Super old joke: What's the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman? A car salesman knows when he is lying to you.

We have laws against distracted driving and some fairly harsh fines. Some people still can't seem to break the habit of texting while driving. A local driver got stopped and ticketed twice in 6 minutes by two different cops and dinged with a total of $1800 in fines and license penalties.

There was a local woman who claimed to be sensitive to her neighbor's wifi. Said it caused her migraines. Her neighbor turned it off when he left for work, as soon as he got home and turned it on she would be on the phone complaining again. Eventually he agreed to not use wifi and she was happy. Later I got the whole story from a friend. At first buddy was almost convinced the woman actually was sensitive to wifi. Then he got smart and turned off the SSID broadcast and she couldn't "sense" the wifi any more.

_Late_ 70s. I had a TI-59, they came out in 1977. The HP-41C came out about 2 years later.

I was university back in the late 70s. Kids would program their calculators with the formulas. Teaching assistants would walk around and reset i.e. wipe the memory on everybody's calculator before the exam started. Most professors allowed students to bring a single 8 1/2 x 11 cheat sheet to the exams. The point of the exam wasn't to find out if you could memorize the formulas, it was to find out if you knew how to apply them.

Credit Card security in the US sucks. Last time I visited there half the stores didn't have chip and PIN. I went to a restaurant, and instead of bringing me the wireless terminal the waitress walked off with my card. Came back with my card and a piece of paper for me to sign. Like there was any security at all in a signature. Who the fuck knows what she did with my card while she was gone.

What is the point of the identical twins (other than adding click-bait value)? Why not submit two samples from the same person under different names?

You don't actually know anything about trains, and talking based on intuition isn't working. Big freight trains have ridiculously long stopping distances. A 20k ton ore train will need damn near 2 miles to stop from 55 mph on level ground. The notion that a train driver could see something on the tracks and stop or even slow down enough to make a difference is entirely incorrect. A stuck brake (spelling matters) is not going to make vibrations that a driver can feel. A broken coupling will cause the train to separate, followed immediately by the train (air brake) line separating, followed thereafter by the train stopping as the pressure in the brake line drops to zero and all the brakes come on. Engines and also generator/alternators and traction motors are already instrumented and alarmed, and an automated system can be programmed to handle most faults.

Two at a time standing maybe makes sense if there are enough people at the bottom of the escalator to saturate it - i.e. a big enough crowd at the bottom that there are always two more people to step on each step as it appears.That is logically the maximum throughput, if you assume that people walking up leave spaces between them. If you had a pool of fit people who all wanted to get up the escalator as fast as possible, then they could all walk, or, god forbid, run up the escalator and the increased velocity would likely offset the effect of the spaces and you would achieve even greater throughput.
 
Around here the transit stations are busy, but seldom at saturation levels. People stand on the right and walk on the left. Seems to work well enough. Most people walk up, the ones who stand are usually pulling a suitcase, or elderly, or obese, or heads down reading a book or a screen.

"not everyone is like you" - I'll borrow that as a counterargument. What portion of our adult population do you think is unable to exercise? Not unwilling, not unmotivated,but physically, structurally, medically unable?

We should be Canadian about this - "So sorry for arresting you. We're putting you an a plane for Beijing in an hour. No hard feelings eh. Here, have some maple syrup and smoked salmon. Oh wait, here's some BC bud too."

There is a company called General Fusion http://generalfusion.com/ that is attempting to use liquid metal fusion containment. Sounds very cool, in an almost steampunk sort of way. Being a physics noob, I'm wondering if anybody who actually knows this stuff can comment on whether or not their idea makes any sense?

You mean NMR? - oh, wait.

I wish. My summer jobs involved things like sliding sheets of plywood into a dryer. One every 7 seconds, for 8 hours a day. (Not saying I ain't a sick bastard, every now and then).

If you have stuff on your computer you don't want to share with the repair guys, then encrypt it or delete it, because there is nothing else going to stop them from seeing it.
 
One of my university buddies worked at a repair job; not Geek Squad, but the local mega-computer-store equivalent. He worked a lot of nights and weekends and often had the repair shop to himself. Any time a machine came in for repair he would run a boot CD with a script to hoover up any and all .jpg and video files and copy them to an external hard drive. In two summers and a year of weekends, he amassed the most amazing amateur porn collection you could imagine. He said about every 3rd machine had a secret stash of porn, mostly boring stuff from the net, which he didn't bother with, but about 1 in 10 had homemade pics or videos which he kept.