It's not as cut and dried as you make it sound. But this may be a step in the right direction. I suspect it will be lobbied into oblivion, though.

Because I don't want to wake up in a bathtub full of icewater missing a kidney?

NoScript can help prevent XSS attacks. Use it.

A nuclear produced EMP would likely be from a detonation high in the atmosphere that would do little or no damage on the ground. A bunker would not be needed for such a scenario.

I know a CEO has to say crap like that, but it's just so ... over the top. I know classrooms are the holy grail for corporations, because it's all about the kids after all and money should be no object to a quality education, but damn. I'm surprised he didn't launch into how VR technology could drastically reduce the spread of the severe respiratory disease that is currently sweeping through schools in some parts of the country. Why is this on /.? He needs to stick to where they will probably really hit the jackpot, porn.

THIS! I love this idea!
Your friend,
Verizon

If you want to give it some teeth, and get some free publicity, in addition to the fine add automatic confiscation of the phone and watch the world explode.

I have signed up for 3 of these from Coursera. I've completed two and dumped one. They do involve a fair amount to time to get through, depending on how familiar you are with the subject matter to start with. I'm guessing most of the people who do this are people who sometimes think about going back to college but aren't quite willing to dump an existing career that pays the bills but perhaps leaves them not completely satisfied. I guess the question I would have is how important is it to these places that people finish their courses? Given that the price right now is $0, maybe they could charge a nominal free (like $20) to sign up, refundable if the course is completed.

Maybe that's why they're shutting it down. Nothing is really free, someone has to pay for your free miles or cashback, and in this case it would be Amazon through merchant fees to the credit card companies. If enough people did this, they'd be losing money more quickly than they could make it.

Well 1,099,511,627,766 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1024.

These are engineering challenges. We know how to attack them. TFA is about a scientific discovery.

They dropped the transmit power when they switched to digital. Theoretically, this was OK because digital receivers can obtain a usable signal from a much lower input power. However in reality, the effective footprint of OTA channels was definitely reduced. During the transition the maximum output power was reduced from 100kW to 45kW, even though digital transmission is only 30% more efficient.

the researchers were coincidentally all missing a particular gene and none of them could figure out what its purpose was.

Google also has two step verification, where a code will be sent to your phone via SMS that you need to enter in order to log in to your Gmail account. A little more hassle, a lot more security.

I'm pretty sure the government is not diverting any money from NASA to try to prove intelligent design. Oh, there probably are a few in there that would like to, but it would be political suicide. (I like to think so, anyway.)