Actually, I'm pretty sure they are obligated to go, and in some states parents' drivers licenses can be revoked if their kids are truant.

if it wasn't a public school? Sure. Don't go snooping around my shit. Even if i've got nothing to hide I have a lot to be embarrassed about or just don't want people to know about.

What if the accused bully has entirely unrelated facts to hide? Say, closeted gay?

I suspect that knock-on effects mean this won't actually reduce bullying all that much, just spread the fun around. Also, to run with that theory, there's a reason kids tend to stay in the closet until they're out of their parents' house. In extremis, to avoid child abuse. In milder cases, they may otherwise end up sent by well-meaning parents to some hellhole of a "pray the gay away" camp or boarding school. Further, there are laws on the books protecting children in some states from having to disclose certain medical conditions to their parents - abortions, and in certain proposals I haven't heard about having gone anywhere (but I haven't heard go away) contraceptive implants may be added to that. I wonder which law will have an exception carved into it for the other's footprint?

Second point - why are public schools different?

Because it IS a public school? Yes. The rules are and should be different.

Why? How can your rights magically vanish by virtue of the fact that you attend public school? Especially your rights regarding your life OUTSIDE of school.

So only people who have enough money to attend private school have civil rights?

... Actually, that explains a lot.

I'm not even going to try to calculate the size of the ash pond, but here's what we have for the mountain of coalâ¦

I used the Embalse nuclear plant as a baseline, because it was the first thing I found on Wikipedia.

A coal-fired power plant producing the same 2109 MWt output would burn 2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year, for a fuel stockpile on site of 24,636,209,400 kilograms. If you prefer tons, Wolfram says that's 27,160,000. - 27 megatons and change. Since uranium in the core is the form it is used in, we shall assume this is powdered coal magically prevented from blowing away, perhaps with a water mist, or plastic sheeting.

The specific energy of coal is 24 MJ/kg; of TNT, a mere 4.6 - a 5.2-fold difference.

Allowing for this, the coal pile contains 141 megatons worth of energy.

While it might be infeasible to efficiently detonate this mountain of coal, odds are once a fire starts, it would be impossible to put out, forming a firestorm effect which may aerosolize enough powdered coal to cause a thermobaric explosion.

Even failing that, the result would approximate a particularly bad coal seam fire, and the surface area involved in combustion, as well as the open-air nature of the fire, would expose the local population to a manmade âoeevil windâ - substantial portions of the coal's mass would be released in the form of CO2 and other combustion gases, asphyxiating anyone unfortunate to be downwind of it. Assuming only 10 million tons of the coal is released in the form of CO2, the result is 3.932 cubic kilometers of heavier-than-air gas rushing downhill from the fire. This will not be released all at once, but instead will sustain the event, perhaps long enough to kill even the vegetation that isn't incinerated by the firestorm or simple radiant heat from an unexpectedly well-behaved fire that doesn't spark secondary blazes - which is a rather likely eventuality.

Granted that storing ten years of coal on-site at a powerplant is vanishingly unlikely, but when apples-to-apples comparisons are made the law of large numbers suggests that any calamity at a fuel dump of this magnitude - of any kind - is likely to be severe, if not a mass-casualty event.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania#Mine_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazuku

My math, for verification:

27 kJ / gram for bituminous coal

0.027 mJ/g

80620 kJ / gram for uranium

80.62 mJ/g

2109 MWt for the Embalse nuclear power plant

2986 times denser power

3.154Ã--107 seconds per year

31,540,000

2109/.027 = 78,111 grams per second

78111*31540000

2,463,620,940 kilograms of coal per year

P.S.: You're an ass.

A coal plant with ten years worth of coal stockpiled on site, plus a similarly sized ash pond, would be just as juicy a target.

We just don't have the technology to detect the toxins released by that remotely - except in so far as the coal ash is itself startlingly radioactive.

Or, perhaps, the doctor guessing wrong about antibiotics' necessity - we can either bitch about over-testing, or about doctors guessing wrong when it's not the most likely culprit, but not both without becoming hypocrites.

Also, when the testing involves allowing a disease to become more advanced while waiting for confirmation, that's a Bad Thing. When the test involves biopsying your testicles, that's also a Bad Thing. :-p

From what I'm told, malvertizements are the most common vector these days.

You may have missed the part about how he has no internet connection save for the Chromebook's integral LTE modem.

If not for that little hiccup, your solution would be quite adequate. If you do that this way, you run the risk of having to courier all of your father's print jobs to him. :p

I'm going to go on record that the real zombie apocalypse will probably happen when someone's prank accidentally infects everyone with a consumer-grade neural interface implant, and only the technical elite will be running NoScript on their hindbrains when it goes down.

:P

There's already lethal exploits for implanted insulin pumps that can be delivered wirelessly. How much do you want to bet that there's similar for pacemakers that I haven't yet read about?

Medical device scarcity is terrifyingly bad right now.

I'm pretty sure that's the business model embraced by Lowe's store-brand home automation gear.

A key component you're missing - we aren't the owners or operators of /.

A better analogy would be if /. could prevent us from typing those HTML tags into our browser anywhere once we've visited the page once.

Imagine the kind of software necessary to enforce such a measure upon end users' computers against their will, and you're a lot closer to understanding Doctorow's point.

But catching asteroids is actually fun...

I think that it's grounds for writing a grant proposal, in order to study gene therapy to tweak these things.

bonus points if you can kickstart my metabolism, while you're at it.

I absolutely do not.

However, I have every intention of raising my standard of efficiency.