I assume by "children" you mean "legal children," i.e. minors. I say this because the whole thread is about the legal construct of person-hood.

We are already well on our way there. In most of the United States, minors between the ages of 6 and 17 (or more in certain situations) are entitled to a free public education. Minors of all ages (including people 18 or over with court-appointed guardians) are entitled to be free of abuse by their parents or guardians. Minors who have sufficient mental capacity (typically teenagers, but sometimes younger) have a voice and sometimes a de facto veto in custody hearings.

Most - but not all - societies treat children and the developmentally disabled as "special cases" when it comes to personhood - someplace above even the most intelligent non-human animal but somewhere below that of an adult with all of the rights and responsibilities that come with being an adult.

Having the right 46 chromosomes (or having parents or grandparents, or not-too-far-back-great-grandparents with them) pretty much gives you a free pass on having to qualify as a legal person. Corporations and other "non-human" legal persons do not get this "free pass."

If someone presented a chimp to the court with an IQ of 100 (i.e. that of an average adult) and that same chimp was clearly able to communicate and comprehend things at the level of an average adult, any court using this ruling's logic would be hard-pressed to deny that particular chimp the status of personhood. It might not grant it the status of a "legal adult," but that's another question.

But what if someone presented a particular chimp that functioned at the level just above (but indisputably above) where an 18-year-old human would need to function to avoid having a court appoint a guardian? In practical terms, we are talking the equivalent of someone with a 70s or low-80s IQ, a proven ability to make reasonable financial and other adult personal decisions, a proven general understanding of what is going on in the world similar to that of someone with a 70s- or low-80s IQ, etc. What then?

We already have primates that can communicate with humans in a human language (American Sign Language or something similar) at the level of a child. How close are we to being able to teach a chimp or other primate the skills needed to pass the "able to take on the responsibilities of personhood" test to the satisfaction of a court of law?

There are already some ways to get some of the benefits of https: without all of the costs, and I'm sure ingenious people will figure out other work-around as well. In the meantime, from where I sit the benefits of https: generally outweigh the costs.

Let's take caching as a trivial example that doesn't require much ingenuity to figure out:

Let's say I run an https: web site. Let's say I want to run a content-delivery-network for my images, ads, and most other content but I want to maintain control of the main index.html file and of a few other "embedded" items. The end user loads the https://.../index.html. Based on the customer's IP address the index.html file will include https: links to nearby CND-offered images, ads, etc. Since the CDN's URL will have a valid certificate, there won't be certificate issues for these items. As long as the end user's web browser tolerates an https: web site embedding content from a different https: web site this will work.

* To be cooked by CowboyNeal
* To be taste-tested by CowboyNeal
* To be eaten by CowboyNeal
* To be a genetic hybrid of a bird and CowboyNeal

Please add your own to the list.

There are some things that clearly disturb the general public to the point where the police are justified in stopping as it is happening due to the specifics of the situation but which should not be criminal offenses thanks to the First Amendment. In other words, the speech should be "partially protected" - if the police tell you to stop saying such and such in a particular situation, and you refuse to comply, then a charge of disorderly conduct may be in order, but if you do comply and go and say the same exact words in a different environment where a reasonable person wouldn't foresee that those hearing your words would react in a way that is criminal, the police shouldn't be allowed to touch you.

A hypothetical (I hope) example would be a person bent on inciting mischief (or even a person with no such motive but a huge lack of awareness of human behavior) going to a large, not-all-that-well-organized protest against the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and saying quite loudly that "poor people should be allowed to walk into any store and take what they want" while not saying anything that sounds like "let's go raid the store across the street now" (that would be inciting others to commit a crime, which is likely already in the "not protected" category).

The police should rightly be able to order the person "cease and desist" as a reasonable person would view the words said in that specific context where the crowd is both large and not following a single leader as likely to incite at least one protester to commit a criminal act (note that this assumption that the words plus the situation would likely result in a criminal act likely wouldn't hold if the crowd was small or the number of people not respecting the protest's leader's instructions were small). If the same person then wrote those exact same words in a newspaper column or a blog, and took no specific actions to make sure that his words were seen by the protesters, then the police should leave him alone, he's just stating his opinion.

Now, we as a society have to be very careful about this. When in doubt, leave people alone to say what they want. If the end result is violence or other criminal acts, then the next time someone says something similar in a similar situation, the police will be able to rightly claim "history has taught us that if we don't get this person to pick a better time and place to speak his peace, criminal acts are likely to occur."

A similar situation exists with speech that is directly threatening:
* Does it actually cause someone to fear for their life or safety?
* Would a reasonable person see that the person's words, delivered in the manner in which they were delivered, cause a person to fear for their life or safety?
* Given the entire situation, is it crystal clear after the fact that there was a clear, actual, intentional, credible threat?

If the first two questions are yes and the 3rd is no, then the proper police response is to shut the guy down and tell him to find a different way of communicating the same message. Of course, if all 3 are true then that's already covered by existing statutes and case law.

Bull****. Federal sentencing guidelines almost never ask for "fully stacked" sentences. Instead, you wind up with X months for the "top count" and a significant "discount" of additional time for each additional count that is either proven or conceded. For a single count, the maximum sentence is almost never handed out unless there are other factors in play. So let's say this guy did admit to all 44 charges and accept a guilty plea on all 44 counts, and that there were no other factors that counted for or against him under the sentencing guidelines. The guidelines would probably recommend that he get a few years for the first count, a year or two more for each of counts 2 and 3, and a month or two for each additional count, likely resulting in a sentence in the 10-15 year range.

