Risk and reward. Poor kids are much better off pursuing low-risk, moderate-reward strategies rather than high-risk, high-reward strategies, because in the event of failure, they don't have anything to fall back on. The children of the upper middle class can aim for the stars, knowing that they won't end up in the mud if they miss. Climbing the ladder takes generations.

Plenty of CRT's left in hospitals. Lots of patient monitors are old but still work exactly as intended, so there's no particular reason to replace them. They're not used in radiology, though.

Similar math problem: imagine the Earth is a perfect sphere, and you have a band of steel running around the equator. You need to roll an orange under this steel band. How much steel do you need to add? Less than a meter.

Creative potential? It would be intellectually trivial to build a 6502 or Z80 in Minecraft - a simple matter of translating logic to redstone. Doing so would be an enormous amount of work akin to creating such a processor out of discrete transistors, but the creativity involved would be minimal and mostly involved with problems like how to allow circuits to cross paths.

The law is the law, right or wrong. You can rail against it night and day, but unless you can get 50%+1 of the legislators or judges to vote your way, your opinion isn't worth much.

MoO was pretty awesome, but Civilization is still the purest form of digital crack.

Don't give it too much credit. The circuit book was a bunch of wiring diagrams (connect pin 30 to pin 57) with schematics of the finished product, but it didn't actually explain what you were doing, why it worked, or why it was important. Decades later, I realized that it was actually capable of creating some pretty cool stuff (recognized the names of circuits), but by then it was long gone.

"Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a legal term of art. Don't expect it to bear any relationship to how anyone would normally interpret the phrase. As a trivial example, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in another person's home, even if they're not around.

No, you don't, because just like with email you entrusted a third party to deliver an unencrypted message for you. Completely erases your "reasonable expectation of privacy". Welcome to the law.

The content of your call may have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but the fact of the call does not.

Sorry man, misread your comment. Totally true.

SUV's are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger mile if you fill them up with people and stuff. They're just bad commuter vehicles.

All those suburban moms drive SUV's because it's a vehicle with a lot of utility - seats four in comfort, with plenty of room for luggage and supplies, plus you can use it for trucking things around. People buy cars to account for all their usage, not just the most common parts.

Because VistA is a pain to implement and maintain. Not every hospital has the IT resources of the federal government available. And it's not that easy to use.

So you want to live in coastal California, with all its conveniences and mild weather and high-paying jobs, but you want a night sky that looks like rural West Virginia?

I agree with you, but you're arguing with an AC who has a mindset that works very, very well in the sort of tribal environment in which our species evolved. Arguing with evolution may be satisfying, but it's rarely rewarding.