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The town provides a glorified fiber LAN.

A solution in search of a problem. Actually running cables to each house is rather easy. Where it is not done, it is due to local governments' interference, "sensible regulations", and bribe-seeking...

unless every new power plant is wind, solar, or wave, there will be MORE emissions. just not where the tailpipe-sniffers are tailgating you.

More emissions than what? If you mean "more emissions than if everybody rode a bicycle instead", then sure, I agree with you. But if the choices come down to driving an electric car vs driving a gas-powered car, then you're simply wrong. Even an electric car powered entirely by coal plants results in fewer emissions than a gas-powered car -- and coal plants are being shuttered on a regular basis, so that worst-case scenario is becoming less common all the time.

Not to mention that moving the emissions away from where the people are is also a good thing.

It's Steve Christensen's SuperClock (plus many others) all over again.

And.

Again.

I've always viewed the entire net neutrality debate as a (hopefully) temporary sideshow while/until we fix the larger problem of lack of competition. The only reason (e.g.) Comcast is able to pull the shenanigans that they are is because we can't go anywhere else.

The problem is, such regulation impedes competition — the more "reasonable regulations", that the governments — Federal and lesser alike — throw at the ISPs, the harder it is to unseat the incumbents. Comcast CEO plays golf with Obama — do you suppose, Obama-appointed FCC-commissioner(s) will be equally fair to Comcast and a challenger?

The less free the market — and government officials deciding, what the owner can do with his cables, is unquestionably reducing freedom — the harder it is for Capitalism's usual forces to work their magic.

That sounds entirely reasonable.

BRB.

It's reasonable for gawker, and threat'sand doxing are okay with feminists too. Along with getting people fired because reasons.

Allow me roll my eyes. Yes people are working on electric airplanes. No they haven't gotten very far with them

You might as well say the same thing about smartphones. They exist. They're for sale. People buy them. And they use them. It's an existing market. And one that's growing very rapidly. And their performance is quite nice. A number now offer ranges of about 400km at cruising speeds, similar to electric cars.

It doesn't matter what "eye rolling" you do, these things exists, the scale of the market grows dramatically every year, and so do the performance specs.

(Skipping your silly pretending that navigating around obstacles and in orders-of-magntiude varying tractiion conditions and full of moving objects that you have no control over and no beacons on them is somehow easier than straight-line flight navigation)

The chances that you're going to use that app when not on a United flight are pretty close to zero. So just uninstall it after the flight. And Android began supporting multiple users with Lollipop. If you're that paranoid about an app getting access to your contacts, calendar, etc, you can just login as a new user and install the app. Then uninstall it when the flight is over.

From the airline's perspective, I can see why they'd want to put this sort of thing into a proprietary app. They don't want to put it on a standard streaming or network file server service because curious (and sometimes malicious) people like us would then immediately begin probing it, seeing what else we could do with it, what security holes they might have left open. This sort of stuff can be fun and games when your feet are firmly on the ground, but don't screw around with it at 30,000 feet. Yeah security problems in these systems need to be highlighted, but we don't need a demonstration with live passengers aboard.

If you have better ideas for how to deal with masses of unemployed people, feel free to suggest them.

Test subjects.

This is highly "dystopian future", of course, but an excess glut of humans makes for a useful assortment to test various drugs, treatments, and theories on. The "haves" will always want to live longer, stay trimmer, completely avoid cancer, etc., but mice and monkey trials can only go so far. So a human test subject dies? Great, a job opening! If a test subject is lucky they'll come out a trial relatively unscathed; a scant few might actually benefit from them. Most will gain some sort of disfiguration and/or malady, at which point their potential for being a future test subject diminishes. Ethics panels and human-experimentation laws? Crony politicians will quickly do away with them. (And the oligarchs will just ignore them until such time.)

This isn't necessarily a "what if". There are already a small group of people who make a career out of being test subjects.

After he led the police to his wife's body, you would think people would stop defending him.

https://www.wired.com/2008/07/...

