to flip off the other cars? Important.

Vouchers are education "food stamps" for the wealthy. You might not think you're wealthy, but most people cannot afford to send their kids to private schools because they have absolutely no extra money to do that. A voucher that pays a fraction of private school costs could really help you out, but be completely worthless to most people because they could not make up the difference. So vouchers end up being a subsidy for the wealthy and relatively wealthy, while leaving the poor where they are. This is why we need a robust and well-funded public school system for all. Unless you believe only the wealthy or relatively wealthy deserve eduction.

Of course, you don't need a missile to deliver a nuke to a place where it can do a lot of damage - as evidenced by nearly every nuclear test ever done.
And you don't need a nuclear explosion to disperse enough radioactive stuff in a populated area to do a lot of damage, as evidenced by Fukushima or Chernobyl.
So why is everyone hung up on the missile capabilities of North Korea?

I'm afraid of what this means: IBM will be selling "LenovoEMC Legacy Removable Storage Modules" soon.

Get the right job and you can work flying people up there.

Had to look it up - wikipedia has A. H.'s birthday as 4/20/1889. Not close enough for me to conclude that the idiot(s) behind this might have had that reason.

He wants to avoid "democratizing" war, but he is OK with governments doing it - I was also struck by this. Is this typical elitist thinking, or an effort to keep the genie in the bottle? Either way, the elites are thinking about what can happen when technology allows anyone to become their own army. Hey guys, it might be time to consider equality.

So it's ITFA.

They elected the jackass not based on his knowledge at all, but on a number of things: their perception of his values (political and "practical"), his party, media coverage, and more. All that came from images created by the kinds of lies, um, I mean advertisements and commentary, that were disseminated prior to the election.

Then there are more intangible but very important things, like his looks, his name, the degree that the local elections were "crafted" by arranging the polling environment and ability to register, the weather on election day, etc.

"In a free market,..." Ok, you lost me right there. There's no free market, never has been. Some forces always wield more power than others and will use it, so a functioning fair market(s) requires regulation.

I think that's just a watch. Nothing "smart" about those features.
A "smartwatch" would interact with you, your changing environment, various networks and databases, to pass information to and from you, and do things based on your commands and other things you do. You won't interact much with it directly because it's tiny, but you could "program it" (set the settings) and read it from a larger device.

>> I wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds.

I don't want to encourage yahoos to drive faster through an intersection against the light, in order to potentially make it safer for them to do that.

Patent zombies?
Patent dragons?
Patent vampires?

Patently boundless.

And definitely not in front of.

...to build a robot that can watch movies, then go out and buy themed merchandise.