My father-in-law believed he could "witch" wires, pipes, or whatever, using two pieces of copper wire. Funny thing is, he could never repeat a witching while blindfolded. We figured that decades in the construction industry meant that he could subconsciously spot the clues where a typical pipeline would be run.

If I were planning where to run tile in a field, I'd look for the low spot, and the easiest, straightest run from there to a drainage ditch. Doesn't take beechwood sticks or copper wires to figure that out.

V2V doesn't have to be limited to reporting just your own vehicle's data. Each packet could include data known about other nearby vehicles. Why does this matter? Because my car has radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors that detect all sorts of nearby vehicles today, so its packets could include reports on all the nearby vehicles it detects, including your old car.

Additional data on other vehicles helps identify failing systems (or cheats), and can theoretically provide some corroborating information about the nearby traffic. Let's say that one of the paranoid people who have posted above tries to dodge tickets by rigging their V2V to always report they're traveling the speed limit, even when they're exceeding it by 30 km/h (even though it's obvious that reporting your coordinates every 100 milliseconds will reveal your true speed.) But if a couple different cars with radar report "vehicle at X,Y, bearing B, change in bearing -3.000 d/s, velocity 38.00 m/s, acceleration +0.1 m/s/s", then even if the offending car self-reports that it is going at 29.00 m/s the rest of the cars in the area can still respond as if it were traveling at 38.00 m/s.

(It's also interesting to consider that evolution will tend to remove incorrectly reporting cars from the road, as they will be involved in more accidents.)

Note that this doesn't even violate anyone's privacy in order to achieve safety. The packet doesn't have to identify the vehicle, as its location is (or at least should be) unique. That way if my right side ultrasonic blind spot sensor picks up a car that is 2 m away, it can simply report the existence of a vehicle at the computed X,Y.

Finally, how does this benefit you, in your old vehicle that doesn't have a V2V system? Once other cars on the road have V2V, those other cars will control themselves to avoid colliding with you. Every car that automatically steers itself away from harming you is one less chance at an accident you might get in. It won't make much of a difference initially, but as time goes on and more vehicles become equipped, you'll gradually have your risks reduced.

Simple: you can automatically activate and deactivate it in certain trigger conditions (light bar, high speed, etc.) but you always let the cop turn it on and off at will.

If the cop has been issued a camera, but it's not recording at the same time that he's arresting someone who accuses him of using excessive force, what's that going to say to a lawyer, or to a jury? "Well, your Honor, we had three police officers trying to subdue the subject in the car when they all had to discharge their weapons and fatally shot the unarmed man with six bullets, but coincidentally the officers had all just been peeing by the side of the road so none of them had their cameras on." I know we have a few kangaroo courts in this country, but when it gets serious you still have to convince a jury to believe the shit being shoveled doesn't stink.

Because camera footage could have vindicated their behavior. And if a cop with a camera turns it off just before he shoots someone, especially an unarmed robbery suspect, do you really think a lawyer is going to just let that slide? The very existence of the cameras will be enough to change behaviors.

There are some jurisdictions that are talking about having the cameras enabled wirelessly whenever the light bar comes on, and then they keep the video rolling until the cop stops the car, gets out, gets back in, and starts driving at the posted speed. So if he stops at a rest area, restaurant, or wherever in a non-emergency capacity, it won't automatically turn on. Of course he'll have the option to turn it on or off whenever he wants. But a cop whose camera is coincidentally turned off every time he's accused of abuse will quickly raise suspicion.

And have you seen the crap cops have to put up with? They're constantly being accused by abusive liars. The honest cops don't seem to mind the cameras in those cases because it really cuts down on their stress. When a defendant accuses a camera-equipped cop of abuse, the quickest answer is to show the defendant's lawyer the video, and (according to NPR) the defendant almost always drops the accusation. And if provoked, the video can help justify the use of force.

It may get some cops to moderate their behavior, and that's fine - we need professional police, and if the camera helps remind them, there's nothing wrong with that.

But your quote specifically says, "principally through performance on a common statewide placement examination." It does not say the CSU system uses SAT or ACT for admissions standards. Perhaps if they based admissions on the SAT or ACT results, they'd need less remediation. Of course, that means rejecting a bunch of the little revenue-generating tykes instead of sending them over to the bursar's office to extract the maximum amount of Financial Aid money from them.

