Sorry, but that one has fallen too. There was a case not long ago of cops in Henderson, Nevada beating and arresting a guy and killing his dog because he refused to allow them to take over his house for use in a drug bust. He sued them for Third-Amendment violation among many other things. Of course, the case doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, as is normal with police-abuse cases these days. The cops are out of control in this country, and are probably some of the worst police in the world.

You don't think the government of China has it in for the people of Tibet? Or that the government of Sudan had it in for the people of what is now South Sudan? Or that the Taliban (the legitimate government of Afghanistan at one point) had it in for many of their citizens? Or that Saddam Hussein had it in for the Kurds and Shia in Iraq?

There's countless examples throughout history of governments "having it in for" various minority groups in that country.

And of course there's the cases of outright invasions, like when Germany invaded Poland or France, or when Russia invaded Ukraine. Invasions are a lot less attractive when the entire population is armed.

You also forgot about Switzerland, where every militia-aged male is armed with an automatic rifle. There don't seem to be any problems with shooting sprees there.

Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization for the people who think the NRA isn't extreme enough: the GOA (Gun Owners of America). If you think the NRA is too extreme, you haven't seen anything.

From what I've seen, and experienced myself growing up, it seems that if your kid is the type who might be bullied, sending him to private (or maybe religious) school is an absolute must. Private schools don't seem to tolerate it, or have as much of a problem with it. They have no trouble expelling problem kids, and they don't accept just anyone.

Actually, I'm usually against outsourcing jobs to illegals, however if the job itself is highly illegal, this actually makes some sense. Besides, kids who are bullied usually don't have thousands of dollars to pay American hit-men, but $100 for an illegal should be quite affordable.

What I'd like to know is: how does this phenomenon (both bullying, and the support of bullying by administrators) differ by country and culture? Is it like this in Japan or Europe? I know it isn't uniquely American; there was a movie a while ago from Belgium called "Ben-X" which was about a kid with Asperger's who was severely bullied and... whoops, almost spoiled it... anyway, it was interesting and definitely not American, so I wonder if things are generally better, worse, or the same elsewhere.

The bullied kids might not want to kill everyone, just the bullies, their friends and sycophants, and the administration and perhaps some of the teachers.

There was a pretty good "The Outer Limits" episode about this back in the 90s. It posited a near-future where an angry college kid designs and builds his own fusion bombs, setting off one very small one as a demonstration then holding a classroom hostage with a much larger one. The episode ended with the note that if this kid could do this, it won't be long before lots of kids are able to do it.

I prefer to tele-commute, and save my vehicle entirely. With the cost of global communication being near zero, HD web cameras being disposable commodities, why commute at all if you're a knowledge worker?

Simple: because the managers don't want you to. Just look at Yahoo's Marissa Meyer.

Who's "we"? Anyone pouring money into any flying cars, electric helicopters, etc. at this stage is a fool. I'm certainly not contributing to any such projects.

It makes sense to invest in electric cars these days, since as Tesla has shown, they're perfectly viable (though a bit expensive still). Heck, GM proved them to be perfectly viable back in the late 90s with the EV1, except that too many entrenched interests didn't like them so GM killed it and crushed all the cars. You don't really need long range in an electric car anyway; 100 miles is more than enough for a commuter vehicle. It'd be nice if Tesla later came out with a smaller, cheaper low-range electric car expressly for commuters; I'd buy one in a heartbeat. I just got to drive a Model S and it's quite impressive, but I don't need that range for my ~15-mile commute nor can I afford those prices, but if there were a medium-performance two-seater with 70-mile range for $20-30k, that'd be pretty affordable and easily worth the money (when you factor in tax credits, lack of fuel cost, and lack of maintenance costs).

The tech's there for electric cars, but it just isn't there for anything that flies.

Well one thing you're forgetting is that with combustion engines, most of the energy in the fuel is wasted as heat. Of course, this is mitigated by the fact that part of the energy is coming from freely-available oxygen in the air (except in rocket engines), but still, with batteries ~95% of the stored energy goes to propulsion, whereas with ICEs it's more like ~20-25%. So we don't need energy density comparable to fuel, but still we're a ways off. With some of the latest developments, it might be feasible in a decade.

Yeah, that's basically impossible. With current tech, you could only build something like this to stay aloft for a few minutes. When Teslas have a range of 1500 miles on a charge, then we'll have the battery tech to make electric helicopters feasible.

Not exactly, because most of the country is Class G airspace, and aircraft aren't limited to public roads. There's even lots of Class G airspace not too far from cities, located underneath controlled airspace. However you still might have to worry about local ordinances and such.

You don't have to fly helicopters from any kind of designated area, as long as you're in Class G airspace. Of course, this excludes probably every municipality, and means you can only land in your backyard if you live in the sticks. And there's still the problem of where to land, unless your office is also in the sticks.

We already have flying cars: they're called "helicopters". They're absurdly expensive to operate, even the small 2-seater models, they're absurdly difficult to operate and require an enormous amount of training, and they're extremely dangerous.

If you want a way to move people around faster, the answer is SkyTran.