Here's an NSL that requires all data from 'inception' of email account.

https://www.wired.com/wp-conte...

Might just be your phone. Almost all the research shows no real difference.

https://gigaom.com/2015/02/11/...

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/f...

Last time I checked currently we have no means of creating artificial gravity in space.

*cough* centrifugal force *cough*

"Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."

Songwriters and musicians are really annoying, in that one has to pay them, they have to live somewhere etc., let's automate! I'm not cynical enough to believe that this is/was a primary aim, but someone will inevitably start down this road with the research results.

Yahoo may be the first since "the reforms of the USA Freedom Act", but the Internet Archive fought and won back in '08. I'm pretty sure Slashdot covered it when it happened, but I'm too lazy to hunt down the link.

It's not clear to me if the USA Freedom Act made this harder (in which case, why are we calling them "reforms"?) or easier. That would make this story a lot more interesting.

(The EFF has the Archive's slightly-redacted NSL on file, for anyone who's interested in comparisons.)

But that's not what is being disputed! Are you unaware that Theranos is a private lab that does all kinds of tests, and this whole finger prick thing is taken out of context and spinned as if that's actual core business?

Oh, but it is what is being disputed. Nobody valued Theranos at $9 billion dollars because they were copying Labcorp's business model. Walgreens did not enter into a partnership with Theranos because Theranos would provide a phebotomist on site to draw multiple 5mL samples and ship them to Theranos.

They are researching ways to get more tests per blood sample, and they invented procedures and equipment for that.

Yes. Researching using commerical samples resulting in the invalidation of two years of sample results in one fell swoop.

But the WSJ made it look like they claim to do all their tests with that experimental technology, then ridicule them when they try to explain why they do tests with "normal" equipment.

Yet again, nobody is interested in a startup that performs tests with "normal" equipment. Theranos touted this very capability in 2014 as something the could already do, not as a multi-year research project.

"And we're able to do all the testing using just a single microsample, rather than having to draw a dedicated tube for each type of test."

So if I got a blood test and my doctor saw the results and wanted other tests done, I wouldn't have to have more blood drawn?

"Exactly. And on their lab form, the physician can write, "If a given result is out of range, run this follow-up test." And it can all be done immediately, using that same sample."

Keep 'em coming. Theranos provided lots of PR material that contradicts you... you just have to specify what they supposedly didn't claim and I can search for more documentation saying otherwise.

You not only need society's permission but its active support to run any kind of business without having to have your own personal army of thugs.

The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts. It must not be allowed to dictate, what services can be offered, by whom, at what price, etc. That it increasingly does so, is an obvious violation of our liberties.

Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state

Yep, Statists gonna State...

over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote

Yeah? And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service? Do you have "democratic control" over Internet-service provision, for example? Are you happy with the government's ability to shut down Uber and Lyft? With the government, that can demand your cell-phone data from your cellular provider — and get it, or else the provider may run into difficulties renewing its license? With the police, who can confiscate your life savings on suspicion of tax-dodging, or simply because you have "too much" cash on you?

Is this the "strong state" you clamor for? Yeah, I know, let's all go raise awareness — that will surely help our strong, but benevolent and kind-hearted rulers realize the errors, nay, imperfections of their ways.

The freedom to pursue happiness is oh-so overrated...

Recep Tayyip ErdoÄYan is an asshole, but Paypal is not behaving any better

In June 2011 Paypal freezes Wikileaks account denying users from contributing to Wikileaks

https://wikileaks.org/Banking-...

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/...

I for one am glad the two can't work together, or our world will become so much worse

https://www.wired.com/2009/02/...

Even faux news has written about that:

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

The recurring problem is that this can be shot down this year, and next year, and the year after that... but they only have to succeed once, and then we're all stuck with it. Add to that the fact that they can just tack it on to a budget bill and seriously, how are we supposed to stop these things from happening? The attack mode on any Congressman who votes against the budget bill is incredibly scathing, no matter what their justification for doing so, and again, that little problem remains that freedom has to win every battle, while the police state only has to win one.

