Smarter people also tend not to enlist in the military to begin with. I had a naval recruiter after me for the longest time. It was pretty clear that he was angling for people that weren't particularly bright or of much value outside the military where they could be pressed into a job without much required aptitude.
How it is that people fall for the sorts of lies he was telling me is beyond me, but you do have to account for the biased sampling selection otherwise you get skewed results. Also people who tend to be more intelligent tend to have better opportunities than the military can provide anyways.
That's not true, the only reason why you're not able to have small nuclear reactors in space is that it's a logistical nightmare. Most of the scenarios that keep people up at night just don't apply to satellites. A nuclear reactor so small as to be capable of being launched into orbit is going to have so little in the way of nuclear material that it's questionable if even a direct hit to an urban area would be anymore dangerous than for any of our current satellites doing so.
Remember the fuel and materials we already use are toxic meaning that we already have to be mindful of a satellite coming back and dumping fuel over a populated areas. Not to mention the debris. Which is why it's just a ban on nuclear weapons in space, not nuclear devices in general.
That's true, however systems like this are far from perfect. And the sniper scenario in urban life is just not that common. Most of the time you're talking things like drivebies or relatively close range shots. You're not likely to be dealing with a gunman that's more than a few yards away from what they're shooting at, and it would make far more sense to get more police and better equipment/training.
Better still, for 250k per square mile you can do a hell of a lot with improved lighting and landscaping. It's pretty well established that quality lighting at night, clear visibility and regular patrols do cut down on crime in a noticeable way. Even just spending a chunk of that money on subsidies and adverts as to how to landscape for crime reduction would likely do more.
It's not a question of whether or not this works in those rare occasions where it's necessary, it's a question of whether it's a better use of tax payer dollars than other options. At this point, I doubt it is, even spending the money on jobs programs and lifting people out of poverty would likely have a larger impact. Drying up the pool of victims, perpetrators and locations is pretty well known to reduce crime.
Because, unless I'm missing something, the only way that you can use DLC is through their store. There is an exception for PCs, as you can mod them, however if you're using the XBox, you're kind of out of luck, even if you want to download them from the internet.
Right, and the deal with W doing it was that it was known to be illegal at the time and was a pretty egregious abuse of power. FISA allows for warrants to be issued after the fact and requires very little in the way of justification. It's barely better than nothing, however it does give at least some judicial over view even if barely.
You say that as if it were a bad thing. With the possible exceptions of Eisenhower and Obama, we haven't had any Presidents since the 40s who weren't better dead. Carter at least has done a number of great things after being voted out of office.
Probably because Flash can interact with the computer in ways video can't. Sure there's ways around that, but it's much easier to start with a binary blob that can. You'd have to doctor the video in a way that was acceptable to the player and that caused the player to do something nasty.
Sure, it's almost certainly possible, but it gets a lot harder when you're stuck in non-executable portion of memory and requiring a random application to malfunction.
Things have changed a lot, you can pretty much expect that most of the time you're just going to get an auto reply. If you do manage to get an interview they may very well think that silence is the same thing as telling somebody they didn't get the job.
Probably the best thing you can do is while searching try and get involved in some open source project. It's probably not going to put food on the table, but it will likely land you access to opportunities that you might not otherwise get. And give you something to put on your CV while maintaining your skills.
But just realize that the manners of people doing the hiring are typically lousy and remember that if you get turned down that you're likely not interested in working for a company that represents itself in such an embarrassing way.
You must be a Windows user or haven't updated to an Apple OS past the old world Macs. The only way of eliminating those dark corners is by eliminating them. Which coincidentally is the thing which angers people more than an obscure corner of the app having issues. I've largely given up on Windows except for a few things because there's somethings which you just can't do.
And others like disabling WMP's stranglehold on my MP3 player requires a somewhat obscure incantation involving deregistering a dll file. Or that time when the resolution wouldn't stay set via the control panel and I had to go reg diving to change it to what I wanted on a regular basis. As broken as that was, it was nice to be able to rig up a simple tweak via an obscure method of screwing with the registry.
