Going back to 1960 or so we have weapons that launched and delivered nuclear pay loads at long distances. From my point of view that is a lot more of a hazard than some robot planted to destroy any tanks that come near by. More recently we have items like the Cruise Missile that can launch and defeat an enemy or erase a city if need be. If automated weapons can keep our soldiers out of harms way I think they are a great development. In the past the ability to win a war somewhat depended upon the size of the population of a nation. In 1950 we saw N. Korea send huge numbers of soldiers into our troops machine guns trying to overwhelm us by being willing to destroy so many of their soldiers. Due to the evolution of weapons we simply are not seeing the huge battles that we saw in prior wars. Lives are being saved by the existence of advanced weapons. Drones leap to mind. We can now kill one enemy whereas in the past we might have bombed an entire town to rubble to eliminate just one important enemy.

Funding opens the door for government intrusion. Even private colleges become agents of the government through funding. Land grant colleges usually have ROTC programs as a requirement of using the land. In order to keep federal money coming in it is rather easy for the government to seek cooperation in various covert programs. State colleges are even easier to push around by the feds. I would bet money that some covert studies have been done in which students were used as guinea pigs and had drugs or bacteria implanted without their knowledge or consent. That flu shot given on campus may have been a flu shot with a little extra added making the kids test subjects.

With the exception of a few ranchers in Texas we all spend our time using public roads. There is nothing private about how one drives on a public road. Anyone is free to study your driving and compile information about your driving habits or where you drive and at what time of day. Whether it's a jealous wife hiring a private detective or an app running on your cell phone it is all public in nature. People are seeking privacy where none has ever existed in the past.

I strongly suspect that if we want to investigate anything in order to help protect our nation we should not be so worried about the terror loonies but instead focus on what goes on in businesses. In order for our nation to survive we need to have a degree of trust in our corporations.. As it stands corporations do not deserve one bit of trust from the public. Whether it is the under handed efforts to hold back the Tesla cars or the outrageous salaries payed to executives or off shoring for tax purposes our corporations betray us hourly. As mistrust of social institutions grows individuals tend to adopt the same psychopathic reasoning as the corporations. The morality of the petty gangster with a gun in a convenience store follows the same logic as big business. That gangster doesn't give a hoot as long as he gets his and the same can be said for almost all businesses that you deal with in your lives. Corruption is the new American way.

Among others the US military took an interest in new or efficient languages back in the 1960 era. Colleges sometimes were used to try out various language experiments without the transparency the English majors should have had as they thought it was simply an educational project. For example try to create a working language with 50 words leaps to mind. If you could get a language with fifty words up and running and the encrypt the language it would offer a very secure language with a built in resistance to being cracked. Keep in mind that you could also create the fifty words yourself. Others might be asked to create languages with 100 or 200 new words. Keep in mind that there are people among us who have a fifty word vocabulary and they somehow get through life. One of the easy things to observe is the slow and difficult flow of formal languages such as mathematics, chemistry or physics. Imagine if Einstein had delivered the E = MC squared equation without telling anyone what E, M or C represented. How many years would have passed before someone understood that equation at all? As far as the beauty and utility of English is concerned it may very well be the best language ever conceived. Some would argue that French would be better and many realize that German is highly suited for science and engineering. The one negative for English is for new learners coming from non English speaking nations. Yet English continues to spread around the world as more and more nations find it essential to do business.

Displacement of teachers is already under way. One student I talked to has already had two of his five courses being taught by computer alone. Testing is done by an automated process as well. using cams and what amounts to security guards one guard can now control four or more class rooms at the high school level. And it comes back to the same thing. One seventh grade American history teacher could teach that class for the entire nation. At some point the kids will shift into computer at home education if it is a stable, two parent home. So not only will teachers become more and more absent but schools will have to be closed as the number of students needing an in school education will shrink. I expect a lot of strife and some sort of class warfare over the education issue.

