It would be interesting because if this were to go onto an actual court battle I'm not sure the kid would win. There is a legal concept in common law called: In loco parentis. In a nutshell it gives institutions such a schools quite a bit of leeway as long as it doesn't "Infringe Civil Liberties" and in the United States we've ended up with the Tinker Doctrine. But that covers more of the limitation of Freedom of Speech in a school than other items.

But In loco parentis has longed been used to allow justification of locker searches. The argument being a parent is allowed to search the room of their child, therefore the school is allowed to the right to search the locker of a student. None of those cases have actually reached the Supreme court to really have a final ruling on where the lines are actually are as far as schools are concerned with In loco parentis. I don't think any schools want this court to make a ruling and set precedence about the limits of In loco parentis because Clarence Thomas has been a critic of the Tinker Doctrine in the past and school may lose a lot of their legal power over students if it ended up there.

I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.

And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

This. Back in Janurary a client of mine and I had a few meetings. He wanted their company phones to get a push notification every time someone filled out a form on his website. But during our conversation he talked about some friends of his who were into bit coin mining and said we should go into a venture. And I said no. I think I mined 4 bit coins through a pool once many years ago, mainly because I've always been fascinated by various distributed computing things over the past decade and was interested in seeing what they had done. But it was clear to me it was going no where, especially when I read about the ASICS and then all the shenanigans about those a couple years go.

Well when I delivered the solution to the push notification thing two weeks ago I asked him what he though about bit coins now. Apparently his buddies lost nearly everything, something like over a year's worth of coins, when Mt. Gox closed down. Not sure if he ever went in on a new rig with his buddies or not, but he knows I've done fairly well for myself owning and selling a couple of businesses in my young life. He's the the type where he's looking for the next billion dollar idea and will never get there. I look for ideas and projects that have a solid idea with realistic expectations.

Would the electric car still work? Could you easily find a place to charge up in that event? A car for the president has some different considerations than me in Suburbia who works from home 3 days a week and doesn't drive much. (For the record I'm a Chevy Volt owner)

We ended up Amazon Prime after me or the wife forgot to uncheck the box and were billed for it during the christmas holidays. We were ordering a lot during that period and it wasn't until a month later when we got the credit card statement that we realized it. Well we looked and quickly found Amazon Prime had everything we were watching on Netflix plus a few shows no longer available on netflix. So we cancelled Netflix and kept prime.

The biggest reason why we've kept it now is because my wife and I are both busy professionals now with young kids. We don't have a lot of time to shop and the two day shipping makes it convenient for a lot of things.

So for $99 a year we'll take the expedited shipping and as far as I'm concerned the streaming is just a nice bonus.

Seriously this. Before I owned my company, had a start up which we turned into a successful company and sold for enough that I now can live comfortably.

After about a year off, I had spent the last 5 working 70 hours a week or more at times, a new start up approached me. They had all the technical talent they ever needed, but wanted some help on the business side. I had been in their shoes and I worked about 30 - 40 hours a week for the first 5 months developing and getting their sales/marketing implemented.

Well here we are a year later and I really only do about 15 hours a week of work if that. Things have been successful. We are meeting sales goals, now have 3 sales people plus one trainer on staff. Literally I got to sales meetings on Tuesdays & Thursdays and then spend a couple hours making sure emails are being sent and going over numbers. And I get paid salary for 40 hours a week. The other 30 hours a week really are "In case something comes up". That may happen once or twice a month where I spend 20 hours actually doing work instead of 15.

This. For the past 6 years I've paid for my own health insurance or had a HSA depending on the state I was living in. Past four years I had a plan that worked for me. Cost was a little under $100 a month for health insurance plus dental. And I used the dental coverage more than the medical side. I was in my late 20's early 30's and pretty healthy. I spent more on dental work during that time than medical. Other than my annual check up, provided free under my plan, I think I had one other doctors visit for a sinus infection. Medication was $4 for generics and I don't think they even billed my insurance. Deductible was $2500 with max out of pocket of $11,000. While that maybe "high" to some people, it was an amount that if I really needed it I could afford to pay out of pocket and it wasn't going to bankrupt me.

Well last October I got a notice stating my plan was "Catastrophic only" and I no longer qualified for it under the ACA because I was over 30. So I go shopping and the "Plan closest to mine" was 3x the cost. The deducible was $5500 and max out of pocket $21,000. When I bring this up in conversations I get told by ACA supporters, "Well that's because before you had a crap Catastrophic only plan and now you'll have a better plan". Well I compared point for point and as far as I can tell, at least on the things that really matter to me, the two plans are nearly identical on what they cover. This new plan appears to be Catastrophic Only, only now if I actually have to use it it's going to hurt my pocket book even more. Typically I only kept around $25,000 in cash on hand in my money market and another $5,000 in checking/savings. Now I'm going to have to look into doubling that over the next few years.

