It's hard to re-direct an x-ray once it's made, but typical X-Ray tube Bremsstrahlung sources are fairly directional to start with. Orient the tube in the right direction, and you can be standing in far lower flux than your target. The Cobalt-60 sources used for industrial radiography to X-ray whole buildings (while keeping the operator shielded) would also be nasty in the wrong hands.

Yes, they are considered fundamental/"elementary" by the same logic that the others are: that they are not themselves built of other fundamental particles.

Plus the gauge bosons (photon, gluons, W, Z), and the Higgs, which seem to have escaped your memory. Apparently, the Standard Model particles are a bit harder to memorize than you think...

Perhaps everyone interested in computers with parents willing and (financially) able to support that interest... but, in reality, for the overwhelming majority of kids, the Apple II in school (or other school computer lab device) was their first and only chance to use a computer (to even find out if they were interested). A C64 at $595 in 1982 is equivalent to ~$1400 today (depending on how you inflation adjust) --- a pretty hefty chunk of money for a "kid's toy" in a world before computer use would be widely recognized by the general public as a vital skill.

The efficient solution --- that relies on self-organizing cooperation in the crowd, rather than technocratic intervention, is that while a person has their phone attached to the charger, they let everyone else line up and make 2-minute calls on it. When the phone is fully charged (or they tire of standing around sharing it), they step aside and let someone else volunteer to provide the "community phone." If you don't want to share your phone, then you've got zero priority for the charging station over those willing to share. I suspect a lot of ad-hoc groups will spontaneously figure some arrangement similar to this out.

Katrina makes a good example. Consider the 26,000 people packed into the Superdome in uncomfortable conditions. During the period, there were a lot of (often highly racist) media reports describing the mass carnage and hundreds of deaths that must be occurring with so many lowlifes crammed together. The final tally from the Wikipedia article:

Civil disturbances in the form of violence and looting against private property / stores doesn't particularly support a thesis that people don't band together for egalitarian resource distribution. From a crowd perspective, store owners hoarding food/medicine for profit while masses starve *are* the obnoxious assholes setting themselves against the greater public good. Disregard for profit and hoarded private property does not show a breakdown of civil sharing of limited resources: hoarding property to protect personal wealth is itself a breakdown in human civility in times of disaster. A self-organizing egalitarian "crowd mentality" would say it's time to throw open the doors and freely distribute vital supplies to the whole community. Note in your linked article on "hurricane Sandy shootings" that there were *no deaths* actually reported, just resistance against shop owners and police protecting the hoarding of supplies.

For actual disaster scenarios, there is abundant evidence that ad-hoc groups of strangers often cooperatively self-organize moderately effectively rather than degenerate into massive murderous brawls. There have been lots of disasters that cast groups of hundreds to thousands of people into resource-limited refugee situations; these rarely turn into bloodbath riots --- typically, you'll see far more efficient and egalitarian distribution of resources (regardless of race/gender/socioeconomic status) than you're likely to encounter in "normal" society. You'll always have a few especially obnoxious assholes, but they rarely succeed in much more than turning the crowds' antipathy towards themselves. Rude, self-entitled behavior is far more likely to be tolerated over "frivolous" resources like a concert ticket than over food, water, shelter, and communications in an emergency with a crowd of strangers.

Have a lot of riots broken out around park benches recently? How many people get punched in the face for sitting on a bench reading a newspaper too long on a crowded morning? Folks generally manage to not go berserk over lack of access to other first-come, first-serve public accommodations; what's so special about these phone charging stations? Anyone on the verge of punching someone over charging time (that they could get at home, work, or a cafe) is likely going to find some other reason to punch someone anyway.

Fair enough; I suspect you're right that, once Apple II's were well past their expiration date, playing 'Number Munchers' and 'Oregon Trail' wouldn't seem so cool to kids with access to a Nintendo at home (or at least at a friend's house). Of course, hating what authority tells you to do is sometimes quite an incentive to get interested in what even outdated hardware can do --- once you learn more about operating computers in the school computer lab than your teachers know, you can cause all sorts of amusing troubles for authority. Perhaps Microsoft will unintentionally drive a new generation of kids to enthusiasm for jailbreaking and hacking administrative access controls; perhaps a better outcome than teaching kids to be happily complacent towards the corporate authoritarianism embedded in their newest shiny smartphone doodads.

Remembering the time when Apple was pushing Apple II's in schools, I sure don't recall kids "hating it" because they felt "forced to use something" --- for the majority of kids, it was their first and only opportunity to use a computer at all. Playing those Apple II games was something new and exciting, that they'd be unlikely to have access to at home (without both well-off and technologically cutting-edge parents).

