Don't you seem to want it both ways too. You have to have some responsibility for your car. Ever see someone have a suspension collapse? That does not just happen, that happens because the dipshit could not be arsed to either look at or have someone look at the suspension to make sure it was not dangerously corded and that rubber bushings were not failing etc.

You can automate most aspects of something like a car, but this is a high performance machine that operates in a wide variety of weather and abusive conditions. It has to be serviced and inspected from time to time. dipshit who does no do that now isn't going to start when the thing becomes more automatic than it already is, (s)he will pay even less attention.

So the automaker supposed to be on the hook because YOU last decided to check break fluid six years ago?

Um not the loans are EXACTLY the problem. Tution grows without bounds because everybody smart enough to graduate from college does recognize it has great value, both in the direct economics of employable and the more intelligible things like connections with other people you make and knowledge and thinking skills that really will enable you to make better more informed decisions in the future.

A college education IS VALUABLE, exactly how valuable is difficult to quantify. So now you make large sums of unsecured monies available to young people many of whom have never seen or worked with an account balance that large before and surprise surprise they are willing to spend it. They don't have an appreciate for how much work it might be to pay that back. What they do see is that Crazy Go Nuts University has a new fancy new recreation facility and bigger dorm rooms than Podunk College. Its difficult to compare the actual education quality but dorm and recreation facilities are things you can see. Podunk has no choice if they want to continue to attract students they have to build these things.

In order to build that stuff they raise tuition, which they can because people are paying with loans anyway and everyone qualifies!

If it was not for government secured loans college cost expansion would probably mostly track with inflation. After all with the exception of some leading edge research schools, almost all the cost would be salary if you take away the billion dollar construction projects.

Price insensitivity is the reason costs have gone up, if you can't afford CGNU's 40K tuition you might very well choose Podunk's $12K tuition and lack of fancy building and giant rooms if the alternative is no college for you. If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.

Okay, but for the sake of argument Mass is an open carry state (with permit). I don't know the specific details because I don't live there.

Hypothetically if someone has a gun permit in Mass. and walks down a public street past a school, not on school grounds mind you, only the street in front of it, while having a gun on their hip or even their bushmaster for that matter can they be charged with "disrupting a s school".

  See I don't understand how doing something that without probably cause to suspect otherwise (ie you know the guy does not have permit) doing something that is most likely perfect legal on public, though not school grounds, in the vacinity of a school can be a crime. It sounds like "loitering" on of the laws that every municipality keeps on the books to hassle people with but rarely press whenever anyone lawyers up demonstrats intent to contest the matter rather than entering a quick plea of guilty. They know if fought to its logical conclusion that statute will be struck for vagueness.

I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.

If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.

I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.

Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.

My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.

Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.

Actually being in ones early 20s and male is highly correlated with auto accidents that is why the actuaries tell them to do that. Just like being in ones early 20s and female is highly correlated with requiring more frequent and more expensive medical care for a number of conditions including pregnancy.

For some reason though charging more for one is a prudent insurance practice and discrimination blocked by the ACA for another.

If you show positive for HIV the insurance company already has a problem. I think it would work more like this. You show positive for having once had the clap or have HPV. Now you are marked as someone who has/had risky sex, ie outside a monogmous relationship where your partners health status is known or unprotected sex with anyone else. Your risk of contracting something expensive to treat like herpes or HIV went from very low to reasonably possible. Now the insurance company has a good reason to get you off their books.

That is probably the most likely example I can think of.

I can't understand how why anyone chooses satellite service for Internet access. If they do they are somewhere so remote that Verizon does not have LTE service, they havent looked in years, or they are stupid.

Verizon's "Installed LTE" (fixed antenna on the outside of the building) is price and speed competitive with the sat com providers has essentially the same usage caps, without the latency an weather related problems.

My guess is Verizon and probably AT&T (why the hell does AT&T not have a similar offering currently?) will be better positioned to add capacity and than the SAT providers ever will. Its easier to shrink the size of cell by erecting another tower than to put up another bird. So the 15/20/30/60GB caps will lift on that side first.

If those caps get large enough that people can reasonably afford to do streaming media, and more Internet based offerings in addition to Netflix show up, my guess would be Direct TV and DIsh's days will be numbered.

Except that many of the founders and our first president were very much against the idea of the USA engaging in treaties and entanglements with other nations. The fact that they designed a system that would nearly always fail to reach such agreements isn't a surprise.

What I think is sad is rather than deal with it, either by embracing their wisdom and not making so many damned agreements, or by having a serious debate about the subject an amending the Constitution rather than running around it with 'Fast Track" authority legislative bunk.