I'll end up going on the plan offered through my fiancé's job when we get married in a few weeks, but there is a big question of whether that will be available next year. So far indications are it's going to be far cheaper for her company to pay the fine and push everyone to the exchange than continue to provide health coverage.

Sorta. The largest direct recipient of "Farm Subsidies" a few years ago was Riceland. Which is a coop technically. When people who own farms like me and my family sell Riceland our rice or soybeans or wheat they cut us a check including the subsidy from the government. That is how we get any subsidy payments for crops. The check doesn't come directly from the government to us. It goes to Riceland first (or ConAgra or Bunge, etc..)

But that's not even as big of deal as it was a few years ago when most homes had 1 computer. Today our home has 8 computers, two tablets, and two smart phones. And right now it's just me and my wife. (I do IT stuff and she's a geeky lawyer who likes tech stuff)

If one of our machines are doing a back up, chances are we just go to another room and use a different one.

That being said, I installed a 16TB FreeNAS system on the home network last year and that's now how we keep track of most things these days.

I'm starting to car shop. Mine is 10 years old, 150k miles and hers is 5 years old and 50k miles. Currently I drive a Chevy and she has a Nissan. Her daily commute is about 35 miles round trip. Could be less if she takes a new job closer to the house. And I work from home 3 days a week, but I can travel upwards of 60 miles for meetings or if I need to go help my Dad with something (40 miles one way).

We are seriously looking at the Volt. With the current tax credits, the price of the Volt is in line with say a Cruse Eco or Malibu Eco. Plus most days we probably wouldn't need to use the gas engine, but if we did it would go the extra distance no problem.

I gave it up about 2005. I had a start up at the time that was 70 - 80 hours a week. I sold it in 2010 and made out pretty well. After a few months of "going out" all the time I and seeing how much I was spending I actually got back into gaming. But I was never one to buy a lot of games. I just tended to play the ones I liked a lot. For instance I bought an Xbox 360 in 2010. Bought the Halo Reach edition. Between then and now the list of 360 titles I own: Halo Reach and Battlefield 3 Premium. In fact ended up using the Xbox more for streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime than gaming.

Instead of getting a new console I elected to buy my first "gaming pc" since 2003 ($850 rig) as well as I got a new set of CH Joystick/Pedals/Throttle and TrackIR like I had in the late 1990's for flight sims. Ironically the flight sim I'm playing is Falcon 4 BMS, an updated version of the game I bought back in 1998. Then I spent $40 on a pledge for this Star Citizen, which I suspect I'll spend a lot of time playing over these next few years given the hours I spent in my teen years playing Wing Commander Privateer.

We really missed the boat with not having local governments at the city/county level build the infrastructure. Where I grew up we had an electric coop. My Dad still lives there. Other than the main lines, it was all buried cables. Power outages were extreme rarities. His rates have been between $.08 - .11 per kilowatt hour. Hell a few years ago the rates went DOWN after the coop paid off some debt. In the city our rates are about .145 per kilowatt hour and increasing to .16 per kilowatt hour here soon. Last state I lived in started to force Utilities to open up their lines to competitors. My electric rates there went down from $0.18 per KW/hr to $.12 when that happened.

When I moved into the city, it was a major utility company, overhead wires, and if we got some ice or wind the power would go out.

Where my Dad lives, water & sewer is maintained by the city, and now contracts out with the county for water. His bill is about 1/3rd less than what our bill is closer to the city and our water is owned by a private utility.

Where it made sense we should have had cities or counties putting in fibre and allowed rural areas to form wireless coops. Then lease out service to whomever at a fixed cost per line.

What about places like where my family farms are located? The costs to lay fibre down all those roads would be prohibitive since you maybe would serve .5 homes per mile. Maybe even less. Hell my grandmother didn't have a private line until 1991. I remember going down there in the 1980's and she had a party line still.

Microsoft used to sell "points" to buy stuff over Xbox Live. Interestingly enough last year they stopped and went to a currency based system. So instead of "rent a movie on demand for 600 points" it became "Rent Movie for $2.99" or whatever the real dollars equivalent were. And I much prefer the new system.

Well, be sure to turn out the lights then. Because once the "Just Another Wordpress" site theme is launched and the comments section, the unique feature that makes Slashdot, as we know it is gone. At that point I'll wait and see where the community migrates to and follow suite. Maybe someone will download Slashcode and attempt to launch a new site. Hell it was a good run. But all good things...