If I notice a quantity of 8" floppies dropped around a parking lot next to an inconspicuous government building, can I assume that some sort of Stuxnet cyber attack is under way?

So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will not scale up; everyone points to small EU countries who are only talking about it, haven't actually done it, who don't have trillions in National Debt to deal with. It won't work here in the U.S and in any number of first-world countries.

You UBI people also make another fatal assumption: That people, not having to work, will 'find their purpose in life'. They will not. Most people have no clue, their entire lives, what their 'purpose' is, and never find one; these people need to be given a purpose; it's called 'earning a living and surviving', AKA 'having a job'. Most people will sit around, eat, have sex, get fat, litter the planet with their directionless offspring, and otherwise get in trouble out of utter boredom and too-much-time-on-their-hands, all on the government dole.

Okay, calm down.

You are predicting that something won't work based on little more than your opinion. Let's throw some facts into the mix.

POINT 1

Taking the US as an example, since you mentioned it specifically, note that the GDP per capita in the US is a little over $53K per person. If the productivity output of the US were evenly distributed, that means that every man, woman, and child could spend $53,000 on goods and services this year, and next year they would have another $53 to spend.

Count only the working adults (about half the population) and that number doubles.

POINT 2

Productivity has about doubled since 1970. That's only 40 years ago. If you believe the trend is linear, it will double again in another 40 years, but if it is exponential, then it will quadrouple in another 40 years.

POINT 3

A hypothetical $1,000,000 invested in an index fund is expected to return around 7% interest over the long term. You need to take the long view on this rate, and not cherry-pick individual past decades - it's been consistent with the rise of productivity. See point 2 above.

Given 1% for management fees and 2% to account for inflation, that $1 million would pay out $40,000 per year in perpetuity.

The US could start a process of putting $1 million deposits aside and awarding the payouts to working class people on some schedule. A lottery, for example. If you want to work, you don't have to enter the lottery.

Note that the cost of the Iraq war was $1.7 trillion dollars, spent over a decade. That amount of money awarded to worker annuities could have reduced the workforce by 1.7 million workers, making the remaining jobs easier to find.

POINT 4

Note that we are rapidly developing self-driving vehicles. The first self-driving semi is on the road right now!

Even if the self-driving vehicle isn't useful 100% of the time (snow, limited visibility), by my calculations this will dump 2.5 million into the labor force almost instantly.

Note that Amazon is experimenting with delivery by drone. This could potentially drop another million into the workforce almost overnight. (If you include postal workers and some others not accounted for in the previous link.)

POINT 5

Regardless of whether you think it will work or not, something has to change.

You either make it work, or try to survive the burning destruction of the US, a modern recast of the French Revolution.

Do you have kids? You might consider what type of world you want them to live in.

Yeah screw Samsung for copying the rounded corners of the iPhone.

Huawei is a far more reputable company who would never copy someone else in an effort to make their product more desirable

Many cloud-tethered products have no documentation for their protocols, no supported way to modify the firmware, and use public-key encryption to make it very difficult to "spoof" the cloud service so you can run them without talking to the vendor's proprietary server. Many vendors have realized that consumers will shop on price and ignore privacy. For example, Y-cam used to manufacture IP cameras, but based on feedback from customers now only offers a smart cloud-based security solutions, in both free and paid subscription versions

Is it really 'the cloud' that's the problem - or is it just that funding it all through advertising is the problem. If Google had all the data it currently has, but used it strictly for providing its services - and you paid for those services rather than letting Google place ads based on what it knows about you, would that be less of an issue?

Cloud based home automation and similar services would still be almost as much as an issue without the "privacy" concerns. For example, in 2014 Nest bought Revolv, a "smart home hub" maker whose product was entirely cloud-tethered. Then Google (owners of Nest) decided they didn't want to support Revolv, and so announced the End of all cloud services for Revolv customers, essentially bricking the revolv hub. So when you own a cloud-tethered device that doesn't have the option to run the essential services on your own hardware, you don't really "own" anything at all.

