"Yes, because humanitarian aid, heavy repair machinery and qualified personnel will be delivered by UPS... go figure."

Besides the military, UPS and Fedex are in PRIME positions to be brought in, in the case of a catastrophe large enough. They have a worldwide (certainly US-wide) delivery system and infrastructure already in place. It's easy to picture a scenario where they are ordered (or offer) to assist.

Some background.. I read... a lot. 200-300 novels per year.

When there's a series, I finish it, even if I didn't much like the first. I'll re-read them every year or other year.

For this book, I won't be reading it again, nor will I buy the 2nd (much less the 3rd) in the series.

Directive 51 terrified me. The concepts in it are just too close to reality; the political machinations; hell those damn near happen now.

It's a book about a worldwide biotech attack that renders all petroleum-based products into goo, combined with a nanotech attack that attacks any metal with electricity present. I won't spoil the rest, suffice to say the attack on our modern technological civilization was complete. It was a book that wouldn't leave my head for several weeks.

Correct. They used a cordless tool to do it. There is video.. the only car that parked next to the truck all day only stopped for 90 seconds. That's all the time it took :)

If your car is like mine was, they wouldn't need to do sniff tests. They'd hear you coming. My catalytic converter was cut out of my 4Runner while in the parking lot at work. I left work at around 4pm, started it up, and nearly shit a brick. It was the loudest vehicle I'd ever heard, I thought it was broken, lol!

Brought a friend out to listen while i started it, he's peering around, and says... "wtf, where's your cc?" Just a pile of metal shavings :)

"Yeah, because the alternative is people living in a house for 30 years and being forced to sell it to pay for increasing property taxes they cannot afford on a retired fixed income is so much better for everyone."

Please. That could have easily been solved. Instead we're in a situation where the people on 3 sides of me rent their original homes out -- it makes no sense to sell them because they pay only _$400_ a year in property tax. The 2 of the 3 houses behind me pay less than $800. Me, I pay $8500. Same size house, bought 12 years ago at a decent rate -- the problem is I remodeled it, and the county reappraises at current day rates. The house across to the left just sold, I expect he'll be near what I pay.

Prop 13 does nothing but encourage neighborhoods to be turned into rent factories and engender bad feelings between neighbors who pay VASTLY different sums for the _exact same service_. It was a good idea poorly implemented, and now everyone is too scared to change it.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-9.0a1.en-US.win64-x86_64.installer.exe , as linked from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

64bit nightly installer. I've been running it a while now, fairly nice.

"(except for in California, where you have to have a teacher certificate to home school"

This is not correct. There is no requirement to have a teaching certificate in CA. That was a short-term decision of a court that was overturned on appeal a few months later; it was never a law. The only requirement is that the lessons include the standards-track material as well, and this is enforced thru periodic testing and feedback with a local school. Additionally popular are home schooling coops who create a legal and instructional framework around what is essentially a school for multiple children, run out of homes.

You are not misinformed.

The largest textbook purchasers are California (#1) and Texas (#2); The rest of the country arguably gets what we 2 states 'agree' on thru our negotiations with the publishers. Texas has such a large influence because it orders books at the state level, whereas most states order (and decide) at a district level.

Now normally, we balance each others whacky theories out. However, CA has drastically reduced _new_ textbook orders due to budget issues for the last few years, so this and last years TX board meetings were of particular import, as TX had unusually strong influence with the publishers.