I agree with your main points, but it is a lot easier to be all idealistic when your kid is only 5. Things are going to change for you quite a bit by the time she's 14 and you will find those nice black and white points of view will all turn into shades of gray.

A teacher will get ito all kinds of shit if (s)he puts his/her hand into a kid's pants - for any reason. Far better to get law enforcement to do this.

Hopefully this will send a message to the stroppy teen.

Spelling Nazi getting feathers out of place over bailing vs baling.

That there is a Wikipedia article on baling wire.

Such a long time to wait...

Apart from different connectors, different models of phone also need different voltages and current ratings. I have 3 Nokias that don't interoperate with each other's chargers.

Same deal here. The connector isn't enough. There has to be standardised voltages and currents to make the scheme work.

The light is still 2D, so going vertical doesn't make any more. If you can see the sun from where you live, then that is sunlight that is not being farmed.

It is very unlikely to be self sufficient because the modern American diet is so inefficient, particularly feedlot meat production which requires around an acre of grain/corn/soy raising to feed an American with meat.

Staying in orbit requires a the right velocity. The results of a collision will have different velocities and some of that will de-orbit.

Who the hell is supporting this? Dell, IBM, Microsoft... and by extension their customers (you and me).

Blaming this on the Chinese while still exploiting things is bullshit.

Health care loves accountability and professional liability insurance etc. The GPL very definitely goes against that with: "THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, ...."

If a patient dies while the software is running then the health provider IT manager will get it in the neck.

Sure, you could start with GPL and add a testing service/wrapper to that but unless there is a good way to insulate the IT manager from the risk then this just won't happen.

Our cats kill rats in the barn and house just fine. They started doing this as kittens (4 months old or so). The adult cats will even kill rabbits.

These are just regular sized cats with no ninja training.

Rats will happily rip a hole through drywall so don't really care if you block up holes. I blocked up some holes with chew-proof material and the bastards just ripped another hole.

If you have rats inside, then the chances are that they are an overflow population from somewhere else. We didn't have rats in the house until the population built up in the barn and the "turf wars" pushed some of the rats into the house. As soon as we killed a lot of the rats in the barn they disappeared from the house.

In my quick guess of 12 I tallied the stuff I've used:

DOS1,2,3,5; Windows 2,3; NT, XP, 95, 98, WinCE, Windows Mobile.

I didn't count all the stuff I had not used (Vista, Bob, and various other releases and point release [3.11 vs 3]).

The services are still needed, even if they are being co-located in less processes.

Less threads would suck as that would drive up latency.

Can't eat air!

One of the great reasons why wireless networking and phone technology is popular in Africa is that the copper thieves can't steal the wires. One area I visited often, many years back, had a 25 mile long telephone cable to a phone that never worked. By the time the installation crew finished the installation the first half of the line would be gone and they'd wait for the next year's budget and start all over again...

Make sure one of the Secret Service guys always carries the BB.

Seriously, this is just another case of illogical fear of "new" technologies. It is already easy to track him: just look for the long motorcade.

Fool me 12 times, shame on me

The number of calls in the interface do matter because they increase complexity. This makes fs maintainability and development a bit harder from version to version as it gets less clear what each call should do. Many of the calls are optional, or can be performed by defaults, which does help to simplify things.

There is little calling overhead from using multiple calls. Of course these interface changes are all done for a good reason: performance, stability, security.