The ads don't contain the trademark, they're simply triggered by a search for that trademark. The former would be confusing for consumers, since it would make them think the ad is for that trademark, while the latter is just an ad for a related service (that happens to be a competitor).
If an ad is misleading, it needs to be pulled. But if it's just an ad? Why do searches that contain a trademark have to be handled any differently than any other search? This opens up a whole can of worms. What about trademark "collisions" between different markets? Who gets exclusive control of the ad space there? Should ads in response to a search for "Visa" be limited to those that link to www.visa.com, or is it OK for banks and travel agencies to have ad space there too? You can't force Google to be the trademark police without seriously affecting the relevance of the ads it displays, and if I'm going to see ads on my searches, I want them to be useful and relevant, not restricted to the trademark holder. These are advertisements, not a keyword service.
None of these failings are problems with Android. You seem to be confusing the OS with the hardware. Android covers the software, and it's up to the hardware manufacturers to decide how they want the phone to work. The only existing Android phone HAS a slide-out keyboard, so just buy one of those instead of one that relies on an on-screen keyboard. Similarly, let the hardware manufacturers know that you'd be willing to pay for a stylus. These are hardware design issues, not Android issues.
You're oversimplifying. You can't go around shooting people that you think are committing a felony. I'm sure that if you saw person A trying to kill person B, and the only thing you could do to save person B is to shoot person A, you'd probably be OK legally, but in this situation, seeing someone mess with the underside of your car, you can't reasonably say that the use of lethal force was even remotely necessary.
Agreed. I think having lots of plumbing and tanks and the like could probably work, but it still felt like it was the interior of a terrestrial building: lots of wasted, empty space above "ground" level. This could have been done a lot better.
Having escaped from a big ship under attack using a bunch of little shuttles, the crew would be POWs or dead. The shuttles can't fight and can't run.
It's possible the kamikaze run by Kirk's father sufficiently disabled the ship so that the shuttles had a chance to escape. It's also possible that the antagonist calmed down afterward and figured there was no point in even going after the shuttles, much less killing or capturing them.
Time travel. Bad time travel. The deus ex machina of bad SF.
Generally, yes, but there was no deus ex machina this time. Time travel didn't solve the problem; it created it. We're now "stuck" in an alternate timeline drastically different from the one we've grown up with. It's a "reboot" for us, and for the characters. I've cringed with each movie/TV episode that (ab)used time travel, but in this particular case I think it's completely forgivable.
Clean ? Great ! You will advance this lofty goal by limiting a single substance...
I did not intend to suggest that eliminating CO2 will fix the environment, or that the environment was even in need of fixing. My point is that it is possible to use the economy to achieve your goals, by aligning the profit motive with your altruistic one.
Industries that are sufficiently mobile could move elsewhere, sure, but plenty of heavy polluters (freight transport in the US, for example) can't exactly move. Plus, as trade barriers drop and the standard of living rises elsewhere, they will indeed start to care about their local environments, and will grow increasingly upset that the world's polluters are all moving into town.
I'm not sure I understand your evolution comment. It sounds like you're saying you'd prefer to allow companies to pollute all they want, and that everyone should simply adapt. I suspect you believe that companies will start to fail (for reasons I don't really see) and that eventually they'll switch to being non-polluting. While I suppose that's certainly possible, it sounds like you'd have to start seeing some catastrophic environmental problems (widespread droughts, famine) for there to be sufficient market pressure for companies to start doing the right thing. I'd rather not see that happen, which means applying some artificial pressure to the market (higher taxes on bad behavior) to influence behavior now rather than later.
In other words, altruistic states where decisions are not made on economic merit, but on the basis of "justice".
You can have your cake and eat it too: regulate the economy in such a way that your sense of "justice" is reflected there. In other words, tax things like carbon emissions, since your goal is to eliminate them. Let the economy do the work of figuring out how to get rid of carbon emissions. Suddenly, polluting companies have a profit motive to be clean.
You're making unreasonable assumptions about the ability of the government to have prevented this: that these machines weren't fully updated with the latest virus protection, and that updates and virus protection are infallible, which would require that virus authors submit their work to all of the anti-virus vendors before releasing it into the wild.
If you want to hold the government to a higher standard, good for you. I suspect the tax consequences of that higher standard would prevent us from ever reaching it, though.
