So what's your point?

Having the freedom to not be forced into contracts doesn't grant you a magical right to force companies to offer the exact products and services that you want. If you don't like the terms of a contract, don't sign it. But you can't reasonably expect businesses to cater to your specific whims so that you can buy a subsidized cell phone.

Facebook has implemented fixes to those bugs. For the privacy minded you can still prevent pending friends from accessing info, and set photo/location tags to require your permission before they go public.

I'm not trying to contradict your major point. Teachers should still be entitled to private lives. And Facebook has come a long way to help people protect that privacy (while farming their all of their personal data).

I don't meant to nitpick, but there is an important point to be made about Romneycare vs. Obamacare.

Romney's health plan was for Massachusetts. And as much as I like to think of myself as a fiscal conservative, as a resident of Massachusetts I have to reluctantly admit that the plan kind of works. For Massachusetts.

Obama's plan is national. It includes an individual mandate that all Americans purchase health insurance. That's a mandate from the Federal Government compelling people to go out and buy something. At the state and local level many of us tolerate and support this. At the Federal level this is unprecedented, and scary.

What works for Massachusetts may not work for the entire nation. As a state, we can do things like anti-smoking legislation and taxing junk foods to mitigate some of our health care risks. I don't think we can do that at a national level.

As someone that was and is opposed to the bill, I honestly believe it was a good faith effort from the Obama administration to include all voices and make sure every concern is heard and considered. Conservatives tried to take advantage of that flexibility to make the bill unpassable, and people like Pelosi never understood why they should have to compromise in the first place.

Regardless of whether you supported this bill, I think we can all look back on the story of it's passing as a very sad, miserable time for American politics.

American ones. In the US it is illegal to discriminate against people over the age of 40 for employment purposes. Obviously, this varies by Nation.

For those not familiar, in the US applicants generally do everything they can to avoid specificity on age unless it offers a specific advantage. Most don't even list College graduation year, because it could let employers infer age.

Even if you voluntarily tell them, it's still meaningless. Employers still cannot use that information to make hiring decisions. All that will do is put the employer in an awkward spot where their HR team has to document every interaction they have with the application from that point on.

Members of protected classes have face-to-face interviews all the time. It's not like we force interviewers to wear blindfolds to prevent them from discovering the applicant's gender and race.

All they have to do is prove/claim that even if they came in contact with that information, it wasn't used to influence a hiring decision. Companies collect that kind of information from applicants all the time (i.e. to support audits on job retraining programs, veteran employment, equal opportunity employment laws).

Companies with large enough HR teams do this by compartmentalizing access. A company might designate an HR rep to handle information pertaining to protected classes. So long as the hiring manager doesn't see that information it's not a big deal.

Trust. But verify.

We 'trust' the kinds of science that opens itself up to observation, criticism, and testing. Even if we never personally replicate the results ourselves, we know that the results can and have been replicated.

Yeah, I get your point.

But even in a corporate environment, you're probably not going to get fired for a single arguably offensive tweet. There are probably better ways to teach kids that lesson than expelling them.

FWIW The summary says it was a school issued laptop. The article doesn't specify, but as you quoted implies that it was a personal computer. Obviously the summary could very well be wrong, but it's also possible that the student is confused about who owns the computer and the article wasn't thorough enough to elaborate.

Also, the guy's tweet was hardly all that offensive. It uses a naughty word for sure. But in the context of describing how it can be used for various parts of speech, not as a swear word directed at somebody or something. Either this is another zero tolerance policy gone out of control, or this kid has other issues and the school needed a reason to expel him.

Especially in this case, where the retrieval effort is happening in an environment that 1) is rich with exploitable resources and 2) we don't have a lot of experience working in.

As far as I'm concerned, any project that lets us learn a little more about living and working on the ocean floor is money well spent.

The concern with fair trade is that 'fair trade' goods are increasingly produced by businesses rather than local farmers (as they advertise). Allegedly, by buying fair trade goods at first world prices the first world is supporting export-only businesses that 'rob' already starving nations of their food production. These businesses then use their comparatively vast wealth to buy the best available farmland to grow more food to ship off to the first world.

Thus the 'distribution problem' is that fair trade food is being distributed as luxury goods to first world consumers who want to think they're supporting impoverished farmers.

/Looks into mirror

APK

APK

APK

If you can build a star ship, you can probably also build one capable of launching/retrieving a set of durable, reusable satellites. Those sats could serve several functions (data gathering, line-of-sight communications, ray gun platforms, etc).

It probably wouldn't be "GPS" gps. But the concept of using 3+ satellites as points of reference for a coordinate system is pretty robust. Obviously we can't predict future tech with any accuracy, but keeping a gps style system sounds feasible.