A little harsh but dead accurate. They're not legally obligated to sue the grieving parents. They could even draw up a contract and sell them limited rights to have this one statue in perpetuity for a dollar, or some such. For PR reasons, the DC rep could even donate the dollar to the rights purchaser.

There are many ways DC could do this, legally and protected, without being asswipes. They chose "fuck 'em; none of the above".

That, or they could be normal decent non-fuckhead humans and let a little boy have a grave that looks like the hero he wanted to be. I prefer that option.

A family acquaintance - let's call him "Joe" - worked as an airport screener. This is a true story: I was personally in the room when Joe was complaining to my dad that he'd been fired.

They run periodic checks where an undercover agent tries to smuggle contraband onto a plane. When questioned after the fact, Joe didn't understand why everyone was upset that he'd allowed a disassembled rifle through screening: "but it was in pieces! He couldn't have done anything with it!". "But Joe, he could've taken it into a bathroom and put it together, couldn't he?", followed by an expression of horror creeping across his face as the realization sank in.

Also, something like a Livescribe pen that records what you right might be the ultimate setup. You're letting your team use tools they're already familiar and comfortable with (ballpoint pens) while still getting the advantages of recording notes as they're taken.

OP: know how you hate it when work gives you some weird-ass, nonstandard tool to do your job ("we've decided to standardize on programming editors!")? Yeah. Why would you want to do that to everyone else?

And 8 registers aren't enough for anyone. x64-64 is a better architecture for reasons beyond its larger memory addressing.

With email subscriptions, users can unsubscribe, suspend, and resume viewing updates at their convenience. Email is also vastly more bandwidth and power friendly than continually polling to ask "have anything for me yet? have anything for me yet? have anything for me yet?".

An email newsletter that a user can subscribe to and which honors the "unsubscribe" link it at the bottom is identically as spammy as RSS.

I just got a large, image-filled email from a vendor, and it came out to 20KB (including headers). Let's assume Microsoft's announcement emails are that huge, and that Microsoft sends out 100,000,000 of them. Let's further assume that Outlook is smart enough to batch recipients to the same domain with a conservative 10-to-1 reduction in number of unique messages sent (probably closer to 500-1, given the number of Gmail users you can collapse). That math works out to about 1000 gigabit ethernet seconds, or about about 1 second of AWS's estimated bandwidth-time, or about 3 seconds of Azure's estimated bandwidth-time, or about a second of traffic at a major porn site. And that's with hugely conservative worst-case estimates for all the numbers involved.

Egress doesn't take nearly the bandwidth you might think it does.

As a side note: I despise a lot of the laws we've been pushing out and don't mean to defend them. I just get weary of the idea I hear too often that the US is uniquely and historically bad about this.

So you'd rather pass laws requiring all of that cultural information to be individually memorized and kept in short supply, rather than those allowing it to be distributed to anyone who wants it. That's interesting. Bizarrely Luddite and a touch racist (because you prefer discriminating against places "everyone knows are bad" rather than ones that can be objectively demonstrated as such), but interesting.

I'll take newer, faster, and scientific, thank you. Fetishizing tradition often equals heresy, and this is one of those times.

I live in San Francisco and you won't be getting a ride from the cabbies who are hypothetically required to take you. Dispatch will accept the call, but no one will ever show up. Maybe you hail a cab, but when they find out you're going to a sketch part of town they'll suddenly remember that their meter is broken.

Taxis are required to pick you up and take you wherever, now. A fat lot of good that actually does you when the driver would rather be somewhere else.

Quick: name a country which doesn't think its ways are the obviously correct ways, and that the world wouldn't better if only everyone else would adopt their standards. Europeans are convinced that we should maintain a bit of aloof isolationism. The Middle East is convinced that a Muslim theocracy would benefit everyone. Much of Asia wishes we could get over the recent notion of individual rights instead of duties to country. And every single one of those groups write laws and UN proposals that - if adopted - would enshrine their ideals and apply them globally.

The US gets slagged on because it's more successful than many others at doing so, but don't for a moment thing it'd be any different if France or Russia or Egypt or China was at the helm.

I think you might classify this alongside "jumping on a grenade".

There's a metal for those wounded in combat, and Perl cuts psyches deeply indeed.