So, everyone that has their Windows computer compromised has only himself/herself to blame? They could have used Open Source, and they could have hired someone to review the Open Source software, which guarantees that it's bug-free, right? So it's really their own fault for getting hacked. Riiight..
TWC almost certainly does an analysis of costs when considering moving to a new area. They price out the cost of the infrastructure, the cost of complying with local laws, and the taxes and fees they would have to pay. Then they try to figure out how much revenue they can get, how much they can charge people, and if the net income is too low, they decide not to go for it. They probably repeat this assessment regularly. So TWC probably "can't compete" because it's determined that its costs will be too high. You probably have several (perhaps potential) Mom & Pop ISPs that are in a similar situation: looking at the cost landscape, and figuring that it's going to be too expensive to enter the market.
But many of those costs are actually imposed by the government. There's taxes, franchise fees, fees to use public rights of way, etc. If those costs went away, that totally changes the equation and TW (or a local Mom & Pop) might actually be in a good position to set up shop in town.
That's effectively what this government ISP enjoys. They don't pay taxes or fees to the government (itself). Consequently, the costs for the government effort are lower.
But is this a bad thing? Maybe you're OK losing out on some tax revenue if it means faster, cheaper Internet. But if that's the attitude, why not just eliminate those taxes and fees for everyone? Why only eliminate it for your pet government-owned ISP? Maybe if you eliminated it for everyone, you'd have two or three ISPs trying to provide service in your locality instead of just Time Warner.
There's also the issue of tax subsidies. Maybe in 5 years it gets a lot more expensive to offer Internet service, but since you have a government ISP, they can just raise taxes, or cut the budget of some other government program, to make up the difference. You still pay a cheap rate each month. Obviously, TW can't just raid government programs like that. But maybe you think tax subsidies for fast Internet are a good thing. Spread the cost around, so that people with lower incomes can afford fast Internet. OK, that's a reasonable position. But why only offer those subsidies to (users of) the government ISP? Why not offer it to everyone?
So long as you have a government ISP in town, without the measures provided by these bills, that's all you will ever have.
The government is competing, but it's competing unfairly. The government doesn't have to pay most (if not all) of the taxes and fees that a private company has to pay. The government also has lots of tax money from other sources that it can use to subsidize your Internet, which your government is free to use in the event that the cost of supplying Internet goes up, but you'd prefer not to (directly) pay any more.
If you think the current set of taxes/fees assessed for providing Internet service is too high, just get rid of them. Setting up a government entity just so that you can enjoy that cost break is kind of retarded. Those taxes and fees were probably created for a reason, but if you don't agree with that reason, the right thing to do is eliminate them, not work around them.
If you think subsidizing Internet through taxes isn't such a bad thing, then subsidize it for everyone, regardless of who they pay. Why only allow a tax subsidy for your pet government entity?
It's these bits of unfairness that the bill is trying to prevent (read the bill, please).
But to say that you have to jack your costs up to match a publicly owned ISP, for all time, just because you can?
This isn't about equalizing all costs, just taxes. Re-read, please. Companies like TW have to pay all sorts of taxes and fees in order to provide service. A government entity may not have to pay those same taxes and fees. The bill ensures that any government-provided service include the same taxes/fees (a subset of the costs) that any other private entity would have to pay.
If you want cheaper Internet, and you've discovered that an oppressive tax/fee structure is one of the reasons it's so expensive, the solution to that is to simply eliminate those taxes and fees, not set up a government entity just to get around them. At some point somebody said, "hey it'd be nice if we assessed a bunch of taxes and fees on companies like TW, to recover our costs and make some money for schools." Now, somebody's saying, "hey it'd be nice if we set up our own government ISP, so that we don't have to pay all of the taxes/fees that TW passes on to us." That's retarded. If you don't want them, just get rid of the damn fees for all ISPs.
Why are you blaming the US government for (a) defects in software they didn't write; and (b) a malicious botnet created and operated by someone else? The only reason the US government is being singled out in this article is because it makes the story more sensational, which means more eyeballs, which means more ad revenue.
I suspect re-publishing doesn't count, since the facts are now public. Anyone that re-publishes isn't responsible for the intrusion, and (now) public facts are public facts, so there's no violation of privacy. But then again IANAL.
