You're free to exercise your religion, you're just not free to acquire a business license and operate under any hocus pocus framework you want.
But it seems that there is no federal law, as written, that prohibits discrimination of customers are a business based on sexual orientation. Not even federal employment laws seem to protect LGBT, except for federal employees

But the Supreme Court can establish a precedent that the existing federal laws that protect the enumerated classes of race, national origin, religion, sex, age, and disability also cover classes not enumerated (what criteria?). Doing so would then prevent states from operating pro-religion/anti-LGBT laws until the federal laws are modified to overturn the precedent by specifically excluding LGBT. It's not so unusual, Reed v. Reed (1971) extended the reach of this clause, and Romer v. Evans (1996) is a case that is strikingly similar to the current issue.

But until that happens, the issuing of business licenses is controlled at the State and County level and remains at their discretion as long as the federal guidelines are follow with regard to the enumerated protected classes. So if your State Assembly and Governor are into the same hocus pocus as you, you can all hold hands and triumphantly expel all the gays from your community. (no, not really going to play out that way. but that's what the end goal appears to be)

(that's how this arm-chair non-lawyer sees it)

The Founding Fathers were well aware of long traditions of the early colonies to attack other Christians of the wrong sect. Puritans hanging Quakers was an early American tradition, and much of the Constitution is written so that various religious groups can coexist.

When I say "various religious groups", let's not forget that while some might consider one group to just be another denomination of Christianity, there are plenty of people who may not agree. It is unlikely that we could unanimously agree that Mormons are Christians, and I've heard plenty of bad things said by various Protestants and Catholics about the Jehovah's Witnesses. Some of the more extreme Protestants claim that Catholics build false idols of Mary and their Saints and choose to pray to them instead of worshiping God. (I'm not interested in debating what Catholics do or do not believe, I was only stating the opinion of a minority of people, as I understand it)

Well it's working, because I don't appear to have any choice.

That's fair. There is some real value in not having to write libraries and drivers from scratch for every project. I forgot that a shield isn't just a block of hardware that convenient interfaces, but usually someone has written some software for that shield that makes it pretty easy to integrate into a project.

I don't agree. I've used Code Red, Launchpad, and others. And the tools they give you pretend to be professional tools, and seem to have a steep learning curve. Especially with Code Red wanting to upsell to a better version. But most of these free IDEs are more like trial versions to me. Adruino's crippling was done to make the process of making little gizmos more accessible, most other tools are crippling so they don't cut into other markets.

That said, I never really was much of a fan of Arduino because I don't have much use for AVR. This is me finally admitting that Adruino was pretty good, and that I may have been a little stubborn to have resisted it all these years.

Sure, all the little shields and things are convenient. But most folks with a search engine and some jumper wires already find out how to connect things not designed for the Arduino to their boards.

But it's the software that has made it easy for everyone to get started immediately. I've used a dozen or so development environments for embedded, and Arduino's has the easiest learning curve I've seen. It's not particularly powerful or flexible, it's not super great at debug/ICE/ICD stuff. But you can type in the few line example C program, and flash your first blinking LED program in a matter of minutes.

For platform that is not commercial and not really for industrial purposes, the software seems to aim for the best user experience. And in software development, instant gratification is the biggest motivator there is.

I'm too busy supporting the baby boomers to give a shit about the millennials.

Which people? I'm in Silicon Valley, unlike people who work in San Francisco.

Actually I have been an IT contractor for a school district, that was my third job. But back then $128K could buy a lot of ARCnet adapters and NetWare licenses.

Good old reliable tape. None of this fancy random access hard disk garbage that fails all the time, or complicated wear leveling flash nonsense.

Maybe something like core memory or bubble memory if I need some random access behavior.

I hear it's down to a penny per bit, only around 1200 megabucks for 10 gigabytes of Core memory.

But is the data even worth $128K? It's not like schools don't already annoy parents with redundant requests and useless information. Having everyone register for school again would at least allow attendance to happen.

So their only copy of the student roster is gone? they can't even take attendance? they don't have back-ups?

Surely this is a problem that can be solved with money, and significantly less than $128K. (the point of my original post, I wasn't suggesting we actually replace all the computers, just that the ransom seemed a bit high)

And why would the NSA potentially reveal the techniques just to capture some crooks? That classified information is surely worth more than the $128K. If it were up to the NSA, they would just pay the ransom and focus on finding terrorists instead.

Maybe 200-500 computers. Is the ransom higher than what it would cost to replace everything? (maybe not enough to replace them with Macs, but Linux and Chromebooks are possible). How many computers does a district with 1700 students really need to get the basics done?

Just seems like a steep ransom to me. Especially since if I replaced all the computers, the old equipment is worth something and I could probably auction it off.

The data is gone if you don't pay the ransom (or crack the encryption). Sadly I don't have a way to resolve that problem, other than to start over again and hopefully anything important has backups. (ideally in a form that doesn't spread infection)

I totally agree with you. I honestly don't know where the $100k number comes from or why it was mentioned. Other than maybe to convince all of us to watch the video.