They heard the judge tell his wife when he called to ask "What's for dinner?"
Wife? Not this guy. This is the same judge presiding over the Proposition 8 trial in California, and the biggest open secret in the whole affair is that Vaughn Walker is himself homosexual.
Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education
You seem terrified that a parent might send their kids to a church-affiliated school "with tax dollars"... when most parents are contributing to those tax dollars. As long as the school is accredited, so what? Some of the finest schools in the country are church-affiliated, especially Catholic schools. I'm not Catholic myself, but between an inter-city public school and a Catholic school in the same area, I'd damn sure take the Catholic school.
Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.
While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that he was risking their "self-esteem". Well, those teachers chased him off, and now I wonder how high the esteem of those students is now that they're no longer reaching the academic heights that Escalante took them to?
Escalante's example is nearly opposite of what you're proposing. It's about someone caring enough about OTHERs and improving their situation dramatically.
You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.
But while he personally sacrificed to help others... he could have made a lot more money had he stayed at Burroughs... he in fact did very much demand that his students take personal initiative. He wasn't a raging Libertarian or anything, but he DID expect a large sense of personal responsibility from his students.
I don't quite understand why you're being modded troll when critics of the system from both right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. As much as conservative groups support things like charter schools, minority families... traditionally loyal Democratic voters... support them even more, because despite ever increasing dollars on public schools, the public system isn't getting it done with their kids. Washington D.C. schools spend more per pupil than just about anywhere else, and yet have among the worst scores and graduation rates.
"Actually the difference between the primary roles of the Army and the Air Force is more akin to the difference between the Army and the Navy. Primary role of the Army is to project land power. For the Navy it is to project sea power. Air Force is well, to project air power."
Except that air power really isn't separate from ground power or sea power, but an extension of both. Why does the Air force fight? To protect forces on the ground. Why does the Navy fight? To ensure dominance at sea. Airpower is used for both purposes. It's just one more weapon. Until we actually can live in the sky, those aircraft have to land after a few hours. That makes them nothing but assets for ground and sea forces.
The whole organizing principle here that makes the case for the Army and Navy, but not USAF, is that "you live where you fight". Nobody lives in the sky. Even in the submarine service... where you arguably CAN live under the sea for long periods... everyone understands that they're just another phase of sea power, not a separate branch. The Air Force is essentially a sexed up phase of ground power... because the primary purpose is, after all, to protect those forces on the dirt. This is why we went to the air in the first place.
The only possible claim that USAF had to a separate identity... strategic airpower, IE hitting targets far away and distant from troops on the battlefield... became moot in the age of ballistic and cruise missiles, which are launched... here it is again... by guys on the ground.
The difference being that the Navy has a claim to a separate identity for one immutable reason... they live where they fight, on the ocean itself. It makes sense to specialize because of this. The Air Force doesn't live in castles in the sky... there are no cloud cities from Star Wars. They live, train, and fight on ground bases... same as the Army. When the Air Force can stay in the air six months at a time, then give me a call.
The future of the Air Force probably lies in space-based operations, while UAV handles Earth operations and is handed back to the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.
No, I don't think so. The Navy certainly isn't going to give up claims to operations in space, and they have a point, after all. The Naval Institute says "Space is a kind of ocean, and oceans are where Navies go".
"Going fully dependent on remote controlled drones is a form of "Preparing for the last war"."
Except that in the future... probably late in our own lifetiimes... you'll see completely autonomous UAV's that aren't remote controlled, but pre-programmed with advanced AI. At launch, we'll literally tell these machines "go kill this guy", and they'll go off and do it. Remote control will only be invoked rarely. Skynet jokes aside, this IS coming.
We don't need an independent Air Force to continue a military industrial complex. Someone will have to make those pilotless aircraft for the Army and Navy, after all.
We did not choose it? You might want to do a little studying about the "peace" conditions imposed on Germany after World War 1.
By the same logic, women deserve to get raped because they wear skimpy clothing.
I think that's a bad analogy in this case. I'm pretty patriotic, and pro-military. I'm a vet as well. And as I've read more about WWI over the years, I've become more and more convinced that WWII didn't have to happen, and that we in the west... including the United States... bear some responsibility for WWII. How? First off, it's becoming harder and harder to convince me that the US had to fight in Europe, that we had any real interest there. The Germans didn't start it, and looking back, was an ascendent Germany really a threat to the US? No, I don't think so. When you get right down to it, I thinking more and more that WWI was just another European Great-Power pissing match.