Regardless of business model, nearly all cloud-tethered products cheap out on protocols and update mechanisms and local components, with the concept that the smarts can be handled by the remote server so the hardware price is reduced. This is great for the vendor's ability to scale up, but not so great if they stop supporting your device, or if your connectivity to the Internet is intermittent, or if their are issues with their cloud service or cloud provider.

What gets really annoying is how many products are designed to be cloud-tethered with no provision to keep working when they can't reach the public internet.

Indeed! Zach was a total gentleman about it too.

* http://www.wired.com/2013/11/m...

"The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before Infiniminer, and there are games that will come after MineCraft. That's how it works."
- Zach Barth, creator of Inifiniminer

Written sixteen years ago by Bill Joy One the best articles on the subject.

False, no level playing field, no competition.

As I said, the market for this kind of transportation still is reasonably free in the US. Official taxis (and the rent-seeking townhalls, that sell "medallions") fight Uber and Lyft and others equally. The playing field is quite level and the competition certainly exists.

Some other markets — such as insurance, Internet-service provision, or education to name a few — aren't as free, but the solution there is not to add more regulation, but to lower barriers to entry to encourage new players appearing.

The same utility poles, that carry Verizon's and Comcast's cables to houses on my block, can easily support cables of 5 more providers, for example. But governments make it too hard for would-be newcomers. Just look at Google Fiber's map — they've rolled out primarily in the "flyover country", because those "rednecks" still prefer their government smaller than the "urban sophisticates" of the coastal metropolises.

Radio Shack went bankrupt and was bought out by Sprint which continues to run several of the stores.

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/r...

at places like NasaSpaceflight.com, which gets its hands on NASA documents rather frequently and is frequently posted to by people in the industry and in NASA and space journalists.

The subject was also covered in press conferences back then and was also discussed publicly by then-shuttle-manager Wayne Hale.

Here is just one of the related docs to wet your appetite, and here is an NSF article about it, although this one is not related to the study of turning the shuttles over to industry.

Here is a link to an NBC news story about one of the 2011 (3 years into Obama admin) options considered to keep shuttles flying until 2017.

Here's another thread from back then for you to tug on.

Now that you have a starting point and evidence that my post was not the fevered imaginings of an Obama hater, I leave it to you to dig around and discover that some of this stuff was just journalistic fluff as usual, but several of the studies were very serious and involved high levels of NASA people.

The whole "Bush killed the shuttles and Obama was a blameless and helpless victim of it" meme is politically convenient for Obama's more space-geeky followers and fanboys, but as usual when politics are involved, the story is far more complex and the mess is far more bi-partisan. This president is no shrinking violet when resisting Republicans in congress, who have greatly angered their base voters by caving-in to him on everything for many years, so his supporters have long pretended that his allowing the shuttles to die was because it was a locked-in irreversible situation before he got into office. That's simply never been the truth. Note: I am no Bush fan and am not trying to remove any blame from him, I'm just debunking the myths of the koolaide-drinking, pudding-eating, NikeShoes-and-purple-napkin-wearing Obama fans who deny well-documented reality while planning their future lives on the comet of perpetual happiness (google: famous suicide cults).

Really. Doesn't ring true. I would have heard of it.

I saw several TV news broadcasts on the subject in the early 1980's, but that was pre-Internet and newspaper accounts are probably available only on microfiche. I wasn't able to turn up anything on the Internet. However, the modern practice of tech slavery is alive and well in the Valley.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/investigation-reveals-silicon-valleys-abuse-immigrant-tech-workers/

Thanks. I'll read.

Sex slavery and human trafficking are alive and well. Several brothels exist within a mile of my home. There is seemingly nothing I can do about it. Cops will 'come by for an inspection' occasionally, get their free rub-and-tug or BJ, and then move on. The cops are part of the problem.

