So do you shoot at police helicopters who's indicia you maybe can't see when they might be hovering looking for a suspect? Do you shoot down medivac helicopters who might be hovering looking for a place to land? Do you realize you don't own nor can you control the airspace over your property from the ground up? This drone operator had a perfect right to hover over this guy's or your house as long as he doesn't touch ground. By any stand your ground law, if the drone was armed, it could shoot back. Why don't we all just disarm in these kinds of situations before someone gets hurt?

Two things: 1. So one could shoot at anything hovering over one's house? A police helicopter looking in backyards for a running suspect? A medivac helicopter hovering while looking for a place to land to rescue someone? Even a drone while it's operator is checking his flight controls? That's an easy way to take up 22 seconds. 2. So I could walk down the street shooting anyone who I even had fantasy about that they might be an pedophile or an ISIS agent? After this guy is a convicted felon, which he should be after this, he won't be able to own guns anymore, and that's probably a good thing for the rest of us.

Governments don't do bad things. People do. (Alas, you have to have governments, but not guns, but that's another arugment.) The people who released mining waste in the article you site made a mistake, but they are not the government although they were working for it. Maybe, depending on the actual facts, they should be fired and maybe, again, depending on facts, the government should be liable. (Maybe the mining company booby-trapped the pit the waste was stored in to make sure someone else, not them, solved their waste retention problem for them - neither you not I know.) But there are, or should be, accountability mechanisms for egregious errors committed by government employees. No or few such accountability mechanisms exist in the private sector. Proof: Not one, not one, of the financial executives who engineered the financial collapse in 2008 has gone to jail for all the misery they caused. Most are still employed, have rotated into government or retired with golden parachutes. We need laws to hold malfeasors punishable when it can be shown they acted with intent outside the public interest when they hold positions of trust.

I worked with a guy many years ago who coined the term "worthy bugs" that we used when we had a really good one. Two, in particular, I remember decades later. 1. This turned out to be a hardware bug that showed up in our software very intermittently. In the 1980's, National Semiconductor offered the NSC 880, a clone of the 8080: Same instruction set, mostly the same specs. This processor is spec'ed such that on the enable interrupts instruction, interrupts are not actually enabled for one instruction cycle so as to allow for a bit of cleanup (pop or whatever) without interruption. Without this, stacks could become confused, and did. Well, the guys at the fab across the street from where we were doing software development did not implement this one-instruction delay, but kept knowledge of it as a secret errata. When confronted about it after we had traces that proved the error in hardware, their response was "well, we didn't think it would ever come up." Bastards. 2. It turned out that one of the early Intel chipsets implementing PCI would, when doing 64K data transfers that fell exactly on 64K boundaries, deliver the first byte of the the range in place of the last byte. I was working on Ethernet device drivers at the time, so this just looked like data corruption in the driver or the network controller to us. It took a while and many logic analyzer traces to root cause this one to the chip set. Once we knew what was happening, the software work-around was easy, but it did slow down the driver just a bit. At least the chip set guys were unaware of this bug, and it never appeared in the many subsequent chip set implementations of PCI.

You might be interested to know that in 1792, a Congress chock full of members of the founding generation, passed a law to implement the 2nd amendment, the first sentence of which reads "A well regulated militia being necessary to the national defense", mandating that every able bodied person (they meant men) to own or acquire a gun and provide powder and shot for it and to present it for inspection by militia leaders on demand. So, the founders, who had just gotten finished ratifying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were quite OK with mandating that the citizens buy or do something that they might not ordinarily do or want to do. Given the requirements of defense in 1792 and the requirements to not, for instance, leave folks on the road after an automobile accident if they can't prove they can pay for treatment, I don't think the founders would disagree much with a mandate to have health health insurance one way or another.

Well, you may be right in an ideologically pure world, but that world doesn't actually exist, and you should perhaps think about what is required by the real world. (Further, government has a legitimate role in supporting the economy when the failures that you say Capitalism needs overcome Capitalism's ability to recover. Read up on the Great Depression, and remember that Capitalism's self recovery mechanisms were too feeble to get us out of the Depression. What got us out was the grand daddy of all government stimulus programs, WWII, after which the US was deeper in debt, as a percentage of post-war GDP, than it is today. We paid our way out of that one by raising taxes which coincided with a period of great American prosperity. Kind of knocks the wind out of the "lower taxes to create jobs" sails, dontcha know.) To return to the topic at hand, to keep America strong and competitive from a strategic point of view. Sure, most companies that can't justify themselves should and are allowed to fail, but we need some strategic capabilities that we can't allow ourselves to lose. There have been many examples where the government had stepped in to do things, including propping up companies, that were required for the strategic advancement of the countries. I'll start with the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's, which was paid for by granting 10-square-mile alternating sections along the right of way through the great plains and elsewhere that the railroad companies then sold to farmers who would benefit from having a rail road close by to get their goods to market. The government then proceeded to essentially rebuild these railroads at taxpayer expense for WWI and WWII, to the benefit of the private railroad companies, because of national strategic need. The railroads certainly weren't and couldn't make the necessary investments. Good thing the government did this, or you might have learned German in high school instead of French or Spanish. For background, read "Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow" by Dee Brown. There are other examples, but no room and little time to write about them.

Good point. The whole country ought to be real glad the government got involved in saving GM rather than letting it go into liquidation or be bought by the Chinese. In addition to saving a whole lot of jobs, it also helped hold an important industrial base in American hands. And on top of that, the taxpayers made money on the deal as GM recovers and pays off what the taxpayers chipped in to safe this company.

