Maybe the Army has been pretty pragmatic about what works and getting rid of boondoggle projects this last decade. But the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps sure do seem to be fully committed to burning billions upon billions of dollars in the F-35 money pit.
> stupidity on the part of a few cops doesn't mean > we're living under ISIS.
When those cops go unpunished it means we're moving in that direction. I'm not saying that the sky is falling and it's for sure we'll get to the point where it's that bad. But we do have a serious problem with increased militancy on the part of the police and a lack of accountability for their misconduct. And it's not out of line at all to call their pattern of abuse to reigned in and to have the abusers punished.
Also, modern pressure cookers are not the same beast as those old relics. They're programmable and multi-function. Mine also functions as a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, and yogurt maker; allowing me to save space by owning one appliance instead of four (I don't actually make my own yogurt. But I could.). For someone without a lot of time to cook, it's fantastic. I can just measure the ingredients, toss them into the pot, seal it, start the program, and go off to do other things. It even releases the pressure automatically after it's done cooking. So I get a fantastic dinner while investing a fraction of the time, effort, and attention.
It's not that theft is an uncommon crime though. It's just that the police don't want to be bothered investigating thefts, arresting thieves, or recovering your property. A stolen car will get a bit of attention. But for just about anything else, the best you can realistically count on is them letting you go into a station and fill out a report that a desk officer will sign and photocopy so you can file a claim with your homeowner's or renter's insurance. Even if your stolen property is GPS enabled, and you can show them on a map a 100 ft. circle where it is, you won't get any help (Not if you're "little people" anyway. A corporation with a stolen prototype will get plenty of help.).
Violent or not, thieves are scum. I'd happily replace every single drug offender, of any kind or level, in prison with a thief.
Just how are body cams supposed to do their job of uncovering and providing evidence of police misconduct if the footage can be redacted, automatically or otherwise? These people are public servants who have a history... an especially ugly and heinous history in the last year or so... of misconduct on the job and dodging accountability for said misconduct. I don't have any particular expectation of privacy from my employer during the performance of my job. Why should they?
You do realize that, unless you're 100% solar or otherwise disconnected from the grid, the electricity you charged your Tesla with is also taxed. Why should it matter whether the tax is paid piecemeal at the gas pump or on your monthly electric bill?
> I understand that semis tear up the roads more than > cars, so yes, an extra road tax for them is not > unreasonable.
I don't even see why that is necessary. Those very same semi trucks also use a lot more gas than a Prius or similar. Likewise, one of the ways said Prius, or any other hybrid, achieves it's high mileage is by being as lightweight as possible. And lighter weight cars cause less wear and tear on the roads and should pay less to maintain them. So just set the gas tax such that it's sufficient to bring in whatever revenue is necessary and be done with it; with no invasive monitoring.
Sure, there will be boundary cases. Some exotic sports cars are lightweight but have low mileage because they're designed for speed and acceleration, not efficiency. And electric cars, obviously, do not use gas; though i'm pretty sure the electricity itself is taxed (At least it is in my state.). But in both of these cases, they're rare enough that they really don't need to figure into the equations.
The last time I flew, the little map w/ the airplane icon gave only a very rough approximation of where were actually were. Just from looking out the window, it was apparent that it was tens of miles off... almost 50 at times. (It was showing that we were way down by Moffat Field, when we were *landing* at SFO.
So, on Virgin America's A320s at least, I highly doubt that the passenger entertainment map data comes from any FMS. The thing would be useless to the pilot if it was that far off.
That's an understatement if there ever was one. Outright dishonesty is pretty much a requirement to work in sales or marketing. How else do make a claim that some sugar-laden, tooth-rotting, breakfast cereal is "a healthy part of a balanced breakfast" while showing a "breakfast" that easily has better than half the calories one should eat for the entire day?
I think that's where a bit part of the assumption of the stupidity on the part of sales and marketing types comes from. It's a lot harder to be dishonest as an engineer. A pice of code either works, or it doesn't. A bridge or building either stands up to its designed load, or it collapses. And there's a very common assumption amongst honest people that dishonest people are dumb, because if they were smart, why would they have to resort to lies?
Proper insurance and background checks are definitely a good thing.
But the legacy taxi companies, the medallion system, and the laws they're bought to fix prices and prevent competition... especially bringing about that aforementioned medallion system, are a font of corruption and scumbaggery easily on the level of the RIAA/MPAA/Metallica copyright cartel types. They effect fewer people, as people out in the suburbs don't generally take cabs/Uber/transit. But as someone who's lived in an urban city since before Uber, Lift, and Sidecar were around; I'll celebrate and support pretty much anything that kneecaps the taxi companies.