The statement is largely true but the libertarian in me wishes to suggest that stopping the mob was the WRONG priority. The mob was doing plenty of things they could have been prosecuted for besides tax evasion, etc. The actual crimes like assaulting people should have put them away. Society would have been better served then as now, had 'we' gone after those corrupt officials protecting the criminals at all levels.

I'd feel safer having got one crooked cop off the street than I would removing 10 guys who sell a little weed and untaxed liquor now and then.

Finally private property, emphasis private is the very corner stone of all other freedoms. Interfering and spying on with reporting requirements with the exchange of money between individuals threatens that most basic freedom. Is a tool that can be used to detect crimes sure, but there are other ways to do that, and much like mass phone record collection I don't believe its one that is justified.

I think its an interesting idea but as you say congress would be almost entirely bogged down in re-upping existing /good/ laws. Even if a vote to 're-approve the federal statute against murder' takes only 60 seconds to execute you still won't get much done in a congressional session.

What I think might be more interesting is to require every legislative act to have preamble like the Constitution does. It should be required to be written in plain language at a 4th grade reading level, stating the acts broad objectives and intent. After say a period of 5 years anyone who is subject to the law should be permitted to challenge it in federal court for 'performance'. If the court finds the Act:

does not materially satisfy the objectives in its preamble
OR
has material unintended consequences (positive or negative the court should not be permitted to make a value judgement)
OR
has been materially used be the Executive for purposes not covered by the preamble

the law should be vacated.

A sentence of "cowboy neal" would violate his rights to be free from "cruel and unusual punishment"

The trouble if you are OBL type is that people are only so dumb. You can convience them to die for the cause but far fewer want to volunteer for a job that most like will result in their being captured not killed and living out there days being force fed at camp X-Ray.

IMHO the real vulnerability is the security line itself and the Boston bombing proves it. You can pack plenty of explosive to cause all kinds of carnage in bag that will plausibly be allowed as a carry on. Pick a busier airport, wait until you are in the middle of the security queue with people cordoned all around you in a big mass and BOOM! Most of these airports haven't got high ceilings and the screening area is in a corridor like space to prevent people from bypassing it. Look what the bomb in Boston did outdoors, think what harm it would do to people indoors!

Such an act would certainly have the effect of terrifying people, of going anywhere near an airport and probably anywhere else they might be forced to queue. Is it as spectacular as slamming a airliner into sky scraper, nope, but if executed well still stands to kill or maim 1000 people give or take. It will still make folks afraid to travel with all the associated knock-on economic impacts. The current system does nothing to defend against this type of thread in fact it makes it far more likely.

The whole cockpit door thing has more or less eliminated the reason a terrorist might have any interest of bringing weapons on a aircraft. If you can't control the plane anymore than all that is left to you is a Libyan style attack where you attempt to cause the plane to crash over a populated area. I suppose you might just want to transport weapons to an unrelated target as well but even the stupidest terrorists has to realize that there are ways to transport weapons with much lower detection risk than by airline. So I just don't see airliners being probably targets any more, when the airport offers a high probability of success, and will make a fine spectacle.

Another thing that must be kept in mind is this is not some issue about funding some obscure little program to feed a certain variety of pigeon in a specific park some place. This is in fact a large news making issue that the public has become quite familiar with it, its also an issue that is closely tied to very fundamental questions about who we are as nation, and what the Constitution means in the 21st century..

You can't be POTUS and not have a strong opinion on an issue like this, Its your job as leader to form one even if you don't have personal convictions. Obama can't duck this one and be fulfilling his responsibilities any more than an umpire can refuse to call "ball" or "strike".

You are either for it, and should be willing and able to articulate why or you are against and ought to be willing to take a strong position there too.

For or against as President in a post Snowden political landscape he owes us more than backing the USA FREEDOM ACT, which as near as I can tell changes nothing other than who owns the building the hard-drives sit in and some nonspecific language about "tools to fight the terrorists".

I would expect much like digital telephony lag is not much of challenge to overcome unless its really really big.

Jitter would be a problem. The human brain is pretty good at adapting to consistent latency, anticipating events, delaying or cramming inputs as required to compensate. Where that breaks down is when the latenecy is sometimes 200ms and other-times 500ms without predictability. Controlling jitter on the public parts of the Internet is hard.

Yes the Windows 3.1x UI was pretty terrible, but NDW (Norton Desktop Windows) replaced a number of shell functions (file pickers, etc), the file manager, gave you desktop icons, a task bar along with user definable buttons, multiple 'views' (list, detail, icon, etc) for program groups and directories, a powerful scripting environment and more.

Windows 3 was damn near unusable without it. It was actually probably the best UI out there with it.