...to consider whether silencing the "don't let him return" crowd played at least some small part in the decision? I mean, you'd have to be some special kind of asshole to imply she should die up there, too, right? Regardless of his reasoning, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's pretty damn awesome she's getting the long overdue opportunity.

If an infinite number of monkeys...

Or from a slightly different perspective, public transit would exist in nearly its current form, just with autonomous vehicles. High-capacity vehicles with mostly predefined routes that would be extremely inexpensive to use compared to the cost of "private transit" vehicles. Maybe someday transportation can be egalitarian, but it's not likely to happen soon, even with autonomous vehicles.

If you make the regulators and their extended families live downwind of the sites they are regulating, you'd find out real quick just how unnecessary these regulations are (or aren't as the case may be).

Is that the pre- or post-Trump EPA?

It initially struck my as very odd that there could be a waiting list for space to open up at a place to store the dead...

700+MPH in open air is nothing like what would happen in a tube. If the car fits the tube almost perfectly, then the worst case (aside from the tube failing catastrophically just as the car arrives at that spot) would be that the tube becomes effectively instantaneously fully pressurized ahead of the car and is somehow resealed. The car would then compress that air, causing the car to slow down. Have you ever played with a syringe without a needle by putting a finger over the tip and depressing the plunger? You can compress that air to a fraction of the original volume.

If the car did not fit the tube closely and had some amount of space around it, then there could be some kind of air brake, where baffles could be extended to seal the tube better during the initial deceleration, then retracted as the pressure builds to manage the deceleration and prevent the car from being pushed back in the tube.

And assuming the cars are a safe distance apart, if a part of the tube failed catastrophically as a car was arriving at that spot, likely everyone in the car would die. The same is true of an airplane, but the airplane is likely to have many times the number of people as the hyperloop car.

I think the idea that facebook is logging into email accounts is going way too far. The legal sh*tstorm from that wouldn't be worth it. I'm guessing it's more like LinkedIn where they get access to your contacts, which you may have exlicitly or unknowingly implicitly agreed to let them do at some point. Pretty easy for them to connect the dots from there.

...it's not what (most? many?) people want. They want their prefabricated beliefs to be bolstered by the "news" they consume and are very much not interested in "real news", aka facts. Just wade through the other comments here claiming FB will now just filter out everything from one end of the political spectrum in favor of the other. Those people will likely use the "fact checked" indicator as a marker of stories to avoid, since they are obviously going to be slanted and "fake".

claims that the Clintons--most probably Hillary herself--tried to kill Pence.

It's clearly for "stealth mode". Turn on the rear camera and display the image on the screen, and the computer becomes nearly invisible!

Seems to me that having the parents both be scientists defeats the purpose. If you want to appeal to most girls, I'd think you'd want to have a more "average" family, not show how daughter of scientists does sciency stuff. Maybe show how daughter of wage workers helps solve family/work problems by coding. For example, my first useful coding job was a score-keeping program for my mother so she didn't have to do it by hand for her entire bowling league.

"Gun free zones" are a joke. They'd be better labelled as "10 minutes of free-fire before someone with guns who can stop you shows up zones".

In the world we live in (in the US), most or all schools are effectively "gun free zones". So we can discuss that side of the argument with plenty of facts and statistics. Your hypothetical armed school zones are really only a thought exercise at the moment. Why don't you get together with other gun rights folks that feel the same way and start an experimental community with all of your kids (you do have kids in public school, right?) going to a school loaded with guns (no pun intended). As long as you have a fairly representative sampling of people (no cherry-picking only truly "responsible" gun owners, good representation from all socioeconomic groups), it would be an informative experiment, even with a sample size of only one school. And after a decade or so of no gun violence on campus, you can remind us all of how right you were.

Until then, I'll stick with the statistics that show that my kids are slightly more likely to die due to a dog attack than from a school shooting.

That's why I said, "as a group". Of course there will be many examples to the contrary.

Heck, armed teenagers would solve this problem.

Maybe, but it almost certainly would create a much bigger problem. Teenagers as a group are somewhat less than stable emotionally. Some good studies have shown that simply having access to guns escalates aggression among adults. We don't really need petty squabbles that might result in hallway fights turning into shootings instead.

Without engaging in a gun rights debate, I'd certainly much rather my kids attend a gun-free school than one where anyone is allowed to carry a gun. Far, far, far, far more people are killed by guns in non-school-shooting-rampages than the other way around, so I'll take the odds as they are now.

And I'll again mention the Washington State school shooting from a few weeks ago. From the accounts I've read, there almost certainly would have been no chance for anyone to have done anything in that case, even if all the kids were carrying guns. Many or most of these school shootings tend to be over before people really realize what was happening. And I somehow don't think the thought of getting shot is going to deter someone who is going to kill themselves, anyway. So your "solution" applies to a subset of an already very small (probability-wise) problem.

I do whole-heartedly agree with your comment about mental health help, though.