An arrest is clearly overkill. Many urban districts are trying to go against the insanity of the past 20 years of zero tolerance and return the classroom management to the classroom teacher, along with more leeway. That said, like your post, such things are usually a call for help. I have see in kids that I personally have known for many years. I have seen it in kids that I hardly know. Such things almost always a request for a response by the child. It might be dropping everything and having a one on one conversation, or therapy. Some educators think that just ignoring the kid is the proper thing to do, and honestly sometimes it is, and if the behavior is repetitive then it simply a training thing, like the baby repeatedly dropping the spoon. But it is a new things, or an escalating things, while it may not be a plan to actually cause harm to someone or themselves, it could be a cry for abuse or some other such thing. Which, again, is not best handled by calling the cops. So we have had the conversation, and attention has been given, and I hope you feel better.

When I got my second iPad a few years ago, I got a Verizon model. That way I had an ATT phone and a Verizon iPad so there was some redundancy. What I did not realize it that the Verizon iPad had no SIM card so that traveling was a hassle. Sure a Verizon product is supposed to provide a higher level of customer experience, as long as you are always in a home region.

I probably will buy an unlocked phone when I upgrade so I can immediately use it to travel instead of having to keep an older unlocked phone around. But for home use, it really makes no difference. Everyone has the same crappy $50 plan. No one is really that helpful. Honestly I find ATT to be a little more helpful than others, and the coverage is good where I am.

I think the reality is that we are all expecting top level personalized service at bare bones rates. It is like those who fly Southwest and complain that there is no food. Or those that recieve a free service such as facebook and then are surprised that people, who are the product, are being monetized.

Clearly he is engaged in unlawful behavior, and is does not seem to make rational decisions, but there are other ways to handle this that would not incur a great cost on society. For instance,ban him from seeing movies. Ban him from logging onto the internet. Put him under house arrest. Yes, he would fight against this, because clearly he wants to escalate. But then he would be put in jail for being a bad citizen, not because some corporation feel they have an entitlement to profit.

In the US we are increasingly paying to incarcirate poor people who make one or two poor choices and don't have the money to buy their way out like others. The assumption is increasingly that one can make poor choices, such as drugs, as long as you are wealthy enough to pay for it. OTOH, if you don't have the cash, you go to jail, and incur an average of $30,000 cost to they taxpayer. It is not that there should be no consequences for violating laws, but maybe we should look at other things, like ankle bracelets that only let you go to work and home.

One big example of this is school truancy. In some states one can be skip as much school as one wants, and long as you have a few hundred dollars to pay for it. Of course if you don't have the cash you are looking at jail time. I am not sure how this helps as kids who skip school probably see no difference between school and jail. I suppose that when they actually go to jail, they may see there is a difference, but some have already been to jail as can make the comparison.

It is 500 miles from Galveston to Oklahoma City. That is 10 sites if placed every 50 miles along the major highway. That means they could have a major traffic area of Texas wired for the Tesla with six port charging stations in less than four months

There a seven Buc cees flag ship stores, where everyone in Texas stops for at least a half an hour to get gas and a Dr. Pepper Icee. That is three months to wire one of the most popular tourist traps. The other locations may not be big enough to hold a charging station, but lets say another six months more months to wire those that can.

So what we are talking about is in six months with enough crews the major populated parts of texas could be wired for Tesla. The parts of Texas that can afford a Tesla, given the three out four cars at many intersections are mercedes or high end volve, that seeing a Maserati, a Lotus, especially a Rolls Royce is not uncommon. Where every city has at least one highly regarded dealership that sells these 100K+ autos. And yet instead of building infrastructure that would encourage the population to buy a Tesla, a population that has the money to buy a second electric car, they whine like babies because the laws don't conform with their expectations. Rather than creating a demand, they blame regulation for their problems.

Before they started trying to extort states taxpayers o pay for their construction costs I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Now it is clear that they are failing to the old regulation card, instead of profiting with innovation.

Elements are defined solely by the number of protons, which is also know as the atomic number. There can be no more elements than we know unless they are created by adding more electrons and adding to the end of the periodic table. Writers often make stuff up, like the 10% brain thing, and people are not educated to know it is just made up.

Isotopes are not considered chemically different from each other as they only differ in neutrons . As understood, the neutrons seem to help hold the atom together. It also appears that the number of neutrons increases non linearly in relation to the number of protons, to the point where elements with large number of protons are unstable.

So the solution to this is to build nuclear plants where we can get minimum regulations and avoid lawsuits. These location should be where no one really wants to live, so that people are not going to effected and need to file lawsuits to protect themselves. I have often thought that the states from Washington to Minnesota, which taken together from a significant net drain on the national budget, should be asked to secede and form a country that exemplify conservative values such as an aggressive free market, very limited regulations, and the like. In such a place nuclear power plants could be built in, say, North Dakota, without any of the pesky useless safety issues that now make nuclear power an unreasonable solution.

