And all that stuff is open to the public internet consuming Verizon bandwidth? You must have a dedicated security team. :)

"I was only following orders." is not usually a valid criminal defense, it just adds conspiracy charges.

Yes, this is the general class of error where you need to think about making the individual user's experience less flexible than would be possible for a single-user system. For a concrete example, if a user activity can cause sustained high usage of system resources such as memory or CPU, and enough users "abuse" this feature, it will bring down usability/performance/system response for the majority of the users and should probably be re-thought.

For an example of a user feature that can be damaging to the system as a whole for a read operation: what if your application has an ad-hoc query interface that end users can access, or even just a search interface that allows poorly indexed queries... A user can generate queries that require full table scans or queries that return large result sets (or both). Enough users doing this could consume mass quantities of application memory to hold their result sets or I/O time on the DBMS scanning the tables. This in turn would bring overall system performance down for all users if you run up against physical capacity limits on the DB server or the application server.

In such a case it could be better to eliminate the feature rather than optimize it. If a feature is available, you can bet your users will "abuse" it to the extent that it negatively impacts other users.

It's because of people like you that we can't have nice things (service).

Nice to see your business is going so well, though.

Well, that plus the fact that by sending an unencrypted email that is stored on the mail servers of an unknown number of ISPs and mail forwarders, they are (probably) violating the privacy notice that says they are only sharing his data with affiliated parties, government, etc.

I was going to suggest S/MIME backed by certificates issued by a low-cost/free certificate authority (this would be a good service for the Open ID foundation or Amazon to get into, since they already have a widely-used SSO service), but based on the discussion above, that solution isn't 100% reliable, so I'd like to hear some ideas that:
* are easy for stupid/lazy/cheapskate users and merchants to use
* guarantee authentication (signing) and encryption, excluding the message routing. I'm not proposing a mail anonymizer service.

It would also help if gmail would implement this as a feature. They're big enough they could act both as certificate authority and mail server.

I'm pretty sure the felony prosecution is bogus, considering what Polk county is like in general. But I'm going to set the race debate aside, since no one is going to change any minds on that subject anyway. What I'm looking at are:
1) The explosion was "small" but was apparently big enough to be heard pretty far away. This wasn't a test-tube "pop" experiment with hydrogen. On the other hand, no damage to people or property was reported. So "was it bigger than a firecracker?", "was it bigger than a cherry bomb?". And what prosecutions for other commercially available "explosive devices" have taken place in Florida in the past? You know those cases must be out there. Fireworks are sold legally in most parts of FL and all it takes is an adult stupid enough to provide the fireworks to an equally stupid kid.

2) She elected to do it on school grounds and not in the science lab or at home. I think this was more of "let's reproduce that YouTube video" and less "science experiment" than is being claimed. OTOH, it clearly was an _experiment_ and not an attempt to actually damage anything.
3) We have no information on what, if any, safety precautions she had in place. Being a teenager, probably none, but we don't know.
4) There's a strong hint that she's protecting another kid here. If she was just doing it on her own, she could have done it nearer to her home. I bet they'd drop all charges if she coughed up a name, and it wouldn't surprise me if the overblown response is just a form of coercion because the authorities have the same suspicions.

From my POV for a expulsion, I'd be looking for something like a 1/4 stick of dynamite sized explosion, and for a felony prosecution, I'd be looking for actual damage to body or property. There's certainly enough intent and stupidity on her part here to justify a suspension and maybe a misdemeanor prosecution for attempting to cover it up as a "science" experiment, but I don't see evidence to go beyond that.

One unfortunate choice the linked press release makes is the phrasing: "Until now, scientists had only theorized the cause behind the phenomenon known as LED “droop” ". This just plays into the hands of people who complain that the Theory of Gravity and Theory of Evolution are "only" theories".

Correct phrasing: "Until now, scientists had only hypothesized the cause..."

You can only pour through the gaps after your brain has been turned to mush by the unintelligible documentation. This could take some time.

Remember a few years ago when weather.com and The Weather Channel tried to make the National Weather Service stop issuing free public satellite imagery and forecasts?

Any chance that NOAA/NWS satellite funding was cut to achieve their objective of privatizing the weather service by less-direct means?

Nah, our noble legislative branch would NEVER do something underhanded like THAT...

Screw the realities of advertising. If a site is willing to risk infecting their viewers and themselves for a few extra bucks a month, and they block me for using NoScript, they (and their advertisers) don't deserve my business.
https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092810-study-top-web-sites-riskier.html

Unfortunately we're too late. At this point a hellfire would probably have no visible effect on her appearance.

I note that the key phrase of the filibuster is about "killing Americans on American soil". So neither Republicans nor Democrats have a problem with killing Americans abroad? I think I better cancel that trip to Germany. What a subtle way to enforce travel restrictions while seeming to allow freedom of movement [/hyperbole]

Seems like trade between the US and China DOES affect politics and policy: we're becoming more totalitarian and restrictive even faster than China is opening up.

I'm mostly with you except on the point where you call your opponents angry whiners...I thought the point of this thread was that partisan politics are part of the problem. The lack of outcry against the growth of executive power under both Bush and Obama is insane. Bush 1 was a bit excusable by post 9/11 hysteria, but for the past 8-10 years, it's been clear that this is more about control and power than about fixing real security problems. What I envision is the entire intelligence community freaking out because they can't intercept all the information anymore and trying to regain control of the "situation".

OTOH, I'm not familiar with the "three new wars" that you claim Obama has launched. Care to elaborate?

PS - If you have land in Florida and you favor Republican energy and environmental policy, you may need to think things out a bit more. OTOH if you don't believe that sea level rise will affect property values in Florida during your children's lifetime, I'll be happy to sell you mine.

Actually, I think it's just shady self-interest and preserving the status quo. They will dump their support for any particular special interest in a flash, if that group stops providing value to them in furthering their own ambition.