If you MUST have a remote-control door lock, make it something that requires very close physical proximity that is very hard to override.

For example, have a receiver that is on the car-facing side of the door handle using a very-near-field communications setup. You swipe your "key" under the handle and the door locks or unlocks.

Yes, it might be possible for a thief to make a small "reflector" and tape it to your car door near the handle, but that's one more step he'll have to go through and one more opportunity for him to be caught or leave his fingerprints behind. Plus, unlike today, the thief can't just sit in a parking lot all day collecting "sample transmissions" for later analysis/reverse-engineering.

Close. I forgot to say "without anything except the laptop and - when the battery is low - a power cord."

That same machine with one of the internal drives replaced by the SSD would be perfect, assuming of course that it fit within my budget and met my other needs (not to heavy, not too big, not too small, etc.).

[The following is for casual readers NOT you or other Slashdotters as you guys already know this]

Regarding portability: Not only must the computer be bootable over the USB (i.e. not someone else's computer with a locked-down BIOS) but the "core" device drivers required to use that computer must be pre-loaded on all the OSes. I've had brand-new computers not boot common Linux ISOs without special tweaks on the command line due to issues with video or other drivers. I've had brand-new computers refuse to boot Windows install/rescue/etc. disks/external-drives and/or boot them but not "see" the hard drive without either customizing the install disk, loading device drivers manually, or going into the BIOS and changing settings to decrease the hardware's performance. The biggest "gotchas" these days will probably be the USB 3 chipsets (the fix is to just find a USB 2 port and suffer the performance it) or the video driver (the fix is to use "safe"/"low resolution"/"low performance"/"generic" boot options if you can).

There once was a cult which was into flashy colors.

To be fair, a lot of relatively sane people were into flashy-colored web sites at the time.

The "big win" for solid-state for a lot of applications is shock-resistance.

Most server racks, desktops, and set-top-boxes outside of earthquake zones don't have this requirements but anything mobile does.

Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.

Well, practically everything. Except on machines where they control the BIOS, they can't tell what happens if I power off, disconnect the network cable, and boot up with another device.

They also can't tell if I use the monitor as a place to hold the sticky note with my password on it. Now, the security team that comes around and night checking for sticky notes with passwords on the other hand....

Companies with job openings have a choice in the free market:

* They can raise salaries or otherwise improve the work environment, which has the effect of "poaching" from those who would choose to do other kinds of work instead (plus a few who might choose to not do paid work at all such as would-be stay-at-home parents)
* They can lower their requirements, which increases the qualified applicant pool
* They can decide they would rather leave the position unfilled or eliminate the position entirely, and use the money they saved for some different purpose, such as creating non-technical-jobs or technical buying goods and services from overseas
* They can try to import or create talent that is willing to work for below-market wages or work in below-what-is-acceptable-by-society working conditions

I bolded the first one because it cuts to the heart of any real "shortage" that might exist - if companies do that, then they will either steal from other employers and/or related industries, possibly creating a similar shortage there, or entice young adults to get the training they need to enter this career field. The first is the free job market at work but it does nothing to eliminate the "overall" shortage of talent across all affected employers/industries. The latter is desirable but only if it doesn't create shortages in the industries that these students would otherwise go into upon graduation.

The second option isn't always an option - lowering your standards for employment may do far more harm than paying more or eliminating the position.

Barring legal or other barriers to trade, the third option - exporting the work to another country - is frequently viable. However, quality control and other issues may be harder to control than doing the work in-house. Caveat employer.

Now, the open question is how much of the "shortage" is real - that is, how much would "appear" to be solved by just raising wages but which would really amount to playing musical chairs with existing American talent - and how much is "artificial" - that is, how much could be filled by existing American talent that is currently unemployed or under-employed and which can't get a job because employers rig job descriptions so they "aren't qualified" or because employers offer salaries that they know no American will accept but which they know a non-American would be happy to accept?

In other news, stores call the police when they see a patron beating her kid to a pulp but they do not call the police when someone buys a single pre-paid cell phone or gift-prepaid-debit-card when they know or should know that terrorists use burner cell phones and prepaid debit cards.

Governments pull people over if they see a kid tied to the roof of a car going down the highway but they don't pull over someone whose trunk lid is shut even though they know good and well that terrorists carry weapons in their car trunks.

To the few of you who think I seriously advocate a police state, yes, I'm being sarcastic.

After 9/11 America became much less of a free country. True, this started earlier. The ramping up of the "police state" after the terrorism of the 1st Twin Towers bombing and the domestic threat demonstrated by a couple (or three?) kooks in Oklahoma City in 1995 didn't help. Treating strong encryption like munitions in the 1990s almost certainly scared off some scholars and computer professionals from wanting to make their careers in America.

I'm not saying things were better before then - the Red Scare era of the 50s and 60s had a domestic aura of "what is good for the government is good for the country" about it. Vietnam and the rest of the '60s saw that crumble at least in part. From a "you can come to America, research what you want, and not have to worry that the government will try to shut you down by any method other than cutting your government funding" perspective the 70s and 80s and maybe the 90s were probably better than the 21st century and better than the 50s and 60s for anyone working outside areas where the primary application would be military or national-defense.