Crashes you say?

Can't remember the last time I had one of those.

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

Everyone's (rightfully) bitching about this, and I agree, but none of that solves the problem.

What's the alternative? Give me a TV brand that gives you, ideally, a dumb TV, but alternatively a decent smart TV that is easy to work with.

Responsiveness is an important, and often overlooked, characteristic. It's important.

Brand/model recommendations; go!

Ever read The Last Ringbearer ? It's the LOTR, but see from the loser side ("History is written by the winners"). And it shows the orcs as some kind of industrial society (aren't they ?) and the elves as some kind of lordly rulling class (aren't they ?). It twists things around in a way that can give you cold sweats...

This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

As opposed to your anecdote of zero (you are obviously lying).

I live in a country in which 96% of the population would be considered "nutbar" anti gun extremists in the US and I've literally never heard anyone say such a thing. Ever.

What happens is this. Someone makes a product with a 0.1% reliability.

This is a fallacy.

What happens is it'll be incredibly obvious in tests (which you can afford to do with cheap missiles) if the reliability rate is that low. Why would it be?

Everything about it screams these are a new cheap, almost worthless missile. Particularly the use of the word 'hypersonic' to describe a missile that the US would never call hypersonic (we reserve that word for advanced, hard to hit hypersonic cruise missiles, not hypersonic ballistic missiles that are easy to destroy)

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

Never mind that hypersonic is not a military term, but an aerodynamic regime. You (or pretentiously "we") don't get to reserve that word.

Mass manufacture of cheap propeller cruise missiles is enough to overwhelm the production capacity of expensive interceptor missiles. And hypersonic ballistic missiles aren't easy to intercept, they are possible to intercept. But, much harder than low speed missiles, so you need fewer to overwhelm the stocks of interceptors.

 

Regulators back then were understood to be particular type of highly accurate clock that was used as a baseline for time keeping: other clocks were set and updated based on the Regulator. The root word was also contemporaneously used in a medical context; e.g. regular bowel movements, regular heart beat. Later, it was applied to devices which control gas pressure.

Does that mean the government, (or the king, since the root of regular is Rex from Latin) had authority over those clocks, or was particularly concerned with his subjects intestinal health, or the pressure of their gas? Of course not.

Plus they hired a military contractor to waste money making stupid ugly delivery vans that are way way behind schedule

Those vehicles are everything the administration hates: they're much safer for vulnerable road users, e.g. pedestrians and cyclists and much more accessible than trucks, with low floor, easy entry and so on.

It irks many of the anti-gun people greatly that shooting is part of several Olympic sports.

I live in a country with strict gun control that a large of the population support, and I've literally never heard anyone say such a thing.

let me disappoint you, that was one of the dumbest pieces of crap that one could watch that year.

To counter from the authority of the dude: that's just, like, your opinion, man.

No idea. It's fine so far, but I've only had it for a few months. Honestly, I'm pretty brutal on devices. Odds are high that I'll break it in some other way before the flexing causes a problem.

First they came for the amoral megacorporations run by lizard people!

Are you claiming that Zuck is a person (even if of the lizard variety)? I do not buy it.