Someday somebody will find the line of code that causes windows to work perfectly at MS and be horribly, horribly broken everywhere else. They'll be awarded a Nobel peace prize for all the peace and quiet they provide.
Because in practice that doesn't work so well. That's how we got shafted with Windows, Flash and iPods. In none of those cases were the products superior to the competition. Point of fact they all suck and for the most part sucked even from the get go, however they had powerful people behind them tricking people into thinking they were the correct solution. Flash has managed to get worse with every iteration whereas the other two are somewhat debatable. Bill Gates himself is famous for convincing people that he's the only one that can give them what they need and that nothing else will do.
Imagine what the world might be like if those abominations had been still born.
That's not really the same things. If you wear glasses you can take them off, and if you choose to get surgery, you are presumably returning your eyesight to the state it was originally. Curing color blindness though, is different. You're doing something that changes the way the eyes function, in most cases from the way they did originally. And you're doing it primarily for the purpose of making color blind people like color sighted people.
It's not wrong because being able to see colors is wrong. It's wrong because people are changing in ways that they can't really comprehend and there's a high risk of people doing so without really considering whether or not it's worthwhile. A better solution would be to make sure signs are painted in proper colors and giving people augmented reality gear when it becomes available.
I've gone somewhat color blind in one eye in recent years, and it's a very different view of things, one side is warmer and the other side is cooler. One side is decidedly easier to pass the color blindness test and the other I barely pass with. The world looks different, but not necessarily better with full color vision.
We're assuming that it's relatively harmless. Personally I've got eyes that are extremely sensitive to light to the point of being functionally blind in bright light. I've learned to adapt and do a number of things in a similar fashion to the way that the blind do them. At this point, I'm dependent upon doing them in that way, "curing" me of that would have a serious impact on many areas of my life.
The brain has a tendency to adapt and to overcome deficiencies, in my case I've managed to gain a couple extra senses that people don't seem to normally have as a way of compensating. I haven't met anybody else that has my level of natural talent for echolocation or seeing in extreme low light situations. Curing a person of my "problem" could very easily cure them of the upsides as well. It's really not something that humans should have any say in unless it's genuinely a very serious problem. Minor things like color blindness need to be considered very carefully in terms of unforeseen consequences.
But, color blindness is something you're born with. The only way that one could reasonably be asked if they want to be cured would involve time travel. Otherwise there could be serious consequences to doing that to a person. It causes enough trouble revealing to somebody that a deeply held belief is in fact demonstrably false. Imagine what it would be like having things suddenly appear very different than they were previously.
Color blindness ultimately has a much larger impact than on what people expect it to have. Curing it could very easily have unintended consequences that aren't so easy to handle.
That's an issue of specifics not approach. They could fix it in a way that works. For instance security patches could get an almost automatic green light. New types of software would take much more scrutiny and ones that were similar to currently approved ones would require somewhat less.
But really, certain classes of application are just too dangerous and easy to screw up that they should be completely banned from the network. This is one of the rare areas where those stupid palladium chips could be an appropriate part of the solution. Additionally, some things just shouldn't be connected to the internet at all. If you need to do an update of one of those, you can hand carry the discs in after having verified the contents and verify them again on the way out. If it's that secure you kind of need that at minimum.
Not necessarily, there are ways of doing this, such as doing an MFS style image with signed patches downloaded as need be with a CD being provided from time to time as the patches get larger. Additionally the only meaningful difference between a BoA disc and say one from BECU would be where the homepage linked to. There's no particular reason why the discs need to be bank specific.
You do realize that most if not all Virtual Machines allow you to run physical discs, right? Or that it's trivial to convert said discs into images that any VM package will accept.