Sounds like they should have specified a security model that would forbid certain classes and method rather than simply removing classes.
After reading through the documentation, it looks like they do throw SecurityException when it's appropriate for them to do so. It looks like they're making extensive use of Java's security features to point out where an application is doing something it's not allowed to. Is this actually a problem people are having with their Java ports?
If a JDK class is missing and the library class you want to use references it the code won't even run with an UnsatisfiedLinkError. That is a HUGE difference.
Do you have any information suggesting that this is how Google chooses to deviate from the standard? I think we can all agree that this is, indeed, a huge difference. But is Google actually doing this?
1. Developer tries to port code
2. javac throws classNotFound exceptions
3. Dev:"WTF! java.lang.System is integral!"
4. Dev is VERY confused since java.lang.System is essential for a basic hello world.
Features of the java.lang.System class that do not apply to App Engine are disabled.
The following System methods do nothing in App Engine: exit(), gc(), runFinalization(), runFinalizersOnExit()
The following System methods return null: inheritedChannel(), console()
An app cannot provide or directly invoke any native JNI code. The following System methods raise a java.lang.SecurityException: load(), loadLibrary(), setSecurityManager()
What about this is unreasonable? Where does it say that apps will get ClassNotFoundExceptions? Please stop spreading unsubstantiated FUD.
"Genetic problems"?? You seem to be confusing incest/inbreeding with polygamy. Abuse? You seem to be attributing correlation to causation. "You can see it over and over again"?? The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". You wouldn't mind having a third or a fourth wife, yeah? If you found three or four women that would consent to such a relationship, what exactly is the problem? Domestic violence happens even with a pair of married heterosexual couples.
All I'm trying to say is that once you take away the religious significance of marriage by renaming it and redefining it as a legal concept, you have to step back and look at all of the other religious aspects of marriage that still remain in your non-religious "civil union". You seem to want to keep the union between only two people, and I'm curious to see why you think that should be.
IMO, any benefits extended to members of a civil union should be justified, not grandfathered into something that's the same as marriage, but called something different:
Are we doing it because we want to encourage people to have children? Then let's extend the benefit to people that have children, not to members of a civil union.
Are we doing it because we want to encourage a stable household to raise children? Then let's extend the benefit to civil unions of any shape and size. Surely raising a child in a household that includes grandparents, aunts and/or uncles is just as "stable" as a nuclear family (which, by the way, is a recent American invention).
Are we doing it because we want family members the ability to take over the finances and make decisions for the household? Why limit that to a spouse? Maybe my grandparents or other family members want me to assume control over their assets too?
You can't take the position that "marriage" is a religious concept, and civil unions are going to be way better because they aren't religious, and then get uptight when someone suggests a variation that offends your religious/moral sensibilities.
I suspect the goal is not to build a human brain, so it's probably not necessary to perfectly emulate all of the biochemical processes involved in one. Even if the resulting "brain" is horribly inefficient, scaling up to 100x the number of neurons in a human brain to start to see some basic cognition, all we have to do is get to that point, somehow, and the Singularity will take over from there.
cause all the kids who didn't learn the correct commonly held theory to have to take an extra few classes in remedial science
I'm not too worried about kids learning the "wrong" theory. Kids aren't quite as dumb as people seem to think. They all know what evolution is, and most of them are quite capable of seeing through this BS. What I'm worried about is that by suggesting there are legitimate scientific alternatives to evolution, these kids will come out of this not having a fucking clue what a scientific theory is. By introducing non-scientific concepts and presenting them as science, we are neutering science education in its entirety, above and beyond evolution/genesis. It does no good if students "believe" in evolution if they also believe ID is a scientific theory.
Every single computer nerd has at least the skill level you've stated. If you want an entry-level programming position, you are competing with hundreds of thousands of kids right out of high school, every year. The only thing that's going to set you apart is your experience, and if that experience isn't programming-related, you need to get some.
Contributing to personal or open-source projects is a great way to start. If you can describe some of the work you've done (the nature of your contributions), this is the best thing to see on a resume. You don't even have to release the software. Just write it, explain what it does, how you designed it, why you designed it that way, and, ideally, be able to provide some code samples.