In many venues there are limits to the recording devices you may take in and use. These are largely in place to limit the quality of the fan images to protect the market for the professional images, which generate a great deal of money. These rules are enforced by bag checks, metal detectors, even pat downs. In addition, the primary function of the ushers seem to be monitoring the fans for use of prohibited devices.

That said, the result of violation of these limits is not generally criminal. If I take a picture of cirque du soleil, for example, I will be asked to stop or be ejected if I do not. Likewise, if I am recording a soccer match, and that is the only way to catch a goal, the rules might be that I delete the recording or be ejected, and if I am always doing this the league has the freedom not to sell me or ticket or let me in if I get a ticket.

So under the terms of service, the solution is to ban these people who post goals from attending the game. Claiming the activity itself is illegal is silly. The best the league can hope for is that a person who has been banned might get arrested for trespassing if they ignore the ban and it can be proven they were aware they were banned.

The problem with MS is that they have never been in the business of supported or selling to end users, and they are entering this market at the expense of the desktop business market.. The cost of their software products, at the consumer level, has always been very high end. They have lower priced products, but those tend to be so incomplete as to require a lot of time to make work. Remember, the product is only cheap if your time is worth nothing.

So MS Surface is a good product, but it is expensive for what it is. To make it look cheap they compare it to a 13" Macbook, but the reality is that if is priced evenly between a 11" and 13" Macbook, so is not aggressively priced.

For better or worse, the reason that consumers buy MS Windows based PCs is because they are aggressively priced. A laptop can be had for 1/2 the price of a Mac because the laptop can have lower specs because MS Windows can run well on lower spec machines. I am not going to run on an I5, but there are many who that is fine and they can get a cheaper laptop than Apple provides, and get service from a third party that caters to end users.

It is going to be a while before the culture shifts to MS being a seller of premium consumer product. This will happen, if MS is serious about being such a firm, but that opens up the business market. Already MS is talking about only supported one version of IE, which means that business is going to have the headache of rolling out frequent updates. Apple is teaming with IBM to get point of use applications on iPad, which will significantly reduce the cost of supplying business rule applications to worker bees. Firms can already create custom apps on Android devices to serve the same purpose. MS Surface should be a way to counter these losses on the desktop. Instead they are produces commercials to make the MS Surface seem fun, and charging extra for a keyboard.

Summer breaks are useful for parents of means who can put their kids into other activities or parents with commercial activities with which the kids can help. For most everyone else it is beneficial to have year round 8-5 school, not because kids get more educated but because it is highly effective babysitting.

A case can be made for a trimester year round school situation in which students are required to attend two per year. Two in a row can be missed with permission, and missing three is equivalent to dropping out of school. This could be beneficial in many ways, but would be complex.

A big problem with the proposal is simply costs. Right now there is a lot of stuff that happens in the summer. Some of it is paid by school budgets, some of it is paid by external grants, some of it is paid by the teacher. The fantasy is that we can increase the school year with no significant costs. This is not true. Over the past 20 years teacher pay has gone up considerable, and a lot of that cost has to do with simple additional time the teacher is required to work. This is the same in any situation. If you are paid hourly, i.e. required to be at work at 7 and work until 3, if they ask to work until 4 every day then that should come with additional pay. This is what has happened with teacher, the additional few weeks and time per day has increased pay about 15%. If we go year round the pay will increase another 20% at least.

There will be other costs. Training will not happen during the off time, so staff will have to hired to cover classes. The argument cannot be made that personal business can be handled during breaks, so teacher will have to take days off during the year, a practice that many teachers now try to avoid. This again will require additional staff hire. To give you an idea of this additional cost, say a school has 60 teachers, which is a small school. Two weeks of training and two weeks of personal time is 20 days. For all teachers that is 1200 person-days, let round it up to 10,000 person-hours. At minimum wage, rounding up again, is $80,000 per school in class coverage costs. Not all of this is new costs, but it is significant. Add a half million for additional pay, weekend costs to maintain the school that is now down over break, and one is looking at a cost per student going from around $7,000 to around $8,000.

Like so many of these studies the centers of the data are of little use for someone trying to quantify speeds. Even if we had a range for the center, say a standard deviation, that would still leave out variables like size, population, geography and variables in population density. It is unreasonable to publish a single number for a states as meaningful. It does back to the idea that one can make a bunch of junk numbers seem more valid by putting them on a pretty map.

The equipment supplied by Comcast or ATT or Verizon or whoever has traditionally been notoriously wasteful in terms of energy. I myself but a router and DVR. The router pays for itself in a year, and both probably have a return on investment of two years in terms of electricity and rental savings.