MCI? Convenient? Maybe for arriving flights. If you have a connection or a departure, it's bloody terrible. I've never been in a more poorly-laid-out airport. Instead of one checkpoint per concourse like any sensible airport, that rathole set up a jobs program for their security types or something, and set up separate checkpoints for every half-dozen gates or so, with each post-security area closed off from all the others.
Changing planes? Guess what... chances are you have to leave the secure area and go through the TSA goon squad again to get to your new gate. Departures are just as miserable. The post-security amenities in any given slice of the secure areas are paltry and low-quality at best. And that's if your flight is departing from a gate that HAS shops or restaurants in its little chink of the secure area. I've never had the displeasure, but I've been told that there are a couple that don't even have post-security bathrooms.
It's also *really* far away from almost everything. If you're downtown, it's not that bad. But if you're there for business or a conference, it's a good hour's drive from the the Overland Park district where you'll be.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not hating on KC. The people are nice and I've had a good time every time I went. But the airport is a disgrace.
I wouldn't so much crap on it. Overall, it was a very good set of novels. But there were definitely some pretty annoying things about it. My top three:
1) All the singing in Fellowship.
2) The structure of The Two Towers (Specifically: Tell the entire story of one half of the split group. Then go back in time and tell the entire story of the other half. Reader must pay obsessive detail to minutia in order to get the two halves time-synced.)
3) Aragorn can't ever just tell anyone his name. It always has to be: "For I am Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, descendent of Isildur and heir of Elendil and the kingdom of Gondor; for behold, I hold the sword that was once broken and is now reforged." Gods. Can you imagine if Peter Jackson had subjected us to *that*? The movies would all be an extra half-hour long just to let strider introduce himself.
> What made silicon valley was what Texas or North > Dakota is today. Cheap land, cheap employees, > friendly government, no one leaving for another > startup.
You couldn't be more wrong. People leaving for another startup is EXACTLY what made Silicon Valley.
Pretty much all of the Intel founders met at and left Fairchild Semiconductors to form their own company. Fairchild itself was the result of people leaving Schockley Labs. Jobs and Woz worked at Atari and Hewlett-Packard before founding Apple. Palm came from ex-Apple employees. AMD also came from Fairchild employees. The cofounders of Nvidia jumped ship from AMD and Sun. YouTube was founded by ex-PayPal employees. And all that's just off the top of my head.
Smart people meeting smart people, having an idea, and having the freedom to leave their employer to implement that idea, is the vert heart of innovation. The fact that you tout non-compete shackles as a good thing *does* mark you as an "anti employee asshole". You labeled yourself in your very first sentence. It also proves that you just don't get what makes for an environment that generates companies that are not only innovative, but fantastic to work for.
There have always been a handful of big players that "dominate" the valley. In the past, it was companies like Hewlett Packard, Sun, IBM, Xerox, and Fairchild Semiconductor.
The names change, but the big companies play their role too. A big part of the valley is people getting their start at the big-name companies, meeting people and developing their skills, and then leaving to form their own startups... which something grow up to be the next big name that "dominates" the valley. Remember: The Intel founders all met each other whilst working at Fairchild, and Wozniak worked for HP before co-founding Apple.
Emergency procedure checklists are still on hard-copy in the cockpit. Flight books (and EFBs) are for routine operations and include things like the flight path, loading and fuel, PAX & cargo manifest, approach & landing procedures for destination, alternate, and en-route airports, en-route weather forecasts, and so on.
Well... to be fair, Yellowstone erupting is one of those things that's just so bad that there's not a whole lot of planning we CAN do. About the only possible survival strategy is: "Be in Australia when it happens.". The problem with that plan though is that there are also super volcanos in Indonesia and New Zealand that could do to the southern hemisphere what Yellowstone can to the north.
My position is that there's no legitimate reason for Assange to be subject to US laws in any way whatsoever. Do you consider yourself subject to China's laws regarding to advocating for democracy? Should a UK citizen be subject to Saudi laws regarding pornography or not being muslim?
If Australia has a law obligating him to keep the secrets of third-party, non-Australian, governments; any charges or legal proceedings should be taking place in Australia. For the US to presume to export its laws beyond its own borders is absurd. And its subversion of both the British and Swedish legal systems (And the latters' willingness to do along with it.) is full-out sickening.
