yet no one left the movie calling it toxic feminism or whatever. This crap.

An important factor to consider is the number of people who fly successfully every day for every one that dies. You can't call something a failure if it works statistically close to 100% of the time. The important thing is that each crash be investigated and if there was a gap to the regulations that contributed to this we will close those gaps and keep it as close to 100% as possible in the future.

Soon self driving will need the same kind of system or it will never work either.

I live in a country where the state subsidises pretty much every health issue. Except glass lenses and frames. You go and make a health insurance around here and guess what it doesn't include in all but the top-of-the-line plan: everything eye prosthetic-related. It is literally cheaper here to perform corrective eye surgery than to buy 2 or 3 pairs of glasses (if you do it through public health and wait around 8-20 months).

And it's getting worse. 3 years ago I paid 35 bucks for top of the line Zeiss lenses, 70 a pair. In the same shop last month, I refreshed my frames and was charged 75 for each lens, 150 total, only this time they were the second best model. Same brand too. And I consider myself "connected" with the clerks, as I've been going there for some time and allow some tax and insurance shenanigans we both take advantage off.

Something even fishier I've noticed, is that frames have gotten cheaper as a way to fool the customer. You can buy a cheaper frame while trying out stuff at the shop, but you're pretty much forced to pay whatever lenses they have around, because the shop knows what's "better". I rarely see anyone downplay the lenses they get in opticians - they will always follow the suggestion of the clerk. Then you end up paying as much or more for the lenses than the frames.

The prices in the summary are why some of our family have started using https://www.zennioptical.com/ (no connection except as customer). One family member got very basic lenses & frames for $9 if memory serves (could be off but it wasn't even $40 with shipping), Mine were more but had more features. It was worth getting the account and submitting photos to "try on" glasses, but one order I placed would have been better if I had paid attention to the posted length of the temple and actual frame & lens dimensions: next one I did better and it is good now.

(My one complaint is that their customer service gave info that was overconfident -- they didn't really know. And their site EULA had terms I didn't like, and nobody was willing to discuss it, either at the posted contact info or the customer service. But the site FAQs etc were helpful for other things, and I was able to adjust frames myself, etc.)

Vision can change over time – that still is true after LASIK. Even if nothing went wrong, it can happen easily that two or three years later your eyes have changed again and you'll need glasses again even though you had them lasered.

Short answer: nope!

Longer answer: Gold rushes start when someone finds an easily and cheaply accessible lode of commercially valuable ore... And a bunch of other people rush in to get their piece of the action. Almost always, they're short lived and the only people who actually make money are the folks selling supplies to would-be miners.

There is no material on the Lunar surface that's easily and cheaply available - even if you use it on orbit rather than returning it to Earth.

Also, if you're going to buy a house and want a mortgage, or you want a loan to buy an automobile (even if you plan to pay it off quickly), having a good credit score helps out a lot. You will want that mortgage someday and won't have the cash to pay for it all at once. But if you don't use a credit card then your credit score may not be very good as there's no history of paying off debts promptly and on time. Yes, it's a bit illogical that someone who goes out of his way to avoid debt is seen as a potential debt risk, but that's how things work.

You can possibly get this to work for you without carrying a credit card all the time. Get a credit card then tie it to auto-pay with your utilities service. Ie, credit card pays the utility bill, and your bank account reconciles the credit card automatically at the end of the month.

The key rule is to ALWAYS pay off the FULL balance of the credit card each month. The interest rates on even the best credit cards are ridiculously high. They're the easiest way to get quickly over your head in debt. Try to never have more than one credit card even though you keep getting these amazing offers in the mail. Occasionally you can use another (ie, $1500 off my refrigerator if I signed up for a Sears card) but cancel it as soon as you can.

So every time anyone loses an hour or gains an hour of sleep and it causes serious health problems, it would be an easily proveable hypothesis, and a theory acceptable to near certainty. Because in everyday life, people lose sleep or sleep in. If it is a true health crisis, the proof is so simple as to be something that we can find in ourselves. "Oops - I missed an hour's sleep , that must be the cause of my arthritis. And my uncle slept in yesterday - and we found him dead in bed - sleeping an extra hour caused this.

You know, seems like your sleep apocalypse needs enforced by law, my very excitable boi.

By the way - shouldn't insomniacs all die after a few sleepless nights?

With places like Zenni Optical (http://zennioptical.com) available, where a complete set of glasses with all kinds of coatings and options and extras comes out to under $50 US, why are people still buying at their optometrist's office?

There's several different places like Zenni online. Even with shipping and currency conversion, it's a lot less expensive to buy online than any eye wear places here in Canada.

And the quality is quite good, comparable to $200+ US frames and lenses. Even if the quality isn't as good as the uber-expensive ones, you can always just buy 2 or 3 pairs each year and still come out ahead. :D

So you're saying it's a Republican trait, rather a conservative trait?

Here in the U.S. the invisible hand is in traction from so many megacorps whacking it with a mallet.