MechEStudent

Teens have been a monetized commodity since the birth of MTV. This isn't a surprise. After 40 years, this qualifies as a 'murican cultural value.

China has more. They have enough that this is a drop in the bucket. While they might be as blatant and ineffective as Russia by interfering with an election, they want a low profile and to maximize capture of revenue, so they are more about making money than trying to put feces on the face of the American political process.

You people should pick your battles. It would help if you knew the battlefield first.

They are already applying this to foreigners when selecting possible people to track, monitor, or engage.

So apple is paying the maker of android to stay in business. Cute.

Hydrogen has hard risks, and high costs. Density. Corrosion. Tunneling/leaking. A new trillion-dollar distribution infrastructure to replace the fluid-version we use for petrol.

What about methanol? We can convert hydrogen to hydrocarbon. Liquid is dense, much less dangerous, less acidic, less leaky, and our current trillion-dollar infrastructure already uses it as a substantial additive.

Welfare is engineered to fail, and it fails. You can't build a system by American political committee and expect it to actually work.

There are known good solutions for poverty that work reliably and consistently well. That isn't what the US welfare system is engineered for. It is engineered to put money in the hands of political donors, not resolve poverty.

The solution to resolving poverty, much like the Buffet rule for politicians, would work overnight, but will never be implemented. Buffet says a law that says no standing politician is eligible for re-election in a year when minimum true GDP year-over-year growth for the last 2 years has been below 3% would work. He is right.

A similar law, based on "theory of constraints" and directly extractable from the pages of "the goal" would work for poverty, but has (sadly sadly) the same political palatability as drinking a gallon of raw sewage.

Dang this lost, broken, wrecked political system and the scoundrels who are in power and abuse it.

The goal is to open the inner solar system for human habitation and resourcing. I'm betting there is a robot on the craft, and its aiming for Ceres.

Lets see if the mounting pedestal comes back with enough Iridium to pay for the development and launch of the FH.

...how well do we use our freedom to choose the illusions we create? -Timbuk 3

Oscar Wilde says: Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Does the soul change?

It is a vast organization with vast bureaucratic momentum and organizational inertia. Can leadership change those? Not even a little. Intel can't change. Emerson can't change. And they have huger and more existential force pushing for change against a smaller mass.

Is the soul any different today than yesterday? Nope.

In ten years you can ask again, and the answer might be maybe.

So the question behind the question is "what is the real soul of the NSA?". Look at their deeds. Words and actions over time tell truth. Look at the trend of their deeds over time.

They could be saved, but I will not speak their rescue here. There is nobody who would ask or hear it.

They could have been saved, and still might.

I gave them more than they deserved, better than they could have asked and they turned it to crap.

Paywalled?

Paywalled.

The US is moving that direction too.

I disagree. Disney has money, and all politicians spend at least half of their working hours soliciting money in exchange for the promise of writing laws. It will be extended.

The founders idea of patent and copyright as being meant to last as long as a working lifetime (20 years) died a long time ago. This is just one more evidence of the democracy moving to plutocracy.

Let's watch it get renewed. Then, up-vote my comment.

This has been on the menu for a long time. At least 3 years. Who is surprised at this?

I see these at a cadence that works with price engineering. I don't believe it. I think it is like "ham supply is constrained this easter" and then they mark up the prices and there are the same number of hams. They were engineering the market, not presenting an actual problem.

This looks like that.

Only 1%? My eye. This has smell of Yahoo to it. I bet within 6 months, this goes up toward 10%. I bet they lost their entire data.

The important question: How much money was it worth to Comcast?

They have a population of ~136k, comprising 60,503 households. If each currently pays $100/mo for a cable bundle and all abandon them for fiber (a gross over-estimate), that is $72.6 million per year of lost revenue to Comcast.

It is, however, $72.6 million of returned value, or something more than about 10% of the $620M/year total city budget. If my town voted to net-reduce its total burden to me by 10% or so, that would be very appealing. If they only returned half of that, it would still be substantial.

If they dispensed with the "evil" of the regular garbage "fees" and price hikes that modern cable monopolies love, it would be worth 100% of the price.

Wars on poverty often become wars on poor people. I was there when Clinton reduced max coverage to 2 years. It was a sentence of lifetime poverty for people who had no option, and that was strongly enhanced by the "human glue".

Link is auto-blocked by security software. Is this a known-misbehaving domain?

Paywalled.

It looked like a way to make a closed ecosystem where there were only a few entrants (users) and the cost of entry was high both economically and in terms of the learning curve.

It is nice to see that I'm not entirely wrong.

So, they want the password off the list, instead of changing it to something (much much much) more secure? Some variant of "battery horse staple and correct", right?

I wish parents raised children because they love their children, instead of treating them like human cattle.

I wish that in-laws were looking to maximize lifelong success of their grandchildren by the selection of the character, aptitudes, and excellences of his wife.

A man who is not a coward and not a weakling should find a wife who is better than him, in many ways, who forces him to be his best self and grow in capabilities even when it is painful. He would never give himself so much power over her identity and strength as one gets by "buying" her.

This makes a culture of rape. If the woman is a commodity and her "no" or any other word or personal desire is, in nearly every other context, a doormat to be walked upon then it makes the "valley" between a meaningless no in every other context and the forcing upon her the meaninglessness of a no in a sexual context an inconsequential crack in the ground. Her "no" should always be heard, and that only comes when she is treated as a human, not as a commodity; that only comes when her voice is always heard and valued as much as every other voice.

This has implications for the economy of prostitution, and pornography.

Says "terms of service violation", no article. Is there a second source?

Absolutely inexcusable.

Yes. The universe has a "Johari" window, that is an implication of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

My 2 year old wanted just one Christmas present. I think that if I had not been a "dumb American" and if I had played with her and the toy instead of urging her to open another present, she would have been happy with one toy for Christmas for years. Deeply satisfied, and blessed full.

I like the change over time part. I think in the last election the "lesser of two evils" dominated, and many people who would have liked to vote Democrat but deeply didn't like Hillary had to make a horrible choice. Two states "flipped" from "blue" to "red", didn't they? Those were "rust-belt" states, so I'm very sure that there wasn't change in cars.

I think that was using a cliche phrase that has come to mean the opposite of the literal meaning. Who is wealthy enough to own a Bentley? The 1%? The 0.1%? Not me.