Assange is accused of releasing state secrets of a country of which he is neither a citizen or resident, in which he was not present in when he released them, from which he never sought or received a security clearance, and to which he never gave a secrecy oath or signed an NDA.
By what stretch of the imagination do you think he is, or should be, obligated to keep those secrets?
There had been smart phones around for years before the iPhone. And before that, we had PalmPilots. And yet, the first round of apps from the App Store and the first round of apps on Android, were both pretty craptacular too. The first round of apps on the iPad were little more than inflated versions of their iPhone counterparts. Most of the early (decent) PS4 games were just "remastered" released of PS3 titles. And then there's the whole Windows 8 fiasco, which took place years after desktops, smartphones, and tablets had all been on the market for years, but managed to be bloody awful on all three.
When developers target a new platform, it takes a bit of time before they get good at it. News at eleven.
Powerful people don't like to be made to look like fools. That's this man's real crime. He made the Secret Service and the Air Force look like a bunch of clowns who can't defend the capital's airspace, even with whatever post-9/11 security enhancements they've made, even from a slow-flying (Maybe homebuilt? Most autogyros are.) aircraft, and even after Hughes publicly announced his intentions to do so.
What *should* happen is a house-cleaning in the Secret Service and Air Force for being so incompetent as to allow this to happen; a slap on the wrist for Hughes for the actual offense, and then a commendation for demonstrating that the emperor was wearing no clothes that day. Unfortunately though, in this matter and more, as a nation we seem to have forgotten (or chosen to ignore) the tenet of: "don't shoot the messenger".
Sony is the "little guy"? Compared to the US government maybe... but they are a pretty huge and pretty unethical corporation.
I actually agree, though, that there's little to be gained by posting this. Sony's general douchebaggery may be fairly noxious. But it's nowhere in the same league as the destructive malfeasance of outfits like Halliburton, Exxon, Blackwater, and the like... to say nothing of the actions of various governments. If the leaked documents concerned their something more vicious like their campaigns of legal harassment of the PS3 jailbreak community, I could maybe see the point. But really, there's no social benefit in this one. I guess, though, since the documents are already leaked; having them in one more place shouldn't be a big deal.
Still though... Sony is far from being "the little guy".
I don't think that's a specific and intentional omission. My experience with American history classes... some of which were in the '80s... was that, conveniently or not, they forgot pretty much the entire 20th century.
Oh, it was in the textbook... the world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy, the space race, and all that. But either the classes were just terribly paced and poorly organized, or the history teachers all thought that the civil war was the single most important event in all of history. Elementary, middle, and even in high school, history class would get about as far as reconstruction, the details of which we'd be tested on in excruciating detail. And then we'd be at the last two weeks of the school year, the teacher would mostly check out, and rest of US history would amount to: "and then a bunch of other stuff happened." And it'd just be a big jumble about Roosevelt wrestling with a bull moose while punching Hitler in the face on the top of San Juan Hill where he buried all the free silver that William Jennings Bryan gave him. Meanwhile, Kennedy... the once and future president... somehow got ahold of Excalibur, and with the help of Patrick Stewart or Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun or someone, re-founded Camelot and flew to the moon to kick Kruschev in the balls for taking away his Cuban cigars.
Granted, history class by its very nature consists of rote memorization and regurgitation, without actual problem solving. So it was a no-brainer cakewalk and I'd always read ahead in the book to the good stuff. But the teachers just didn't seen to think the 20th century was important at all. It wasn't until a college class that I took as a HU/SS elective ("American Foreign Policy in the 20th Century"), was I actually taught more than the smallest bit of it in an organized manner.
On the contrary, I've found Google's targeted ads to reflect my own interests reasonably well. They don't *always* get it right, of course. But they do so the majority of time. The thing is, I share neither my computer nor youtube account with anyone else. so there's no chance of anyone else's browsing skewing the profile they have of my interests.
So, if you're consistently finding that the delivered ads don't reflect your, or your kids', interests; you're better off making sure that the right person is logged into the right account than ranting about how google teh eviluz. If you ARE sure that the correct person is always logged into the correct account, and you're still seeing ads for furry hentai tentacle-porn, you might want to check into their non-youtube internet habits instead of ranting about how google teh eviluz.
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Maybe the Army has been pretty pragmatic about what works and getting rid of boondoggle projects this last decade. But the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps sure do seem to be fully committed to burning billions upon billions of dollars in the F-35 money pit.