You asked how the Texas School Board was promoting revisionist history that was out of touch with the facts. I'll cite one example: The Texas School Board asserts that the founders didn't mean to have a strong seperation between church and state. The facts are they embedded in the Consitution in the last paragraph of Article 6 that there will be no religious test to hold any office reaching all the way down to state legislatures. And, as is much better known, the first amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. These mean that not only can a Bhudhist, a Hindu, an Athiest, a Jain or an adherent of any other religion can hold office and that they may not pass any law or regulation that respects or with respect to any religion. Further, many of the founders clearly were not fans of religion. One quote I remember from Thomas Jefferson (you may have heard of him and his impact as one of the founders, although the Texas School Board seems to want to eliminate mention of his influence) is: "In every day and every age the priests have been the enimies of liberty." It's not well known - one has to dig into the facts of the time, that is, do a little historical research - to know that until 1790, the residents of MA were being taxed by the gov't to support the Calvinist (Puritan) church, a practice that was stopped due to the founders insistance on a seperation between church and state. This is just one example of the efforts by the Texas school board to play fast an loose with the facts in order to promote their conservative religious ideology. There are other examples. For instance, the TSB wants to call the Atlantic Slave Trade the "Atlantic Triangle Trade." It was, in fact, a slave trade. To sugar coat these kinds of things prevents our children from leaning about the corrosive effects of slavery and racism in American history and how we can make this great country even greater if we are aware of our past, both the glorious as well as the inglorious aspects.

I wonder if the proponents of the new Texas standards have ever actually read the Constitution. In particular, the last paragraph of Article 6 includes "...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." That means that a Hindu, Bhudist, Athiest, Jain or the adherent of any religion, or lack thereof, may assume any office from local congressman or judge on up. And certainly none would be allowed to administer or legislate his religion into law or policy by the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Seems to me, Congress is not even allowed to respect religion, let alone be guided by it or create any policy or law based on its religious origins. Of course, conservative activist judges may see this differently as many have over the years.

Firstly, I would queston your definition of a bigot. But let's go with it for a second. The reason most folks replying to this development don't qualify as bigots is that irrationality, required in your definition, is not part of thier arguments. The fact is, the Texas school board is teaching a revisionist history that is out of touch with the facts. The founding fathers really did intend a strong seperation of church and state. Ever read the Consitituion? It's in there in the statement that there will be no religious qualificacion for any federal office, which to them included congressional reps, as well as in the first ammendment which prohibited any law respection an establishment of religion. Pretty strong stuff. Further, renaming the slave trade the "Atlantic triangle trade" belies the point that the Southern economy, of which Texas was a part, prior to the Civil War was all about slaves and cotton, the latter not being nearly as profitable without the former. It's interesting that the new Texas standards require comparing Jeff Davis's inaugural with Lincoln's. They should compare the US Constitution with the Confederate Constitution (easily available on the web). The later is almost identical to the former except that the CSA Constitution enshrines slavery such that it may never be challenged. And of course, in my opinion, the Southern states, Texas included, forever gave away any claims the protection of thier "cherished institutions" on the basis of "States Rights" with the Dred Scott decision of 1856 in which they tried to cram slavery down the throats of all the Northern states in spite of any of their anti-slavery laws by saying that Southern Slavery could be enforced in the North because "...no negro had any rights that a white man was bound to respect." So, yes, folks who criticize the Texas school board's new standards on the basis that they are dishonest with the history of the country are not bigots by your definition because they are not irrational, a description that applies much more aptly to those on the Texas School Board who pushed these new standards through.

Fox "News" has shown repeatedly that they cannot seperate opinion from fact. I have now problem with them having any opinion they want, but they cannot make up their own facts, which they habitually do. That makes thier opinions suspect.

Having worked in a company that makes Ethernet adapters that implements IPsec offload, I can tell you EXACTLY what's holding up encryption across the network: Cisco and possibly a few other network hardware vendors. The problem is that they can't see into encrypted traffic, and they want to "own the network". If they can't see into the traffic for deep packet inspection, route optimization, traffic steering, etc. all their fancy hardware becomes pretty neigh useless. And encrypted traffic cannot be viewed by "lumps in the network". And these "lump makers" are, unfortunately, influential enough to make commercial implementation difficult by others. In fact, the best, most effective encryption is done as high up the stack as possible so as to protect the traffic from as many lower layers as possible. And, if you study the problem carefully, you'll see that you actually need encryption at several layers to properly protect the entire attack surface. But you either have to do this cleverly with existing protocols - possibly getting into vendor-specific solutions that would need to be standardized, - or create new protocols. Just applying SSL/TLS to everything is not the answer. As I said, solutions exist even at some large companies that could bring them to market inspite of Cisco. But to bring them to market, there needs to be some market pull from the user community for effective cross-network encryption, which, so far, does not exist.

I spend a year studying for my computer science degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara at the University College of Wales in Aberystwith. It was one of the best years of my life, and, in addition to leaning a lot about the subject, I learned about it from a non-US-centric point of view, which was quite interesting. I also learned a lot about the local culture (Aberystwith had a non-university population of about 15,000 and 41 pubs) and made some life-long friends. If an opportunity to study abroad lands in your lap, you'd be a fool not to grab it with both hands and squeeze all you can out of it. You will be learning computer science for the rest of your career, but you don't get many chances to live in a student community in another country.