Like putting a pin in a balloon! Ahh, probably not the best example.

... stored it all on his own server in the first place, he could run for President.

I'm sure a class action suit would work great.

Earthquake hits LA, does major damage. Oil and gas companies are taken to court in a class action lawsuit. (There's a lot of oil production here, especially around Long Beach.)

The case drags on for years, but eventually the companies have to settle, let's say for $10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money right? Except half of it goes to the lawyers. Then half of the rest is made as a tax deductible donation to the Red Cross for disaster relief. The remaining 2.5 billion is split amongst the approximately 18.5 million residents of greater Los Angeles. Which would come out to a little under $150 per person. And it's delivered in the form of coupons for 50% off your next 100 gallons of gas. That 2.5 billion will of course go into a fund until those coupons are redeemed, and i would be surprised if the companies responsible don't get to keep the interest on those funds until they're spent to reimburse the gas stations that redeem the coupons. And of course a lot of people will forget that they have the coupons and never get around to using them. And a lot of the people won't actually own a gasoline powered car and will have to try and sell the coupons, probably for less than market value.

(And then most likely the price of gas in LA will go up for "unknown reasons" until most of the coupons have been redeemed.)

Whoops, it certainly wasn't consciously intentional :)

As a favorite author liked to say, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Unfortunately we are very poor at evaluating externalized costs. The pollution put out by coal plants that are "far enough" away from cities, the fish that are killed by hydroelectric damns, the excess carbon produced by all fossil fuels, and now the potential for damaging earthquakes from large scale oil and gas operations.

Of course the first ones to ignore externalized costs are the business offloading those costs on everyone else. And if a magnitude 7 quake gets triggered and people get hurt or killed (potentially dozens or hundreds of people in the US and possibly many more in less developed areas) the corporations responsible ought to be liable for millions or billions of dollars. But if necessary they'll lawyer up for a fraction of the cost and drag the issue out in court for years until everyone forgets. After all, how do you prove that this particular quake wouldn't have happened without drilling? And how do you prove which company's actions triggered the quake?

Good thing smart phones have speakers. Waze already make use of audio for turn alerts, they can do they same for Amber alerts.

A big boom, but not quite big enough to destroy the star? Perhaps the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator just got misdirected to the wrong location?

Agreed. Snowden's actions _may_ have been somewhat detrimental to our security, especially in the short term, but they did a lot to help shore up the values we _should_ be concerned about in the long run.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." That Ben Franklin quote gets thrown around quite a lot, but that's just because it's so demonstrably true. It's always possible that the people in charge right now are good and honorable, but if you keep giving up liberties then sooner or later someone is going to come along who wants to abuse the system and there will be nothing left to stop them.

And just for the record, it should be noted that he said "essential liberty". We all have to give up some liberty to live in functioning society. Unfortunately everyone has different opinions about which are the "essential" liberties and when you've crossed the line between prudence and paranoia.

"Apple Watch Sport with 42mm Silver Aluminum Case and Blue Sport Band"

AKA "the one no body wants".

... if this research is so obviously critical, it's not like only the government benefits from or cares about network security. Let those who think it is so critical pay for some.

"which are apps that are signed by specific software vendors, the Windows Store, or even your own organization"

That's good to know, but sadly it looks like even in verbatim mode google still ignores punctuation. For years after i switched to google for most searches i still used AltaVista for a lot of coding related questions because it would recognize and honor punctuation in the query.

If there was a way to force it to expand all the article sections by default i'd be a lot more inclined to use the mobile site. As it is i often end up on wikipedia on my phone because i was searching for something specific about a subject and google suggested that wikipedia page contained relevant information. But then when i try to text search for the word/phrase that i did the google search on it fails because that section of the article is collapsed.

Some states (like Michigan) have addressed this by changing things up, and funding schools on a statewide basis rather than from property taxes.

Like US car companies, it is very hard to admit when the fat years are over. Give them time; I suspect they will come around a bit.