The biggest clincher is that the Earth's electrical grid doesn't even have to be susceptible to be damaged by such storms. The damage is due to high-intensity, slowly-changing magnetic fields that induce what amounts to DC current (when compared to the brisk 50/60Hz). Such low-frequency currents happily saturate the transformer cores and destroy the infrastructure. The solution is rather simple, and would have costed very little to implement: AC coupling of all conductors over a certain length in transmission and distribution circuits. By all conductors I really mean all: the grounded conductors, and mast-to-mast earting wires would need to be AC coupled as well. An alternative would be to add DC-breaking overcurrent protection to all circuits, including grounded and lightning protection circuits.

The guy in the article is exactly the kind of an engineer I wouldn't hire. Doesn't see the forest for the trees. Code isn't always an answer, dummy.

That's perfectly fine though: the fault indicator lights are there to indicate that there's a problem. Things get ugly when you decide not to run the engine anymore when such "tampering" is detected. Or, worse, if the emissions equipment is replaced by properly functioning aftermarket parts that don't have proper authentication circuitry and/or firmware.

This is bullshit. The manufacturer wants nothing open because it'll commoditize the stuff that rakes them boatloads of money. Regulation has nothing to do with it. The owner/operator of the equipment is responsible for maintaining it with adherence to emissions regulations. How she does it, is up to them.

This isn't actually the case. I know of no Federal regulation that disallows adjustments by a particular party. All that the regulations require is that there be no unauthorized modifications to the system. They don't place the onus on anyone to prevent such modifications in any particular way.

That's impossible unless you're talking about comments in the header files, or the implementation (.cpp) files don't include their own headers. Generally speaking, every .cpp file must include its header in the first non-comment line of the file.

Good:

// foo.cpp, Copyright (c) 2105 Dynabone LLC
#include "foo.h"
#include <cmath>
...

Bad:

// foo.cpp, Copyright (c) 2105 Dynabone LLC
#include <cmath>
...
#include "foo.h"
...

The solution is simple, then: consider how much the cheapest insurance would cost you vs. paying the IRS fines. Do whatever makes financial sense. It won't be a big expense for you. Consider it another tax - and if it happens to be paid to an insurance company, you could even, gasp use the benefits when the time comes to do so!

So, you've got a 100k of disposable income sitting around just in case you had to say in the hospital for a week? Well, good for you, but I don't want the likes of you setting public policy, you know.

I forgot the most important thing: you aren't supposed to read about it . You're supposed to read it . Go ahead. It's free.

Those aren't called hacks, they are techniques and they stem from the structure inherent in numbers. As you progress in mathematics, you're supposed to be building a large vocabulary of such "hacks". Eventually you'll learn your multiplication table without even trying. More importantly, you'll be able to apply said hacks to larger numbers, where memorization doesn't help.

So, your complaint is not only solitary, but severely misplaced. Yeah, I attribute it to FUD. If you hear anything about Common Core from people who haven't read the source text and have no understanding of subject matter, everything you hear will be wrong. And I do mean everything. The misinformation is that bad.

Hopefully you've read Paul Lockart's A Mathematician's Lament. If not, you'll find it quite resonating, I think.

Such as? Hopefully no mathematician would ever do that.

This, a thousand times this! You can see the forest and the trees, and switch your perspective at will. U.S. math teachers can see the branches and the needles of the evergreens. I'm not sure if they even see the leaves of the deciduous trees, for they often know of only one way of doing a particular thing. Seeing the forest? Forget it.

Not only that, they fundamentally don't understand math. They can't see the forest for the trees. They don't know about the more abstract, unifying theories that intimately affect most of what they teach. Teaching elementary algebra without knowing what a group or a ring is, is silly. It's cargo cult teaching: all the moves, none understanding.

I find the idea that math is being taught by non-mathematicians to be preposterous. Would you like music to be taught by someone who can't play an instrument, or art taught by someone who can't create any art themselves? Well, it's for that very same reason that we need a mathematician's perspective even in teaching elementary maths. And by a mathematician I mean at least someone who has had the training of a mathematician.