Ok. SolarCity then.

They out of sight, out of mind. Further, there's really no one to regulate them. Most ocean going boats are registered in countries with the least stringent of regulations and neither the motivation nor ability to do otherwise.

Frankly, if ever there was a case to be made for nuclear power, it would be these boats.

You have to start some where. Everyone likes to poke at China, but last I checked, per-capita the U.S. is still the world's largest polluter. China carries roughly half the world's solar panel production and is second only to Germany in installed capacity. As an investor in renewables, China is well in the lead of ever other nation.

Ocean going vessels to my understanding have basically no pollution controls on them nor emission standards that they must follow. Consequently they make up some of the worst sources of environmental pollution. Ideally they'd be nuclear powered, but even if they were to implement even basic pollution controls they'd make a world (pun intended) of difference.

I admire your courage to look eminent peril in the face and say "I shall refrain from salvation, from optimal solutions for they are found whereupon the slippery ground resides. I shall stick to my principles and hold tight to the letters of old come what may. Compassion, facts, evidence, fear be damned the pen strokes of men long turned to dust shall be my rod, my compass till I join them in perpetual slumber at the end of my journey."

Setting aside your straw men... I perceive that your position is basically the same as most everyone else providing such speech. "Don't tread on my but let me tread upon you in what ever manner suits my taste." The founding fathers for whom you purport to hold esteem also held to the belief that government should be represented by and for the purpose of the interests of it citizens. Yet, your position, your arguments, all run scared from any notion that would result in you ceding control over any facet of your life to government. If your position was taken at face value and implemented accordingly you would come away with having precious little control. Notions of beverage size would be a distant memory. In its place would be countless individuals operating according to their own principles treating and being treated as paving stones to be tread upon.

Thank you though for that amusing citation of HIPPA though. In any other context, a piece of legislation that your kind would hold up as the quintessential definition of government overreach. I'm assuming you read it right? No? I'll give you a hint, the privacy bit was but a pinch of sugar to make the medicine go down. It really had little to do with the bulk of that legislation.

Uh oh. Careful. Citing the 10th amendment and all. That sounds suspiciously like big government adding to what the Constitution says. Our illustrious founding fathers must be rolling in their graves.

If only it would apply its IQ to targeting those without much of one.

With all due respect to the "framers," I don't give a damn what the "framers" had in mind. They were not gods, they were far from infallible and most certainly not soothsayers. What they had in mind was a pre-industrial revolution society with its concerns and ambitions.

What they penned on paper gave this country a starting point, but it in no way should be the conclusion. The farther we travel in time from the point of their authorship the more limited the scope of understanding those documents will have. A cursory examination of government at every level will quickly testify to this point.

In modern society no man is an island unto himself. The activities of a person will with near certainty have consequences for others to some degree whether good or bad. You hold up a soft drink cup as an example of absurdity. Allow me to illustrate how it is otherwise. The reality is that that 64oz soft drink is of course not the first and only incident of reckless over consumption of sugar but rather a example of a lifestyle of over consumption. At some point this lifestyle begins to manifest health consequences for which medical care is required such as for diabetes and coronary disease. The cost of which saps money from the person's respective health insurance pool and/or increases the hospital's un-reimbursed expenses. Either of which end up driving up costs for everyone else in the healthcare system. Along the way, numerous people have been inconvenienced by incidents both significant and otherwise whether by their larded person spilling out from the boundary of their airplane seat into yours or simply by disgusting them with their lack of personal care.

If the activities of a person have negative consequence on others it becomes their concern. In modern society the central agency through which these concerns are redressed is government.

It isn't always about primitives--bubble sorts, linked lists and the like. Theory deals far more broadly.

You would be surprised to see how many interviews you can cut short by asking questions like: "what is the purpose of inheritance in OOP?" or, "You are told that you are going to be assigned to a project involving a number of technologies for which you currently have no knowledge. How would you prepare?"

Self-taught, while not always, usually means all syntax and APIs but precious little theory except that which is obtained through osmosis. Due to the "you don't know what you don't know" factor this limits not only the domain of problems that can be solved but the efficiency, robustness and maintainability of their solutions. Most often they reflect a focus on too many trees and far too few forests. A reflection similar to their decision to try to shortcut their way around the prerequisite of a formal education.

Mean while anyone having to work with them or their products is forced to waste time waiting for the reinvention wheels as well as fixing or working around their messes.

Learning syntax and APIs are one thing. Maybe you're particularly adept at that. However, this is only a fraction of what makes a good software engineer. Theory is critical to their application. The development of robust, efficient, and maintainable software more than just knowing how to mash the keyboard and hit "compile". The theory of application for those APIs, the theory underlying data structures and algorithms, theories of architecture, etc.. With out these your projects will suffer as you constantly reinvent the wheel and "learn from your mistakes." Yet, those who went the self-teaching route most often skip the theory, skip the mental exercise, narrowly focusing on syntax and APIs.

I'm not saying a college degree is a perfect accommodation for producing best of breed software engineers. I think many colleges are missing the mark on providing necessary experiences encountered by those in the trenches. So much of the course work feels like bringing a tank to a knife fight and it provides a distorted sense of reality that undermines the point of what they're learning.

The mandate would force everyone onto the network and provide a common attack surface. I can't wait for the fun to begin. Here's a teaser.

I'm not sure how Slashdot became a place for shopping advice but... This really isn't that hard. Most places such as Amazon, Newegg, etc. have customer reviews. Select from the ones having large number of overwhelmingly good reviews. As an FYI, particularly with phones, OEM batteries are in many (most?) cases salvaged from used devices, and are not new. If you insist on going the with OEM batteries, then only buy from the OEM unless customer reviews provide a compelling case otherwise.