If traffic enforcement becomes less of a need, then move part of the budget over to hire more detectives to solve crimes.

Exactly. The Thiokol engineers knew that the air temperature at the launch pad was below the lower range operating temperature of the O Rings which was 40 degrees (or 50 degrees for the system as a whole). The O rings themselves were certified down to 40 degrees but the engineers were bullied by management who wanted proof that the system would fail rather than the other way around and then when the engineers couldn't prove that it would fail they were overruled. I think the comments that it would be "away from goodness" was just a really impotent way of saying something like "there was a potentially increased risk that the rocket would explode that can not be quantified because of lack of data", but saying the rocket might explode in such blunt language was probably a quick ticket to being fired shortly afterwards and the engineers probably knew that.

Language matters and the fact that GM was more worried about getting sued than about engineers accurately conveying concerns over safety is damning. GM is supposedly a new company after bankruptcy. Is it?

I think there is plenty of fault on all sides. From the climate scientists and many environmentalists the attitude has seemingly been once that you prove that humans are causing some climate change that it automatically means that we have to stop whatever is causing that climate change... which seems to be why somewhat cynically many have taken the attitude that in order to respond to the call for drastic, disruptive and destructive change to our industrial and energy base that we have to snipe at the science instead of talking about the holistic costs and benefits.

To me the costs of both continuing to increase greenhouse gases are real, but so too are the costs of cutting back greenhouse gas emissions too abruptly to adequately fill the gaps that are left. And the extreme negatives of sea level rise and climate disruptions must be looked at within the context of the hundreds of years we would have to adapt and compared with other ways in which our biologically diverse ecosystems might be harmed. People might be harmed either way.

To me if the solution to Global Climate change would result in economic hardship and social upheaval with the potential for more wars and civil unrest, then I see the danger of ideal thinking versus the reality that wars could be far more catastrophic to our environment than continuing along our current path towards climate disruption and sea level rise.

If we have the economic resources we can adapt and preserve habitat and improve quality of life for more people, but if we cut back too sharply then we risk depriving ourselves of the natural and economic resources which might enable us to adapt to the coming changes and even what we might be able to accomplish through sacrifice might be futile in the scope of the problem.

To me that is the rational argument we need to get to. Yes Global Climate change appears to be real. Yes, it pales in comparison with the changes that nature can throw at us in any given year... so a single volcanic eruption can cause a big drop in temperatures or some other changes might throw off our math in some other way making years or decades of planning completely irrelevant... but that doesn't mean we don't try to plan out decades from now or even hundreds of years from now.

We have a capacity to put in place the changes now that could make some difference for the better. While I largely agree with those who don't want to make burdensome decisions based on 300 year extrapolations, that doesn't mean we don't do the things that could reasonably benefit us now and in the future with better technology and more adaptability regardless of Global Climate Change.

I think we should all try to agree on habitat protection and setting aside more natural spaces. These natural ecosystems are often carbon sinks and are places where if properly managed and located can help preserve biodiversity. Nuclear I already mentioned and I really wish environmentalists would do the math on radioactive waste which has far more limited effects than even the toxic waste from things like solar panels which require large scale mining, production and very big land use, but certainly things like coal or oil are overall more toxic to our environment than nuclear. So, habitat preservation, nuclear, some wind and rooftop solar, along with better settlement patterns with enough jobs, food production and things to do close to where people live to reduce transportation costs, improve quality of life and reduce waste. There are probably many things like that which over the next thirty years could be win-win propositions for both reducing future Global Climate Change, improving quality of life for people and improving habitat for biodiversity and natural heritage preservation. And I think a rational majority could come to some agreements to make some of these modest changes.

From my perspective the "debate" over climate change is a red herring on both sides to avoid agreement because perpetuating the dispute itself has become an industry with its own constituency. And this is a problem in a lot of areas of political dispute. Where perpetuating a dispute gains its own constituency.

