That's disingenuous fear-mongering, not demonstration. If you try to educate people by screaming, "OMG the earth is becoming Venus! 0.0388% is higher than 0.0387%, and that much closer to 96%!! We're all gonna fry!!!", don't complain when they don't take you seriously - you've invalidated your own point.

Just to be clear, you are referring to climate scientists like Stan Goldenberg and Kiminori Itoh, the latter of whom began voicing his skepticism a full 13 years before Fukushima out of concern that "it was dangerous that the Japanese society was going to increase nuclear power plants to decrease carbon dioxide"...yes? If so, your assessment is correct.

The USPS isn't losing a battle against the "E-mail Age" - it's losing a battle against organized labor. As is every other productivity sector in the U.S. And so long as we have a government that unconditionally supports one side of that battle, productivity -- be it mail delivery, manufacturing, education, etc. - will continue to lose.

There's a very important distinction that people miss when drawing this false equivalency: Failing to prioritize phone use while driving is a result of poor judgment, while alcohol impairment is a cause of poor judgment. The former CAN be addressed through education rather than criminalization - but we're too lazy to do that. Instead, we take the same approach as abstinence-only sex education employs, namely, "This is universally dangerous. There's no safe way to do it. Bad things will happen to you if you try." This is counterproductive. If you assert the dogma that something is absolutely bad, you don't leave yourself any room to teach people who are going to do it anyway, how to make it less bad. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own making - phone use while driving remains as dangerous as it is NOT because it has to, but because we willfully refuse to make it safer.

All sorts of things are wrong with taxing based on mileage. Drivers are not the only ones who benefits from the fact that they're driving. Society benefits because people are able to get to work, contribute to the economy and pay taxes. The collective benefits because children become productive members of society on account of their parents are able to deliver them to school. Everybody who needs to eat benefits because grocery stores are able to get their goods delivered so they can supply them to customers. Economies that depend on tourism benefit because travelers are able to reach their destinations.

The question is, what's right with taxing based on mileage? Why should drivers have to pay disproportionately for everyone's benefit?

He didn't say it should be immune, he said it should be tolerant. Ensuring that zero external RF emission gets in may be impossible, but making sure that once it's there you can handle it without crashing certainly isn't.

The only avionics components that should be even remotely susceptible to Wi-Fi interference are RF sensors whose measurements might be skewed by the presence of external EMI. Protecting even the most sensitive computational and display circuitry from Wi-Fi and other low-level RF interference is something we've been able to do for decades.

If your display goes blank when someone fires up their Wi-Fi card, you haven't failed to solve a difficult problem -- you've failed to solve an easy one. It makes me wonder what else in your design isn't fault-tolerant.

If Dell's engineers could design a laptop 10 years ago with a Wi-Fi transmitter *built in* that didn't crash when you surfed the web and sell it to the consumer for $2K, I have to believe that this achievement is not out of reach in 2011 for top-end engineers who design aircraft nav/display units that sell for tens of thousands.

So...my kid goes off and surfs somewhere stupid and the family computer gets infected. The ISP cuts me off from the rest of the world, making the internet a safer place for everyone else.

Great. What happens next? Am I stuck in Paypal-like purgatory where they're "reviewing" my account ad nauseum while I have no access to the outside? Do they start snail-mailing me CDs with antivirus software? What would be the EXACT path a customer follows to get back online? Until that's unquestionably clear, nobody should be cutting anybody off.

That's the problem with this, right there. When you introduce legislation as "Precious Little Snowflake's Law", you get a free pass on the whole unpleasantness of having to appeal to people's rationale. Instead, you get unfettered access to their "OH MY GOD MY BABY!!!!" instinct. It's a fail-safe strategy (how many "Whosit's Law" measures have failed to be ratified?). Simply brilliant.

This is a HUGE problem with our legal system across the board. What should be important when we pass a law is the statistical validity of cause and effect -- not the one-off tragedy that one family experienced, no matter how great.

Whether this particular drunk-driving law is prudent or not is hardly even relevant. The real issue is that it should be illegal to include any victim's (or other person's) name in the title, text, summary or advertising of a proposed bill. The "Brady Bill", "Megan's Law", "Leandra's Law", etc., etc., etc. should be required to pass muster on their merits (which they may possess, and that's fine as long as there's rational analysis and critical reasoning involved) instead of getting rubber-stamped on an emotional tear jerk.

It's actually more like "You go ahead and do whatever you think is best, given all the things you've considered and I probably haven't. I'd rather the enemy not know."

Or are we so humane and politically correct now that that word isn't part of our vocabulary, even in wartime?

Wow, that is incredibly short-sighted.

Let's make an analogy to the corporate world for a second (as much as we all like to hate "evil corporations"). If you're a shareholder in a company, you have a vote at shareholder meetings - just like you vote in elections and referendums if you're a citizen of the country. However, that does not -- and should not -- mean that you get to be privy to every management decision and the details of every internal action the company takes. Why? Because it is imperative to the success of that company -- and to your success as its stakeholder -- that some things remain private so as to maintain competitive advantage.

Not everything single thing the company does will be something you agree with. And not everything it does will be pretty, but it's important to understand that people higher than you might have a better perspective on the sometimes-unfortunate cost of staying in business.

