Except back in 1859 it was not a terrorist or state actor that did it to us; it was SOL and the sun certainly could do it again. While we have some ability to detect and predict when the risk of such an event occurring is higher than usual there ain't much we can do about it either.

So some EMP resilience would be a nice to have. Now the doom sayers are always telling us how after only a few days without electricity we all start dying. Well an EMP is likely to damage transmission lines (because of their length) and possibly some sensitive electronics most stuff won't likely be affected unless its a very very high intensity event. The big east coast power failure of what was it 2k4? Kinda proved we can get on for at least a few days without mains power.

The bigger question is would a China or Russia who might not be similarly given their relationship to the sun at that moment of the event try and take advantage of our condition with a conventional force.

Ever since Exchange 2007 came a long its been a few trivial powershell commands to copy the contents of one mailbox into another. What he probably should do is have his exchange admin copy his mails to a folder in his managers mailbox; so they won't be subject to delete.

That way the person likely to be responsible for anything the submitter would have been will have the information at his finger tips, and in a format that is easy to forward the relevant parts to whomever (s)he finds to do the actual work.

Once a designated replacement is hired that folder can be copied/moved to that persons mailbox.

Maybe it is maybe it isn't. The question is why do you and honestly why did the couple care. This isn't like civil rights battles of the past with Jim Crowe and such.

If blacks were being turned away from a specific lunch counter there would have been no big movement the issue was they were truned away at EVERY counter. We don't have that problem today, certainly not with the GLBTt community.

The fact the so much outrage over the incident exists proves that. They could said well "a fuck you too than" and headed to any other bakery in town. The vast vast majority of which would have said "hey your money is as good as anyone else's is just tell us what you want on the cake."

I can understand their being upset and telling everyone what bigoted assholes the people at the bakery that rejected them are. I can totally understand and support anyone who says "you know what I'd rather spend my money at bakery #2 because they treat everyone like a person and I would rather do business with a place like that". I think asked government to FORCE bakery one to serve any specific client is a bridge to far. We have a freedom of association under the first amendment. Reasonably for that mean anything there is an implied freedom from association. if the American Nazi party tried to hire me to do some work for them I'd turn them down. They are not a client I want, I don't want be associated with them and their ideas in any way. If a Christan baker sincerely believes that openly homosexual people are hell bound unrepentant sinners I can understand they'd feel the same. Why should the rest of us force our value one them?

You do realize that even the dessert is a complex ecosystem of micro flora and fona that would be greatly harmed by being permanently covered in solar cells. You must also be aware that transmission loss with electricity is well HUGE. So you are discussing a large ecosystem altering deployment of solar cells, much larger than anticipated, in place where there is nobody to maintain them. Sounds like a pretty stupid plan.

Right up there with daming another river or installing another giant bird migration path altering wind farm. Those are okay in Europe because the Europeans already killed all the birds in past centuries but they kinda suck in the states.

Someday folks are going to wake up and realize their is more to protecting our the environment than CO2 emissions. All the greenies want to do is run around and spoil the last few unspoiled places are earth to stand up their renewables; personally I'd rather burn a little more oil.

If you actually plan to meet your stated goal yes. If the objective is to score some political points by saying something that sounds good, than it means no such thing. 5 years out and then 10 years out, then 20 years out, when opponents are making noise that threatens you political you just tell supports that "there is still plenty of time, and with the economy....now isn't the time to...."

Don't you seem to want it both ways too. You have to have some responsibility for your car. Ever see someone have a suspension collapse? That does not just happen, that happens because the dipshit could not be arsed to either look at or have someone look at the suspension to make sure it was not dangerously corded and that rubber bushings were not failing etc.

You can automate most aspects of something like a car, but this is a high performance machine that operates in a wide variety of weather and abusive conditions. It has to be serviced and inspected from time to time. dipshit who does no do that now isn't going to start when the thing becomes more automatic than it already is, (s)he will pay even less attention.

So the automaker supposed to be on the hook because YOU last decided to check break fluid six years ago?

Um not the loans are EXACTLY the problem. Tution grows without bounds because everybody smart enough to graduate from college does recognize it has great value, both in the direct economics of employable and the more intelligible things like connections with other people you make and knowledge and thinking skills that really will enable you to make better more informed decisions in the future.

A college education IS VALUABLE, exactly how valuable is difficult to quantify. So now you make large sums of unsecured monies available to young people many of whom have never seen or worked with an account balance that large before and surprise surprise they are willing to spend it. They don't have an appreciate for how much work it might be to pay that back. What they do see is that Crazy Go Nuts University has a new fancy new recreation facility and bigger dorm rooms than Podunk College. Its difficult to compare the actual education quality but dorm and recreation facilities are things you can see. Podunk has no choice if they want to continue to attract students they have to build these things.

