First step is to get kids to have fun developing critical thinking and logical analysis skills. Some of those will go on to want to learn coding and related topics, while the fundamentals will help anyone faced with that sort of problem.

Give grade school kids games like The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis to play, don't force them to memorize the particulars of a programming language that will be obsolete by the time they graduate high school.

More toppings!

Only if the data is normally distributed. Vaccination rates in the US, however, aren't. Or shouldn't be, anyway. The median should be somewhere in the 90% range in what should be a highly skewed distribution.

Either in the settings by turning it off, or by putting bogus login information in. Or you can block the TVs MAC address at the router.

No wifi, no networking, no smart functionality.

Insanely Audiophile?

You can run monofilament cables to orbital satellites

No we can't. The technology to manufacture mile-long monofilament (I assume you're talking something like buckytubes, nothing else has the strength) cables isn't available yet, let alone manufacturing 23,000+ mile cables.

Now, people might argue about risks, but until the technology is actually availabe -- which it is not -- the point is moot.

Come back when they're building suspension bridges out of the stuff.

Is that an African unicorn or a European unicorn?

But there is no such choice in the single most important sphere of all: the children education.

Really? There is no choice? No private schools, no charter schools, no home schooling?

I'm all in favor of arranging public education to grant more choice to students; smaller and more numerous schools and let a student go to any public school in their county/city/state (depending on how taxes are allocated) they like. Maybe even vouchers for secular private schools that take the voucher as the whole tuition (no public funds for religious education, no letting rich kids use tax dollars as partial payment at a school for the 1%ers), though I'm not sure on that point. But to claim that the current system offer no choice is simply inaccurate.

Since 1960-ies the per-pupil annual cost of public schools quadrupled (inflation-adjusted), while the quality of education remains the same (if it has not gotten worse).

Public schools have increased the array of services provided -- free and reduced-price meals, special education, vocational education, and services for disabled or ESL students -- in that time.

Overall, public schools have equivalent or better outcomes than private schools with the same level of spending per student.

And Texas's public school spending is near the bottom compared to other states, so trying to link this to some supposed overspending on schools does not fly.

If you're thinking of voting for any politician who takes contributions from the the NEA, then FUCK YOU.

...because the NEA is so strong in Texas. So very strong that per-pupil spending and teacher's salaries are near the bottom compared to other states.

As usual, union bashing is disconnected from reality.

That's all you need. If you want a better quality image than a cheap USB webcam, use the Raspberry Pi camera, but a $5 USB cam works just fine if you don't need a high frame rate -- and if you're just pointing the thing at a menu, you only need one frame a day ;). The software is FOSS, and works just fine on the r-pi. I use such a setup to monitor my 3D printer from elsewhere in the house. If you need fine-grained control over who connects, well the Raspberry's running linux, so go nuts.

Although that seems ridiculous overkill for a relatively static menu.

Let's talk income tax, because the vast majority of people are employees, not small business owners (when you compare the amount of actual business owners to the amount of pandering that goes towards them, it's hilarious.) When you make a certain amount, as I do, small changes to my tax rates don't really bother me. I make a shitload of money, so another couple of % of my earnings isn't really anything I'm prepared to uproot my life for, pick up and move for. Your claim that the rich people are mostly people who own business is stupid sauce.

Parallel universes are just slices of the "real" universe offset in different timelike directions from the slice we experience. I.e, think of time as N dimensional where N > 1, if time were 3 dimensional we could call the timelike dimensions t, t', and t". Our perception is limited to t (plus x, y and z). Moving in the t' or t" axes, we get to parallel worlds (also known as travel "crosstime" in many sci-fi stories). QM effects can propagate crosstime, but we can only observe one slice of that.

There's no actual "split" when a wave collapses, the parallel world(s) was (were) always there, it (they) just hadn't differentiated yet. (There's also no preferred t-like axis -- an observer travelling along t' (with fixed x,y,z) will see a progression of changes just as one at the same (x,y,z) would see travelling along t or t" -- but they'd be different changes.)

Niven had the right idea with his "All the Myriad Ways", the TV series "Sliders" was close too. The idea that there's only one (or at most a handful of) parallel world(s), like ST's mirror universe, is just silly.

And yes, I'm making this shit up (although not entirely). It's part of the background to my paratime stories.

Hell, I'm still waiting for David Gerrold to release the next in his "War Against the Chtorr" series. The volumes are almost as thick as Martin's, and I don't think he's released one this century. (And I still haven't read the final volume in Tubb's "Dumarest" series, which DelRey dropped with like two volumes left to go. It's now available on ebook, some thirty years later.)

That said, as a writer myself I understand some of the problems in writing a series (one where there's an overarching storyline and character development, rather than just a series of episodes with the same characters and setting.) But yes, in beginning a series you're making a promise to the reader, and the more readers you have, you start to lose the excuses that the publisher dropped the series or that you couldn't quit your day job to write full time.

Guess what, you're that Joe Sixpack. They've successfully convinced you that it's not worth the effort of trying.

Vinge is considered one of the fathers of cyberpunk because of his "True Names", which did precede Varley's chilling (and Hugo-winning) "Press Enter[]" (1981 vs 1985).

On the other hand, Varley's much earlier (1976) "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was also one of the seminal works of the field.

Been a while since I've read it, but the warlocks (hackers) in "True Names" would never have let their identity (true name) be determined from their coding styles.

But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.

Well, sort of. There's also the Rankine scale. On it, 0 is also the absolute lowest temperature (0K = 0R), but the units are the same size as Fahrenheit degrees.

The only place I've seen it used is in old rocket propulsion texts and similar non-SI thermodynamics stuff.