Further, the absolute draconian position that we put Germany in after the war created an atmosphere perfect for the rise of Adolf Hitler. Had we not tipped the balance in favor of the UK and France... had Germany fared better after the war.... I think there's a good chance Hitler never rises to power. He wasn't inevitable. He took advantage of the utter desperation Germans were feeling.
Woodrow Wilson should have never agreed to the draconian demands of our fellow allies. Despite his best intentions, all he helped accomplish was the implosion of one empire in favor of two others in Europe.
So I think the analogy is more along the lines of a combatant being raped by the victors... and then becoming so twisted by the experience that they embrace total evil to have the satisfaction of their revenge.
Seems like this works so well they want more of it... but in order for it to do all that they want it to do they'll have to divert resources from the manned flights that exist now. Some programs win, some programs lose. Typical Washington debate about to come up...
No, more than that, UAV's are such a contentious issue because of the tremendous culture clash it's causing in the Air Force. In the Army, Navy, and Marines, UAV's are just another military tech tool to use in battle. But in the Air Force, which bases its entire identity on the old Knights of the Air thing, UAV's aren't seen as a valuable tool so much as they're seen as a threat to the very existence of the Air Force itself.
Think about it. If the day is coming when you can train young, non pilot computer geeks to do what current pilots do.... at less cost and less training time, too.... then why have an independent Air Force at all? Because sooner or later, we'll be able to make UAV fighters that can maneuver better, fly farther, and hit harder than any manned craft of today. It's just a matter of time
I think the dawn of the UAV era may well herald the end of the independent Air Force, and I think the current crop of pilots know it too. And it begs the question, did a seperate Air Force ever really make that much sense? It was a branch based on a particular technology.... akin to the Army splitting Tanks off into their own separate service, or the Navy doing the same with submarines. Airpower really isn't a doctrine so much as it's just one more weapon in your arsenal.
I think by our children or grandchildren's lifetimes, the Air Force may be long gone, and looked at the same way jousting knights in armor are looked at... a glamorous, romantic period that was relatively brief, and brought to an end by technology that made it obsolete.
We do not need yet another federal agency. Splitting them in two will only result in two bigger agencies with an ever ravenous appetite for more tax funds.
One of the worst things Bush did post 9/11 was creating the spate of new federal agencies. Can anyone say that their flying experience is actually better after TSA was created? Anyone?
How much good did creating yet another layer of intelligence bureaucracy do us? Did intelligence get any better after we made the Director of Central Intelligence obsolete by creating a Director of National Intelligence? Not one damn whit. It just grew the federal payroll some more, and added more bloat and bureaucracy.
Vital intelligence work needs to be done, but we need to be trimming down these agencies, not creating new ones.
"having lived behind the iron courtain, I could say that socialism or communism leaders never really cared about own ideology."
You are mistaking socialism/communism for dictatorship/totalitarianism. It's a common mistake.
Well it's awfully damn convienient that whenever someone starts a socialist or communist government, they always happen to end up a dictator. So they've killed and starved perhaps hundreds of millions over the past century, but hey, they just didn't do it right, is that it? Lets give 'em another chance?
They always turn out to be dictators because, surprise surprise, socialism and communism are ripe for that kind of system. If you can declare things like property rights null and void "for the people", then there's nothing that you cant take or abolish.... for the people, of course.
"I've got no beef with socialism in general, but what Chavez is doing isn't socialism."
I really get tired of hearing this old canard... "This isn't really socialism. Socialism really has never been tried". Bunk. This is exactly where socialism goes. There's always people that refuse to play along, and this is what happens to them.
Perhaps the 6 graders that just started math had a really good teacher. One year with a good teacher can outpace several years with a mediocre teacher. The conclusion of the study should be better teaching methods not less education.
Except it wasn't just one teacher. The results were uniform across the poor schools participating in the study.
Well I can buy, that young brains are not always best suited for specific tasks, but it seems contrary to conventional wisdom to remove math till the 6th grade. I can't imagine walking around blind in that respect till I was 12 or so.