These places pull the same stunt that you described – job in America!!! Once they arrive, Visa or Passport is "held" by employer until repayment of airfare, etc. is paid for. Their job is not cleaning, or whatever, but sex-trade work. They fear returning home out of (misplaced) shame. Or lack of funds. With no papers, they cannot open a private bank account. And the pimps cycle them through all of the various cities to keep a fresh stable of (slave) whores, who have no idea what city they are are in at any given moment.

So, that said, and having perused your link, I must agree.

H-1B visa overload, with people training their own replacements, is another example of this type of double-exploitation. An H-1B is supposed to be for someone with a "special skill that can't be found locally in the US." Um. Hello? Americans are training their own replacements. That is a hint that the required talent exists locally – just not any that can have a visa-renewal lorded over their heads to demand long hours.

Again, thanks for the link.

Really. Doesn't ring true. I would have heard of it.

I saw several TV news broadcasts on the subject in the early 1980's, but that was pre-Internet and newspaper accounts are probably available only on microfiche. I wasn't able to turn up anything on the Internet. However, the modern practice of tech slavery is alive and well in the Valley.

According to the report, which was released by The Center of Investigative Reporting (CIR), The Guardian, and NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit, these labor brokers have often charged workers the cost of a visa and didn't have a job waiting for them when they arrived, both of which are prohibited by visa rules. And in some cases, when workers arrived in the U.S., the account goes, they were "benched"—placed in a guesthouse with subpar living conditions and asked to post exaggerated resumes online.

Then, when workers received jobs, the report claims, the body shops who hired them collected a cut of their salary. The authors of the investigation probed this migrant worker problem for a year, speaking to thousands of Indian tech workers both on and off the record. They found abuses in Silicon Valley, as well as other parts of the U.S. One worker described it as an "ecosystem of fear."

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/investigation-reveals-silicon-valleys-abuse-immigrant-tech-workers/

To my understanding the feds used a flashed-based exploit based on the decloak module in metasploit

"It worked because Adobe’s Flash plug-in can be used to initiate a direct connection over the Internet, bypassing Tor and giving away the user’s true IP address."
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/...

Is this still the case? What other ways could the feds have used to decloak a Tor session?

I mean come on, we love (well, some love) nostalgia, but not the Automats [1] please :) Might have the old-is-new-again feeling that is in fashion again these days, but I don't think this is the way to go. Although, I don't eat at Wendy's more than once or maybe twice a year, so yeah, who cares :))))

[1] http://www.wired.com/2008/07/g...

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/long-lost-mayan-city-teen-found-isnt-lost-city/

Andno matter what your star map tells you,chances are good you’ll hit upon a settlement in that area.“The Maya area was so densely occupied in Classic Maya times that many years ago a well known archaeologist, Ed Kurjack, told me that the area looked much like the Ohio Valley, denuded of trees and full of towns that were fairly close to one another,” wroteSusan Milbrath, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, in an email. “So at any given point you would be likely to find an archaeological site.”The archaeologist Richard Hansen pointed out that the location appears to be very close to that of the ancient Mayan city of Uxul,which has been under excavation since 2009—not exactly a long-lost city.

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/long-lost-mayan-city-teen-found-isnt-lost-city/

I was fooled, too. But I am gullible. It was a neat feeling believing it while it lasted... loves me some Mayan archeology. But some of you already figured out it was probably too good to be true.

According to the German news ( http://www.merkur.de/lokales/w... ), that is incorrect. It actually did roll over:

Rollover of Tesla sports car / Uberschlag mit Tesla-Sportwagen
The car came off the road and overturned / Daraufhin kam das Auto von der StraBe ab und uberschlug sich

It may not look like it did, but that's because

You can stack the equivalent of four Teslas on on one Tesla Model S without the roof breaking

( http://www.wired.com/2013/08/t... )

Responding to myself to provide citations and additional details, since there's some (perfectly understandable) incredulity in response to my comment.

Regarding the weld, it's a variety of friction welding that SpaceX developed:
http://electrek.co/2015/05/24/...
http://gas2.org/2015/05/29/spa...

