A little harsh but dead accurate. They're not legally obligated to sue the grieving parents. They could even draw up a contract and sell them limited rights to have this one statue in perpetuity for a dollar, or some such. For PR reasons, the DC rep could even donate the dollar to the rights purchaser.

There are many ways DC could do this, legally and protected, without being asswipes. They chose "fuck 'em; none of the above".

That, or they could be normal decent non-fuckhead humans and let a little boy have a grave that looks like the hero he wanted to be. I prefer that option.

A family acquaintance - let's call him "Joe" - worked as an airport screener. This is a true story: I was personally in the room when Joe was complaining to my dad that he'd been fired.

They run periodic checks where an undercover agent tries to smuggle contraband onto a plane. When questioned after the fact, Joe didn't understand why everyone was upset that he'd allowed a disassembled rifle through screening: "but it was in pieces! He couldn't have done anything with it!". "But Joe, he could've taken it into a bathroom and put it together, couldn't he?", followed by an expression of horror creeping across his face as the realization sank in.

>there certainly is a shortage of tech workers in the US willing to work for 19,000/year

Up here in Seattle, there are blocks of apartment buildings manned by outsourcing companies like Mindtree where there are 3-5 Indian contractors living in each unit getting paid under 30k each. With houses going for 3-4K and 3 bedroom apartments going for 2K-2.5K, they have to have so many people living together to save money.

I saw ATT Wireless replace an entire billing department with cheap overseas labor, VP gets a big fat bonus and leaves. Then department fucked up and was billed 1 million dollars a day for almost a month and they had to bring in very expensive contractors to fix the issues. Funny thing, this is happening all the time, the PHB outsources, collects a fat paycheck, moves on, and boom, issues appear.

But I've also worked with NOC's from India and helped build one out. We pay 5K a month for 4 people for 24 hours watch our network and take tickets. There is no way we could afford that here. The problem I have is the NOC use to be a stepping stone for jr sysadmins to work their way up, and that stepping stone is largely vanishing.

WE don't lack the will.

We lack the power.

The ones with the power lack the will (or desire) - because their power depends on control of generation of energy through resources they control; namely fossil fuels. They're not going to give up that power while they have it. Not voluntarily.

The reason thorium never hurt anybody, is because it is complete fantasy. Nobody has ever built one that has demonstrated any degree of industrial reliability and usefulness. Thorium is up there with Fusion, as far as being a demonstrated technology.

Mostly because they're not interested in mandating specific aproaches. Instead of the old-fashioned approach of Nixon's EPA, they're going for market-based solutions: putting a price on carbon emissions, for instance. Or a conservative variant on that, George H. W. Bush's cap-and-trade mechanism updated by John McCain for carbon dioxide.

Or the most recent study's proposal: just eliminating taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels would get us halfway to the 2-degree target.

I suspect that there are more than a few groups and people with influence who disagree. And from the evidence, they're likely to continue to get their way.

.. enormous subsidy that the USA put into highways starting in the 1950s. It was ostensibly to create a transportation system that would not fold up following a nuclear attack, but like all such things it took on a life of its own.

First off, the ping rate for auto traffic is an enormous number of pulse durations or return times -- the radar will ignore returns coming back more than a couple of microseconds after it sends its last ping, and only needs to ping every few tens of milliseconds. That's a window of less than 0.1%.

If a car detects a return in a "forbidden" time slot, it can just switch to not using that frequency. Or use the kind of random backoff that Ethernet has been using now for forty years.

And that's just two solutions.

... basically, what American Colonists were rebelling against in the first place. . . then adopted.

Also, something like a Livescribe pen that records what you right might be the ultimate setup. You're letting your team use tools they're already familiar and comfortable with (ballpoint pens) while still getting the advantages of recording notes as they're taken.

OP: know how you hate it when work gives you some weird-ass, nonstandard tool to do your job ("we've decided to standardize on programming editors!")? Yeah. Why would you want to do that to everyone else?