California's state constitution sharply limits increases, the result of the 1978 Proposition 13, or as I've always thought of it, the "make the new guys pay for everything" amendment.

The bad news is that 2 million passwords have been compromised.

The good news is that they're all "123456".

There's also the fear of prison. These things will be transmitting live video feeds back to home base. If they actually existed, that is.

When they store it in clear text on a laptop, it takes up less disk space.

Perhaps difficult, but not impossible, if somebody is determined. How many people would be willing to sift through garbage for a year looking for a few million bucks?

It's easy to let somebody else's house burn, but when it's your own property going up it's a different story.

The really big, destructive fires here in Colorado the past few years have all been exaggerated by drought and short-term weather conditions. "Letting it burn" doesn't work in these situations; if you don't stop fires quickly, you wind up losing hundreds of houses, as we've been through several times recently.

I'm sure online businesses will be eager to add a tag that says "don't visit my site".

Here is a 2008 report with statistics from NHTSA about accident causes. The number of ways they break down accident causes is kind of overwhelming, but there are a few interesting things you can extract. One of them is that "other vehicle encroachment from adjacent lane" is the "critical pre-crash event" in only 0.5% of accidents, while "travelling over the lane line" accounts for 10.8%."Turning or crossing intersection" accounted for 36.9%, and "travelling off the edge of the road" accounted for 22.2%.

I tried it just now, but around 30 I got bored and started browsing the web instead.

90% of Americans think that 90% of Americans are sheep.

Grandparent doesn't have a clue what chess is about. Anyone who thinks chess is just memorizing openings has never played it seriously. I spent about ten years playing in tournaments, getting up to a USCF expert rating, and never found it necessary to memorize much beyond a couple of move. Most games diverge from anything resembling any other recognizable game within the first 5 to 10 moves, after which the real fun starts. Strategy, tactics, positional play, endgames - this is a really wonderfully complicated game that most people can't handle, so they try to put it down as "memoization" (sic) or "a solved game". If you don't like it, that's fine, but you shouldn't try to comment on things you don't understand.

Remember, each game of chess means there's one less mistake to be made. :)

Getting a 10% commission on every book sold for that Kindle seems like a good deal for the bookseller. Note that they don't have to sell the book to the Kindle owner themselves.

Of course, the cynical response to this proposal would be "what independent bookstores?". Not many of them are left, so the few survivors might as well get what they can out of this.

It may have been "started by locals", but it quickly became a national cause. The anti-Morse campaign was funded by $500K of anonymous outside money by some organization that wasn't required to file campaign statements - sounds like the Koch brothers greasy fingerprints to me. If you live in Colorado Springs (as I do) you would find it obvious that the recall proponents were well-funded, since we got bombarded by negative anti-Morse ads. Morse lost by only about 350 votes (out of about 15000), so the Kochs actually spent over $1000 for each decisive vote. Since the turnout was so low, the activist loonies got a much larger share of influence - most of the Democratic side wasn't really engaged enough to bother voting in this off-year off-cycle election, hence the 20% turnout.

Fixed it for you.

Contrary to your misconceptions, this recall was about controlling the Colorado state Senate and threatening legislators, not just about gun rights. Also, the "grass roots" recall of Senate President John Morse drew only a 20% turnout, there were more petition signatures to put it on the ballot than votes to recall in the actual election, and about $100 spent by outside donors for every vote actually cast.

For my family, the biggest front-end problem is getting rejected for Medicaid. Once that's done (and it's required to get the tax credit), the rest should be simple, but the Medicaid application is blocking the road forward like a fallen tree at this point.