This implies that stopping greenhouse emissions cold turkey doesn't have real costs that outweigh the potential problems you cite. So far all the solutions that are proposed by the most active main stream environmentalists like cap and trade or solar and wind build outs either won't make a dent in Global Climate Change and/or taken as holistic solutions would cause massive disruptions to the economy with some very negative consequences that would very likely outweigh the benefits.

In the US, we have spent the last 40 years on conservation and pollution controls and the result has been an export of much of our industrial base to China where they pollute more freely with a coal based economy and then ship back those cheaper goods on great big ships, trains and trucks. Has it even made a dent Globally or just moved the problems of pollution to China? Possibly, that historic movement of production partly based on cheap labor, but also partly based on US environmentalism, has even accelerated CO2 emissions. Certainly, the US is somewhat less polluted especially in some urban and downwind areas which is good. But thinking Globally means we can't just think of short term localized benefits when we tally up the good and the bad for the bottom line.

We could be 100% greenhouse free in 20 years if we embraced a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and most importantly nuclear. But without nuclear it is going to be fracked Natural Gas, Oil and Coal providing the majority of our base load for our electric grid and the majority of fuel for our cars and trucks. The good news is that natural gas is less polluting than coal and oil and might fill the gap and slow down CO2 emissions while we reassess our collective priorities, but the bad news for Global Climate change is that a change to natural gas from oil and coal just slows down Global Warming a bit and it isn't a longer term solution and we will be back to coal not too long after that if we don't get to a more sustainable energy system.

If people on all sides get serious about Global Climate change and want to slam on the breaks to try and simply lock in a few feet of sea level rise and some slightly warmer temperatures in the next three hundred years, then the way to do that is with a tripling of nuclear power capacity with existing technology and much bigger multi-Billion dollar investments in new nuclear power technologies, along with some solar and wind power to supplement.

Otherwise much of what many in the environmental movement have been talking about for the last few decades has been a meaningless distraction from the engineers task of making more efficient use of our resources to support the largest population in human history as best we can. Both sides need to get real if we are going to make the world a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable place for billions of people.

That was my point. I guess it was not fleshed out properly. That the suggestion that Tesla just become a battery company was motivated as a response to Toyota dropping Tesla as a supplier. But the example of Samsung/Apple and many others is that competitors often buy products and parts from one another when they need to. Even in the extreme case of Samsung and Apple where they are engaged in a very public Global legal battle Apple is still buying key components from Samsung. So if Tesla builds the best car batteries at the lowest price, then car companies will either buy them or not be able to compete in the plug in electric car market.

The point is probably because car competitors don't want to buy batteries from a competitor... which is just a fact of life in many areas of industry. Apple probably doesn't want to buy parts from Samsung, etc. But if the product is better than other competitor products, then companies will choose to to buy from Tesla in self interest, if not and someone comes along with a better battery then the battery business was probably a bad exclusive bet anyway.

Good points. Protecting lives is important, but Liberty is what we fight for, it is what generations have killed and died for, it is what, God willing, we leave to our children. When Lincoln talked over the freshly dug graves of Gettysburg he couldn't say they were fighting to save lives because that would have rung hollow amidst so much death and destruction. When he said "shall not perish from this Earth" he wasn't talking about his life or the lives of his fallen countrymen he was talking about the battle so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

We can't have a government of the people, by the people or for the people if we have a government spying without warrant on all the people. Making a mockery of the rights enshrined in our constitution and the real abuses of government power that those constitutional rights are intended to prohibit.

Buttle or Tuttle? The movie "Brazil" seems like a foretelling documentary of the NSA and the US Federal Government and what happens when you turn the fight against terror into an issue of "Information Retrieval". Government "Big Data" is the new Big Brother.

