No, not PlayStation. "Personal System/2", IBM's attempt in 1985-86 to rewrite the PC Industry Standard Architecture into their own proprietary version. They charged a measely 5% licensing fee (in a market where margins were already in that range).
As with most things in life, this is an easy problem when approached from a cost/benefit viewpoint.
In this case, we have:
(risk of being spied OnStar)*(loss of privacy) + (risk of being stranded)*(result of being stranded) + (added price of OnStar and service) (<,=,>?) (risk of being spied on with a cell phone)*(loss of privacy) + (risk of being stranded w/ cell phone)*(result of being stranded) + (added price of cell phone and service)
If you've already got a cell phone, and you always have it with you, that side of the question is pretty small.
My little formula ignores the gee-whiz-me-too value of having a built-in car phone and other trivial factors.
Unions. Baby, it's time. Other than that, you call a lawyer. Now. I'm VERY sure what they did was very much illegal, and since you indicate you have a clean work history, they have no room to fire you.
their work is primarily distinguished by the final output
adverse working conditions or other problems that face the group as a whole
Outside of that setting, a union isn't useful and can be harmful in a number of ways that others have pointed out.
As for the legal angle, IANAL but I do have common sense. It's not obvious that his employer did anything illegal or even underhanded.
The outsourcer may have done something underhanded, but their relationship was with the employer, not the guy who got fired. If the employer believed the outsourcer more than the employee, that speaks of a larger problem either with the employer or the guy they let go. Perhaps the outsourcer made a better dollars and cents case or had a better grasp of golf than the employee did, and management made their decision based on that. Hey, it's their company.
While I personally think that outsourcing is generally a bad idea, I can't prove it. It just feels wrong. Maybe that's why I'm not running a Fortune 500 company.
I was working for a couple of departments at a big institution. One of them was stable (fairly homogenous systems, well-defined needs, friendly people), while the other one was a constant source of trouble (heterogenous historically entrenched systems and diverse needs, with conflicting politics entertwining them). The troublesome department decided to fire me. The stable department wanted to keep me.
I decided to use the half-time status to start my own consulting firm, instead of finding another department. I'm still really small, but it pays the bills and there are tremendous benefits to being self-employed, financial and otherwise.
I don't know what your financial status is, but if you have a chance to develop a business, do it. If you have to take a part-time job while your business gets on its feet, do it.
If people are outsourcing your skills, compete with the outsourcers and crush them like the insects they are!
So it is more useful--about as "more useful" as that handicapped ramp you never appreciated until you have to roll a heavy desk up it.
There are many other settings where making something accessible also makes it easier to use for the rest of us:
I always use the handicapped stall in public restrooms. Spacious, well-lit heads are better.
I really appreciate wheelchair buttons on the doors to public buildings when what I'm carrying won't let me open the door otherwise. Powered doors are better.
We're doing some remodelling on our house. Part of that will be 36", wheelchair-friendly doors. Big doors are better.
It's really just about being user-friendly, making your edge cases disappear.
Some of the cleverest, most inventive people I know make their living with a hammer.
Yes, there are carpenters who just do what they're told all day and then drive their Ford Ranger to the nearest bar for the night. I'm not talking about them.
Every jobsite that a carpenter sees is a little different. Some are different enough that a carpenter has to invent, on the spot, a jig, tool, technique, or come up with a plan to get the job done in an efficient manner such that the finished product will be right.
I consider myself to be a fairly inventive guy. I'm in awe at the way professional carpenters attack their problems. The old line "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" should really say "If all you have is a hammer, use it to make another tool."
But it doesn't give you an overdose of special effects - I don't think there has been such clever editing in a horror movie since the first big Dracula movie.
I actually almost mentioned both of those points - the careful restraint of special effects and the (first?) b&w Dracula. I decided I didn't know who played the Count in the movie I remember. That one gave me a fright enema, too. I was 9, but I literally checked under the bed that night after watching it in mid-afternoon.
Maybe you're some kind of mindreader, but the only clues we've got to the intent of the members of Congress (17th or 21st Century) is their expressions.
The quote I supplied was from the minutes of the Senate Judiciary Committee as they wrote the Act. It was a clear comment on exactly the topic discussed in SCO's open letter. As the majority of the Supreme Court said in Eldredge v. Ashcroft, "... a page of history is worth volumes of logic."
We don't need to read their minds when we have their expressions, as (from your expressions) I believe you would agree.
BTW, real programmers know the machine can parse only the code, not the comments, no matter how well intentioned.
You appear to be using "machine" as a metaphor for society, "code" for laws, and "comments" for intent. Which do you mean are well intentioned, the machine, the code, or the comments? The analogy fails in any case, because it's precisely because we aren't machines that we need the comments to understand the code. Comments are especially helpful in debugging code, even when you know in general what a piece of code is supposed to do.
