Let's let the parents who choose not to vaccinate their children send their kids to a public school ... just not the same public school as the vaccinated kids. [I'm guessing someone will bring up "separate but equal" -- but the division here is not along racial lines but along an axes that the parents can control and easily modify.] The teachers can be paid a bit more (and be vaccinated) to compensate them for their increased risk. If a student displays symptoms of an illness for which they and others are not vaccinated, they get to stay home in unofficial or official quarantine until a doctor and/or the school nurse clears them to return. Of course, given the waves of sickness that are probably going to sweep those schools, it may take the whole year (no summer vacation) or even multiple calendar years for a student to advance a grade. But when the 8th or 9th graders turn 18, they can make their own decision as to whether to stay in the non-vaccinated school or be vaccinated and take summer school to finish only a little behind their peers.

Offer drivers low-cost or free phone cases with space to hold their driver's license on the back. Driver pulls their phone out of their pocket (it's likely more accessible than their wallet) and shows/hands the back of the phone to the officer.

Offer drivers a holder that attaches via suction cups or similar mechanism to their dashboard. Find some way (driver's license doubles as an EZPass? Cops have a scanner that lets them bring up the driver's information more quickly when they stop a motorist, rather than having to take it back to their vehicle?) to encourage drivers to put their licenses in that holder while they're driving.

The privacy and security considerations are strong arguments against turning the driver's license into an app or something similar. But if they really want a high-tech solution, working with phone manufacturers to create a lock screen app (open source, to reduce the chances of a back door) that allows a police officer to enter a code (which gets logged on the phone manufacturer's servers and should be able to be associated with the individual officer) into the lock screen to display JUST the license info, not actually unlock the phone. This would also be useful if a phone is lost, stolen, or used as part of a crime; it would allow the police to identify the owner.

Though I've ascended a few characters, I haven't tried to do so in a while, mainly because of that long, slow slog through the mazes. I'd consider changing things around so that there's maybe a 1/10 chance of getting a maze on any standard Gehennom level - or better yet, only the special levels get mazes.

Funny how the wizard is one of the weakest characters at the beginning of the game, but becomes almost unstoppable at experience level 30. Reverse-genociding purple worms, taming them, and teleporting them away can really be helpful on the Astral Plane - a bunch of pet purple worms can really wreak havoc. Even one pet purple worm can be handy in Minetown (though I take care to lock Izchak in his shop when I clean out Minetown).

Note that you have to buy a codec license to activate the Raspberry Pi's MPEG-2 support. Once you've added the license key to your config.txt, XBMC will handle MPEG-2 just fine; I can stream shows from my MythTV backend without any problem. But, the sluggish interface is a bit of a problem, especially when using an IR remote.

In my neighborhood (Chicago area), they most certainly trim the trees, to the point that many of them look downright weird. That doesn't completely prevent storm-related power outages, but it at least makes them pretty rare for me.

Still, if the crown of one of those trees snaps off, like it did in a severe storm late this June, it can result in an extended outage. That's when I discovered that my UPS outlasted the batteries in Comcast's local infrastructure by a wide margin.

I've never had voltage sag to the point that the battery was needed, but there have been a few times, during summer heat waves, when my UPS would go into boost mode (about 108V or so at the wall socket). Lately, though, I've been getting higher-than-normal voltage, consistently 124-127V, and when it gets above 126 the UPS will knock 16V off. At least it can use an autotransformer to deal with minor over- and under-voltage conditions, instead of killing the battery. If it were switching to battery I'd be calling my power company.

Back on June 30, a severe storm knocked out power to my neighborhood for about 20 hours. I had my systems on a 1500VA APC Smart-UPS, and after a couple of minutes, when it was obvious the power wasn't coming on soon, I turned off the big machines and stayed online with an Atom box.

Unfortunately, it appears that Comcast hadn't planned for long power outages. Twenty minutes after the power went out, the internet went down and stayed down. That kind of performance doesn't give me much confidence in their home phone service, needless to say. Of course, the AT&T landline kept on trucking, but it's looking like that won't be an option for too much longer.

"Extreme Shrimp" is going to be my next band name.

Theoretically yes, you may be able to determine if a particular program will halt by testing and inspecting.

Practically, you may not be able to determine if a program will halt. See the Collatz conjecture. Assume a program that accepts as input a positive integer n and returns the number of steps before the first time the Collatz iteration reaches 1. Does that program halt for all possible legal input values?

As another point, regardless of whether or not a program or robot can _choose_ to kill a human, Asimov's robot stories indicate that not even the First Law of Robotics excludes the possibility of robots killing humans. Does the robot _know_ that to take a particular action will kill a human? A robot chef could use shrimp in the preparation of a dish not knowing the diner who will eat it is deathly allergic. What is the definition of "human"? The debate about abortion shows human beings can't answer that one. And then there's the Zeroth Law of Robotics, a limited version of which these researchers seem to be trying to test. That one is particularly tricky as neither humans nor robots can predict the future (no one has developed psychohistory yet.)

If the original reviewer is still at the Post, inviting them to write the new review would make it an apples-to-apples comparison. If the original reviewer is not still at the Post, inviting the person who has responsibility for writing "culture" or "entertainment" reviews now would at least make the comparison apples-to-crabapples (same genus, different species.)

Then the artist should invite the Post reviewer to his next concert and ask the Post to amend the review by adding a link to a new article describing how the artist has improved.