It's ultimately probably a better idea to have to boot into it rather than using something else as it makes it more of a deliberate process. A bit of a pain, but more deliberate in nature. Anybody that can't figure out how to work around the reboot limitation shouldn't be doing so anyways.
Most likely, I've seen computers that were built completely into the keyboard in recent years, but they haven't taken off. I'd be shocked if the name would be enough to change that.
The right solution to illegal immigrants using this is to deal with the problem of illegal immigrants. As in levy huge fines against people that knowingly hire them and fix immigration policy to make sure that jobs that are legitimately not being filled by US citizens are at least filled by green card holders. You're not going to get it 100% right, but having 11m or so of them mostly working in sweatshop like conditions is a disgrace.
I don't want a national ID card personally, but the reality is that we already have one, we've all got our social security cards, and as long as the new card is in a similar vein, there's probably not going to be a whole lot of fighting about it. A national drivers license and set of records for everything would be a much bigger fight, with good reason.
Of course it's imperfect. So were Medicare, Social Security and Unemployment insurance when they were first passed. It's ignorant to blame government in general for what Republicans in particular are doing.
The Republicans blamed the Democrats for selling out our veterans. Funny thing is I remember only a few short years ago when the Democrats were trying very hard to get more funding for the VA system and the Republicans were fighting hard to kill the initiative for being costly. If the Republicans would focus on fixing things the right way instead of blindly cutting taxes on the rich.
In answer to your question, those that most need this reform have been fighting the hardest against it. Just because you're lucky enough to be able to afford to pay out of pocket for things, doesn't make that the status quo. What I was having to pay as somebody that was in good health, but flunked into the high risk pool anyways was unaffordable. Even the nearly $6k a year I was paying in premiums was more than I could really afford to pay. Sure, I did find a way, but I had to get help in doing so since I didn't have the money and couldn't afford not to have health care.
Even today, that would represent a very serious drain on my budget if I weren't lucky enough to be insured at work. Which by the way might not have lasted much longer had I needed to pay out of pocket.
First, health care is in no way worse than it was 12 years ago.
Citation necessary, it's not worse if you have it, but the plans have been getting expensive at an alarming rate. A couple years back when I had an individual policy, I was lucky to only get a 12% increase in premiums. Some people are having increases as high as 76% or more. Sure if you have health care it's not any worse, but it's an increasingly common thing for a person to not have any at all.
Second, all of the concessions made to get health care passed were made to entice Democrats. No concessions were made to Republicans, and no Republicans voted for any version of the bill.
Umm, perhaps if the Republicans were willing to participate in the debate instead of blindly saying no, they'd've got something out of it. There were plenty of concessions made to conservative causes, they were just to ignorant and stubborn too participate. Remember the scare tactics about things like the "death panels" nowhere in any of the versions of the bill was there a single mention of that. And the portion which they twisted into "death panels" was completely removed. Also, single payer was stripped from the bills.
Third, Republicans have had detailed proposals on the table, all of which addresses specific problems with specific solutions, since before the first Democratic bill was ever conceived. You're right that they failed to enact any of these when they had power, and for that they deserve scorn. But supporting the democratic bill on those grounds is a bit like shooting yourself in the head because your mother served meatloaf for dinner even though she had steak in the fridge.
Bullshit, the Republicans haven't at any point put any proposal on the table that had even the slightest chance of working. They were fundamentally flawed and were never intended to be put into place. Basically window dressing for people uninformed enough to not know any better. Some of the ideas that were good were put into the final bill.
Fifth, this is the first ever use of reconciliation for something that isn't reconciliation. And there has never been anything bigger than this, let alone anything bigger than this passed by reconciliation.
Bullshit, that's something that the Republicans under Bush 43 did on more than one occasion. And worse still, the Patriot act was passed without any of the legislators being given time to even read the whole thing.
Sixth, support for this bill is under 40%. That is not "mildly unpopular".
Citation required, the vast majority of Americans support reform, the fact that the Republicans can lie to the American people without any remorse is just disgusting. Perhaps if they hate this so much they can move to some other country.
