And where did that "Left talking point right now" come from? You would have sounded reasonable before Donald Trump's mob tried to stop the democratic process. They literally tried to "destroy Democracy". And you know this. You know this, and you support it. We see what you are.

I agree, it's extremely wasteful. However, it's energy storage that produces drinking water from an internal combustion engine. As storage, this could be useful for overnight power in desert regions bordering the ocean, like north Africa and the Arabian peninsula, which have plenty of insolation and a shortage of fresh water.

This is true.

This is bullshit. Same battery chemistry, same number of cells in the replacement. 12v lead-acid batteries are a worldwide standard. If the same size or even a bit smaller and it fits, it'll work fine. BMW just wants more cash.

For a battery swap? Don't lick the terminals, they're made of lead.

A pickup truck stops on Fifth Avenue. The driver hops out, pulls a tarp off the back of his truck, and pushes the button on his remote. 500 small drones launch over the course of 30 seconds, each with a camera and a small explosive surrounded by ball bearings. Hell, imagine this at a high school football game in small town America. Actually, imagine it in Adelaide, or Leicester, or Mumbai. Imagine it at a political rally, a protest, an inauguration, a concert in the park.

A cheap drone is ~$25, a camera & SOC combo $10, a grenade-equivalent payload $10. Thousands per day could be pumped out of a factory in the target country, stockpiled for a few months, and then loaded onto trucks for delivery for a simultaneous attack on multiple soft targets. Add in facial recognition (heftier SOC) for targeted assassinations. You could target/exclude a specific person, an ethnic group, an age group, a gender, particular clothing... this is the holy grail of bioweapon developers. I support Manchester; if they lose, everyone wearing Liverpool colors is a valid target for my $250,000 of drones (that's ~5,000 drones). Cheap autonomous weapons are WMDs if you have a military's budget.

Some thoughts:
The Zuck'll sell you photos of your political enemies.
Alkaline's the best power supply for killer drones. Higher power density for the weight = longer range/hunt time, and it's not like you'll need to recharge.

They're not putting the Uighurs in labor camps, but It's okay that they're putting the Uighurs in labor camps because they're unlawful combatants. The CCP talks out both sides of their mouth. Pick a line and stick with it.

South Korea is indeed "giving" those photos. I didn't have a choice; they took my photo when I changed planes there, even though I never went through immigration, and they didn't tell me they were giving it to a private company. Had they informed me, I might have used a different airport. Facebook is the wrong comparison.

I wanted to prove you wrong for upvotes, but you're right. A writer for DDB Worldwide Communications Group coined the phrase. Still, his delivery brought it to life. It's sad that a misdemeanor marijuana charge derailed his career. "Dude, you're getting a cell!" isn't as funny as I thought it was in 2003.

I still think it's better to call things what they are. If every time you refer to unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work as "stealing", you also explain that the theft was of an abstract concept ("opportunity to distribute" - presumably to the perpetrator, whom the rights holder assumes would otherwise part with money) and not a theft of the work itself, then I have no quarrel with the terminology. But calling it "stealing" without the footnote is a sneaky deception - a word used to trigger a visceral response (no one likes a thief).

If I break into Zuckerberg's house at night and take photographs of his oil paintings, would you honestly call me a burglar? I "stole" his opportunity to sell me photographs of his paintings, I guess. By MAFIAA logic, copying a sentence by hand out of a library book to use in your paper is theft - you should have bought your own copy if you wanted to quote it. You stole the publisher's opportunity to sell their book to you. (Yes, this would legally fall under fair use, but that's just a defense - the offense is the same: unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work.)

"Stealing" is simply the wrong word. Copying and then distributing a work to which you have no rights is (and should be) a crime akin to theft (but still not theft), but simple unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work is not "stealing" in the vernacular sense.

Back in the day, if you wanted to steal a work of text, you would grab it and run. Copying is not stealing. The copyright owner still has their work; you just have a copy.

Your stance on its legality aside, why not just call it "unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work"? It's a lot more accurate and doesn't overload the definition of a common word.

You and a curious executive both know about "many many" foreign porn sites - the same ones, no less. What industry do you work in?

Just to clarify, Mormons are white supremacists to the extent that they are Mormon. I was raised one. I was a Mormon missionary. The Mormon religion is racist as fuck. Native Americans become "white and delightsome" if they don't sin (and god cursed them with a "skin of blackness" to make them unattractive). Black people didn't side with Michael the Archangel (who is also Adam, for some reason) in a pre-mortal war against the devil, and so Mormon Jesus gave them black skin (and made them be born descendants of Cain, the first murderer). I was born with white skin because I chose to side with God. Racism is part and parcel of Mormonism. It's baked into scripture and doctrine. Mormons claimed to have revealed "Truth" regarding race, but that "truth" shifts with public opinion (though it's retarded by 50 years or more).

They've edited the Book of Mormon to make it slightly less racist, and now they're rejecting the doctrine of past prophets, but if past prophets were just giving their "opinions" on race and calling it the revealed Word of God, isn't that what the current one is doing too?

Stick that maglev cart on a banked circle and you've got a higher g habitat for sleeping/exercise/whatever.

Small ion drives and gaffer tape ought to do the trick.

That's a good point; I guess it won't be so useful for Earth satellites. Still, it would be good data for designing probes headed to the outer planets.

It's those untracked rocket bits left to orbit the Sun that are worrisome, but I suppose the odds of an old booster in solar orbit hitting a satellite are astronomical.

So are we going to recover the booster, or at least put it in a stable orbit? It'd be nice to see what 60 years of micrometeorites have done - might give us a ballpark lifetime on the ISS and future space projects.

And out of principle, we really should clean up our shit before it hits someone. Or at least put a few magnetic solar powered beacons on it so we can track it and deal with it later. That'd be a fun NASA project.