TSA increased security measures delay passenges all over the world. By a recent estimate the lost time is comparable to 100 human lifetimes every day. So, here we go - TSA extra security killed more people in the last 2 months than 9/11. And TSA is killing 3000 people a month, every month since 9/11. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

True, but if they want to sell phones into USA and Japanese markets, they must pay at least for those. I really wonder why people have not gone for that loophole yet?

From my Eastern EU perspective attendance (and performance) is easy to fix.

Make schools free, but mandatory. Make it mandatory for the student to finish school. If a student does not pass the test for at least 50% level in ALL classes, then he automatically stays in that class for the second year. Key tests are centralized and secret - every pupils of every school take the same test at the same time and all results are graded by teachers in other randomly chosen schools (to prevent cheating and grade boosting) the content of the tests is top secret so that no teacher can prepare their students specifically for that test. That is step one - establish a fair, but strict testing system that ensures that if a child is in a grade, he deserves to be there.

Every teacher must know all their students and take attendance every time. If a student is not in class, he must bring a doctors note or a parents note (if he is away less than 4 days in a row). If there is no excuse for being late, the parents are summoned to school so that they can excuse him or punish him at their choice. However if parents do not show up, then child protective services are engaged and child is removed from their parents for neglect and is forced to live at the school.

In any case everyone must be forced to go to school until they graduate for merit (or at least until they are 21 and declared mentally challenged). if you are too stupid to graduate from school, you are too stupid to drive, vote or take government office. One can regain those privileges by continuing his education (for free) until he graduates.

No home schooling, private schools must obey the same testing and attendance laws.

Why in the name of God does the teacher not know everyone in their class? Even if teachers change often it is pretty easy to take attendance - count people in class and if there is someone missing ask, who it is. If the pupils do not cooperate - then do a full and boring roll call. But really in 99% of cases the teacher should be able to just glance at the class and tell who is not present right away!

It is actually all about money.

Imagine party A plans to make a law that would tax the ultra-wealthy more and give some tax breaks to middle and low income earners, but party B would like to do the opposite.

A few hundred millionaires can easily communicate and coordinate to make a company and write a 5 million USD check each to campaign against party A so that the law is stopped, because they know that this is less than half of what this law will cost them each year. And they can easily afford doing that.

The couple hundred million people with low to medium income on the other hand have it much harder to organize and can't really afford to make companies or donate much to politics, because they need to put food on the table.

Citizen United ruling makes it possible for a few hundred millionaires to out-spend and out-campaign the few hundred million other people. It allows 0.01% of people the power to freely and anonymously manipulate and basically buy the political process against the interests of the overwhelming majority of 99.99% of the population. That is NOT right.

Yes, and still there are limits to individual contribution to such PACs and requirements of transparency from them. Which do not exist for other businesses. If I donate money to a specific PAC, it is reasonable to expect that it is my wish that this PAC spends this money furthering its political agenda.

However, if I go and eat at MacDonalds, it does NOT mean that I have now expressed a wish for the board of MacDonalds to spend the profit they gained from me on their personal political agenda.

Money is not speech. Contribution of money to political purposes is very restricted.

You can speak all you want, but you can not use more money to do the speaking than allowed by the limits. And it is kinda hard for a corporation to do much speaking in the 2500$ allowed. And so it should have stayed.

Don't forget the firefighting and police, military and jails. ;)

There is plenty of recent evidence of how lax, dangerous and useless these systems become when they are given over to private for-profit corporations.

AFAIK this might actually improve on the segmentation, because with 3.0 Google expressly forbids/discourages extensive customisations (like HTC Sence), partially because upgrading those customizations to need Android versions for all the phones is the major reason why it takes so long for phones to get new Android versions.

So here is hoping that once you get 3.0 after that all further upgrades would be nearly simultaneous for all devices.

The problem with having the extra engine and transmission parts is that it complicates the design, which drives up the cost of the car and cost and complexity of maintenance on that car. It would have been much better if they would have made it a straight and simple serial hybrid that got 10-15% less efficiency, but cost 10k less and was much easier to service and find spare parts for.

Actually if you read the source, these decoys are meant primarily for military exercises - so that your troops can be trained to seek and destroy targets that look as real as possible both in natural light and in infrared and on the radar.

You can do all kinds of things with that, for example - make 10 rocket launchers and heat up only a few of them when the attackers approach: the attacking pilots must observe the heat signature of the targets and deduce which targets are battle ready and which have already fired their payload and then destroy first the rocket launchers that have not launched their missile and might do it soon.

Government does NOT benefit. The beneficiaries are lawyers and (for a very tiny part) the judiciary. But the actual government (the executive) has nothing to gain from this.

I would say WoW is an exception to this, because the expansions basically reinvent the game every two years, especially this one that fully refactors the initial leveling experience as well as adding the new content at the top.

There is one on n900 - it measures how high can you throw you n900 and how high is the drop, using the timer and accelerometer.

Sore, go inspire some rapists not to rape and some bank robbers not to rob banks. And while you are at this, could you also inspire some politicians not to take bribes? kthxbye

In other news - anti-robbery laws that just came into effect will make streets more dangerous! Before it was perfectly legal to come up to a strange on the road, show him a knife and pick their pockets for that few buck that you were short for a latte, not that robbing people has become illegal the criminals have become more aggressive, they put socks on their heads and run around with sharp knifes, also they often take all your money because the act of robbing someone now has become a dangerous thing for them to do. Also many states are consearned that now that robbery is considered a crime the crime rates will go up and will thus spoil their national statistics which is the last thing they need in an election year.