> stupidity on the part of a few cops doesn't mean
> we're living under ISIS.
When those cops go unpunished it means we're moving in that direction. I'm not saying that the sky is falling and it's for sure we'll get to the point where it's that bad. But we do have a serious problem with increased militancy on the part of the police and a lack of accountability for their misconduct. And it's not out of line at all to call their pattern of abuse to reigned in and to have the abusers punished.
Also, modern pressure cookers are not the same beast as those old relics. They're programmable and multi-function. Mine also functions as a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, and yogurt maker; allowing me to save space by owning one appliance instead of four (I don't actually make my own yogurt. But I could.). For someone without a lot of time to cook, it's fantastic. I can just measure the ingredients, toss them into the pot, seal it, start the program, and go off to do other things. It even releases the pressure automatically after it's done cooking. So I get a fantastic dinner while investing a fraction of the time, effort, and attention.
It's not that theft is an uncommon crime though. It's just that the police don't want to be bothered investigating thefts, arresting thieves, or recovering your property. A stolen car will get a bit of attention. But for just about anything else, the best you can realistically count on is them letting you go into a station and fill out a report that a desk officer will sign and photocopy so you can file a claim with your homeowner's or renter's insurance. Even if your stolen property is GPS enabled, and you can show them on a map a 100 ft. circle where it is, you won't get any help (Not if you're "little people" anyway. A corporation with a stolen prototype will get plenty of help.).
Violent or not, thieves are scum. I'd happily replace every single drug offender, of any kind or level, in prison with a thief.
This is terrible.
Just how are body cams supposed to do their job of uncovering and providing evidence of police misconduct if the footage can be redacted, automatically or otherwise? These people are public servants who have a history... an especially ugly and heinous history in the last year or so... of misconduct on the job and dodging accountability for said misconduct. I don't have any particular expectation of privacy from my employer during the performance of my job. Why should they?
You do realize that, unless you're 100% solar or otherwise disconnected from the grid, the electricity you charged your Tesla with is also taxed. Why should it matter whether the tax is paid piecemeal at the gas pump or on your monthly electric bill?
> I understand that semis tear up the roads more than
> cars, so yes, an extra road tax for them is not
> unreasonable.
I don't even see why that is necessary. Those very same semi trucks also use a lot more gas than a Prius or similar. Likewise, one of the ways said Prius, or any other hybrid, achieves it's high mileage is by being as lightweight as possible. And lighter weight cars cause less wear and tear on the roads and should pay less to maintain them. So just set the gas tax such that it's sufficient to bring in whatever revenue is necessary and be done with it; with no invasive monitoring.
Sure, there will be boundary cases. Some exotic sports cars are lightweight but have low mileage because they're designed for speed and acceleration, not efficiency. And electric cars, obviously, do not use gas; though i'm pretty sure the electricity itself is taxed (At least it is in my state.). But in both of these cases, they're rare enough that they really don't need to figure into the equations.
The last time I flew, the little map w/ the airplane icon gave only a very rough approximation of where were actually were. Just from looking out the window, it was apparent that it was tens of miles off... almost 50 at times. (It was showing that we were way down by Moffat Field, when we were *landing* at SFO.
So, on Virgin America's A320s at least, I highly doubt that the passenger entertainment map data comes from any FMS. The thing would be useless to the pilot if it was that far off.
> aren't always entirely honest
That's an understatement if there ever was one. Outright dishonesty is pretty much a requirement to work in sales or marketing. How else do make a claim that some sugar-laden, tooth-rotting, breakfast cereal is "a healthy part of a balanced breakfast" while showing a "breakfast" that easily has better than half the calories one should eat for the entire day?
I think that's where a bit part of the assumption of the stupidity on the part of sales and marketing types comes from. It's a lot harder to be dishonest as an engineer. A pice of code either works, or it doesn't. A bridge or building either stands up to its designed load, or it collapses. And there's a very common assumption amongst honest people that dishonest people are dumb, because if they were smart, why would they have to resort to lies?
Proper insurance and background checks are definitely a good thing.
But the legacy taxi companies, the medallion system, and the laws they're bought to fix prices and prevent competition... especially bringing about that aforementioned medallion system, are a font of corruption and scumbaggery easily on the level of the RIAA/MPAA/Metallica copyright cartel types. They effect fewer people, as people out in the suburbs don't generally take cabs/Uber/transit. But as someone who's lived in an urban city since before Uber, Lift, and Sidecar were around; I'll celebrate and support pretty much anything that kneecaps the taxi companies.