If you're interested in a job in an IT shop of a non-software company, this should be sufficient to get your foot in the door. The bar isn't high there, but that also means the skill level of your peers there will be below-average, so your opportunity (incentive) for mentoring and growth will be limited. If you're interested in a job at a real software company (Microsoft, Google), your personal projects and a healthy enthusiasm for your desired occupation will probably get you an interview, but all of the algorithms, data structures, math, and boring crap that you probably didn't learn in college suddenly becomes important, so expect to do a lot of reading (studying) if you hope to get past the interviews.
If I'm not paying attention, and rear-end you while you're stopped at a stop light, who should pay for fixing your car? If you think I should pay, but I don't have any money, who is going to end up paying?
In civil justice/equity systems such as those in the US, when you harm someone else, you are required to compensate the person you harmed. I buy liability insurance to protect me in the event I hit your car, and it's my responsibility to fix it for you. I buy uninsured motorist coverage in addition to protect me in the event you hit me, but you don't have any money. Insurance doesn't make me responsible for your problems. It helps me be responsible for my problems.
Your stampeding animal analogy is bad because we do not hold animals responsible for their actions. A zoo, however, might be responsible for the harm caused by the animals it exhibits, but generally, you're right in this context that it would be your own medical insurance/health plan that would cover wild animal attacks.
Your daughter is going to be bombarded by sex from all directions. She'll get it at school, on TV, movies, from friends (and "friends"), and, yes, the Internet. Strict filtering at home just means the neighbor's unfiltered Internet is all the more enticing. Talk to your kids about what it is, what they're seeing, why it's out there, and make it cease to be a "naughty" attraction, and an unfiltered Internet should cease to be a problem. If your kids want to see "forbidden" content, they're going to figure out a way to do it. The biggest thing is having an open dialog about what your kids are seeing and learning. I'd rather my kids talk to me about what they read on some white supremacist site than keep that information from me because they thought they'd be in trouble, since it was filtered.
USB flash drives are normally implemented as a USB disk, not a FAT32 "device", so the FAT32 implementation (and patent concerns) are pushed off to the host that reads/writes to the disk. Digital cameras and iPods could be considered hosts in that sense, and they probably already have FAT32 licensed.
Don't document mundane tasks. Instead, automate those tasks so that humans don't have to do them. If you have a long scripted process for performing a task, script it. Then, document things in two ways:
1. High level documentation explaining the process, and what scripts to run or automation to utilize to perform the task. 2. Write well-documented code so that if something goes wrong, the operator can see what happened and how to fix it.
We use a variety of techniques and technologies to write documentation internally, but it's all web-accessible, and every project/team has a home page that has all of these documents linked from it. We don't document the mundane, unless it's something that someone must think very hard about before they hit enter.
Slashdot Mirror
The ads don't contain the trademark, they're simply triggered by a search for that trademark. The former would be confusing for consumers, since it would make them think the ad is for that trademark, while the latter is just an ad for a related service (that happens to be a competitor).
If an ad is misleading, it needs to be pulled. But if it's just an ad? Why do searches that contain a trademark have to be handled any differently than any other search? This opens up a whole can of worms. What about trademark "collisions" between different markets? Who gets exclusive control of the ad space there? Should ads in response to a search for "Visa" be limited to those that link to www.visa.com, or is it OK for banks and travel agencies to have ad space there too? You can't force Google to be the trademark police without seriously affecting the relevance of the ads it displays, and if I'm going to see ads on my searches, I want them to be useful and relevant, not restricted to the trademark holder. These are advertisements, not a keyword service.
None of these failings are problems with Android. You seem to be confusing the OS with the hardware. Android covers the software, and it's up to the hardware manufacturers to decide how they want the phone to work. The only existing Android phone HAS a slide-out keyboard, so just buy one of those instead of one that relies on an on-screen keyboard. Similarly, let the hardware manufacturers know that you'd be willing to pay for a stylus. These are hardware design issues, not Android issues.
You're oversimplifying. You can't go around shooting people that you think are committing a felony. I'm sure that if you saw person A trying to kill person B, and the only thing you could do to save person B is to shoot person A, you'd probably be OK legally, but in this situation, seeing someone mess with the underside of your car, you can't reasonably say that the use of lethal force was even remotely necessary.