In this case, however, I agree with you --- a lot of kids (pretty much all of them from a middle class socioeconomic background) will already have seen better computers (or even have one in their pocket). Dumping crappy cheap tech on schools for a tax writeoff and some publicity isn't particularly going to be awe-inspiring for the kids. But, it will stall school administrations from considering switching to less Microsoft-centric platforms for at least a few more years; and, even if the kids don't like it, they'll be blocked from learning much about alternatives when they have to do classwork in Microsoft Office instead of [insert superior alternatives here].

Gravitons are not a Standard Model particle, though you can tack them on to the Standard Model to partially explain some gravitational behavior (though not without introducing mathematical problems). The link between Standard Model (and variants) field theories and General Relativity is still missing: one can calculate how particles act within gravitationally bent spacetime, but there is no "microscopic" model for how particles themselves bend the spacetime around them as you approach high enough energies for that to be relevant.

You're talking about Wikipedia: note, Wikipedia isn't ad-laden! Despite serving up a huge volume of material, Wikipedia manages to do so on a community-supported model without advertising and tracking scumbaggery embedded in every page. You want a large-scale functioning example of alternate models, and you've just provided one yourself!

Wikipedia is an example of a still centralized, but advertiser independent (donation supported) distribution model. If you wanted a more decentralized Wikipedia-like system, you could adopt a bittorrent-like model: lightweight centralized indexes of content, but generally downloading the bulk of content from peers. For the thousands of people downloading "Algebra" between edits, the central servers would only need to distribute a handful of updated copies, then direct future requests to grab the page from distributed shared sources. Various distributed servers could take "responsibility" for hosting ranges of (alphabetically organized) words.

If a serious need arose, it's possible to devise distributed indexing models. Consider: what Google does doesn't require one massive supercomputer with a globally shared memory space to process every request; their algorithms already work with more loosely coupled distributed computing systems. Many people banding together could generate distributed indices. Furthermore, a peer-to-peer reputation based ranking system could help fight back against SEO douchebaggery screwing with search results --- the distributed cataloging system could include much more "real human" evaluation of "this is a good and relevant site for this search term, not just a keyword list on a domain squatter's site."

That's the beauty of distributed systems. I don't personally consume or produce individually unaffordably high amounts of bandwidth. I couldn't afford to host all of Facebook's content --- but it's not a terrible financial stretch to cover the cost of my small part of the web. A billion people producing self-supported content that only benefits "few to none" results in a plethora of beneficial content --- and what is most Facebook content, if not beneficial to "few to none"? If I produce something that becomes so vastly popular that I can no longer self-fund the distribution, then I can look at other non-advertiser-mediated models to support the cost. Maybe I can sell access to my stuff; or, if I'm putting it up "pro bono" because I want to share it most widely, I can distribute via bit-torrent; or find a few like-minded volunteers/donors among the zillions viewing my stuff to share the burden of distribution. So, either I can afford to host it myself on pocket change, or I can find a model that doesn't require contaminating my content and demeaning my viewers by letting advertisers and spies shit all over it.

Yes, I'm bitching about the top 0.01% in particular --- indeed, the number of parasites is low, but the reason for bitching is that they're immensely damaging disproportionate to their number. When a single person can put hundreds or thousands (or more) of others out of jobs and homes to serve their own selfish interests, we have a problem. When a single person (or a couple Koch Brothers) can sway national politics by far more than a handful of votes, we have a problem. And, to the extent that the top few percent derive some to most of their income from mimicking and serving the parasitic machinations of the super-wealthy, they too deserve censure. Yes, it's possible to get in the top 20 or 10% of income by putting in a shitload of your own work; I don't begrudge anyone for that. But the closer you get to the top, the more likely you're deriving the majority of your wealth from parasitically interposing yourself to control the labor of others.

Really? I take it you've never bought a book? Subscribed to a high-quality periodical operated without advertising? Seen a free performance or presentation put on by enthusiastic hobbyists (at their own expense) for the fun of it, or paid for tickets to a non-free performance? Visited a public library or museum? There are many alternate models, in active use, often producing higher quality results than mass-market ad-supported commercialized dreck.

I put up my own web content for various special interest hobbyist concerns on my own dollar --- for literally pocket change even on a student's salary. I can't buy a cup of coffee for less than my monthly hosting expenses for sharing content within my (non-corporate-mediated) social communities. Submission to the demands of megacorporate advertisers --- so they can pass back immensely multiplied costs elsewhere --- is not the only option.