Regarding the crush test breaking the machine:
http://www.wired.com/2013/08/t...
http://www.roadandtrack.com/ne...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

It's also worth noting that Tesla claimed they had achieved a NHTSA safety rating score of 5.4, which was utter and complete nonsense since the scoring is capped at 5 stars. Tesla apparently arrived at that number by totaling up each of the subcategories and ignoring the fact that the total score is capped by design. The NHTSA rightly slapped Tesla for saying they had achieved a score beyond the max, and by no means should my previous comment be taken as an endorsement of Tesla or everything they've claimed regarding their safety record over the years. I was simply sharing a neat tidbit that seemed relevant. Nothing more.

No fanboy, you didn't actually hear that. [...] I assure you, no Tesla 'broke the machine'.

A) So you're saying that Wired, Road and Track, USA Today, and a number of other news outlets fabricated a story that I never read? That seems like a bit much conspiracy for me.

B) I'm no Tesla fanboy. I'm glad that they're pushing a stagnant industry forward at a faster pace, but that's about it. I don't think Musk is the second coming of either Jesus or Steve Jobs, I have very little interest in their cars as they exist today, and I strongly believe that they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in a number of instances where they've tried to distance themselves from traditional aspects of cars (e.g. the touchscreen in their cars is ludicrous and unsafe).

Watch one season of NASCAR and get a clue.

This thread was discussing the relative safety of luxury cars and my comment was clearly constrained to them, given that I explicitly referred to them. But I'll let you take my comment out of context if it'll help you feel better about being so wrong about everything else.

Specifically, which hardware from Microsoft is bad? Give examples of how and why it is bad.

Zune in general, Zune Brown in particular.

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/fond-memories-microsoft-zune-brown/

Kin Phones

http://www.wired.com/2010/06/four-reasons-why-microsofts-kin-phone-failed/

Tablet PC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC

MSN Direct Smart Watch

http://www.smartwatchnews.org/2004-microsoft-spot-watch-smartwatch/

Actually, it isn't. You don't have the facts. True believers never do.

we Want a Government controlled infrastructure of the internet as our current providers are expensive and often have bad habits

You have Government-controlled infrastructure already and that is why it sucks. Government can not get public schools right for decades and continues to mismanage even the high-profile things. You want them to take over the Internet service-provision too?

You are a fool, which would've been fine with me, except you want them to further take over my Internet-access too — not just yours...

http://viv.ai/ Wired did a nice write up on them in 2014: Wired.com

Those of us on internet in late 90's remember the most popular voice chat software that even worked over dialup. It was hugely popular among ham radio operators as being one of them, we got the ok to setup links to 2 meter and 70cm band repeaters, after not the greatest of verification but it wasn't a disaster.

1995 article on the original iphone: http://www.wired.com/1995/10/i...

it worked damn good over dialup for what it was, even allowed calls to landlines, and ham radio links, it was great for those days, and of course peer 2 peer

1996 college paper on the specifics of Iphone: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~kell...

Microsoft owns Apple stock for a while now. I've not heard Microsoft selling its holding in Apple, but if you find it then you will be right. Keep in mind that these are non-voting shares, but dumping $150 million back in 1997 when Apple was worth about $19 made a huge impact. That deal alone sent Apple stock up $6 and increased the volume from less than 100 million to over a billion. historical prices

If you read that, you'll see I oppose a carbon tax.

Only because you prefer "regulation" — which is even worse for its arbitrariness.

So, your claim seems unsupported.

But you would not deny being a Socialist either. Which is curious, because this would've been a perfect opportunity to do so. Instead, you chose to remain coy.

Why wouldn't you simply state for the record, that you do not approve of Socialism?

Your favoring of regulation to smother an activity you dislike certainly indicates that you are one. Modern Socialists have shifted from the Marx' "government must own means of productions" to the seemingly milder "government must regulate means of production". It is more convenient that way — being owners, government officials may be asked inconvenient questions about the failures (as is the case with public schools, for example).

