Ice hockey recently introduced video review. There's no right and wrong, you're trading off flow of the game versus correctness.

Personally, I'd prefer having a time limit on the review. The refs get 60 seconds to review then must make a call, right or wrong. It's sort of like American elections: if there's a dispute (like the 2000 Presidential election), part of the legal logic behind the process is to quickly reach a conclusion and not let it drag on.

Magnify and enhance sector A5.

Once again, life imitates science fiction.

There was a book or movie about this. We need to ship Opportunity some potatoes and duct tape, something like that.

Good point. I didn't see the project requirements. My guess is the actual requirement was something like "99% chance of operating for at least 90 days." It wasn't "10% chance of operating 90 days." That's a pretty big difference. I might be able to build the latter. I have no chance on the former.

Legally speaking, what gives the city council the authority to set prices and price limits?

Seriously, could a city council just decide they want to put a price floor or ceiling on anything they want? Let's say the Mayor wants to buy spam for a penny a can. Could the city council just decide spam must be sold for no more than 1 cent? Or is there any legal limit to what sorts of price controls a city can impose?

(Yes, I know, if they did this, there would not be any spam for sale within city limits. I'm trying to understand the legality here, not the likely outcome.)

IANAL but I'm guessing that since rights start with the people and flow upward, a city can pretty much do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't conflict with state or federal laws, or the Constitution. If none of those say a city can't restrict prices, well then they can.

This seems like a great dodge to ban items you don't want in the city: just impose an absurdly low price ceiling. You can sell all the pot you want but for no more than a penny a pound, with a $50 per ounce tax.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts, please. The copy editor at the Times ought to know this. Sheesh, the quality of journalism these days.

(Trivia contest time: how many other commonwealths are there and what are their names?)

OK, get back to ranting about NIMBYs, Kennedys (live or dead), wind farm subsidies, fossil fuel cronys, and how the Illuminati are poisoning the oceans.

From TFA, they propose dedicating 5% of cropland to this plant and that removes 50% of the carbon dioxide we release (which seems like a remarkably high efficiency, high enough that I'm sceptical). That means, dedicate 10% and we would be in a carbon balance. Dedicate 15% and we start reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. This, of course, depends on keeping our global carbon dioxide emissions constant, which may or may not be likely.

That would be expensive to do and would take a lot of arm-twisting. But the math looks like it would work. Assuming it's sustainable, this could be a long term solution.

I don't know how sustainable it would be. It seems the cork goop would eventually build up in the soil and I gotta believe that would cause problems. But first things first.

That was my thought too. The stuff the plants product, suberin, was described as a "waxy, carbon rich" substance. TFA says it typically doesn't break down for centuries to millennia (although that seems unlikely to me--surely some microbe likes to eat this stuff).

So you plan a ton of super garbanzos and have a hummispalooza. A few decades later, I'm wondering about your soil quality. It will start getting gummed up with suberin, won't it? Will it still be good crop soil? I'm hoping the professor has thought this through.

OTOH, if suberin is a waxy goop, maybe it can be collected and refined into a biofuel. That will re-release the carbon but at least it's a closed loop. That may be better than using fossil fuels.

The devil is in the details here.

And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.

Wow, someone on Slashdot admitting another poster has a point! Thank you!

Amen brother. I doubt you'll ever get money out of politics. At best, you and I can tell our representatives that we don't want them to "bring home the bacon", we want them to vote in the best interest of the city/state/country as a whole. And we can vote that way (which doesn't make much difference, not one vote, but get a million like thinking voters and now it's interesting).

OK, really off topic here. There's some actual science in Political Science. They can show how having winner-take-all, first-to-the-finish voting systems, like we tend to have in the US, basically guarantees we'll have two dominant and largely stable parties. So I can't agree more that we need to get rid of our intuitively obvious but flawed system of "one person, one vote, most votes wins, winner takes all". You think about it a bit and only something like a third of American voted for our current President, which means that minority gets a lot of power over the majority. How busted is that?

I live in California, a reliable Democratic state for the last 20 years. My vote in 2016 made absolutely no difference. No matter what I did, all our Electoral votes were going to Clinton. As a result, neither Trump nor Clinton had to give a rat's a** about anything Californians cared about, other than how it affected fund raising. I think it would be better for all Californians to divide our Electoral votes proportionally somehow (county by county, district by district, proportional to the popular vote state wide, there are many ways). That would be good for all Californians, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Pirate, whatever. The Democratic leadership, however, will never go for this, they'd be crucified by the national party. The Republicans could get behind this but they have no say in how the state is run. I don't know how to break the logjam.

I'd also love to have a system other than plurality voting. Instant runoffs, approval voting, ranked voting, all of these can work. All are better in big ways from what we do now. BTW, it's also provable that all must have a fundamental flaw, sorta like Goedel proved all strong enough arithmetic systems must be inconsistent or incomplete. The details are complicated but you basically must always a flaw like situations where strategic voting makes sense, or the order of candidates on the ballot affects the outcome, frustrating things like that. It's a fascinating topic if you don't mind wanting to just scream every now and again :).

Absolutely. In theory, any increase in supply (holding demand constant) will push the entire supply/demand curve downward. But you're right, the lower price curve will increase demand and we'll hit a new equilibrium.

I'm not an economist but I believe it's accepted that in normal markets, the new price curve will be lower everywhere than the old one. Where it lands is very complex and basically can't even be measured. I'm sure all good microeconomics classes spend weeks exploring all the twists and turns of this.

There are abnormal markets where the supply/demand curve doesn't slope downward. Some items (e.g. fine wines and art) have more demand as the price increases. These are corner cases the professor will have lots of fun putting on the final exam.

My point exactly. How many $100 bills have you picked up? Personally, I'm at zero. My chance of picking up a stray $100 is approximately 0 plus epsilon. Not exactly zero but so close I don't dream about it.

How about we worry about real problems instead of hypothetical ones? Like how to open up more spectrum and increase the amount of service available?

Fine. That's not my main point. Sure, there are edgy grunge hipster studios in the heart of the urban district which rent for a premium. There are also a lot of apartments (like the one my daughter rents in Berkeley) which are expensive and a dive. The landlord charges an arm and a leg because that's what he can get right next to the college campus.

(I kinda suspect people started with dive apartments because that's all they could afford (just like people wore jeans with tears because they couldn't afford to replace them.) Over time, instead of being a problem, we made grunge and ripped jeans into a virtue because that's where the "cool" people lived. But I digress...)

Yeah, and you know what that's called? A healthy market. In my dreams of a health housing market, most anyone who wants a home can find one in their price range. It might not be very spacious or luxurious if their price point is low but it's available. I suggest Seattle (and Berkeley and Manhattan and San Francisco and San Jose and...) are very, very far from having the problem of too many houses and not enough buyers. Let's burn that bridge when we get to it.

Correct because this has never happened, or at least not to any significant extent.

If you think that's a problem needing regulation, we also need to regulate attacks by hippogriffs.