25 years ago there was desktop cold fusion. A lot of people wanted it, there were conferences on it, probably at least a hundred million was invested in it over a year or two. but it was bogus. The hypothesis was sound, it was no completely unreasonable, but the experiments showing a positive results on the hypothesis were flawed. It is not that cold fusion does not exist as something that might happen, it is that we have not shown it happens. I don't want to muddle the situation, but there is a clear line between what can happen and does happen in the lab. Theoretical people have told me that their models are necessarily not connected with reality. They are math, and the math sometimes tells us what is going on, sometimes fools us, and sometimes is just bonkers. What differentiates all this is good experimental science, which is really hard to do. I mean really hard, and for the most part does not lead to a theory, but only data that can be collected by math. This is why even though Galileo did a lot of good research, it was 100 years before the math caught up and we were able to do what we now classify as as science.It is why electromagnetic, the speed of light, quantum mechanics, and what is to follow is going to drop out the math. Which is to say we have a very complex interactions. Virtual particles drop out the math. The math says that they must exist, but inherently can't do anything useful. This is in the same way that photons can be coupled so they may seem to act faster than the speed of light(maybe, until we get distances longer than the earth-moon system we cannot really know) but no one expects information to be communicated faster than the speed of light. The end result is that if you have an experiment that violates the math, you have to be very sure it is a good experiment, and the consensus is quickly building that this is not. There is a certain responsibility to being an experimentalist. One can't just willy nilly say there are 40 dimensions of energy is created from the aether. On can be sloppy with conclusions, as Einstein was with the photoelectric effect, or Milikin in his oil drop experiment, but one does have a responsibility to do ones best to control systematic errors, and not jump to conclusions when one does not fully understand those errors. Unless, of course, like the two cited authors you are lucky enough to be accidentally correct.

We also have to look at how repeatability works. One reads a paper, does one best to follow the work, perhaps calls one of the researchers to get clarification, combine this with known methods, and at the end of the day maybe get a similar result. If, as in the case of cold fusion, the result is not similar, then there is at least some carelessness if not fraud in the original result. Which is fine because it is just one result, and no one should thinks one result is conclusive.

In social sciences reproducibility is possible. For instance in epidemiology databases are crunched using well known statistical methods to determine correlations, then further science is applied to determine is these correlations might be causative. If a second party cannot do an equal statistical analysis and get similar results then the results are not valid. If a second party can go through the process of collecting the data and find systematic errors, then the results is not valid. This is in fact a big problem with education research. When subject to the process of real science, much if not most of the research has been shown to not meet those standards.

So social science research can be scientific, but there is a second issue. We expect research to be predictive. It is said that field such as astronomy are as unscientific as social science. But in astronomy there is an element of application. The results are used to predict other finding which then can be confirmed. This is the element that makes fields such as physiology less scientific.

I thought of it another way. You go to the store and everything the kids touches goes on your credit card. Remember, most of what occurs in the apps has no real world equivalent. You can't go and return it, or even complain it was faulty or did not meet expectation. At least a theme park if there is bug in the ice cream you might get another one.

In any case,Apple is absolutely wrong here. If this were a convenience feature it would be easy to add in a setting like they do with so many other features. For instance cellular data roaming can be turned off. To make sure that Apps still have an opportunity to waste bandwidth there is an annoying reminder to turn the cellular data back on when accidentally using the App. If Apple wanted go, it could allow users to set the time interval anywhere from zero to 15, or more, and then allow the App to be as annoying as it wanted to get you to turn back to 15. As it is, the protocol is clearly meant to maximize unintentional in App purchases.

Information implies past data and perfect information implies absolute security and verification. This is more possible through the medalian system as carry a large cost and can be removed if people are very unreliable or dangerous. Of course the system is not perfect, but utilizes the time tested method of excessive punishment for certain acts, as well as background checks. Look at it like cleaning staff in a hotel. They have oppotunity to steal, but there is likely no due process if an accusation arises so there is less incentive to steal.

In the current system, information may be collected, and may be reliable, but it is not verified or acted upon. One can imagine where a driver gets a bad review, then creates a new account with a friends credentials. One can imagine a case where cars are not well maintained and cause an accident.

In fact the solution to this is very simple and should not raise the prices much if the profits of the service are moderated. Require each driver to carry commercial insurance and have a commercial drivers license. My father had one, so I know they are not difficult to get. The service could contract with an insurance company to provide a customized package. I think it is important for each driver to contract with an insurance company, not the service, because the insurance company will have additional checks and verifications. The policy can then be linked to the profile to insure that a driver is more likely to be who he or she says it is.

Right now these services are simply trading security for costs. For some this is a good tradeoff. But if the system of regulated cabs is dismantled without something equally secure we will simply see a period where people have no choice but to be insecure and then an expensive process where regulation, probably worse regulations, are implemented.