Seventh, our proposal is not "doing nothing". If anything, the democratic proposal would be more accurately described as "doing nothing" on the grounds that while it does do a ton of stuff, none of it addresses any of the things that are wrong with health care in the US today - with the possible exception of the individual mandate, which is unconstitutional.
Um, right, but only under a very technical definition of doing nothing. Tort reform and waste reduction is something, it's just easy to confuse that since it's so little that it rounds to nothing. Also it's not unconstitutional, you'll have to cite a legit source on that. This sort of thing has been litigated in the past and the SCOTUS has recognized that it doesn't violate the constitution. But then again, SCOTUS lately seems to not feel like reading the constitution when it's not convenient for the conservatives.
Imagine that there's a garbage can on fire in your back yard. A couple hundred firefighters respond. They evacuate your neighbors from their homes, dig trenches around the garbag
I wouldn't say that much, all current systems yes, but ones that could be implemented in the near future definitely not. The weak spot in the equation is the centralized nature of things. Just like how FTP servers are easy to shutter to stop the source of pirated content relative to torrents that allow many to be involved.
As solar becomes more prevalent, the power grid could be altered to more closely resemble the fishnet that became the internet. You'd have many smaller sources closer to where people use the power. It would definitely still be vulnerable, but it would make things much more difficult. You cut the transmission lines into a major city and chances are they'll run out of power immediately. However the way things are going, you'd cut the lines and they'd be down to partial power.
Depending upon the infrastructure it could be surprisingly fine grained.
On top of that, if one feels that strongly, there're options. For instance blocking Google javascript and cookies goes a long way, as does not running flash.
One could also go through various proxies and firewalls, but blocking cookies, javascript and flash is enough for most people, anything beyond that is probably overdoing.
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Smarter people also tend not to enlist in the military to begin with. I had a naval recruiter after me for the longest time. It was pretty clear that he was angling for people that weren't particularly bright or of much value outside the military where they could be pressed into a job without much required aptitude.
How it is that people fall for the sorts of lies he was telling me is beyond me, but you do have to account for the biased sampling selection otherwise you get skewed results. Also people who tend to be more intelligent tend to have better opportunities than the military can provide anyways.
That's not true, the only reason why you're not able to have small nuclear reactors in space is that it's a logistical nightmare. Most of the scenarios that keep people up at night just don't apply to satellites. A nuclear reactor so small as to be capable of being launched into orbit is going to have so little in the way of nuclear material that it's questionable if even a direct hit to an urban area would be anymore dangerous than for any of our current satellites doing so.
Remember the fuel and materials we already use are toxic meaning that we already have to be mindful of a satellite coming back and dumping fuel over a populated areas. Not to mention the debris. Which is why it's just a ban on nuclear weapons in space, not nuclear devices in general.
That's true, however systems like this are far from perfect. And the sniper scenario in urban life is just not that common. Most of the time you're talking things like drivebies or relatively close range shots. You're not likely to be dealing with a gunman that's more than a few yards away from what they're shooting at, and it would make far more sense to get more police and better equipment/training.
Better still, for 250k per square mile you can do a hell of a lot with improved lighting and landscaping. It's pretty well established that quality lighting at night, clear visibility and regular patrols do cut down on crime in a noticeable way. Even just spending a chunk of that money on subsidies and adverts as to how to landscape for crime reduction would likely do more.
It's not a question of whether or not this works in those rare occasions where it's necessary, it's a question of whether it's a better use of tax payer dollars than other options. At this point, I doubt it is, even spending the money on jobs programs and lifting people out of poverty would likely have a larger impact. Drying up the pool of victims, perpetrators and locations is pretty well known to reduce crime.
Because, unless I'm missing something, the only way that you can use DLC is through their store. There is an exception for PCs, as you can mod them, however if you're using the XBox, you're kind of out of luck, even if you want to download them from the internet.