"RealProgrammer" is just a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym; I don't hesitate to admit I'm a wannabe who wastes way too much time on Slashdot.
As for whether the [Ff]ramer's intent or current popular will should prevail, or whether that's even the question, I think we'll have to accept that our opinions differ.
maddog isn't careful enough to avoid the irrelevant "author's intent" of the "framers" of the US Constitution.
The intent of the author of a document isn't relevant? That's clearly bogus. I could take your comment, parse it phrase-by-phrase, and give it a meaning you never intended. After all, you wrote that in the past; I should interpret it according to the present. Put a different way, if the author's intent isn't important, then it's useless to write anything down, since the reader's opinion is the only one that matters.
What's more important here is that the Framer's intent and Congress' current legislative intent are in lockstep agreement. See this post from Dec 9 for a quote from Congress about its intent for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995, the legislation scrutinized in Eldred v Ashcroft and totally mischaracterized by SCO's McBride. Congress made it clear that copyright wasn't primarily about profit, just as the Framers intended.
Your local telco store may help. You know, the place where they stock extra phone books, overpriced telephones, and try to sell you an overpriced cell phone plan. They sometimes have secondhand relay racks, or as I found, even full-sized server cabinets, for which they don't have a use. Ask for the person who buys commercial customer premises back office equipment.
I went to a bankruptcy auction and bought three Motorola telecomm cabinets for $1.50 (that's right, a dollar and a half). These are only about 60" high by 18" deep, so they're really just dressed up relay racks. I gave one to a client and kept the other two.
Adding rails to one of them was about $60. I ordered them through my local telephone company, because it was cheaper and better than buying angle iron, drilling holes, and threading them myself. I added wheels and some paint. My total expenditure was just over $100 per cabinet.
I also bought a used high-end server cabinet for a client from the local telco for about half the price of a new one.
Our local recycler has a division that deals with computer stuff. Anything computery they separate out and try to resell. The nice thing is, they sell it by the pound! I bought several rackmount cable management modules for about $20, less than the price of a single new one. They were just sitting in a pile on the ground. I cleaned them up, and they made a nice addition to my cheap server cabinet.
If you want to put your rack in a closet and maintain a reasonable temperature, you can buy a bathroom fan and thermostat for not much money. I think a nice quiet fan is about $75, but in a closet noise may not be an issue.
First book for new Heinlein reader? I read most, or all, of Heinlein's books and short stories by my early twenties. Yeah, I read other stuff, too. Here's my list of Heinlein's novels to read:
Methuselah's Children
I think this is the prototypical Heinlein book. It starts with a basic premise about something that's different from reality, and explores the consequences of it.
Starship Troopers
Not as juvenile as the movie, this book will challenge a young adult and their beliefs about citizenship, the military, and life. I think it had a profound influence on my decision to join the Marine Corps and to stick it out.
Stranger in s Strange Land
The word "grok". 'Nuff said. (This was my first Heinlein book)
The Door Into Summmer
This book is premised on an inventor who creates the first domestic robot, something like a Roomba but a little smarter.
The times we're living in now remind me of this book.
Any other Heinlein book
The Number of the Beast
It was the work in progress when he died, and it's not what his other work was. It did give me the line, "Did the universe just shift again?"
However, Lindows is a competitor to the software Windows and that's a completely different story. Say you started a company called LApple...
No, it's more like: say you had a product named "Fjord", an amphibious retrofit for Ford SUV's. The word "ford" in English predates the company by that name, and means to cross a small body of water. You're doing your best not to infringe on their name by changing it slightly.
The word "window" in English actually predates Microsoft's product. It's use WRT computer software does, as well. In fact, The X Window System was introduced in 1984, at about the same time as Microsoft's Windows product, and the two names were not interesting even then. What else would you call a product that put windows on the screen? "Boxes"? "Widgeted Rectangles"?
Microsoft is abusing the court system to squash a competitor. "Lindows" rhymes with "Windows". So what?
Maybe they should change the name to "Lindoze", since the "Windoze" spelling is more familiar to some of us anyway.
The count should be done in as many redundant ways as possible.
The voting machine should SSMTP email the totals over the network at the end of the day. Yeah, that has a security downside, but the upside is that it's FAST.
The voting machine should print out its results on paper. Little old ladies then total up the paper results from their polling place and telephone them in. That's pretty fast, too.
The voting machine should print out a ballot with two identical halves. You tear half off and drop it in the locked box. That's the official ballot. You keep the other half to do with what you will. The ballots are then handled by the usual means to get the official total. This is slow, but secure.
If any of these methods disagree by enough to arouse suspicion, an audit can be done since the raw data is still around.
An auditing feature of this system would be for the machine to hash an ID for the voter, using for example the machine's ID, the date/time, and the picks made. That unique ID gets printed on the paper ballot, but the time doesn't (so the little old ladies can't deduce how you voted).
