Having a wife who is a teacher it sounds like you have things nailed. Lots of new fads most of which are little better than hope. Granted part of the problems in education is from parents who don't give a shit, as well as children who don't give a shit, but there is still a lot of BS from the education administration. With my kids it has been let the schools teach what they can, then spend the time to actually really teach them things properly and fill in the large quantity of gaps left by teaching to the test.

My oldest who is now in first grade has a surprisingly good understanding of how things work and even some very abstract concepts, all of which were not covered in school. For example they covered some very basic geology in school, and he got interested so I entertained that for a while and we went out and collected some fossils, checked out some strata of land on exposed rock faces, went into detail on the different types of rocks, etc all to provide a better education. I even melted some rocks and made some new ones in some experiments to show what happens when they cool at different rates (besides if you have a forge any excuse to use it is a good excuse).

When people bring this up the forget that the market was trying really hard to punish those bad actors but the government stepped in and prevented the invisible hand from bitch slapping them back to the stone age. Granted the invisible hand was probably going to destroy a bunch of non bad actors as well but with the government's interference we don't know if that would have been worse, or if it would have even happened.

I'm curious what you would use to kill a Samsung device if someone decides work around the security, especially since I would assume that they would be WiFi only devices not cellular ones? I have found getting around KNOX and MaaS360 on a Samsung device to be not all that difficult if one doesn't care about preserving the data on the device. You are correct in that you would know which device fell off pretty quickly so you would know who to blame but still if I was a kid having access to a now unlocked device would be the end goal, especially if the device belonged to someone else.

You assume that people are a good shot, especially in a crisis situation. Hell a lot of people can barely hit the paper 21 feet in a controlled environment like a shooting range. Also even a clean shot to the vitals with a high powered rifle isn't guaranteed to drop someone. As evidence I offer every deer I have ever shot, all through the heart, heart + one lung, or both lungs, none tipped over dead and while they didn't run much they still ran. Granted the farthest I ever had to track one was about 40 meters and the blood trail has always been like someone dumped a bucket of red paint on the ground but they all still ran. By high powered rifle I mean one that shoots 203gr soft point boat tail 7.62x54r ammunition that leaves a silver dollar sized exit wound and destroys any soft tissue in the general vicinity of the wound channel from cavitation.

I got the joke, just carried it a bit farther.

My thoughts exactly. What is more shocking is that there was someone at Accenture who was looking from someone whit experience and knowledge. The running joke were I work when writing test books or manuals is to write them so even someone from Accenture could do the install or test.

It had better be a pretty big handgun, maybe something like this, otherwise they likely would just shake it off if they are on PCP.

Unfortunately that would be easily recognized as a glitch. Really what people should do is rig it so that 3rd party candidates start winning entire precincts and make the existing 2 major parties minor parties. For example in Minnesota if your party falls below 5% of the vote in a statewide election it looses major party status. This means it doesn't get automatic ballot access (state law), and also won't be included in any debates(rules setup up by the local media).

If you are going to hack democracy why not really hack it.

Yet here in Minnesota we can still use paper ballots where one just fills in the bubble and sends them through the scantron like machine. We are able to get results shortly after polls close unless a hand recount is needed, the machine is very accurate at counting ballots, and there are paper ballots that in case of a recount or other questions can be manually inspected by anyone with at least one functioning eye.

Official advertised caps yes, the hidden ones no.

I will take that as a complement as it is usually sign of good sarcasm if it is hard to initially pick up on. Far too few people catch ones like that and similar sarcastic comments of mine have often ended up modded troll.

It was and that I have used line on those who are very jingoistic and spout the lines of:
if you haven't done anything wrong...
It is for [our safety | the children].
It usually stops them in their rants and for a moment cause them to pause and contemplate.

Do you actually get a physical signed letter or just the electron BS that is bulk e-mailed out to all who signed one? If it is a physical signed letter that would be neat, I think I now have an idea for a petition.

Hell it is hard to get the Mormons to not give me a copy of their book. Also I have found that with what most would consider a real religion I can go to one of their priests, clergy, what ever, and ask any non patronizing question of them about their religion and get an answer. Most will even entertain some patronizing questions so long as one isn't belligerent, degrading, or a complete ass hole. With CoS you get a sales pitch.

With most religions they are more than willing to give me copies of their holy books some are quite persistent (look at you Mormons) so I don't think they would care about the copyright thing as they just want more people to have their stuff. Scientology on the other hand basically is the BMG CD club of religion.