Right, and the deal with W doing it was that it was known to be illegal at the time and was a pretty egregious abuse of power. FISA allows for warrants to be issued after the fact and requires very little in the way of justification. It's barely better than nothing, however it does give at least some judicial over view even if barely.
All three of those are correct, somebody will tell us that God doesn't exist.
You say that as if it were a bad thing. With the possible exceptions of Eisenhower and Obama, we haven't had any Presidents since the 40s who weren't better dead. Carter at least has done a number of great things after being voted out of office.
Mmmm, soylent source. Now with 15% more dead code.
Probably because Flash can interact with the computer in ways video can't. Sure there's ways around that, but it's much easier to start with a binary blob that can. You'd have to doctor the video in a way that was acceptable to the player and that caused the player to do something nasty.
Sure, it's almost certainly possible, but it gets a lot harder when you're stuck in non-executable portion of memory and requiring a random application to malfunction.
Things have changed a lot, you can pretty much expect that most of the time you're just going to get an auto reply. If you do manage to get an interview they may very well think that silence is the same thing as telling somebody they didn't get the job.
Probably the best thing you can do is while searching try and get involved in some open source project. It's probably not going to put food on the table, but it will likely land you access to opportunities that you might not otherwise get. And give you something to put on your CV while maintaining your skills.
But just realize that the manners of people doing the hiring are typically lousy and remember that if you get turned down that you're likely not interested in working for a company that represents itself in such an embarrassing way.
You must be a Windows user or haven't updated to an Apple OS past the old world Macs. The only way of eliminating those dark corners is by eliminating them. Which coincidentally is the thing which angers people more than an obscure corner of the app having issues. I've largely given up on Windows except for a few things because there's somethings which you just can't do.
And others like disabling WMP's stranglehold on my MP3 player requires a somewhat obscure incantation involving deregistering a dll file. Or that time when the resolution wouldn't stay set via the control panel and I had to go reg diving to change it to what I wanted on a regular basis. As broken as that was, it was nice to be able to rig up a simple tweak via an obscure method of screwing with the registry.
Someday somebody will find the line of code that causes windows to work perfectly at MS and be horribly, horribly broken everywhere else. They'll be awarded a Nobel peace prize for all the peace and quiet they provide.
Because in practice that doesn't work so well. That's how we got shafted with Windows, Flash and iPods. In none of those cases were the products superior to the competition. Point of fact they all suck and for the most part sucked even from the get go, however they had powerful people behind them tricking people into thinking they were the correct solution. Flash has managed to get worse with every iteration whereas the other two are somewhat debatable. Bill Gates himself is famous for convincing people that he's the only one that can give them what they need and that nothing else will do.
Imagine what the world might be like if those abominations had been still born.
That's not really the same things. If you wear glasses you can take them off, and if you choose to get surgery, you are presumably returning your eyesight to the state it was originally. Curing color blindness though, is different. You're doing something that changes the way the eyes function, in most cases from the way they did originally. And you're doing it primarily for the purpose of making color blind people like color sighted people.
It's not wrong because being able to see colors is wrong. It's wrong because people are changing in ways that they can't really comprehend and there's a high risk of people doing so without really considering whether or not it's worthwhile. A better solution would be to make sure signs are painted in proper colors and giving people augmented reality gear when it becomes available.
I've gone somewhat color blind in one eye in recent years, and it's a very different view of things, one side is warmer and the other side is cooler. One side is decidedly easier to pass the color blindness test and the other I barely pass with. The world looks different, but not necessarily better with full color vision.
We're assuming that it's relatively harmless. Personally I've got eyes that are extremely sensitive to light to the point of being functionally blind in bright light. I've learned to adapt and do a number of things in a similar fashion to the way that the blind do them. At this point, I'm dependent upon doing them in that way, "curing" me of that would have a serious impact on many areas of my life.
