Was not prepared for that headline this morning.

Who subscribed me to Slashdot After Dark?

I'm not sure it's prudent to wait on the primary beneficiary of a poor educational system to overhaul that system.

A good education can be had by researching online, but the value of this is regularly naysaid by internet trolls. Counterintuitively, the public seem to put much stock in their opinion of it. The result is that "everyone knows" information cannot be trusted, simply because it can be found predominantly online.

That occurred to me as well.

Perhaps people will get their governments under control, so that the People decide what gets researched... and the government must settle for the scraps.

You're quite correct.

And when someone who's sick goes into work anyway, and transmits their cold and flu to others who then need to take sick days, the deadlines of those other employees don't change either.

The viral recipient employees appreciate that fact very easily. It's a wonder that the viral originators, not to mention the employers, don't.

It's such an antisocial workplace statement to make. "I'm not rearranging my work schedule because I'm sick - five of the rest of you guys can rearrange yours because I'm sick. Enjoy." That this unspoken statement doesn't make it onto many peoples' radars appears to be a testament to how many people don't have their moral compass active on a consistent basis.

Just give it a brand name. Heck, it worked for Twinkies and some people even ate those.

Ocean Silk could work quite well, though it would probably have a more dissociative name - Rymplon, for example.

Wasn't aware that I did.

Stereotypes don't shift due to facts. They shift due to perceptions. Trolls and other internet shills have been relying on that for decades.

I wonder what having techie types with superior firepower as the societal norm will do to the prevalent stereotype.

If I had access to confidential police records, including undercover cops, and wanted to sell it, I might arrange a distribution method such as this.

It's a good thing that nobody with significant amounts of money has an interest in determining the identities of undercover cops.

So, next is checking into 4Square from your Minecraft bunker.

Obama is formally and criminally charged with treason by the U.S. military

The underlying enabling fallacy the public has accepted here is that their political representatives have the lawful authority to do anything within their office that does not contravene the laws - and of course, they write the laws.

This deviates from the structure of American government as established, in two ways. In office, the authority of said political representatives must derive from the People. What powers and authorities the People did not vest in the federal government remain with the People, or with the states respectively.

Secondly, politicians do not make law anymore. The draft and enact legislation ("legis", legal), and this term refers to the paperwork and bureaucratic process only. Legislation and legal refer to that which has the form and appearance of law, without necessarily having the substance. Was everything dated correctly? Submitted to the correct parties? Turned in on time? Did it receive the proper number of Yea votes? Great, it's legal. But in order to be law as well, it must have the proper derivation of authority - and that must come from the People. Just as governments cannot give anyone money that they have not taken from someone else, so also can they not exercise powers, authorities and privileges that were not vested in them by the People. By default, rights belong to the People. This is the purpose of founding documents: To specifically allocate powers and authorities to governments, and to define their nature and limitations.

By contrast, the vast majority of what American politicians do today is analogous to malware. And like malware, it successfully evades detection because the People, by and large, have not updated their detection algorithms in a very long time.

As the political malware increasingly bogs down the system's runtime, the People have begun to do so. The results will be easy to extrapolate from the computer analogy.

The estimation by non-users that drug use produces a sudden, drastic and permanent brain deterioration in the users seems to have been unrealistically amplified by society, in my experience.

The estimation can cause non-users to discredit the assessments of users on general principle, which of course leaves their assessments the only valid ones remaining - for them, anyway. The article's question isn't likely to be resolvable within a context like that, because the typical result is just marked social division between users and non-users. I suppose the two social factions will just have to resign themselves to arguing the matter with no possible chance of resolution.

That estimation also produces other resultants, too: A societal justification for keeping most drugs on the black market, with all the private and government programs that drug money is used to fund. And for users, it keeps them reliant on a distribution network, at the prices they set, and limits both their quality assurance and selection of substances. Additionally, it should be noted that if you're a major drug distribution network with a lot of the say about what specific types of drugs become readily available within a country, you have the ability to partially shape the mindset, mood, energy level and attitude of a given generation.
The ability to influence that can be intensely useful for, say, politicians.

With all that potential incentive attached to it, that common estimation is beginning to seem less and less innocuous and naturally-occurring. When that estimation rubs off from "society", where - specifically - do people get it from? Ah, that's right. It's the slant on medical research data of prolonged, hard use of certain drugs, provided to us at an early age by government-controlled public schools and government-funded anti-drug campaigns in the media.

But it's not as if there could be a hidden agenda at work there.

Short answer: "It's a risk to give access to your identifying information to people on the internet. Unless it's us."

So the geeks would be the early adopters, and everyone else would probably wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.

Sure, the geeky masses. WordStar. Spreadsheets. In other words, business needs at home and in the small offices.

For personal use, the geek stigma was only overcome once people found they could play decent computer games.