Except that if you read the article, you'll notice that kids aren't blind about math without our formal instructions methods. Gray notes that young children have a natural affinity for the counting and value of objects at young ages... "real world math understanding", if you will... and that formal drill and theory actually retards this natural understanding. Note that in the New Hampshire experiment, the poor kids still had a better grasp of how common math works in the real world than did the formally trained kids from better schools... and this was before their formal math schooling in sixth grade.
He thinks that what we're doing to kids at those ages now is somewhat analogous to teaching a monkey to stack bottle caps in ascending order. The monkey may get it right through rote drilling, but has no concept whatsoever of what the exercise means. There are undoubtedly gifted children that pick up theory naturally, but at that age, they're far in the minority.
When people say they're against "embryonic stem cell research" everyone else just hears "stem cell research" because they're too dumb to know the difference (and that's on both sides!).
I keep hearing this, and it's not true from my experience. People I talk to... normal, guy on the street neighbors, friends, and co-workers... are aware of the difference and of what the argument is. Quit assuming that everyone around you is dumb on the issue. I know this is Slashdot, where gross generalizations are a tradition, but try actually talking to people about this, and you may be surprised.
We are--- the restrictions on stem-cell funding have always been on embryonic stem cells, not on research involving stem cells derived from post-fetus-stage living humans, as is the case here.
And you also bring up something important that gets lost here. The restriction was only on federal funding of new stem cell lines. The research itself was never banned in any way, shape, or form. Nothing was stopping private organizations or states or universities from doing their own original embryonic cell work. The federal government just wasn't going to pay for it if it came from outside of existing stem cell lines already in the research pipeline.
correction: Nobody who understands the difference has fought against funding for research into cures using adult stem cells.
There's a massive ignorant crowd of fundies who still consider anything and everything to do with stem cells to be bad.
That is wrong, sir. Find me someone that opposes embryonic stem cell work on religious or ethical grounds. Then ask if they're opposed to non-embryonic stem cell work. To a man, you'll find almost no one. Go to any major religious or conservative publication.... National Review, National Catholic Reporter, etc... and find me one of them... just one... that opposes non-embryonic research. Every single one of them, and major political and religious organizations... even the most conservative of churches... support non-embryonic work. And they've made this clear from the very beginning.
" That is why I use and would recommend Comodo Time Machine "
This is why I would recommend a Mac, or at least something other than Windows. The anti-malware that you have to use on Windows is sometimes almost as bad as the malware itself.
Windows, in and of itself, has become a stable, useful operating system. It's come a long way from the unstable 9X days, and truthfully, in some ways its easier to use than OS X. Were it not for the security issue, I might still be running Windows at home. But the cost in using Windows now... the cost in time, hassle, an dollars because of its security issues... just isn't worth it to me anymore. And if one Linux distro ever came to dominate the field and get the same kind of commercial support the Mac does... I think you'd see a mortal wound at Microsoft.
Redmond needs to pull an OS X and completely re-write the next version from the ground up.... write it from a completely different direction, make it completely incompatible with previous versions. Backwards compatibility with vulnerable previous versions is only one of the things that doom Windows... but it would be the right place to start in fixing their problems.
Holy crap! they offered 2 billion to buy us out? We're not even worth half that!
... almost a billion in cash in the bank and no debt. They're worth more than 2 billion.
Are they? Isn't their market share fast declining? For all of the mocking that Sun received prior to their buyout, they had the benefit of not only software that was actually selling, but hardware as well. Novell chucked their own OS over the fantail and basically sells Linux with commercial support now. Billion in the bank or no, they haven't stemmed the loss of mindshare with the SuSe acquisition. If that was supposed to change their fortunes, it failed.
"If people put a fraction of the time they spend on fake farms into a real business, they'd be rich. So much effort goes into collecting fake gold and going on quests to kill monsters that are nothing but a collection of 1's and 0's. It just seems like such a waste"
This is pretty much how I look at gambling and lotteries. I've never understood people that enjoy losing money in Vegas or at their state lottery. You've got a better chance of being hit by lightning several times than you do winning your state lottery.
If you took that 10 or 15 bucks a pop that you're sinking into your lottery, and instead put it every time into an interest-bearing savings account, pretty soon, you're going to have a pretty good chunk of money saved up. But we encourage this stuff because "people will do it anyway", and most of the time the justification is "but the schools need it", which is just another variant of "for the children". Gambling is, more or less, a tax on stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
They heard the judge tell his wife when he called to ask "What's for dinner?"