It would be interesting to compare the graduation rates to the remedial course attendance. Do the remedial students fail to graduate at a higher rate than the qualified students? Are we doing those younger, under-qualified students a disservice by allowing them to matriculate?

I know you're only trying to help defend the image of the American education system, but please, stop. I'm not sure you could have packed more condemnation of your school's English curriculum into a three sentence reply.

You did remind me of a joke, though. "The bigger America is, diverse it gets."

With PIN-based transactions on financial cards, the PIN is defined by the contract as the method of your approval, so no other signature is required. And I have yet to meet a cashier who is qualified as a graphologist who is legally qualified to compare a signed charge slip with the signature on the back of the card. Instead, most cashiers are trained to ignore the signature, other than making sure they got one. Some chains don't even show the customer's signature to the cashier, and some don't require the customers to show their charge card.

As this rolls out, we will see that certain issuer's cards will have PIN requirements, others will have signature requirements. It will vary by bank.

Something to note is that many banks will certainly get it wrong as this rolls out. We observed this from Canada's EMV experience. The Canadian bankers all thought they'd define a certain set of rules with EMV that would ensure every card was secured by defining PIN requirements, offline transactions, dollar limits on the cards, etc. It turned out that their cards were almost unusable for a lot of transactions, and they succeeded in making lots of people switch back to cash. The US banks are not eager to repeat that experience, but they are just as likely to get it wrong.

This will likely not be a smooth transition. Merchants and customers are all going to run into roadblocks, and lots of people are going to be upset before it's all done. I'd suggest patience, and to politely let your bank know of trouble as soon as you encounter a problem. The more complaints they hear, the more incentive they'll have to fix it before their customers jump ship for the few banks that get it right.

It's kind of sad that you underestimate kids like that.

The US market is moving rapidly to chip, as the PCI has mandated a liability shift as of October 2015. After that date, any merchants who don't demand a chip instead of a mag stripe will be fully liable for any fraud on the account, so the incentive for retailers to abandon mag stripes is very strong.

I have no doubt that Coin will be implemented well, and will provide a measure of physical security that plastic cards don't. However, be assured that retailers are indeed suspicious of them because they are not original cards. No institution has yet decided to officially say yes or no to them - everyone is kind of waiting for guidance from the PCI. And with Chip-and-PIN only a year out, they may just decide to not decide.

Once the merchants have the terminals in place and the liability has shifted to them, the issuers will have strong incentive to deploy chip cards, as they will have the least secure piece of the system. Mag stripes will be gone in just a few years.

That will depend on your bank, and your account. Some banks will require customers to use PINs, others may not.

Yes. Teach him or her once, and they feel like they now know the secrets of science. They'll soon be looking up exact lat/lon for their location, and setting it more precisely than the affordable (cheap) mechanism can handle, which is just fine. This also teaches them how to find Polaris. And if they ever get the itch to take some photographs, they'll have the right tool for the job.

After looking at Saturn's rings and spotting the Galilean moons, they're going to want to see other famous features; looking for the Messier objects is a great challenge for kids. This will quickly teach them a few other foundational skills, too: how to read a star chart, Right Ascension and Declination, and sidereal time. All this can be done on a relatively inexpensive 4" reflector with a small equatorial mount on a tripod.

A Dobsonian will give much clearer pictures for the money, and is great for viewing easily identifiable objects, but it's not going to give them a working understanding of celestial mechanics.

I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.

If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across rich and poor alike. If you're always led by selfish people who won't ever raise taxes, nothing will continue to happen.

Interesting idea, but the data doesn't support it.

While Massachusetts has 858 people per square mile, the population density of Minnesota, 68.1, is almost identical to Mississippi, with 63.7 people per square mile.

U.S. Census data also shows a significantly higher percentage of residents with internet connectivity in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, and significantly lower percentage in Mississippi. (Sorry, the source, http://www.census.gov/prod/201..., doesn't list the exact percentages, but I'm sure they'd be available if they were relevant.)

If density were that much of a factor, I would expect the states with similar density to have similar connectivity rates. The data doesn't bear that out.

Comparing the average ACT scores of the three states, Massachusetts comes in at 24.1, Minnesota at 22.8, and Mississippi at 18.7. Minnesota is closer to Massachusetts than Mississippi.

It's also worth noting that Minnesota's more recent governors have made statewide high speed internet a priority to help grow the economy.