Yes - sometimes a government agent who has infiltrated a drug cartel or other organized crime ring has to do some regrettable things to achieve the ultimate success of an operation. If you take the "information wants to be free" approach, go full Assange and expose each instance of such an action, all it will mean is that these actions were taken for nothing.

The world isn't perfect, and sometimes there is collateral damage in performing necessary tasks in keeping your ship afloat. Total opacity isn't the right answer either, but there IS a middle ground. Unfortunately getting to that middle ground requires some genuine thinking, which neither Assange nor his supporters seem willing to do.

"Information wants to be free" is simple. "Rights come with responsibilities" is a little more complicated.

He's a scared 19-year-old up against a police department that wants to have him up on a cross. His parents (who obviously failed to teach him when it's OK to push your luck and when it's not) are probably siding with the cops to now "teach him a lesson", so he's got no one in his corner.

Put yourself in that position, and imagine the DA (or whatever Canadian equivalent) gives you a choice between pleading guilty and not driving for half a year, or facing jail time if you contest the charge. You'd plead guilty too, even if it IS a gross violation of due process - you don't have the requisite tools/experience to fight the system, and knowing that you were legally right is of little consolation when you're being savaged by your cell mate.

This guy may or may not have been speeding.If he actually was (which I personally do think, but that's irrelevant), there is no way a witness could identify him. At 87mph, you can't read a license plate or even identify the model of the car. The best you can do is say a white BMW went by really fast. If we're really saying that's good enough to convict someone who has a white BMW because, well, he's a teenager and should be taught to slow down -- despite how the law is written -- then we may as well do away with police and courts altogether and go back to lynch mobs.

(Incidentally, if you actually read the thread where he posted his boast, you'll see that after enough people pointed out the error of his ways he came around and agreed with them. Lesson learned. The best education comes from your peers and the people you look up to, not the people you're afraid of.)

As an aside, the snitch in question who thought the best use of his time in the U.S. was to call Canada and report that one of their citizens might have been speeding should be outed and dealt with appropriately.

I admit I didn't have time to read the study thoroughly, but:

(a) The study specifically talks about hybrid cars, not pure electrics; the headline is misleading.

(b) Let's take a very conservative estimate and say an electric car draws an average of 10hp when driving. That's about 7.5kw. Let's round that up to 8 for simplicity's sake, and if we assume 100% efficiency, the car needs to spend 4 minutes on the charger for every 1 minute it spends on the road. If we charge it overnight (8 hours), that's 2 hours of driving time, or 60 miles if you average (as many drivers do) somewhere around 30mph - before you have to plug it back in for another 8 hours. And that's in the absolutely best case.

I might be missing something, but 2kw to charge sounds very unrealistic to me.

Wrong. I trust science - in fact, as far as observing the physical world goes, I think I can say I only trust science.

But when a "scientist" says, straight-faced and without irony, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?", that is NOT science.

I am in no way a creationist. That said, I'm not afraid to admit there IS scientific doubt about Darwin's theory of evolution (why should I be?). That's why it's called a theory, not a fact or axiom. That's how science works.

Why are you afraid to admit that there is scientific doubt about human-caused climate change -- or whatever the politically-correct title for it is this week -- and why are you so eager to sweep this skepticism under the rug by claiming that it comes from Big Energy, rather than from some legitimate, apolitical scientists (as it does)?

The reason that these men fought the American revolution, and were willing to die for it, is so that future generations of Americans could live in a society where they could enact major change WITHOUT having to get dead or injured. That was the sacrifice they made - "the cause," as you call it, that was worth it.

It goes beyond the fear of physical injury or death. Let's say you oppose gay marriage, for whatever reason. Who knows - you might have perfectly rational, well founded reasons for your stance, and you certainly have your right to support whatever political beliefs you hold. The trouble is, nobody is interested in your reasons. Your beliefs are politically incorrect. Your name goes in a searchable registry of gay marriage opponents.

Now, let's say you're a software engineer (or work in any other field where politics aren't a factor in your performance). Let's further say you're very good at what you do. You apply for a job. The hiring manager -- or even the first-tier reviewer in HR -- does a Google search on your name. It doesn't matter that you're highly decorated in your field and hold an Ivy league Ph.D. It doesn't matter what your references say about you, because it'll never get that far. As soon as your name shows up on that registry of political pariahs, you're untouchable. You won't get the job. Or the next one. Or the other one you're qualified for. Thanks to this SCOTUS ruling, because you signed your name to a political petition, you can no longer make the living that your hard work entitles you to make.

If I'm not mistaken, the forefathers of the fighters in the American revolution left their home countries to escape exactly this paradigm.

Also - if your signature on a petition should be a matter of public record, why is there a shroud around the voting booth and how come you don't put your name on the ballot you turn in?

There's a "next time" happening continuously. It just doesn't make the news because (A) it's not politically correct to vilify African regimes, and (B) sad pictures of oil-soaked birds in the Gulf of Mexico sell western guilt better than pictures of oil-slicked water in Nigeria where there aren't any more birds left to pull at bleeding heart strings.