Agreed. I think having lots of plumbing and tanks and the like could probably work, but it still felt like it was the interior of a terrestrial building: lots of wasted, empty space above "ground" level. This could have been done a lot better.
It's possible the kamikaze run by Kirk's father sufficiently disabled the ship so that the shuttles had a chance to escape. It's also possible that the antagonist calmed down afterward and figured there was no point in even going after the shuttles, much less killing or capturing them.
Generally, yes, but there was no deus ex machina this time. Time travel didn't solve the problem; it created it. We're now "stuck" in an alternate timeline drastically different from the one we've grown up with. It's a "reboot" for us, and for the characters. I've cringed with each movie/TV episode that (ab)used time travel, but in this particular case I think it's completely forgivable.
I did not intend to suggest that eliminating CO2 will fix the environment, or that the environment was even in need of fixing. My point is that it is possible to use the economy to achieve your goals, by aligning the profit motive with your altruistic one.
Industries that are sufficiently mobile could move elsewhere, sure, but plenty of heavy polluters (freight transport in the US, for example) can't exactly move. Plus, as trade barriers drop and the standard of living rises elsewhere, they will indeed start to care about their local environments, and will grow increasingly upset that the world's polluters are all moving into town.
I'm not sure I understand your evolution comment. It sounds like you're saying you'd prefer to allow companies to pollute all they want, and that everyone should simply adapt. I suspect you believe that companies will start to fail (for reasons I don't really see) and that eventually they'll switch to being non-polluting. While I suppose that's certainly possible, it sounds like you'd have to start seeing some catastrophic environmental problems (widespread droughts, famine) for there to be sufficient market pressure for companies to start doing the right thing. I'd rather not see that happen, which means applying some artificial pressure to the market (higher taxes on bad behavior) to influence behavior now rather than later.
You can have your cake and eat it too: regulate the economy in such a way that your sense of "justice" is reflected there. In other words, tax things like carbon emissions, since your goal is to eliminate them. Let the economy do the work of figuring out how to get rid of carbon emissions. Suddenly, polluting companies have a profit motive to be clean.
You're making unreasonable assumptions about the ability of the government to have prevented this: that these machines weren't fully updated with the latest virus protection, and that updates and virus protection are infallible, which would require that virus authors submit their work to all of the anti-virus vendors before releasing it into the wild.
If you want to hold the government to a higher standard, good for you. I suspect the tax consequences of that higher standard would prevent us from ever reaching it, though.
So, everyone that has their Windows computer compromised has only himself/herself to blame? They could have used Open Source, and they could have hired someone to review the Open Source software, which guarantees that it's bug-free, right? So it's really their own fault for getting hacked. Riiight..
TWC almost certainly does an analysis of costs when considering moving to a new area. They price out the cost of the infrastructure, the cost of complying with local laws, and the taxes and fees they would have to pay. Then they try to figure out how much revenue they can get, how much they can charge people, and if the net income is too low, they decide not to go for it. They probably repeat this assessment regularly. So TWC probably "can't compete" because it's determined that its costs will be too high. You probably have several (perhaps potential) Mom & Pop ISPs that are in a similar situation: looking at the cost landscape, and figuring that it's going to be too expensive to enter the market.
But many of those costs are actually imposed by the government. There's taxes, franchise fees, fees to use public rights of way, etc. If those costs went away, that totally changes the equation and TW (or a local Mom & Pop) might actually be in a good position to set up shop in town.
That's effectively what this government ISP enjoys. They don't pay taxes or fees to the government (itself). Consequently, the costs for the government effort are lower.
But is this a bad thing? Maybe you're OK losing out on some tax revenue if it means faster, cheaper Internet. But if that's the attitude, why not just eliminate those taxes and fees for everyone? Why only eliminate it for your pet government-owned ISP? Maybe if you eliminated it for everyone, you'd have two or three ISPs trying to provide service in your locality instead of just Time Warner.
There's also the issue of tax subsidies. Maybe in 5 years it gets a lot more expensive to offer Internet service, but since you have a government ISP, they can just raise taxes, or cut the budget of some other government program, to make up the difference. You still pay a cheap rate each month. Obviously, TW can't just raid government programs like that. But maybe you think tax subsidies for fast Internet are a good thing. Spread the cost around, so that people with lower incomes can afford fast Internet. OK, that's a reasonable position. But why only offer those subsidies to (users of) the government ISP? Why not offer it to everyone?
