But you didn't respond to my suggestion that the video be retrievable only by court order. Don't you think that would mitigate a lot of the issues you mentioned?

the Federal government's control reaches into the crooks and nannies it was never supposed to reach

"Supposed" by whom? Some long-dead people?

I do think there is some misalignment between laws as written vs. current practice. But you should realize that bringing them together would most certainly result in more changes to the law, than to how they are practiced. For example, Social Security may or may not be particularly Constitutional, but it will get written into the Constitution long before it will be repealed. Most people want it.

I would say, no thanks. And that employees in the performance of their duty are in a different situation than ordinary people going about their private business (even if in a public space). I can't think of any good reason not to make this distinction.

That said I also think that access to "Cop-Cams" should be by court-order only. I don't think the police should be able to selectively choose whatever video supports their case, nor feel that they are being needless monitored constantly.

On a theoretical level, you're correct. On a personal level, the nose thing is pretty convincing. Give it a go, you'll see what I mean.

At some instant you are reeling from a punch to the face, and you have an awareness (a memory) of having asked for it 5 seconds previously in a heated philosophical argument. The problem is you have no way of directly experiencing those previous events from 5 seconds ago. It could be that the universe is just a snapshot of this precise moment, which includes sensations of memory, the appearance of slashdot, and the fear of being punched in the face.

There is no disproving this. But it also doesn't matter, since if nothing else the present does contain the perception of continuity, which is all that drives our choices even if continuity does exist. If we somehow discovered that we're just a dream or computer simulation, what does that actually change? What previous theory of existence does it displace?

"The focus should always be on how to think rather than a list of facts." That has been the conventional wisdom for a few decades now, but a big problem is that you can't measure things like "critical thinking" in the abstract. Thus the movement towards standardized testing. Nobody says to himself, "we should study lists of facts instead of how to think!" but they do see other nations pulling ahead of the US in standardized tests, and panic. Next thing you know, music and PE classes disappear, end education tends to become rather narrow. And of course, dropping standards does not really transform the *average* classroom into a scene from Dead Poets Society with people standing on the desks and being inspired.

Another day, another overblown headline. Quoting from the article, the questionable phrase is: "; focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; "

This is wide open to interpretation. Obviously it would be insane not to teach the scientific process. I think there are some who feel education has strayed too far from mastering basic facts into abstraction, such as "new math" instead of mastering times tables.

Anyway this is just one guy's brain fart and not a law. I am kind of curious what he meant by it though.

But he was right of course. There is no way to prove ground truth, such as the continuity of existence - it's just assumptions. Some people never grasp that, most others tire of thinking about it and move on. But not because they solved or proved anything.

Butting into somebody else's conversation just to blurt out that you don't understand it is silly.

Ha ha, you have a 16-drive array in your RV? Just when I thought people on slashdot weren't cool any more.

See this graph? That is what you are talking about - staying on the left half/third of that graph.

But like you said that is totally dwarfed by SSD.

Cloud backup of an 8GB drive? Egads.

I see, the amount of "Finished Motor Gasoline" was 134.5 BN, so I should have said "oil" instead of "gasoline."

In 2013, the United States consumed a total of 6.89 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average of 18.89 million barrels per day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so, 289 billion gallons.

Individual effort is precisely the wrong way to approach the problem. No individual has a measurable impact on the overall environment. The only thing that would work is manipulating the natural economic incentives that are pushing us towards disaster.

the effects on the environment are a side-effect, and comparatively small. If we decide to intentionally target the global environment, the effects could be much bigger.

We can only hope, but I find that extremely unlikely. How many dollars have been spent on dredging up carbon and dispersing it into the atmosphere in the last 200 years? The US spends a trillion dollars per year on gasoline alone, and the US is about 1/4 of world oil consumption (less by now). Global coal consumption is over 7 billion tons per year. That is a ton of coal for every man, woman, and child on earth, per year, every year, for decades on end.

What this means is even if we find some means of restoration that is 100 times as potent at cooling the planet as CO2 is in warming it, the task is incomprehensibly huge.

Here you go. (Jump to 3:36 if it doesn't do it for you).

Check out the sweet GPS Nav unit at 4:08 also.