On a downhill trail like that, you should be able to outrun it on a bike.

It would be a pretty good incentive to ride fast!

I do that watching rodeos.

The only people I feel sorry for are the clowns that get fucked up trying to save the testosterone junkie. They're like the S.A.R. teams searching for the idiot who hiked into the mountains with shorts, t-shirt, $500 sunglasses and a half bag of trail mix.

Lawsuit for false advertising?

Overall, this seems rather analogous to bottled water. Penn and Teller did a brilliant "Bullshit" episode about bottled water back in the day. It got sifted, but is now dead. The entire episode (first half is about feng shui, second half about water) is available on vimeo, though:
https://vimeo.com/193125042

Long story short, most bottled water presents itself as coming from a mountain spring, or glacier, or whatever. But in reality, the vast majority is simply municipal water from whatever city the packaging plant is in, usually not going through any additional filtration or purification at all.

At least with water, it is possible to test for contaminants. Diamonds can be graded / assayed to certify some basic characteristics, but of course there is no straightforward way to track their history and know where they came from, etc. At least, not short of having a paper trail tracing it back to the place and time that it was mined, which could easily be faked.

Bottled water gets away with promoting an "image" of being sourced from mountain springs or whatever by never actually claiming that it is in a legal sense. Usually there is fine print available noting the location that the water came from / was packaged. This diamond company seems to go beyond that and to make claims about their diamonds that are impossible to actually prove. Hopefully they get nailed/shut down.

On my tablet, each individual we rented an airbnb from in Iceland automatically had their chosen profile picture attached to each email, and many were landscape or building photos, so this part at least is not so odd. I'm just guessing it works the same on cell phones, I don't have one.

It is ironic that a civil liberties counselor had this happen, but that's probably why it gained attention. This kind of thing happens daily, but usually not so blatantly or with such a clear 'paper trail' of emails. It still could be fake, but anyone with 1/2 a brain would know that faking something like this will be exposed quickly and ruin their future, so I hope it's not.

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

You won't see any commercials BLAZING THE TRAIL on social justice issues... but i view these ads as a social barometer. They'll come along after the trail is blazed and take a snapshot of public opinion, which... has some value. Some exec somewhere had to do the research and figure out, well damn, turns out more than 50% of our demo cares about this, so... so do we!

https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-radar
even cooler, as of a recent update the Tesla can actually bounce radar underneath and around the car ahead to the one in front of it (albeit probably at a lower resolution)
"Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front - using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal - and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar."

Maybe, but realistically, they won't. Here is a list of the most popular hits of 1916, let me know which ones you hear people singing today.

"O Sole Mio" by Enrico Caruso
"Santa Lucia" by Enrico Caruso
"Somewhere a Voice is Calling" by John McCormack
"Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday On Saturday Night?" by Al Jolson
"I Love A Piano" by Billy Murray
"Pretty Baby" by Billy Murray
"I'm Gonna Make Hay While the Sun Shines in Virginia" by Marion Harris
"Keep the Home Fires Burning ('Till the Boys Comes Home)" by James F. Harrison
"There's A Long Long Trail A-Winding" by James F. Harrison
"Ireland Must Be Heaven, For My Mother Came From There" by Charles Harrison

Fair points, but he still seemed to engage with her more than I would have and he certainly did a lot of talking.

I had a similar, but lesser experience with a woman on a multi-use trail when I was riding my bike, many years ago. She was sure that this was only a walking trail and tried to block me from riding. I simply got off my bike while she was shouting at me, then head-faked her and got around. I got back on my bike and rode off once I was clear of her arms. I just didn't think I should spend much time thinking about her. You just can't take to crazy.

I wonder how well it would work today though. The glow was a bit... off... but more modern technology could perhaps make the puck stand out more, while ditching the trail when it goes super fast.

Your video, The R-rated Oregon Trail, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 106 Badge!

You're kidding, right?
Do I have to make a list? On every continent white people visited (if you can call showing up and not really leaving a visit) we fucked up the lives of a good portion of the people living there.
Sure, mankind has always been cruel, in every corner of the earth. However, white people are to murder, theft and slavery what Coca Cola is to refreshing diabeeetus (yes, that's how it's spelled). A fucking international enterprise whose traces can be found everywhere. On every fucking continent.
I hope we can agree on that. Otherwise, here's a short list: Gippsland Massacres, Nagasaki, Opium Wars, My Lai Massacre, fucking Iraq, Crusades, Apartheid, Herero and Namaqua genocide, that whole Columbus mess, Trail Of Tears and transatlantic slave trade (because why the fuck not?). Oh, my bad, I forgot the freaking Holocaust and starting 2 World Wars.
Who does this? Who? White people, that's who. Europeans and their descendants.
Would you like to argue that level of evil is genetic? I won't.
It's cultural. We europeans (and later our emigrated offspring) always thought we're better than everybody else, we had god on our side (and the Pope agreed!). Probably a leftover from the Roman Empire. And that's why everywhere we go, we steal, murder or occupy the shit out of every place. No other collection of ethnic groups has so much blood on their hands and it's not because we're worse DNA constructs than the others. All humans are capable of evil, it just takes a certain way of thinking to go that far.
Thankfully, we wrecked our own continent so badly during WW2, that we finally started to improve our ways. But here's the problem: we just started. We're far from being done.
Orban, LePen, Farage, Putin, Petry and last but not least Trump.