So long as you have a government ISP in town, without the measures provided by these bills, that's all you will ever have.
The government is competing, but it's competing unfairly. The government doesn't have to pay most (if not all) of the taxes and fees that a private company has to pay. The government also has lots of tax money from other sources that it can use to subsidize your Internet, which your government is free to use in the event that the cost of supplying Internet goes up, but you'd prefer not to (directly) pay any more.
If you think the current set of taxes/fees assessed for providing Internet service is too high, just get rid of them. Setting up a government entity just so that you can enjoy that cost break is kind of retarded. Those taxes and fees were probably created for a reason, but if you don't agree with that reason, the right thing to do is eliminate them, not work around them.
If you think subsidizing Internet through taxes isn't such a bad thing, then subsidize it for everyone, regardless of who they pay. Why only allow a tax subsidy for your pet government entity?
It's these bits of unfairness that the bill is trying to prevent (read the bill, please).
This isn't about equalizing all costs, just taxes. Re-read, please. Companies like TW have to pay all sorts of taxes and fees in order to provide service. A government entity may not have to pay those same taxes and fees. The bill ensures that any government-provided service include the same taxes/fees (a subset of the costs) that any other private entity would have to pay.
If you want cheaper Internet, and you've discovered that an oppressive tax/fee structure is one of the reasons it's so expensive, the solution to that is to simply eliminate those taxes and fees, not set up a government entity just to get around them. At some point somebody said, "hey it'd be nice if we assessed a bunch of taxes and fees on companies like TW, to recover our costs and make some money for schools." Now, somebody's saying, "hey it'd be nice if we set up our own government ISP, so that we don't have to pay all of the taxes/fees that TW passes on to us." That's retarded. If you don't want them, just get rid of the damn fees for all ISPs.
Why are you blaming the US government for (a) defects in software they didn't write; and (b) a malicious botnet created and operated by someone else? The only reason the US government is being singled out in this article is because it makes the story more sensational, which means more eyeballs, which means more ad revenue.
I suspect re-publishing doesn't count, since the facts are now public. Anyone that re-publishes isn't responsible for the intrusion, and (now) public facts are public facts, so there's no violation of privacy. But then again IANAL.
After reading through the documentation, it looks like they do throw SecurityException when it's appropriate for them to do so. It looks like they're making extensive use of Java's security features to point out where an application is doing something it's not allowed to. Is this actually a problem people are having with their Java ports?
Do you have any information suggesting that this is how Google chooses to deviate from the standard? I think we can all agree that this is, indeed, a huge difference. But is Google actually doing this?
Citation needed, please. Here's what Google's documentation about java.lang.System says:
What about this is unreasonable? Where does it say that apps will get ClassNotFoundExceptions? Please stop spreading unsubstantiated FUD.
"Genetic problems"?? You seem to be confusing incest/inbreeding with polygamy. Abuse? You seem to be attributing correlation to causation. "You can see it over and over again"?? The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". You wouldn't mind having a third or a fourth wife, yeah? If you found three or four women that would consent to such a relationship, what exactly is the problem? Domestic violence happens even with a pair of married heterosexual couples.
All I'm trying to say is that once you take away the religious significance of marriage by renaming it and redefining it as a legal concept, you have to step back and look at all of the other religious aspects of marriage that still remain in your non-religious "civil union". You seem to want to keep the union between only two people, and I'm curious to see why you think that should be.
IMO, any benefits extended to members of a civil union should be justified, not grandfathered into something that's the same as marriage, but called something different:
Are we doing it because we want to encourage people to have children? Then let's extend the benefit to people that have children, not to members of a civil union.
Are we doing it because we want to encourage a stable household to raise children? Then let's extend the benefit to civil unions of any shape and size. Surely raising a child in a household that includes grandparents, aunts and/or uncles is just as "stable" as a nuclear family (which, by the way, is a recent American invention).
Are we doing it because we want family members the ability to take over the finances and make decisions for the household? Why limit that to a spouse? Maybe my grandparents or other family members want me to assume control over their assets too?
