But, to steal one of George H. W. Bush's catchphrases, this will be kinder, gentler espionage.

Now take proposals like California's plan to require EVs to have bidirectional charging circuits so that vehicles plugged in for charging can be tapped by the utilities to cover capacity shortfalls, such as on windless nights when the vaunted 'green' wind and solar aren't producing, and pull it back into the power grid to avoid brownouts. Suddenly the number of cycles your EV's battery undergoes isn't under your control any more, and in a region with particularly volatile power production, you can find yourself at the end of the warrantied cycle count -- and the utility company is paying you only for the power they take, not for the wear on your battery pack.

And V2G is a boon for the utility providers, too, because it means that they don't actually have to build out capacity to meet projected demand, as long as they can convince the state to mandate bidirectional equipment that will allow them to tap into EVs whose owners expected to be charging their vehicles overnight, but instead come out to go to work and find them drained. On the consumer side, it puts control over the number of charge/discharge cycles your EV's battery undergoes out of your hands; the utility may pay you for the power it's sucking out of your EV, but it's not going to be paying you for the wear on the battery packs themselves.

The wind-farm operators put in bids for the cost per kWh/MWh they want to receive to make a profit; these are ranked in increasing order of bid, and accepted in turn until the required delivery amount is reached. The highest bid accepted becomes the 'strike price', and all the accepted operators will get paid at that rate. If the wholesale cost of energy goes below the strike price, they're subsidized for the difference; if it goes above the strike price, they refund the difference. This is the 'contract for difference'.

The issue is that none of the wind-farm operators have activated their CfDs, and are instead just selling their generated power at the open-market prices, which are inflated due to the need to maintain conventionally-powered generation on standby to cover shortfalls in renewable generation -- currently much higher than the strike price specified in their CfDs and almost 3x the average cost of power in the US -- and then turning around and declaring that they need even more subsidies so they don't lose money, which implies that either they're just trying to gouge more money out of the government (which will get paid by the end-users as taxes or 'special levies'), or the real cost of renewable generation is significantly higher than they projected, handing the lie to the claims of "cheap renewable power".

What I find annoying is that you used to be able to select "group my order into as few shipments as possible", with the goal of getting it all in one package, but now, even if you select 'next Amazon Day' or the various delayed-delivery options to get your order delivered all on the same day, what you seem to get is one package per item, multiplying the amount of packaging material that you need to dispose of/recycle. It feels like a big step backward for Amazon, but I suppose it's an artifact of shipping the order from whatever warehouse happens to have each particular item, rather than having warehouses with wide enough inventories to be able to assemble an order from a single warehouse -- that way, you can ship product to a fewer number of warehouses, reducing your inventory-tracking overhead.

It's the legroom, but the seat widths contribute to the problem as well. I'm 6'5", and my knees are almost invariably jammed firmly into the back of the seat in front of me, but my shoulders are wider than the seat plus both armrests; even if I put my hands in my lap, my shoulders are, bone to bone, sticking out to both adjacent seats, and if I'm in a window seat, I have to lean enough to be even more of an imposition on whoever had the bad luck to be in the middle seat.

And in that one statement, the ESA is declaring that it is aware of and condones the fact that its members are misleading some consumers in the name of increased profits.

And I'm forgetting the Kalthoff repeater, designed in 1630, which was the first repeating firearm to be brought into military service; the Kalthoff designs, both pistols and muskets, had a capacity of between 5 and 30 shots depending on the individual design, and had a rate of fire varying from 30 to 60 rounds per minute. The Royal Armory in Denmark listed 133 repeating firearms in its 1775 inventory, although by this time they were regarded as antiques, with more modern firearms in use.

Well, let's see. The Belton Fusil -- Belton petitioned the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War looking for a military contract -- would fire up to eight rounds in three seconds with a single pull of the trigger, no 'skilled operator' required. The Girandoni repeating air rifle had been in existence for more than a decade prior to the 2nd Amendment being written. The Lorenzoni pattern of repeating flintlocks, invented in 1688, was widely available, allowing the wielder to cock and prime in one action, allowing a high rate of fire. The Chelembron magazine-fed repeading flintlocks could fire up to twenty rounds, requiring the user only to point the weapon up and turn the barrel and its magazines to feed powder into the chamber, prime the lock, cock it, and feed a bullet into the barrel, after which the barrel was rotated back, ready to fire. And this ignores weapons like the 1718 Puckle gun -- a giant flintlock revolver -- and volley guns, which fired from an array of multiple barrels, or the Chambers-pattern volley gun, which could fire 224 rounds at a rate of fire of approximately 120 rounds per minute. The Founding Fathers were well aware of developments in rapid-fire weapons at the time the 2nd Amendment was drafted.

Then people will move to other terms, possibly drawing from other languages, like '' (Russian), 'Occidere' (Latin), 'Töten' (German), 'Drepa' (Icelandic), 'Bulala' (Xhosa), or 'Fasioti' (Samoan), or wander off into other types of euphemisms like 'discorporate', 'embalmprep', or some other term, until the social media sites do something clever like employ AI text processing to determine context to distinguish between a conversation about a self-driving vehicle hitting and killing a pedestrian and someone trying to upsell terrorist activity. Right now it's like AOL when all of its cancer forums got up in arms because the service was censoring 'breast'.

The only winning move is not to play.

Back when I was in high school taking AP exams, the method that my teachers taught me was, if any problem seemed as if it would take a significant amount of time, skip it and go through all the easy ones first to maximize the number of questions you answer, and then go back and answer the hard ones. So if the problem that the 34% were having was that an earlier problem was eating too much time, they should skip that one, answer 4, then come back to the one bogging them down and work on it until the time runs out.

And there's nothing that suggests that anything about the patent is going to address one of the fundamental problems with a large distributed blockchain -- the transaction rate limit. The number of transactions going through a credit card company far outstrips what the big cryptocurrencies are capable of.

There is an article on ny.curbed.com showing the Jacques Cortelyou map of southern Manhattan from 1660 overlaid on the current map of Manhattan. Southern Manhattan has easily doubled in size since the Cortelyou map was made, and for all that there may be bedrock under there, the land itself is all landfill.

I already keep a (mostly mental) list of products and services I won't have anything to do with, giving avoidance priority to the ones that show "video will play after ad" over the five-second "skip ad", although I have yet to encounter a YouTube ad that was for anything I was interested in. If they've got an algorithm to tailor ads based on my viewing history, it's crap. But if I have to extend my advertiser-deprecation to emailing declarations that their companies' unskippable ads has cost them my business and that of anyone who listens to my recommendations for companies to avoid, then that's just a cost I'll have to absorb.