MCI? Convenient? Maybe for arriving flights. If you have a connection or a departure, it's bloody terrible. I've never been in a more poorly-laid-out airport. Instead of one checkpoint per concourse like any sensible airport, that rathole set up a jobs program for their security types or something, and set up separate checkpoints for every half-dozen gates or so, with each post-security area closed off from all the others.
Changing planes? Guess what... chances are you have to leave the secure area and go through the TSA goon squad again to get to your new gate. Departures are just as miserable. The post-security amenities in any given slice of the secure areas are paltry and low-quality at best. And that's if your flight is departing from a gate that HAS shops or restaurants in its little chink of the secure area. I've never had the displeasure, but I've been told that there are a couple that don't even have post-security bathrooms.
It's also *really* far away from almost everything. If you're downtown, it's not that bad. But if you're there for business or a conference, it's a good hour's drive from the the Overland Park district where you'll be.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not hating on KC. The people are nice and I've had a good time every time I went. But the airport is a disgrace.
I wouldn't so much crap on it. Overall, it was a very good set of novels. But there were definitely some pretty annoying things about it. My top three:
1) All the singing in Fellowship.
2) The structure of The Two Towers (Specifically: Tell the entire story of one half of the split group. Then go back in time and tell the entire story of the other half. Reader must pay obsessive detail to minutia in order to get the two halves time-synced.)
3) Aragorn can't ever just tell anyone his name. It always has to be: "For I am Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, descendent of Isildur and heir of Elendil and the kingdom of Gondor; for behold, I hold the sword that was once broken and is now reforged." Gods. Can you imagine if Peter Jackson had subjected us to *that*? The movies would all be an extra half-hour long just to let strider introduce himself.
> What made silicon valley was what Texas or North
> Dakota is today. Cheap land, cheap employees,
> friendly government, no one leaving for another
> startup.
You couldn't be more wrong. People leaving for another startup is EXACTLY what made Silicon Valley.
Pretty much all of the Intel founders met at and left Fairchild Semiconductors to form their own company. Fairchild itself was the result of people leaving Schockley Labs. Jobs and Woz worked at Atari and Hewlett-Packard before founding Apple. Palm came from ex-Apple employees. AMD also came from Fairchild employees. The cofounders of Nvidia jumped ship from AMD and Sun. YouTube was founded by ex-PayPal employees. And all that's just off the top of my head.
Smart people meeting smart people, having an idea, and having the freedom to leave their employer to implement that idea, is the vert heart of innovation. The fact that you tout non-compete shackles as a good thing *does* mark you as an "anti employee asshole". You labeled yourself in your very first sentence. It also proves that you just don't get what makes for an environment that generates companies that are not only innovative, but fantastic to work for.
There have always been a handful of big players that "dominate" the valley. In the past, it was companies like Hewlett Packard, Sun, IBM, Xerox, and Fairchild Semiconductor.
The names change, but the big companies play their role too. A big part of the valley is people getting their start at the big-name companies, meeting people and developing their skills, and then leaving to form their own startups... which something grow up to be the next big name that "dominates" the valley. Remember: The Intel founders all met each other whilst working at Fairchild, and Wozniak worked for HP before co-founding Apple.
Or, considering where on the body a watch is worn, Apple just figured that people who got their tattoos in prison are not their target market.
Emergency procedure checklists are still on hard-copy in the cockpit. Flight books (and EFBs) are for routine operations and include things like the flight path, loading and fuel, PAX & cargo manifest, approach & landing procedures for destination, alternate, and en-route airports, en-route weather forecasts, and so on.
Well... to be fair, Yellowstone erupting is one of those things that's just so bad that there's not a whole lot of planning we CAN do. About the only possible survival strategy is: "Be in Australia when it happens.". The problem with that plan though is that there are also super volcanos in Indonesia and New Zealand that could do to the southern hemisphere what Yellowstone can to the north.
My position is that there's no legitimate reason for Assange to be subject to US laws in any way whatsoever. Do you consider yourself subject to China's laws regarding to advocating for democracy? Should a UK citizen be subject to Saudi laws regarding pornography or not being muslim?
If Australia has a law obligating him to keep the secrets of third-party, non-Australian, governments; any charges or legal proceedings should be taking place in Australia. For the US to presume to export its laws beyond its own borders is absurd. And its subversion of both the British and Swedish legal systems (And the latters' willingness to do along with it.) is full-out sickening.