The absurd thing about this is that Google's search results are constantly updated. The search results they were ordered to censor were probably no more than a few weeks old at most, maybe even updated that day by visiting web sites and following all their links and indexing their content. The articles themselves about this guy's bankruptcy were the old "data", but apparently since they were newspaper articles the person couldn't get them taken down. I have sympathy for this person who has moved on with his life and can apparently pay his bills now and doesn't want to let a bad reputation follow him around forever. But this is fundamentally a freedom of speech issue. If the newspapers had a right to print it, then I have a right to link to it. This ruling that allows people to take down search results that link to old newspaper articles will just lead to bad people sanitizing their past and it jeopardizes our future.

"Oh all those selfies of my dick that I sent to women I was sexually harassing happened months ago and should be removed from my search results, please only link to articles about me walking old ladies across the road, I am ready to be president now." -Anthony Weiner

The solution is for the EU to stop making bad laws that undermine freedom of speech. What is written online and transmitted is the product of human expression it isn't just "data". But I agree that if Google's page rank algorithm isn't accounting for how old and unchanged the content of web pages are when ranking results then that is giving us a skewed view of the world and it is unfortunate if people are harmed by their own search results when they have moved on to other things. Certainly the passing of time shouldn't automatically bury web pages relevant to your search, but it should be a factor. And yes I am well aware of the ways that websites try to game their search results by updating content automatically so it would be a burden on Google to come up with some sort of way of weighting page rank using time so that really old unchanged articles are buried deeper in the relevant search results.

This was clearly a terrible decision in Europe and a good example of why American should not go down the path of "data protection" laws. In this specific case there were old articles written about this businessman's bankruptcy that Google picked up in its search results. But apparently the articles themselves were protected by some free speech rights so he couldn't just have them taken down and therefore they would have been out of Google's search results, so the only way the businessman could bury the old reports that are still online was to eliminate the search results so nobody could find them. So, basically Europe is saying that people have a right to free speech, but if you are offended by someone's speech you have a right to make sure they are never heard. This is crap law and undermines freedom of speech in the EU.

My point is to stop trying to change the system by playing by the same old rules. We know that time and time again whenever Congress gives over policy making authority to unelected commissions that we get regulatory capture by industry and we get all sorts of regulations that reduce real competition in industry while making jobs for lawyers and lobbyists in Washington. We have to stop letting them do that. Congress are the elected representatives of the people in the United States. Congress should be making policy at this level and not some unaccountable unelected board or commission.

Maybe or Maybe not, but quality of regulation aside, at this point Congress has completely abdicated its responsibility as the law making institution as a representative of the people in several areas including telecommunications regulation. I would argue that delegating their regulatory authority to an appointed body invariably comprised of industry lobbyists is worse than periodically bad legislation from Congress. For better or worse Congress is accountable to the electorate every two years, but the FCC is made up of appointed lobbyists with independent terms largely unaccountable to the people who's interests they are supposed to represent. At the very least Congress should be required to vote on or change new FCC proposed regulations before they take effect so that the people get a chance to have their final say through our elected representatives.

Congress isn't supposed to be leaving the final say on public policy up to unelected boards and commissions. The regulations that the agencies issue are supposed to merely fill in the gaps between public policy as decided by Congress and execution as performed in the executive branch. It is undemocratic to be simply passing laws that give over whole areas of public policy to these regulatory bodies, which then invariably are subject to capture by industry insiders. At this point it is as if Congress has just passed the buck to industry and told them to regulate themselves, but still pretend like the people have some say so they keep the FCC around for appearances and to deflect criticism from Congress and the President who are the ones collecting the checks from the lobbyists.

At this point I think we need to just go ahead and eliminate the FCC and Congress needs to legislate these regulations directly. We are beyond the point of just needing to play some BS game of musical chairmen to appoint another industry lobbyist to regulate their own industry. From no longer licensing new radio stations to this idiotic spin the wheels and do whatever you want as long as you hire the right lawyers as lobbyists kind of bullshit regulation the FCC is a farce