The demand for oil and other fossil fuels is only a symptom of over population. We can go on endlessly about all of the effects of a population explosion without ever confronting what drives all of the issues. Fraking, coal ash dumping, air pollution, urban sprawl, ruined oceans, water shortages, military threats, illegal immigration, food prices all go back to the same core issue which is too large a population both in the US and around the world. Without strict birth control it will continue to get worse and worse and just maybe end human life on Earth.

Well gosh! If big business can make more money and create just one more minimum wage job what does it matter if thousands are killed and entire cities shaken into dust. I man, where the hack are our values. Maybe some of those tall buildings can TRICKLE DOWN and smack a right winger on top of his head. And with rising seas the dust and corpses will be washed away anyway so businesses do not have to clean up the dead and dying. Oh the joys of capitalism!

Obviously trying to enforce such an idiotic law will cause law suits going all the way to the Supreme Court and Tesla will win. I'm dead certain that W. Va. is so loaded with wealth that a waste of millions of dollars means nothing to them at all. Tesla should be allowed punitive damages for this outrage.

Seriously, those that deliver information to the public are heroes. Our nation must no be so weak kneed that we need secrets. Voting means nothing when the public has no right to know. Example : Does our military need more funding or less funding? How the heck can we know when we do not know the capabilities of our military? Some senator preaching in the senate may make all kinds of claims but that may be based on bringing home the pork chops rather than military needs.

Car makers may not want to win such a suit. By getting the courts to force them to make code available the companies establish a legal shield against law suits caused by people who incorrectly use the code. They can not be held liable if they are forced by the government to reveal that code. Sometimes suits are filed with the intention of loss or at least with the hope of establishing "clean hands" to show a jury that everything possible was done to prevent a situation.

I assume that she was simply trying to placate her voters with rhetoric rather than actually seeking to ban a book. Frankly a normal education will tend to teach bright people how to build a pretty good bomb. A tiny knowledge of physics, chemistry or even eight grade level science will give a kid all he needs to build a bomb. For example science students are taught about dust explosions in grain elevators and how violent and dangerous they are. So any kid in middle school would tend to know that a bunch of dust in the air and a spark can create a violent explosion. Simply defining an explosion as rapid combustion clues students in. And teaching basic safety to kids such as using propane indoors without proper ventilation reveals the potential of using a building or room as a bomb. A trip to a hobby store and a look at model airplanes can teach a kid how to wire a simple remote control switch. By the time a kid gets to the tenth grade chemistry class the teacher has no choice but to teach how to avoid explosions in the lab. Naturally teaching how to avoid explosions in fact teaches just how to cause an explosion.

I realize that it is difficult to achieve a balance in fairness in sentencing but here we have an example of a court getting whacked out. Try and find a single case in which a drunk driver or hit and run driver who has killed someone gets 18 years in jail. Now it is obvious that no one likes to get a couple of hundred bucks ripped out of their wallets such a crime does not come close to killing someone and fleeing the scene. And i know that some people will say it involved more than one victim. But then again big tobacco and big coal kill a lot more than one person every single day and the law allows them to keep right on doing it. Worse yet as tobacco sales fell in the US our tobacco companies exported more and more tobacco to nations in which the population remains completely uneducated and allows children to smoke. The long and short of it is that both our civil and criminal justice systems need a rework from the ground up.

Many cars are stolen with the intention of parting them out. If that is the case the car surely will be disassembled within the first 48 hours and engines, transmissions and everything else will be stripped and the bare frame abandoned or even cut up and put inside other cars that are taken to the crushers as they pay by weight. High end cars are usually loaded on ships and exported. Your target are local idiots who hope to alter numbers, paint, change the appearance and keep the ride for a long time. If locals did it then there is some hope of finding the vehicle.

Sadly our colleges have been under great pressure to become trade schools and offer numerous courses that should not be taught in college at all to placate parents and politicians. The idea of college has always been for people who love learning and not for job or career training. With education over the net what is happening is that people who love learning can learn endlessly. But on the down side we have many really nasty people offering supposed college level courses that are in fact worthless all the while charging big bucks for what students can get for free. Taking a 60K loan to get degrees from totally non accredited junk schools is beyond idiotic. Worse yet why does our government allow loans for young people to sign up to these scam colleges?