I think the basic problem for liberals in America is a numbers game:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/180452/liberals-record-trail-conservatives.aspx

Liberals had the illusion of being the majority because certain recent victories they had culturally and politically, when in fact they were still in the minority . They tried to silence the majority, who complied, as the man said, and then voted.

The power of the vote in America is greater than decades of social conditioning; it can completely change the direction of a country politically and more importantly, ideologically. That is what is happening here, which is a course correction by the majority which will lead to some diminishment of liberal thought in America. It may not last long, however, depending on the character and nature of the Trump presidency.

Liberalism worldwide seeks to change the value system of every nation in the world. The stated goal is a one world government without borders. This is also exactly what the bible predicted would happen. Whether it happens through liberalism, or another ism, there will eventually be a one world government overseen by the Antichrist.

Gorgeous. I went there last summer. It is that stunning. I strongly suggest it as a vacation destination to anyone adventurous.

BUT.....

When you spend the time, energy, and exorbitant amounts of money to go see the unspoiled wilderness and nature, and some asshole ruins it by flying their drone overhead for a few hours, it's enraging.
That happened to us twice (maybe by the same group at different places, we aren't sure). I was ready to grab that drone and throw it in the berg filled lagoon, or the beautiful collimated basalt waterfall they were flying in front of. I had to wait over an hour at the waterfall for the assholes to move out of the picture....they had walked past the 'don't go past this sign' signs to get the shots they wanted right in front of the falls, and refused to move or get back on the trail.

If you own a drone, please be respectful of the rules and of others, or know that it's your fault when someone loses it and destroys your toy. Don't act like the world belongs to you, and other people's peaceful enjoyment of natural areas don't matter.
Your youtube views don't trump my right to peace and quiet in nature.
I feel like drones need to be regulated in public spaces for that reason. Not totally banned, but given specific days when it's allowed and make most parks and all natural parks off limits at all other times.
Drone footage is amazing, drones buzzing overhead are amazingly annoying.

I'm basically done with defending WikiLeaks as well, after the shit they pulled with the leaks of Turkish data. Completely irresponsible, that one.

However, WikiLeaks doesn't need credibility -- the data does. And the data they published vis-á-vis Clinton/Podesta/DNC is, as of now, solid. There was one fake document, but that was shown to have been injected by someone other than WL.

"Strong bias" -- oh, I do have a strong bias. Plural, as in biases, actually. For instance, I'm disinclined to take anything the US intelligence agencies say at face value, given how they manufactured more than one casus belli. I don't put much weight into (un-)official statements in general, but especially since all the misinformation they spread about issues like the coup in Honduras or the actions of Nazi militias in Ukraine.

In this particular case, however, my argument is much simpler: Occam's razor seems much more likely than malicious intent. Propaganda outlets on both sides are run by people. Maybe the propaganda outlet Sputnik intentionally twisted the content of email, or maybe they just fucked up, like people are wont to do. Maybe someone intentionally fed Trump this bad info, maybe his people are just as incompetent as he is.

There are too many parts in this that include people who have more than once proven themselves to be utterly incompetent, or in complete ignorance of even the concept of truth. I don't think Trump gives a shit about truth or facts, he strikes me as the typical blowhard who spouts whatever shit comes to mind, and spins stories on the fly like a 4-year-old when caught red-handing.

No need for a conspiracy there, with all this incompetence, naiveté and plain disregard for facts.

So when they keep on pushing the Russian angle in this, it just seems like a desperate attempt to conjure up the old unifying enemy. Why worry about Russian propaganda when there's plenty on FOX and MSNBC/CNN? Why worry about Russian hackers when you accept the unbelievably insecure method of eletronic votes, partly without paper trails, and completely controlled by private companies?

It's just very strange to an outsider like me to see them focus on perceived external influences when the internals are a complete clusterfuck. And this presidential election is the biggest clusterfuck I've seen in 30 years, which doesn't mean much, admittedly.

That said, we can't just be looking at it from the outside with binoculars, not when people are back to full-blown Cold War rhetoric. When the ruling class in the US and/or the ruling class in Russia start their pissing contests and other forms of grandstanding, it's usually brown people who pay the price, like they have been in Syria for the last couple of years. And Libya. And Yemen. And Somalia. And Afghanistan, And Iraq. And Pakistan.

Personally, all the rhetoric about "standing up to Russian aggression" and similar nonsense makes me keenly aware that the bridge just outside my hometown was constructed with a shaft to place explosives in, to slow down advancing Soviet troops... so yes, I would very much like to bitch-slap all these warmongerers on both sides, but particularly the ones in the US since they are currently the ones racking up the highest death toll.

Edit: I should have made it clearer. Yes, WL is absolutely biased against Clinton and they do seem to act in support of Trump. Assange in particular. Which bums me out to no end, since I actually met the guy in person when they presented WL at the 26C3.