Wife? Not this guy. This is the same judge presiding over the Proposition 8 trial in California, and the biggest open secret in the whole affair is that Vaughn Walker is himself homosexual.
Because vouchers in general are not about school choice, but a means of forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education
You seem terrified that a parent might send their kids to a church-affiliated school "with tax dollars"... when most parents are contributing to those tax dollars. As long as the school is accredited, so what? Some of the finest schools in the country are church-affiliated, especially Catholic schools. I'm not Catholic myself, but between an inter-city public school and a Catholic school in the same area, I'd damn sure take the Catholic school.
Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.
While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that he was risking their "self-esteem". Well, those teachers chased him off, and now I wonder how high the esteem of those students is now that they're no longer reaching the academic heights that Escalante took them to?
Escalante's example is nearly opposite of what you're proposing. It's about someone caring enough about OTHERs and improving their situation dramatically.
You on the other hand are barking up the "people should just help themselves" tree.
But while he personally sacrificed to help others... he could have made a lot more money had he stayed at Burroughs... he in fact did very much demand that his students take personal initiative. He wasn't a raging Libertarian or anything, but he DID expect a large sense of personal responsibility from his students.
I don't quite understand why you're being modded troll when critics of the system from both right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. As much as conservative groups support things like charter schools, minority families... traditionally loyal Democratic voters... support them even more, because despite ever increasing dollars on public schools, the public system isn't getting it done with their kids. Washington D.C. schools spend more per pupil than just about anywhere else, and yet have among the worst scores and graduation rates.
Truly an American icon. Or at least a Mexican one.
Escalante was from Bolivia.
"Actually the difference between the primary roles of the Army and the Air Force is more akin to the difference between the Army and the Navy. Primary role of the Army is to project land power. For the Navy it is to project sea power. Air Force is well, to project air power."
Except that air power really isn't separate from ground power or sea power, but an extension of both. Why does the Air force fight? To protect forces on the ground. Why does the Navy fight? To ensure dominance at sea. Airpower is used for both purposes. It's just one more weapon. Until we actually can live in the sky, those aircraft have to land after a few hours. That makes them nothing but assets for ground and sea forces.
The whole organizing principle here that makes the case for the Army and Navy, but not USAF, is that "you live where you fight". Nobody lives in the sky. Even in the submarine service... where you arguably CAN live under the sea for long periods... everyone understands that they're just another phase of sea power, not a separate branch. The Air Force is essentially a sexed up phase of ground power... because the primary purpose is, after all, to protect those forces on the dirt. This is why we went to the air in the first place.
The only possible claim that USAF had to a separate identity... strategic airpower, IE hitting targets far away and distant from troops on the battlefield... became moot in the age of ballistic and cruise missiles, which are launched... here it is again... by guys on the ground.
The difference being that the Navy has a claim to a separate identity for one immutable reason... they live where they fight, on the ocean itself. It makes sense to specialize because of this. The Air Force doesn't live in castles in the sky... there are no cloud cities from Star Wars. They live, train, and fight on ground bases... same as the Army. When the Air Force can stay in the air six months at a time, then give me a call.
The future of the Air Force probably lies in space-based operations, while UAV handles Earth operations and is handed back to the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.
No, I don't think so. The Navy certainly isn't going to give up claims to operations in space, and they have a point, after all. The Naval Institute says "Space is a kind of ocean, and oceans are where Navies go".
"Going fully dependent on remote controlled drones is a form of "Preparing for the last war"."
Except that in the future... probably late in our own lifetiimes... you'll see completely autonomous UAV's that aren't remote controlled, but pre-programmed with advanced AI. At launch, we'll literally tell these machines "go kill this guy", and they'll go off and do it. Remote control will only be invoked rarely. Skynet jokes aside, this IS coming.
We don't need an independent Air Force to continue a military industrial complex. Someone will have to make those pilotless aircraft for the Army and Navy, after all.
We did not choose it? You might want to do a little studying about the "peace" conditions imposed on Germany after World War 1.
By the same logic, women deserve to get raped because they wear skimpy clothing.
I think that's a bad analogy in this case. I'm pretty patriotic, and pro-military. I'm a vet as well. And as I've read more about WWI over the years, I've become more and more convinced that WWII didn't have to happen, and that we in the west... including the United States... bear some responsibility for WWII. How? First off, it's becoming harder and harder to convince me that the US had to fight in Europe, that we had any real interest there. The Germans didn't start it, and looking back, was an ascendent Germany really a threat to the US? No, I don't think so. When you get right down to it, I thinking more and more that WWI was just another European Great-Power pissing match.
