I read a very interesting piece just this morning where a man who was not talking to police without a lawyer ended up having his silence used to prove that he was lacked basic human empathy in a fatal hit and run. Of course, now I can't find the article.

Wish I had some mod points today.

Not sure I want a living room that is completely white unless I have an Xbox on.

The story specifically is about Nashville. I've been places like this but the Opryland Gaylord is not one of them.

I'm sure it is. I support a customer every few years at a 4 day convention there. Last time they bought a brand new dyson vaccuum for less than the price of the cleaning crew vaccuuming the booth at night. Another vendor bought a full set of very nice folding chairs for their booth for the price of chair rental. The service prices are just absurd.

From what I can gather, the features of most peoples' phones are good enough that they don't want to talk to the people around them much less people who aren't around them.

And that is solved by airgapping my thermostat either by removing its wifi settings or setting up a local wifi network. I've got a spare router sitting in a box and I don't even have any connected devices to need a dedicated network. I'm just not seeing any reason that any effort at malice here wouldn't be exponentially more time consuming that what it would take to thwart it.

I've got a question, what possible motivation could anyone have for hacking my thermostat?

I got an ad from Walmart/Sam's Club yesterday saying they could scan my kids' faces in store and make a custom action figure with their faces on it at select stores as part of a pilot program.

So if I just sever all legal means of communication then I should be free to skirt the law? I'll have to remember that.

The climate change folks set the public expectation with the original wording of this discussion. There is a significant amount of the population who don't understand the issue any deeper than the two words "global warming." You can rant and rave about the idiodicy of people, but until you actually tackle the grammer nazi issue then you won't make it anywhere with policy changes.

Well then there is a difference between the colloquial and the academic uses. That in itself is probably a big reason for the divide between positions on the issue.

Yep. It is an availability bias. We only hear about states rights when in completely screws something up. You can't seriously say that a uniform code of law works best across the country, can you? What is best for California is best for New York? Or what is best for Arkansaw is best for New Jersey? Or what is best for Hawaii is best for Montana? Different attitudes, different resources, different population densitities. We are strong because we are different but united, granted when we screw it up the we screw it up monumentally.

There is a good chance the test is flawed, but IQ is not the only indicator of high intelligence that points to a subset of people as intelligent but who don't perform well in school. It is pretty terrible when intelligent people can't do well in intelligence training.

My oldest is 6 and naturally curious about how it works. You could go through all the mechanics and he would be captivated with the description but never touch it. My youngest is 4 and you've got to be careful merely doing things in his presence.