Or would that just be considered a gag gift?

I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.

But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.

I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.

There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?

It's a common theme, but it begs the question -- do we just live in a state of anarchy now, where the "order" the police provide is merely illusory and most people are law abiding because of social convention, etc? Or does policing actually provide some kind of utility function to maintaining order?

I wonder about this, but I also wonder what the secondary of effects of harsh punishments would be. What happens if the police end up being just deliberately ineffective?

It's not like they don't have myriad ways to be ineffective that are basically impossible to control or punish -- evidence lost, conclusions not reached, investigations short-shrifted.

Maybe some or all of these happen now, but could they get worse and what would the larger effect be?

It doesn't seem to be in Windows 8.1 from my experience on a Surface Pro 2 -- it's a nice display and very high resolution, but it's scaling options leave a lot to be desired.

I can only imagine the same phenomenon would be true on super high resolution screens, although a lot of people seem to like 4k monitors, but it's hard to know what these would be like in day-day usage.

Incredible pixel density is nice, but it seems like (IMHO, anyway) that UIs and applications need to have a lot more flexibility about how they work with very high resolution displays.

The pope is treated as having political importance not because of the efficacy of his theology but because he is the spiritual leader of 1+ billion Catholics, a large portion of which actually believe in the doctrine of papal infallibility.

I think users have been clamoring for years for a way to moderate stories but I'm pretty sure CmdrTaco and the other original founder/editors never wanted it implemented out of sheer ego to prevent their genius story ideas from being moderated into oblivion.

I'm curious how data sharing works in those countries with nationalized health systems. I'd wager there's at least as much information sharing there as anywhere else.

The urban poor can't afford Internet? Every time I drive through "poor" urban areas, I'm always amazed at the forest of DISH/DirecTV dishes on apartments. Half the time I wonder if its not an NSA branch office or occupied by a NASA tracking station.

AFAIK most cities who signed cable franchise agreements required the entire city to be wired. While I'm sure more affluent areas were wired first, I seriously doubt my own city (Minneapolis) isn't universally wired 30 years later.

And 80% of the population is urban, and I would wager that number is slightly higher for African Americans, meaning that most of them live in areas with accessible broadband.

I'm not sure they're that closely related to eels. I've had eel in a Chinese restaurant and I didn't find it as good as squid and octopus.

The article I read say they approximated squid, if less chewy. IMHO squid and octopus don't really have a strong flavor -- they really just represent whatever they are cooked in (the Greeks seem to have a flair for them, oil and herbal seasoning).

In fact, I think a lot of people could be served tripe if you cooked it like squid and never know the difference.

One of the great ironies of our modern era is the simultaneous effort to reduce technology consuming westerners to the level of subsistence farmers in the name of ecology and to turn subsistence farmers into technology consuming westerners in the name of development.

I suspect that much of the crud in a gas tank mostly remains in suspension as the car is driven. The more fuel in the tank and the more it is driven, the greater the dispersion. It can settle out when stopping and a low fuel level can increase the concentration.

They are a delicacy in France and could probably be used as dog food or a protein enhancer for other food stocks.

Are they basically just remanufacturing the recovered cells into some kind of standardized battery pack with a standardized charging and usage interfaces?

I'm curious why this isn't done now if there's value in the cells vs. a more material-based recycling that uses them as input into creating new cells. I'd wager the argument is basically economic -- the cost of some other kind of battery input (new alkaline cells or "good" Li cells or whatever) is cheaper/better than these kinds of cells.