Further, the absolute draconian position that we put Germany in after the war created an atmosphere perfect for the rise of Adolf Hitler. Had we not tipped the balance in favor of the UK and France... had Germany fared better after the war.... I think there's a good chance Hitler never rises to power. He wasn't inevitable. He took advantage of the utter desperation Germans were feeling.
Woodrow Wilson should have never agreed to the draconian demands of our fellow allies. Despite his best intentions, all he helped accomplish was the implosion of one empire in favor of two others in Europe.
So I think the analogy is more along the lines of a combatant being raped by the victors... and then becoming so twisted by the experience that they embrace total evil to have the satisfaction of their revenge.
Seems like this works so well they want more of it... but in order for it to do all that they want it to do they'll have to divert resources from the manned flights that exist now. Some programs win, some programs lose. Typical Washington debate about to come up...
No, more than that, UAV's are such a contentious issue because of the tremendous culture clash it's causing in the Air Force. In the Army, Navy, and Marines, UAV's are just another military tech tool to use in battle. But in the Air Force, which bases its entire identity on the old Knights of the Air thing, UAV's aren't seen as a valuable tool so much as they're seen as a threat to the very existence of the Air Force itself.
Think about it. If the day is coming when you can train young, non pilot computer geeks to do what current pilots do.... at less cost and less training time, too.... then why have an independent Air Force at all? Because sooner or later, we'll be able to make UAV fighters that can maneuver better, fly farther, and hit harder than any manned craft of today. It's just a matter of time
I think the dawn of the UAV era may well herald the end of the independent Air Force, and I think the current crop of pilots know it too. And it begs the question, did a seperate Air Force ever really make that much sense? It was a branch based on a particular technology.... akin to the Army splitting Tanks off into their own separate service, or the Navy doing the same with submarines. Airpower really isn't a doctrine so much as it's just one more weapon in your arsenal.
I think by our children or grandchildren's lifetimes, the Air Force may be long gone, and looked at the same way jousting knights in armor are looked at... a glamorous, romantic period that was relatively brief, and brought to an end by technology that made it obsolete.
We do not need yet another federal agency. Splitting them in two will only result in two bigger agencies with an ever ravenous appetite for more tax funds.
One of the worst things Bush did post 9/11 was creating the spate of new federal agencies. Can anyone say that their flying experience is actually better after TSA was created? Anyone?
How much good did creating yet another layer of intelligence bureaucracy do us? Did intelligence get any better after we made the Director of Central Intelligence obsolete by creating a Director of National Intelligence? Not one damn whit. It just grew the federal payroll some more, and added more bloat and bureaucracy.
Vital intelligence work needs to be done, but we need to be trimming down these agencies, not creating new ones.
"having lived behind the iron courtain, I could say that socialism or communism leaders never really cared about own ideology."
You are mistaking socialism/communism for dictatorship/totalitarianism.
It's a common mistake.
Well it's awfully damn convienient that whenever someone starts a socialist or communist government, they always happen to end up a dictator. So they've killed and starved perhaps hundreds of millions over the past century, but hey, they just didn't do it right, is that it? Lets give 'em another chance?
They always turn out to be dictators because, surprise surprise, socialism and communism are ripe for that kind of system. If you can declare things like property rights null and void "for the people", then there's nothing that you cant take or abolish.... for the people, of course.
"I've got no beef with socialism in general, but what Chavez is doing isn't socialism."
I really get tired of hearing this old canard... "This isn't really socialism. Socialism really has never been tried". Bunk. This is exactly where socialism goes. There's always people that refuse to play along, and this is what happens to them.
Perhaps the 6 graders that just started math had a really good teacher. One year with a good teacher can outpace several years with a mediocre teacher. The conclusion of the study should be better teaching methods not less education.
Except it wasn't just one teacher. The results were uniform across the poor schools participating in the study.
Well I can buy, that young brains are not always best suited for specific tasks, but it seems contrary to conventional wisdom to remove math till the 6th grade. I can't imagine walking around blind in that respect till I was 12 or so.