The brain has a tendency to adapt and to overcome deficiencies, in my case I've managed to gain a couple extra senses that people don't seem to normally have as a way of compensating. I haven't met anybody else that has my level of natural talent for echolocation or seeing in extreme low light situations. Curing a person of my "problem" could very easily cure them of the upsides as well. It's really not something that humans should have any say in unless it's genuinely a very serious problem. Minor things like color blindness need to be considered very carefully in terms of unforeseen consequences.
But, color blindness is something you're born with. The only way that one could reasonably be asked if they want to be cured would involve time travel. Otherwise there could be serious consequences to doing that to a person. It causes enough trouble revealing to somebody that a deeply held belief is in fact demonstrably false. Imagine what it would be like having things suddenly appear very different than they were previously.
Color blindness ultimately has a much larger impact than on what people expect it to have. Curing it could very easily have unintended consequences that aren't so easy to handle.
That's an issue of specifics not approach. They could fix it in a way that works. For instance security patches could get an almost automatic green light. New types of software would take much more scrutiny and ones that were similar to currently approved ones would require somewhat less.
But really, certain classes of application are just too dangerous and easy to screw up that they should be completely banned from the network. This is one of the rare areas where those stupid palladium chips could be an appropriate part of the solution. Additionally, some things just shouldn't be connected to the internet at all. If you need to do an update of one of those, you can hand carry the discs in after having verified the contents and verify them again on the way out. If it's that secure you kind of need that at minimum.
Not necessarily, there are ways of doing this, such as doing an MFS style image with signed patches downloaded as need be with a CD being provided from time to time as the patches get larger. Additionally the only meaningful difference between a BoA disc and say one from BECU would be where the homepage linked to. There's no particular reason why the discs need to be bank specific.
You do realize that most if not all Virtual Machines allow you to run physical discs, right? Or that it's trivial to convert said discs into images that any VM package will accept.
It's ultimately probably a better idea to have to boot into it rather than using something else as it makes it more of a deliberate process. A bit of a pain, but more deliberate in nature. Anybody that can't figure out how to work around the reboot limitation shouldn't be doing so anyways.
Hammer? Wasn't that a codename for some of AMD's processors? I think we can lift those. I'm just not sure what the 3-lbs., designation stands for.
Most likely, I've seen computers that were built completely into the keyboard in recent years, but they haven't taken off. I'd be shocked if the name would be enough to change that.
The right solution to illegal immigrants using this is to deal with the problem of illegal immigrants. As in levy huge fines against people that knowingly hire them and fix immigration policy to make sure that jobs that are legitimately not being filled by US citizens are at least filled by green card holders. You're not going to get it 100% right, but having 11m or so of them mostly working in sweatshop like conditions is a disgrace.
I don't want a national ID card personally, but the reality is that we already have one, we've all got our social security cards, and as long as the new card is in a similar vein, there's probably not going to be a whole lot of fighting about it. A national drivers license and set of records for everything would be a much bigger fight, with good reason.
Of course it's imperfect. So were Medicare, Social Security and Unemployment insurance when they were first passed. It's ignorant to blame government in general for what Republicans in particular are doing.
The Republicans blamed the Democrats for selling out our veterans. Funny thing is I remember only a few short years ago when the Democrats were trying very hard to get more funding for the VA system and the Republicans were fighting hard to kill the initiative for being costly. If the Republicans would focus on fixing things the right way instead of blindly cutting taxes on the rich.
In answer to your question, those that most need this reform have been fighting the hardest against it. Just because you're lucky enough to be able to afford to pay out of pocket for things, doesn't make that the status quo. What I was having to pay as somebody that was in good health, but flunked into the high risk pool anyways was unaffordable. Even the nearly $6k a year I was paying in premiums was more than I could really afford to pay. Sure, I did find a way, but I had to get help in doing so since I didn't have the money and couldn't afford not to have health care.