Assange is accused of releasing state secrets of a country of which he is neither a citizen or resident, in which he was not present in when he released them, from which he never sought or received a security clearance, and to which he never gave a secrecy oath or signed an NDA.
By what stretch of the imagination do you think he is, or should be, obligated to keep those secrets?
So?
There had been smart phones around for years before the iPhone. And before that, we had PalmPilots. And yet, the first round of apps from the App Store and the first round of apps on Android, were both pretty craptacular too. The first round of apps on the iPad were little more than inflated versions of their iPhone counterparts. Most of the early (decent) PS4 games were just "remastered" released of PS3 titles. And then there's the whole Windows 8 fiasco, which took place years after desktops, smartphones, and tablets had all been on the market for years, but managed to be bloody awful on all three.
When developers target a new platform, it takes a bit of time before they get good at it. News at eleven.
Somehow, I had a brain fart and thought this guy landed at the White House.
s/Secret Service/Capital Police/
Powerful people don't like to be made to look like fools. That's this man's real crime. He made the Secret Service and the Air Force look like a bunch of clowns who can't defend the capital's airspace, even with whatever post-9/11 security enhancements they've made, even from a slow-flying (Maybe homebuilt? Most autogyros are.) aircraft, and even after Hughes publicly announced his intentions to do so.
What *should* happen is a house-cleaning in the Secret Service and Air Force for being so incompetent as to allow this to happen; a slap on the wrist for Hughes for the actual offense, and then a commendation for demonstrating that the emperor was wearing no clothes that day. Unfortunately though, in this matter and more, as a nation we seem to have forgotten (or chosen to ignore) the tenet of: "don't shoot the messenger".
Sony is the "little guy"? Compared to the US government maybe... but they are a pretty huge and pretty unethical corporation.
I actually agree, though, that there's little to be gained by posting this. Sony's general douchebaggery may be fairly noxious. But it's nowhere in the same league as the destructive malfeasance of outfits like Halliburton, Exxon, Blackwater, and the like... to say nothing of the actions of various governments. If the leaked documents concerned their something more vicious like their campaigns of legal harassment of the PS3 jailbreak community, I could maybe see the point. But really, there's no social benefit in this one. I guess, though, since the documents are already leaked; having them in one more place shouldn't be a big deal.
Still though... Sony is far from being "the little guy".
I don't think that's a specific and intentional omission. My experience with American history classes... some of which were in the '80s... was that, conveniently or not, they forgot pretty much the entire 20th century.
Oh, it was in the textbook... the world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy, the space race, and all that. But either the classes were just terribly paced and poorly organized, or the history teachers all thought that the civil war was the single most important event in all of history. Elementary, middle, and even in high school, history class would get about as far as reconstruction, the details of which we'd be tested on in excruciating detail. And then we'd be at the last two weeks of the school year, the teacher would mostly check out, and rest of US history would amount to: "and then a bunch of other stuff happened." And it'd just be a big jumble about Roosevelt wrestling with a bull moose while punching Hitler in the face on the top of San Juan Hill where he buried all the free silver that William Jennings Bryan gave him. Meanwhile, Kennedy... the once and future president... somehow got ahold of Excalibur, and with the help of Patrick Stewart or Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun or someone, re-founded Camelot and flew to the moon to kick Kruschev in the balls for taking away his Cuban cigars.
Granted, history class by its very nature consists of rote memorization and regurgitation, without actual problem solving. So it was a no-brainer cakewalk and I'd always read ahead in the book to the good stuff. But the teachers just didn't seen to think the 20th century was important at all. It wasn't until a college class that I took as a HU/SS elective ("American Foreign Policy in the 20th Century"), was I actually taught more than the smallest bit of it in an organized manner.
On the contrary, I've found Google's targeted ads to reflect my own interests reasonably well. They don't *always* get it right, of course. But they do so the majority of time. The thing is, I share neither my computer nor youtube account with anyone else. so there's no chance of anyone else's browsing skewing the profile they have of my interests.
So, if you're consistently finding that the delivered ads don't reflect your, or your kids', interests; you're better off making sure that the right person is logged into the right account than ranting about how google teh eviluz. If you ARE sure that the correct person is always logged into the correct account, and you're still seeing ads for furry hentai tentacle-porn, you might want to check into their non-youtube internet habits instead of ranting about how google teh eviluz.