Think of this as a function of time. Probably a lot cheaper to have a network of people able to service big rigs available throughout the country on short notice than to pay them to sit in the truck all day, except where the cost of a delay exceeds a certain threshold--i.e. the cost of paying to have a mechanic sit in the self-driving truck adjusted by the probability of it breaking down.

In NJ, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas so that you will keep the guy who pumps it employed. They *could* have employed him dong something useful--thing TVA-type programs where he's doing a job to improve the environment, for example--but this is what they picked. There will be pushback against automated trucks in a similar fashion, although of course they're so much more proficient that they will prevail in the end.

There are a lot of trucks where liability or small tasks that still require human judgment will keep with human drivers for a good long while yet. Fuel Trucks delivering to local gas stations, septic trucks and heating oil trucks that have to find a port in every person's yard, etc...

I do wonder whether the amount of stuff that falls off the back of the truck will go up or down. Less oversight of the stuff, but less chance for a driver to be in collusion with the people who fall things off the back of trucks.

But can reopen.

Think plaster walls and ceilings. You can repair cracks, but just get new ones.

Chisel it into stone tablets, then find an ignorant local. Set up a natural gas line to a nearby bush and hide behind a rock. Cub your hands to add a slight reverb effect and tell him to preach the chiselled word, then break the tablets and hide them in a box and trick nazis into looking at them.

I am assuming the problem is the one you ALWAYS have--that they change the terms and it's pretty ridiculous. Back in the 80s every math book for grade school made up lots of terms that no parents would know, so you had to learn a whole new language if you wanted to teach your kids. But at the end of the day it's just math and those definitions usually hurt more than they help. They could easily pick one set of definitions and stick with them--ideally a set that is empirically verified as the one that students have the least trouble learning or remembering, for example.

With great respect for the place of civil debate and mutual respect in our society, I ask, "What the flying fuck is wrong with you?"

I mean, maybe you just rolled out of bed, but the next time someone drops tens of billions trying to fix some of the biggest and most complicated problems in the world, please don't act like they're a first-year coder who forgot to run a test suite on strcmp().

LordLimeCat, I see you have procured the strawmen, but don't forget the margarita salt.

You know that most credit card companies can be set up to alert you to extraordinary spending and don't charge you for fraud, right?

Supply and demand. We would probably be better making the public schools open to all certified teachers to teach their subject--more of a community learning center. But charter schools are another market-based solution that makes more sense than the current system. Subsidizing a supplier is just a bad idea from an economics perspective and prevents *choice* from shaping better education. The public schools are so terrified of lawsuits anyway that they really don't bring a lot more to the table, it's just that the teacher's union has very effectively made any threat to them seem like it's hate or an attack on family values or the like rather than what it is--a concern that the single most important role in our society is being terribly mismanaged.

Your FEDGOV already knows where everyone is from cellphones.

One of the advantages to uber is the Cabbie has a strong disincentive to waste your time trying to pry cash out of you. Regular cabbies in the US commonly pretend their credit card readers aren't working so that they can collect off-books income.

It is nevertheless the doctrinal origin of the border search exception. Personally I find much better arguments lie in the massive harm that can be done by importing contraband today--post WW-1, you have weapons like the machine gun. Post WW-2, you have the atomic bomb. Today you have highly developed bio-threats.

Of course, a search of your *computer* doesn't help much with those...

Actually, it's really irrelevant *which* agency does the search for these purposes. The question is the permissible scope of the border search exception, which is the same regardless of agency.

Fundamentally, arguments against the border search exception are usually weak. The Fourth Amendment was written largely by the same people who sat in the First Congress, and the First Congress explicitly granted customs officials the power to do thorough searches of ships, etc... in order to regulate contraband coming into the United States. Therefore we *know* that they considered such warrantless searches to be "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment.

Laptops present a somewhat new issue because of how much of an intrusion a search of them represents, and there has been a little bit of pushback against *destructive* searches of people's property absent at least reasonable suspicion, but as a general rule the United States can do pretty much whatever it wants at its own border.

Fundamentally, a large part of what MS is selling today is its cloud services. Software subscriptions, OneDrive, MS hosted Exchange, Cloud computing, etc...

Better data links can be helpful with that. Think load-balancing or parallel processing or insurance against depletion of resources. If someone makes a bad call or an unexpected load comes up rapidly beyond their planned needs, low-latency connections let them offshore the needed resources for a day or two while they work to bring in a few thousand new machines locally, for example.

Data links they control also improve security. MS actually has pretty good privacy policies, people, and security compared to other providers; the more third-party companies involved in that, the less secure it is.

It's basically the time post-second-election when the Pres starts to worry less about election of his party in the future and more about doing the right thing. So we're had more DoJ civil rights investigations, more support for net neutrality, etc...

There is no role here at all unless the guy breaks a law. If he breaks a law, it's the role of the police.