You can't take the position that "marriage" is a religious concept, and civil unions are going to be way better because they aren't religious, and then get uptight when someone suggests a variation that offends your religious/moral sensibilities.
Why only two?
I suspect the goal is not to build a human brain, so it's probably not necessary to perfectly emulate all of the biochemical processes involved in one. Even if the resulting "brain" is horribly inefficient, scaling up to 100x the number of neurons in a human brain to start to see some basic cognition, all we have to do is get to that point, somehow, and the Singularity will take over from there.
I'm not too worried about kids learning the "wrong" theory. Kids aren't quite as dumb as people seem to think. They all know what evolution is, and most of them are quite capable of seeing through this BS. What I'm worried about is that by suggesting there are legitimate scientific alternatives to evolution, these kids will come out of this not having a fucking clue what a scientific theory is. By introducing non-scientific concepts and presenting them as science, we are neutering science education in its entirety, above and beyond evolution/genesis. It does no good if students "believe" in evolution if they also believe ID is a scientific theory.
Every single computer nerd has at least the skill level you've stated. If you want an entry-level programming position, you are competing with hundreds of thousands of kids right out of high school, every year. The only thing that's going to set you apart is your experience, and if that experience isn't programming-related, you need to get some.
Contributing to personal or open-source projects is a great way to start. If you can describe some of the work you've done (the nature of your contributions), this is the best thing to see on a resume. You don't even have to release the software. Just write it, explain what it does, how you designed it, why you designed it that way, and, ideally, be able to provide some code samples.
If you're interested in a job in an IT shop of a non-software company, this should be sufficient to get your foot in the door. The bar isn't high there, but that also means the skill level of your peers there will be below-average, so your opportunity (incentive) for mentoring and growth will be limited. If you're interested in a job at a real software company (Microsoft, Google), your personal projects and a healthy enthusiasm for your desired occupation will probably get you an interview, but all of the algorithms, data structures, math, and boring crap that you probably didn't learn in college suddenly becomes important, so expect to do a lot of reading (studying) if you hope to get past the interviews.
If I'm not paying attention, and rear-end you while you're stopped at a stop light, who should pay for fixing your car? If you think I should pay, but I don't have any money, who is going to end up paying?
In civil justice/equity systems such as those in the US, when you harm someone else, you are required to compensate the person you harmed. I buy liability insurance to protect me in the event I hit your car, and it's my responsibility to fix it for you. I buy uninsured motorist coverage in addition to protect me in the event you hit me, but you don't have any money. Insurance doesn't make me responsible for your problems. It helps me be responsible for my problems.
Your stampeding animal analogy is bad because we do not hold animals responsible for their actions. A zoo, however, might be responsible for the harm caused by the animals it exhibits, but generally, you're right in this context that it would be your own medical insurance/health plan that would cover wild animal attacks.
Your daughter is going to be bombarded by sex from all directions. She'll get it at school, on TV, movies, from friends (and "friends"), and, yes, the Internet. Strict filtering at home just means the neighbor's unfiltered Internet is all the more enticing. Talk to your kids about what it is, what they're seeing, why it's out there, and make it cease to be a "naughty" attraction, and an unfiltered Internet should cease to be a problem. If your kids want to see "forbidden" content, they're going to figure out a way to do it. The biggest thing is having an open dialog about what your kids are seeing and learning. I'd rather my kids talk to me about what they read on some white supremacist site than keep that information from me because they thought they'd be in trouble, since it was filtered.
USB flash drives are normally implemented as a USB disk, not a FAT32 "device", so the FAT32 implementation (and patent concerns) are pushed off to the host that reads/writes to the disk. Digital cameras and iPods could be considered hosts in that sense, and they probably already have FAT32 licensed.
Don't document mundane tasks. Instead, automate those tasks so that humans don't have to do them. If you have a long scripted process for performing a task, script it. Then, document things in two ways:
1. High level documentation explaining the process, and what scripts to run or automation to utilize to perform the task.
2. Write well-documented code so that if something goes wrong, the operator can see what happened and how to fix it.
We use a variety of techniques and technologies to write documentation internally, but it's all web-accessible, and every project/team has a home page that has all of these documents linked from it. We don't document the mundane, unless it's something that someone must think very hard about before they hit enter.