Even today, that would represent a very serious drain on my budget if I weren't lucky enough to be insured at work. Which by the way might not have lasted much longer had I needed to pay out of pocket.
Couple of corrections:
First, health care is in no way worse than it was 12 years ago.
Citation necessary, it's not worse if you have it, but the plans have been getting expensive at an alarming rate. A couple years back when I had an individual policy, I was lucky to only get a 12% increase in premiums. Some people are having increases as high as 76% or more. Sure if you have health care it's not any worse, but it's an increasingly common thing for a person to not have any at all.
Second, all of the concessions made to get health care passed were made to entice Democrats. No concessions were made to Republicans, and no Republicans voted for any version of the bill.
Umm, perhaps if the Republicans were willing to participate in the debate instead of blindly saying no, they'd've got something out of it. There were plenty of concessions made to conservative causes, they were just to ignorant and stubborn too participate. Remember the scare tactics about things like the "death panels" nowhere in any of the versions of the bill was there a single mention of that. And the portion which they twisted into "death panels" was completely removed. Also, single payer was stripped from the bills.
Third, Republicans have had detailed proposals on the table, all of which addresses specific problems with specific solutions, since before the first Democratic bill was ever conceived. You're right that they failed to enact any of these when they had power, and for that they deserve scorn. But supporting the democratic bill on those grounds is a bit like shooting yourself in the head because your mother served meatloaf for dinner even though she had steak in the fridge.
Bullshit, the Republicans haven't at any point put any proposal on the table that had even the slightest chance of working. They were fundamentally flawed and were never intended to be put into place. Basically window dressing for people uninformed enough to not know any better. Some of the ideas that were good were put into the final bill.
Fifth, this is the first ever use of reconciliation for something that isn't reconciliation. And there has never been anything bigger than this, let alone anything bigger than this passed by reconciliation.
Bullshit, that's something that the Republicans under Bush 43 did on more than one occasion. And worse still, the Patriot act was passed without any of the legislators being given time to even read the whole thing.
Sixth, support for this bill is under 40%. That is not "mildly unpopular".
Citation required, the vast majority of Americans support reform, the fact that the Republicans can lie to the American people without any remorse is just disgusting. Perhaps if they hate this so much they can move to some other country.
Seventh, our proposal is not "doing nothing". If anything, the democratic proposal would be more accurately described as "doing nothing" on the grounds that while it does do a ton of stuff, none of it addresses any of the things that are wrong with health care in the US today - with the possible exception of the individual mandate, which is unconstitutional.
Um, right, but only under a very technical definition of doing nothing. Tort reform and waste reduction is something, it's just easy to confuse that since it's so little that it rounds to nothing. Also it's not unconstitutional, you'll have to cite a legit source on that. This sort of thing has been litigated in the past and the SCOTUS has recognized that it doesn't violate the constitution. But then again, SCOTUS lately seems to not feel like reading the constitution when it's not convenient for the conservatives.
Imagine that there's a garbage can on fire in your back yard. A couple hundred firefighters respond. They evacuate your neighbors from their homes, dig trenches around the garbag
I wouldn't say that much, all current systems yes, but ones that could be implemented in the near future definitely not. The weak spot in the equation is the centralized nature of things. Just like how FTP servers are easy to shutter to stop the source of pirated content relative to torrents that allow many to be involved.
As solar becomes more prevalent, the power grid could be altered to more closely resemble the fishnet that became the internet. You'd have many smaller sources closer to where people use the power. It would definitely still be vulnerable, but it would make things much more difficult. You cut the transmission lines into a major city and chances are they'll run out of power immediately. However the way things are going, you'd cut the lines and they'd be down to partial power.
Depending upon the infrastructure it could be surprisingly fine grained.
On top of that, if one feels that strongly, there're options. For instance blocking Google javascript and cookies goes a long way, as does not running flash.
One could also go through various proxies and firewalls, but blocking cookies, javascript and flash is enough for most people, anything beyond that is probably overdoing.