I had the opposite experience. The AP/honors classes I took my final 2 years of high school were more difficult than anything I encountered my first year at the University of Washington. It was actually a major let down as I was hoping university would be more like my AP/honors classes and it actually felt like I was going backwards as far as education making the transition from high school to university.

There's a reason the wrist watch is much more common than the pocket watch. It's more convenient. If it was as nice to grab something out of your pocket, whether it be a pocket watch or cell phone, the pocket watch would have never gone away. In fact, the wrist watch would probably have never gained popularity in the first place.

The health care system is entirely different. Social security is structured like MLM. You pay people based on those at lower levels paying in. Like MLM, it's sustainability is entirely based on an increasing number of people paying in. With reproduction rates falling in developed countries (the environment can't sustain the old population growth anyway) the system will fail, because there won't be enough paying in. If you think of it as a retirement account where you put money in through your working life to retire on at old age, it actually has a negative interest rate for today's young workers. That's like putting $100 into a savings account today so that you can have $75 in 10 years. You'd be better off sticking the cash in your mattress.

The health care thing is nothing like that. It's not structured like MLM. It's sustainability is not an issue. As far as employers dropping coverage, there's little motivation. Say they pay $35,000 for the average worker per year including health insurance. If the government forced them to stop providing insurance and forced you to buy a $10,000 family plan, you're simply moving the expense from the company to the individual. It would then cost the company only $25,000 for the average worker if they held all else equal. So they could increase salary by $10,000 and remain at the same cost as they were before, $35,000 per employee. The only thing that could screw people would be the employers, and they're equally capable of screwing people today. In reality, under the health care bills today it would encourage employers to carry coverage and penalize them for not doing so. But your standard Fox News analysis is going to try to scare you into believing the health care bill equals communism.

While the technology itself is capable of decent bandwidth, the implementations are pretty terrible. Run low bandwidth wires to the cell towers and you just move the bottleneck somewhere else. 3g is more of a buzzword than anything at this point, until we actually start taking advantage of all that the technology has to offer.

Even better are those double seal ziploc bags. If we put the astronauts into one of those they'll stay good for months.

No, same roads. The vehicles just act differently. Steering, acceleration, those are nice and tight on the car. I zip-zoom-fly. But the 7,000 pound truck (which is just an extended cab long-bed F250 drives differently. If I take the same turn that I did in my car in my truck I'd flip the truck.I have to slow down more to turns. It takes me longer to brake, longer to accelerate. The vehicle does matter, as driving style is somewhat changed. You're more conservative in a truck because you can't see around as well and can't speed up to get out of someone's way like a car. If a sharp curve is coming up, you probably slow down to even what the signs say you should be at rather than ignoring them like I do when driving my car. It's just very different. My car handles faster speeds. It handles them with more control. And with less mass it's safer. Vehicles do differ - which is why some people buy sports cars and some people buy SUV's. If you want fast and performance suspensions you want the sports car and you can do things others can't. If you get the SUV you can carry an entire soccer team while pulling a boat, but you won't have the speed or driving characteristics of the sports car. It'll turn slower, you'll have higher chances of being a rollover. You just can't pick two different cars that different and pretend they're the same and that one-size-regulation makes it so. Some of those big SUV's towing trailers wouldn't dare go the speed limit out of safety, but they could (and be a danger).

The best person to decide how safe something is, is the driver. They learn the vehicle, they learn how it works, whether it drifts to the right or left, whether the mirrors work worth a damn, how long to stop, how fast to accel, and use that information to do what they feel is safe driving. It's not just a matter of "60MPH"

Yup, and the safe speed differs by vehicle. If I'm driving my sportier car (wouldn't really call it a sports car) I'm much more comfortable with higher speeds and sharper turns than I am when driving my 7000 pound truck. A "one size fits all" speed limit isn't really the most efficient system.

One reason for it is the different regulations of each country. If a major company with deep pockets sells a region-free DVD globally some country will sue because it didn't censor the left eyebrow of all blonde women, or whatever ludicrous regulation that country has.

With Blackjack! And Hookers!

It varies state to state, but these are in general the required college immunizations.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a law that requires all students to provide documentation of immunizations for tetanus and diphtheria (Td), measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) with 2 MMR shots documented and a series of three (3) hepatitis B shots given over a 6-month period. Meningitis vaccinations are required for all new students arriving on campus, whether or not they live at Fisher.

From here.

More like a car design engineer who creates a seriously hot car designed to carry a family of 4. Then due to the $300k price tag and low-price brand is forced to cut corners to get to $30k, removing most of what made the car awesome in the first place.

If the car designer disagrees and still wants to build that $300k family car, he should quit and start up a new auto company to do just that.

It'll be like AOL all over!