Actually, gas is getting people further today. My current Civic is a nicer car than my first car, and gets about double the number of miles per gallon.

If you're going to drop the value to zero suddenly, it doesn't really matter that much whether you financed or not. You still need to come up with the money to replace the car, whether you already spent the money or still owe some.. Personally, I've got insurance to cover the expense (minus the $1K deductible).

I observed three K-12 schools in Minneapolis fairly closely for thirteen years recently, and I saw nothing like that.

It isn't just line losses, it's also line capacity.

AC current isn't on steadily, and so the RMS voltage is about 70% of the maximum voltage. DC is steady, and so it can make full use of the voltage capacity of the line.

Another problem DC faced was switching. It has to be possible to turn connections on and off. It's harder when high voltage is going through, and AC has momentary zero-voltage points.

Most of what I know about electrical power transmission is from a job I had about fifteen years ago, so I don't know what switching technology is available.

Actually, scientists and academics have historically not gotten much respect. During and after WWII, there was a strong feeling that we needed science in the Cold War and Space Race, and they got a burst of respect, which seems to have run out. Anti-intellectualism runs deep in the US psyche.

If you're working on a solution for a user problem, then, yes, the user knows at least what the goal is. That's not how Apple became that rich.

Suppose Jobs noticed people with MP3 players and asked them what they thought would be better. They wouldn't have described the iPod. If he'd asked people with smart phones, they wouldn't have described the iPhone. The iPad is somewhat different, as I've seen a lot of similar concepts floating around (Star Trek, for example), but a focus group concentrating on designing Star Trek PADDs would not have come up with the iPad.

This approach has high risks and potential rewards. If you guess right, and Jobs usually did, you can just stand there and suffocate in the money people throw at you. If you guess wrong, you do something like write off nearly a billion dollars of Surfaces.

Okay, so whyTF did the company decide to fire the guy without going through the agreed-on procedure? The union may have had good reason to fear arbitrary firings (people are fired for illegal reasons all the time), and written consultation on firing into the contract. Instead, the company decided that it was more convenient to break the contract they signed rather than comply and take further steps if the union didn't do the intelligent thing, and that's the union's fault?

Unions have caused abuses, although I suspect in much lower numbers than management has, but this is not one of them.

RMS appears to think that making a living writing software is a fine thing, as long as you don't write software that is released under a proprietary license, and that really doesn't concern most programmers. He has also supported the "dual license" model of MySQL: release your stuff under GPL, and sell a license to use it in proprietary software for money to support the project and developers.

It's perfectly legal to take photographs from a public place. Google cars normally stay on public roads, so their operations are legal. Google has had legal problems when the cars left public roadways and drove onto driveways and the like. There are limits on what somebody can do to observe; courts have held, for example, that police can't use things like infrared imaging to tell what's going on inside a dwelling without a warrant.

The air above my back yard up to at least 83 feet is not a public place.

There is no Constitutional right to privacy against a private party, but there's nothing against a government passing laws against invading privacy.

From the stuff I've seen, you have an expectation of privacy when you can't be seen by another person outside your property. In a flat area, a six-foot privacy fence should do that.

I think you'll find that hitting a fairly small airborne object gets real difficult pretty fast as it goes up. If it's out of shotgun range, you're very unlikely to hit it with a rifle, and falling rifle bullets are a real danger.

Automatic updates for non-savvy users are overall a good thing, I'll agree. Set it as the default, and have no immediately obvious way to disable it (put it in a control panel somewhere) and you've got the non-savvy users on automatic updates. Then it's up to Microsoft to avoid screwing over these people too much, if they can manage. I'd rather deal with the updates on my own schedule, and I'd rather not have to pay extra to get that.

So, if your potential boss or landlord or police officer doesn't recognize that people change, what the heck do you do?

I never did any of that. I was a well-behaved kid, which means I'd have a permanent advantage over you in the real world. I assume you learned eventually not to do that sort of thing, so it's not really relevant to who you are now, which means my advantage would be undeserved.

Life lessons that don't affect you before they've ruined your life are not valuable. If you can't get a job at 25 because of a stupid thing you did at 14, how does that help you become a better person?