Except that if you read the article, you'll notice that kids aren't blind about math without our formal instructions methods. Gray notes that young children have a natural affinity for the counting and value of objects at young ages... "real world math understanding", if you will... and that formal drill and theory actually retards this natural understanding. Note that in the New Hampshire experiment, the poor kids still had a better grasp of how common math works in the real world than did the formally trained kids from better schools... and this was before their formal math schooling in sixth grade.
He thinks that what we're doing to kids at those ages now is somewhat analogous to teaching a monkey to stack bottle caps in ascending order. The monkey may get it right through rote drilling, but has no concept whatsoever of what the exercise means. There are undoubtedly gifted children that pick up theory naturally, but at that age, they're far in the minority.
We need more of this to convince people that it is absolutely worth it to research and use stem cells as much as we can.
What kind? This wasn't from embryonic stem cells. This was from the child's own cells. So they were literally "thinking of the children" in this case.
When people say they're against "embryonic stem cell research" everyone else just hears "stem cell research" because they're too dumb to know the difference (and that's on both sides!).
I keep hearing this, and it's not true from my experience. People I talk to... normal, guy on the street neighbors, friends, and co-workers... are aware of the difference and of what the argument is. Quit assuming that everyone around you is dumb on the issue. I know this is Slashdot, where gross generalizations are a tradition, but try actually talking to people about this, and you may be surprised.
We are--- the restrictions on stem-cell funding have always been on embryonic stem cells, not on research involving stem cells derived from post-fetus-stage living humans, as is the case here.
And you also bring up something important that gets lost here. The restriction was only on federal funding of new stem cell lines. The research itself was never banned in any way, shape, or form. Nothing was stopping private organizations or states or universities from doing their own original embryonic cell work. The federal government just wasn't going to pay for it if it came from outside of existing stem cell lines already in the research pipeline.
correction:
Nobody who understands the difference has fought against funding for research into cures using adult stem cells.
There's a massive ignorant crowd of fundies who still consider anything and everything to do with stem cells to be bad.
That is wrong, sir. Find me someone that opposes embryonic stem cell work on religious or ethical grounds. Then ask if they're opposed to non-embryonic stem cell work. To a man, you'll find almost no one. Go to any major religious or conservative publication.... National Review, National Catholic Reporter, etc... and find me one of them... just one... that opposes non-embryonic research. Every single one of them, and major political and religious organizations... even the most conservative of churches... support non-embryonic work. And they've made this clear from the very beginning.
" That is why I use and would recommend Comodo Time Machine "
This is why I would recommend a Mac, or at least something other than Windows. The anti-malware that you have to use on Windows is sometimes almost as bad as the malware itself.
Windows, in and of itself, has become a stable, useful operating system. It's come a long way from the unstable 9X days, and truthfully, in some ways its easier to use than OS X. Were it not for the security issue, I might still be running Windows at home. But the cost in using Windows now... the cost in time, hassle, an dollars because of its security issues... just isn't worth it to me anymore. And if one Linux distro ever came to dominate the field and get the same kind of commercial support the Mac does... I think you'd see a mortal wound at Microsoft.
Redmond needs to pull an OS X and completely re-write the next version from the ground up.... write it from a completely different direction, make it completely incompatible with previous versions. Backwards compatibility with vulnerable previous versions is only one of the things that doom Windows... but it would be the right place to start in fixing their problems.
Are they? Isn't their market share fast declining? For all of the mocking that Sun received prior to their buyout, they had the benefit of not only software that was actually selling, but hardware as well. Novell chucked their own OS over the fantail and basically sells Linux with commercial support now. Billion in the bank or no, they haven't stemmed the loss of mindshare with the SuSe acquisition. If that was supposed to change their fortunes, it failed.
"If people put a fraction of the time they spend on fake farms into a real business, they'd be rich. So much effort goes into collecting fake gold and going on quests to kill monsters that are nothing but a collection of 1's and 0's. It just seems like such a waste"
This is pretty much how I look at gambling and lotteries. I've never understood people that enjoy losing money in Vegas or at their state lottery. You've got a better chance of being hit by lightning several times than you do winning your state lottery.
If you took that 10 or 15 bucks a pop that you're sinking into your lottery, and instead put it every time into an interest-bearing savings account, pretty soon, you're going to have a pretty good chunk of money saved up. But we encourage this stuff because "people will do it anyway", and most of the time the justification is "but the schools need it", which is just another variant of "for the children". Gambling is, more or less, a tax on stupid.