There's no better decision you can make, IMO, than to walk away from broadcast media, and newspapers, and all those centrally-controlled outlets for news. If you have a deep distrust of blogs, that can work for you. Find a blog or two of interest; look for ones that routinely correct stories when commenters point out flaws, avoid those that instead ban the commenters. As long as you keep your distrust of blogs, that's a good way to keep your head out of the sand.

The only way to learn anything about current events is the combination of a hard-to-censor channel, a willingness to correct mistakes, and your own distrust of everything on that channel.

And how would subscriptions work? And why wouldn't everything be a subscription? A VAT can be made to work, but this is so game-able.

Plus, you're missing the key fact about government: they never give up a tax. Any tax you propose will be in addition to existing taxes, not in place of them.

Again with the "express". No, let's stay on the topic of "should a university provide students with the ability to read up on controversial political topics?" Of course they fucking should, or what's the point of a university? If a university doesn't exist for the very purpose of providing open access to all the information that there is without any for of censorship, what good is it? Such an institution should receive no accreditation, and no public funds.
 

I doubt very much the reaction would have been the same if he'd written that he did it with bow & arrow.

As far as I am concerned, it was the school's actions that were criminal. First, censorship is not the business of schools. Second, they called the police over a non-crime. They didn't even have a reasonable suspicion that any crime had been committed.

It's one thing to say "no guns in school". It's quite another to ban any mention of them. This isn't China.

Considering this is my first professional certification, I don't know if I can aptly answer that. I can tell you this:

• SANS certifications are notorious for being difficult.
• SANS Certifications are well-known in the industry. These are not some fly-by-night "let's give certs away" things.
• They certainly are not inexpensive. This certification costs something in the neighborhood of $4,000 to take. The first exam attempt is around $600. If you fail and need to try again, it will cost you around $300 or so.
• The certification is good for four years.

So... I'm actually pleased at having passed this. :)

No. I strongly disagree. The economics of this have not at all been thought out. Human ingenuity and engineering is not magically a match for human stupidity.

Meanwhile China, OPEC, the US, Russia, won't go along. It's likely that nobody will go along, including the parties advocating these proposals. The combination makes the exercise pointless.

Which is a combination of the No True Scotsman fallacy and trying to claim something by shifting the definition (here, from the usual definition of "authoritative" to "evidence-based").

More likely so he would never have to buy a replacement battery when the one from the factory dies (which he never encounters, always buying 8 year old cars) It's important for there to be people with spirit like that in the world.

In my first job out of school I worked for a Reliability department at a Medical Device company. The Reliability department was specifically organized as a branch off of Operations, not Quality or Engineering. Our responsibilities included providing a totally separate audit and review process from Quality or Engineering.

Companies do not want to shovel out defective product at the lowest possible cost and go out of business every few years to shuck off another layer of litigous customers. Maybe in your Comic Book world the Richie Riches and Scrooges who own all the factories do, but this is the real world.

More people are likely to remember 2009-2012 when government regulators bumbled around and got in the way.

I think this is more along the lines of them wanting to avoid the time and expense, since every new model will have to be tested after every code change, I guess.

Ah, they want to skip most of the regression testing. It makes sense, given who they are.

The article topic is wrong, and Google doubtless lawyered it to be that way. They want to do less real-world testing, and devote more resources into testing via simulation.

They don't need to ask anybody permission to do more simulation. What they're trying to do is spend less money on real world testing so they can devote it to simulation testing.

Similarly, I would rather play Minecraft than have a job. Digging gold ore in minecraft is 'work' too, so why won't they let me do that instead of real work?

The Raspberry Pi is designed as a pedagagical, easy-to-access entry point for new programmers to get involved and learn about experimenting and adventuring on computers. It was never about being 'the ideal embedded platform' for slashbots to use for their Media Center computer. Sure it's vintage, but other successful and popular single-board systems are even 8-bitters, like the Arduino, and still very successful and valuable to have out there for people to use.

Moving targets are not 'friendly' to the general public, and the Pi gives everyone a stable starting point.