The south had a disproportionate number of legislators because they could count 3/5s of a slave towards their population even though the slaves could not vote. The north had the larger numbers and the larger economic base and yet the federal government was split. The big political battles were over which new states could be slave states or not, in order to maintain the status quo of an ineffective federal government. So in that sense, the northern states had less power than they felt they should have had.

The primary reason for the South to secede, according to leaders within the confederacy, was to maintain slavery. Slavery was an underpinning of the economy (and it was weakening to be sure but still dominant). Slavery was also a major political issue, it decided what sorts of power you had in relation to the federal goverment (the 3/5s rule gave slave states a disproportionate amount of political clout compared to the number eligible to actually vote). Sure there was more at stake but slavery was the overarching issue to be resolved, and it was the untreated open wound left from the initial formation of the union.

But how far down does it go. if the neighbors across the street want to join a different country, should you be forced to go along with them? The Crimea has a majority of pro-Russian people but not an overwhelming majority. Tyranny of the majority perhaps.

On another level, is the desire to send your taxes to a different address important enough to create a civil war, important enough to send out gangs to rough up people who disagree, and important enough to totally screw up the place you call home?

Because the 8.1 update 1 is a very small change, it's too small to give it a ".2", and it's definitely not a service pack either. What it adds are mostly tweaks. (allow metro apps to appear on the task bar, give metro apps an auto-hiding title bar, add search/power buttons to metro screen, right click on metro icons to get a context menu, detect computer type when deciding to boot to desktop versus metro by default)

It's not obvious how to do this though. And when someone does figure it out, sometimes it breaks during the upgrade with no solution.

It's not so obvious how to do this though. It shows up as an "important" patch, which means it doesn't get installed by default. And it's not called "Windows 8.1 Update 1", instead it's just one of a long stream of Windows 8.1 64 bit patches with the same generic name. You recognize which one it is by the 6 digit patch number.

It's not a service pack though, it's pretty small overall.

At the same time high school standards are dropping, so maybe you need dumbed-down college standards to reach an acceptable level?

Now you will almost certainly have a life impediment without that college degree. It will most likely affect ability to get past HR resume filters, ability to get hired, size of raises and promotion opportunities. Self-taught is great, nothing wrong with that. Self-taught tends however to be self-taught in only the interesting stuff (ie, no theory, no writing classes, no physics lab courses, no arguing with profs you disagree with, etc). But self-taught with additional education is very good. But even then without the degree there will be people who do not want to hire or promote, the resumes will be put into the B pile, etc. I am not saying this is the correct way for companies to behave, however it is the way most of them operate.

They often put several vaccines into the same shot though. Part of this whole anti-vacc hoax paper was all about a single shot for mumps/measles/rubella, and Wakefield claimed that three separate shots would be safer. Sort of ironic that he wanted more shots and yet the anti-vaccine movement he spurred on wants fewer.

And when she says vaccine makers just need to make safer vaccines, how would she be able to tell?

Why can't it just mean they want to follow tweets but no make their own? I don't do twitter, but this sounds suspiciously like the elitist arguments that used to be on usenet or some bulletin board systems, where readers who didn't post were given insulting names like "lurkers".

Trade school mentality is part of what is dumbing down high tech. Trade schools are all about learning a very narrow focus, and learning it very superficially. It gets you a job for a few years, until the fashion trends move on and those narrow+shallow skills don't let you follow along. Sure, it's fine for the bottom tier of workers, the high tech equivalent of the assembly line workers. People with a good education don't need to retrain because they can pick it up on their own (and possibly are the first people in the new types of jobs, because you can't have a training program for new types of jobs before those jobs even exist).

On the other hand there is a very disturbing trend towards intentional avoidance of education. Sort of an anti-intellectual movement, but by people in a so-called tech industry (I say so-called but it involves very low tech stuff like web design or computer support or being an apple genius). Even some doing more high tech work seem to want to take a misguided shortcut, mini-maxing their education. This make sense if the person does not have the financial means to attend college (though state colleges are affordable and good quality and come with financial aid), but I get the impression that this isn't the primary motivator of these minimalists.

College is a great stepping stone though. Everyone's gotta go because it is the only way to get ahead. Skipping college is a major life impedement. Maybe you wish things were still like the old days when college was only for the intellectual elite or only those who want to learn, but those old days are extremely old (as in nearly a century). There is still the opportunity to learn for the sake of learning, but that can be grad school. You can learn plenty outside of college but you CAN NOT reliably get a decent job that way.

We have had immigrants for over one hundred years scrimping and saving to get their children a college educated and move ahead in the world. And now that's turned on its head because of native born solidly middle class or higher people being hip and cool by skipping college. Totally bizarre.

So disconnect those XP boxes from any external access. Any information they need for their job can come from internal sites only, or they have special computers they can visit for the strange reason of needing to check the internet (this should be extremely rare). If they need to access the internet too much, then they put in a request for a better computer (this should be a tiny fraction of the staff). Remember, we've gone millenia without the internet.

If he did not get permission from the building owner for every piece of "art" he created, then he's merely a vandal with better PR.

Rotten fruit thrown from drones?