you could have stopped after "explorer" and had just as valid a recommendation...

Do you have any idea how much money you could be saving by doing your own maintenance? Your local auto parts store has frequent sales on oil and filters for $25 for a set. Changing the oil takes a whopping 10 minutes. And unless you're driving 20k miles per year, you certainly don't need to be changing the oil every 3 months. A brake fluid flush *might* take you a couple of hours but requires no special tools (a combination wrench set, a short piece of hose, a jar, and a jack and your lug wrench is all you need). The AC "service" was probably just a matter of topping off the coolant (another 10 minute job). A transmission fluid/filter change is slightly more expensive and time-consuming, but again, no more than an hour.

Um, 2 miles can NOT be leisurely walked in 15 minutes. That's a 7:30 mile pace, which is a pretty decent running pace, depending on what kind of shape you're in.

Make it 30 minutes, and you're about right.

Good point. There's also the issue of "how do I get credits in the first place?" or, "I don't own a car but still want to participate!" The obvious way would be for people to buy "miles", but that makes it even easier for the city governments to argue that it's still the same service.

Simply put -- consumers can't be trusted to be able to deal with complex secure authentication schemes. That's why there's so many easy-to-guess "What city did you grow up in?" password-reset functions. There are so many weak links in the chain of trust, it takes a concerted effort on the individual's part to secure it.

The CEO of Cloudflare fell victim to this when someone CONVINCED AT&T TO REROUTE HIS VOICEMAIL, starting a chain of events that wound up with the interloper having complete control over Cloudflare and the myriad of sites that use CF (and therefore trust it to send legitimate data).

It's a bit exciting/fascinating to read about the chain of events, (particularly the timeline):

http://blog.cloudflare.com/the...

http://blog.cloudflare.com/pos...

I think there's a false assumption here--that separating students into different schools based on academic performance is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, such segregation would enable the schools to tailor their teaching to the needs of their respective students. So the higher-performing students aren't held back due to a lower-performing student, and the lower-performing students don't feel lost because the teacher has to trying to teach an arbitrary curriculum at an arbitrary speed.

There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.

While I agree with some of your points, I'll take issue with this statement. In my opinion, the lack of parental participation and school/legislative policy have degenerated in a vicious cycle. Schools try to do more to help kids, while discouraging/preventing parental influence on school policy. As a result, parents are less involved, which leads the school to do more, etc.

As for "day long day care" - so true. Look no further than the push for 4k and Head Start, which have repeatedly and consistently failed to produce lasting benefits, while costing taxpayers *billions*. There's no educational justification for it.

Does it include APIs for the NSA backdoors?

They didn't do it for NSA money, that was just gravy. They did it for Mossad money and got the NSA to chip in after the fact.

I'll start: "You blew it up! You BASTARDS!"

In business, they have a standard "due diligence", before any transaction is completed, both parties are given enough time to determine if the transacion is all it seems. On the internet, there's a site called letmegooglethatforyou.com. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Because if there's any place in the entire world where you want to put decommissioned WMDs, it's in the middle of a sea too large for effective policing and too shallow to put them out of the reach of wreck divers

First, you stop asking sefl-defeating questions. The question is not "how do you protect privacy when its out of your control", it's "how do I control things in order to increase my privacy" You ask how to maintain your privacy when your friends all have cameras, why do you have friends that pull out a camera at the drop of a hat again? You ask about protecting personal data that's collected by banks and companies that have horrible IT, why are you doing business with them again? Your privacy is literally your own business, and if you don't mind it, someone else will.

Not good enough for Cheney apparently

Ahh, then not Cheney, who had his implant broken precisely so that would be the only way to do it...