But when you regulate something to death (such as rail-roads, mortgage-lending, air-travel, or healthcare, or Internet-service, or indeed, the power-industry) the blame falls on the "evil KKKapitalists", who nominally own the banks, airlines, hospitals, ISPs, and electric plants. You can then "save" them with subsidies and bailouts, which, naturally, give you a right to attach additional strings and impose more regulation. Voila, government control of the means of production (and service-provision) is further solidified...

The debate about "autopilot" versus "fully autonomous" is a very real concern, validated by Tesla drivers themselves. You have drivers that stop paying attention to the speed limit, abuse autodrive to violate traffic laws, take their hands off the steering wheel, or just climb into the back seat and let the car drive itself creates not just a danger for the Tesla driver but for every car on the road. This despite Tesla's insistence that people must still stay at the wheel and drive; the technology has advanced enough that people get a false sense of confidence to push the limits even if the technology is not truly ready for it. That's the point that the Volvo engineer is making.

That shift in scientific thinking happened about a century ago.

Maybe — and first they thought, we are dangerously cooling the Earth.

Presumably you are late to the party.

Your condescending "presumption" is both incorrect and irrelevant to the discussion.

Incidentally, while I note speculation that Kodiak may have been connected by glaciation to the mainland during the last ice age, I'm not finding any information about the last time there was a land bridge.

I heard it from a guide explaining, why Kodiak bears are so similar to, but quite the same as the mainland grizzlies. Like the humans trapped in Tasmania for thousands of years, Kodiak bears used to mate with other grizzlies sufficiently recently to not have become separate species. Contrast them with the pink iguanas found on one of the Galapagos islands — those critters got separated millions of years ago and are already a separate species.

But, whether the islands of the Kodiak were connected to mainland by land or by ice is not very relevant to this discussion — because the ancient disappearance of the ice would've been blamed on human sins by the same shamans just as well.

Should you wish to continue arguing for credibility of today's "climate science", please, follow-up under this other post of mine with the citations I ask for in it.

Absolutely untrue. Check out this story:

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/hack-brief-isis-data-breach-identifies-22000-members/

Otherwise, they'll claim it as their own and you won't get any money for it.

The problem they have in Europe is due to historic dicounts/tax concessions on diesel, they became popular with tight-fisted motorists. Even though most of these concessions have been removed, the mindset of "diesel == cheap" remains.

There is no such tax advantage in the UK, in fact typically diesel is more expensive (slightly) than petrol, and has been for many years. It is however still a win for the "tight fisted" driver due to diesel's typical higher fuel economy.

The real "problem" in Europe is that they legislated for much stricter standards on fleet average fuel economy and CO2 emissions (see e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com... ). The only way to meet those standards has been small diesels, it is only in the last couple of years that petrol technology has started catching up. USA doesn't believe CO2 is a pollutant, has low taxes on fuel, so US drivers don't (in general) care about efficiency. Some of the big US car mfrs (e.g. Ford) make highly efficient cars that they only sell _outside_ the US - because apparently no US demand... http://www.wired.com/2009/02/f...

Diesel is no dirtier or cleaner than petrol (end electric just moves the dirt where you can't see it), it is just different. It is all really about which pollutant you want, and how fast you want to die. CO will kill you in minutes, and petrol engines are 20-40x worse than diesels. Unburnt hydrocarbons we don't yet know how fast they'll kill you, but again petrol is a lot worse than diesel. NOx will kill you in years to decades, maybe, and diesels are worse than petrol. CO2 will kill most of us in generations, maybe, and petrol is worse than diesel.

There is a direct relation in any IC engine (petrol or diesel) between NOx and CO - bring one down and the other goes up. Pick which you want. Personally I'll take the NOx and live a bit longer.

There is a natural expectation of some privacy, even in public places.

While I tend to agree with you, the government feels otherwise.

http://www.wired.com/2010/09/p...