By which logic, nobody should ever go to jail for murder. After all, the victim can't testify...

Yeah, coding would be good knowledge for people on the hill, especially in the light of legislation about H-1 visas and the like. No disagreement.

That said, I think general science literacy would have greater overall impact and make a greater positive impact on my life and my confidence in the direction that things are going.

Really, I don't need my legislators to know how to program, because I don't know that programming skills are what's needed to produce good legislation and policy.

Basic literacy in science, and the honesty to make evidence-based decisions would be much higher on my list of essential skills for congressvermin.

The sample was a set of legal briefs, but the conclusions were about judges. Small samples may work, but you can't sample population A to make an inference about unrelated population B.

By analogy, the fact that my ice cream truck only sells half as much ice cream as I expect doesn't tell me that there aren't many kids in the neighborhood. Maybe my prices are crazy. Maybe my only flavor is chocolate-chutney ripple. Maybe the scary clown on the top of my truck frightens children away. From looking at my inventory, there's probably not enough information to tell.

The fact that judges didn't read pages and 3 and 4 of the briefs could be because the documents were late, incorrectly presented, or manifestly incorrect on the first page.

No need to read the rest.

I am not at all sure that the benefit of "creating a degree of transparency to improve public trust" will outweigh the benefit of maintaining a degree of secrecy to permit the improper activities. The loss of freedom for some police will be tangible; the gain in reputation will not be. The only hope would be to have this imposed on police departments from outside.

Keeping the classified material more than 7 meters away from the cell phones doesn't seem like that hard a measure to put in place. Maybe you could put a source of interference near the phone lockers if you wanted extra security.

Shitty customer service is not a strategy.

I was doing computer work in the 1980s. I worked with women who were programming, doing VAX & mainframe admin, and performing actual rigorous systems analysis.

The claim that women are not interested in technology or computing is just false.

You don't need a cell signal for the authenticator to work. You do, however, need an internet connection for email. So "off grid" use is very limited.

The heat is used to create steam in most power generation schemes. The amount of heat needed to create a stated amount of steam is the same regardless of source. The fusion reactors would only need to be scaled up to the point that they create heat comparable to current coal reactors. "Mini-suns" are not part of the plan.

MS Word jumped directly from version 2.0c to version 6, so that MS could catch up with WordPerfect.

Oddly, changing the version numbering doesn't actually make the product better. Who'd have guessed that?

Why won't anyone think of the clowns?!

Radar is widely used in Virginia (which I know from unfortunate experience). Also, radar detectors are illegal and are themselves enough to prompt the police to pull you over. The people who I knew that had radar detectors ultimately lost them to police seizure. None of this should have been a surprise to anyone, given the many "RADAR DETECTORS ILLEGAL" signs at the state borders.

Just because I can see the moon in a telescope doesn't mean I can reach out and touch it. It's a matter of physical and logistical problems, not just telemetry.

I remember IBM selling a 5MB hard drive for the PC for $5K. It was a great deal at the time.