In order to build that stuff they raise tuition, which they can because people are paying with loans anyway and everyone qualifies!

If it was not for government secured loans college cost expansion would probably mostly track with inflation. After all with the exception of some leading edge research schools, almost all the cost would be salary if you take away the billion dollar construction projects.

Price insensitivity is the reason costs have gone up, if you can't afford CGNU's 40K tuition you might very well choose Podunk's $12K tuition and lack of fancy building and giant rooms if the alternative is no college for you. If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.

Okay, but for the sake of argument Mass is an open carry state (with permit). I don't know the specific details because I don't live there.

Hypothetically if someone has a gun permit in Mass. and walks down a public street past a school, not on school grounds mind you, only the street in front of it, while having a gun on their hip or even their bushmaster for that matter can they be charged with "disrupting a s school".

  See I don't understand how doing something that without probably cause to suspect otherwise (ie you know the guy does not have permit) doing something that is most likely perfect legal on public, though not school grounds, in the vacinity of a school can be a crime. It sounds like "loitering" on of the laws that every municipality keeps on the books to hassle people with but rarely press whenever anyone lawyers up demonstrats intent to contest the matter rather than entering a quick plea of guilty. They know if fought to its logical conclusion that statute will be struck for vagueness.

I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.

If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.

I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.

Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.

My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.

Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.

Actually being in ones early 20s and male is highly correlated with auto accidents that is why the actuaries tell them to do that. Just like being in ones early 20s and female is highly correlated with requiring more frequent and more expensive medical care for a number of conditions including pregnancy.

For some reason though charging more for one is a prudent insurance practice and discrimination blocked by the ACA for another.

If you show positive for HIV the insurance company already has a problem. I think it would work more like this. You show positive for having once had the clap or have HPV. Now you are marked as someone who has/had risky sex, ie outside a monogmous relationship where your partners health status is known or unprotected sex with anyone else. Your risk of contracting something expensive to treat like herpes or HIV went from very low to reasonably possible. Now the insurance company has a good reason to get you off their books.

That is probably the most likely example I can think of.

I can't understand how why anyone chooses satellite service for Internet access. If they do they are somewhere so remote that Verizon does not have LTE service, they havent looked in years, or they are stupid.

Verizon's "Installed LTE" (fixed antenna on the outside of the building) is price and speed competitive with the sat com providers has essentially the same usage caps, without the latency an weather related problems.

My guess is Verizon and probably AT&T (why the hell does AT&T not have a similar offering currently?) will be better positioned to add capacity and than the SAT providers ever will. Its easier to shrink the size of cell by erecting another tower than to put up another bird. So the 15/20/30/60GB caps will lift on that side first.

If those caps get large enough that people can reasonably afford to do streaming media, and more Internet based offerings in addition to Netflix show up, my guess would be Direct TV and DIsh's days will be numbered.

Except that many of the founders and our first president were very much against the idea of the USA engaging in treaties and entanglements with other nations. The fact that they designed a system that would nearly always fail to reach such agreements isn't a surprise.

What I think is sad is rather than deal with it, either by embracing their wisdom and not making so many damned agreements, or by having a serious debate about the subject an amending the Constitution rather than running around it with 'Fast Track" authority legislative bunk.

The statement is largely true but the libertarian in me wishes to suggest that stopping the mob was the WRONG priority. The mob was doing plenty of things they could have been prosecuted for besides tax evasion, etc. The actual crimes like assaulting people should have put them away. Society would have been better served then as now, had 'we' gone after those corrupt officials protecting the criminals at all levels.

I'd feel safer having got one crooked cop off the street than I would removing 10 guys who sell a little weed and untaxed liquor now and then.

Finally private property, emphasis private is the very corner stone of all other freedoms. Interfering and spying on with reporting requirements with the exchange of money between individuals threatens that most basic freedom. Is a tool that can be used to detect crimes sure, but there are other ways to do that, and much like mass phone record collection I don't believe its one that is justified.

I think its an interesting idea but as you say congress would be almost entirely bogged down in re-upping existing /good/ laws. Even if a vote to 're-approve the federal statute against murder' takes only 60 seconds to execute you still won't get much done in a congressional session.

What I think might be more interesting is to require every legislative act to have preamble like the Constitution does. It should be required to be written in plain language at a 4th grade reading level, stating the acts broad objectives and intent. After say a period of 5 years anyone who is subject to the law should be permitted to challenge it in federal court for 'performance'. If the court finds the Act:

does not materially satisfy the objectives in its preamble
OR
has material unintended consequences (positive or negative the court should not be permitted to make a value judgement)
OR
has been materially used be the Executive for purposes not covered by the preamble

the law should be vacated.