The tallies should be sorted by this ID when printed. There is no association anywhere between the individual and their vote, but an individual can use the ID on their paper copy of the ballot to inspect the list to make sure their vote was handled correctly. Similarly, the official ballots can be compared to the paper printout or even an online version.
A paranoid watchdog group could even collect a large sample of the paper ballots and check that against the published results.
It included NDA language, said I couldn't redistribute it, and it said I had to pay to use it after 90 days or something. I was just looking to see if they left a Linux distro accidentally online, and didn't want to bother with their stupid developer secrecy.
I think it even said I couldn't divulge the contents of the EULA. Right. Sue me.
I was able to download/pub/ls-lR from ftp.sco.com (216.250.128.13) 74.91 KB/s (600 Kb/s). My broadband is rated at 640 Kb/s, so the bottleneck was likely at my end.
Monday night and into Tuesday morning I downloaded several files from the SCO ftp site, including/pub/ls-lR, a legal notice saying they had removed Linux, and kernel-source-2.2.13.rpm (I think). I just wanted to verify that yes, they still had Linux source available for download. I also downloaded a 650MB iso of a developer CD that turned out to have a nasty EULA, so I deleted it.
The transfer speed was a consistent 74.9 KB/s, which I noticed because it was much lower than I typically get. My download speed at home is usually above 250KB/s, since I have a cable modem in a small town.
That was probably the optimum time to do a download, and the big file was a good test. Unless you and I have exactly the same bottleneck, I think 75KB/s is the max throughput of their network connection.
They call the investment "passive", but they have control over SCO's biggest asset, the litigation division. They're watching this like a hawk, just as we are.
Namecalling is the technique of the intellectually bankrupt.
Pot, kettle, black.
Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after.
Fun with statistics, tactic #1: always assume causation. Just because I come home 90% of weekdays just before sunset doesn't mean I cause the sun to set by doing so. There may be other factors at work.
Entrance to technical fields is cyclical, following supply and demand and what's trendy. The pressure of immigration on the job market more constant, since people want to come to the U.S.
The expansion of H-1b quotas was in response to the dot com boom, which had resulted in high demand for tech workers. When the bubble burst, there was suddenly a glut of workers (most of whom were and still are domestic). They can't find jobs at the pay rate they're used to getting. Add to that the burst bubble itself, which gave tech careers the aura of risk.
Calling the downswing in the cycle the government's fault is no more correct than giving the government credit for the upswing.
Claim 977: The use of a comfy chair as a torture device. Prior art includes my first job interview (Sequent, Inc.).
By the way, I notice your name's not 'Bruce'. That could get confusing... we'll have to just call you 'Bruce', then.
Claim 978: The placement of a penguin on a television set, which set consists of a television receiver or any other television, for the purpose of presupplying, or supplying a premise in a visual or other manner, or for any other purpose concerning response to queries about the television schedule. Upon receipt of a request such as, but not limited to, queries for what such prerecorded or live programs might be displayed in the immediate future, or other future, or other classification of time or space, the answer will then involve said presupplied penguin.
cultivate technical excellence among their own citizens-something the current corrupt governments and corporate elites are hesitant to do.
(Pssst - hey, buddy: your tinfoil is showing.)
It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?
It also seems to me that the "corporate elites" have even less influence on the education level of the average citizen than the government does. To the extent that they do have influence, I see them pouring billions of dollars into research at universities. They want English-speaking engineers and knowledge workers. Next time you see a job ad from a company which is a front for the "corporate elite", see if it doesn't say "excellent communication skills" or some such.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the public school system. Blame parents who refuse to discipline their kids and refuse to let the schools do so. Blame teachers who are more interested in inculcating politically correct ideology than in teaching hard stuff. Blame education lobbyists who want to shut down home school competition, even though home schoolers are demonstrably better off than their public school counterparts. The foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list, but I don't think the government or "corporate elites" can be added.
There are plenty of villains. There's no need to invent more, or to lay the problem at the feet of the wrong ones.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not PlayStation. "Personal System /2", IBM's attempt in 1985-86 to rewrite the PC Industry Standard Architecture into their own proprietary version. They charged a measely 5% licensing fee (in a market where margins were already in that range).
I predict this will die because:
Oh, and Microsoft is drifting into irrelevance.
As with most things in life, this is an easy problem when approached from a cost/benefit viewpoint.
In this case, we have:
(risk of being spied OnStar)*(loss of privacy) +
(risk of being stranded)*(result of being stranded) +
(added price of OnStar and service)
(<,=,>?)
(risk of being spied on with a cell phone)*(loss of privacy) +
(risk of being stranded w/ cell phone)*(result of being stranded) +
(added price of cell phone and service)
If you've already got a cell phone, and you always have it with you, that side of the question is pretty small.
My little formula ignores the gee-whiz-me-too value of having a built-in car phone and other trivial factors.
I hope this is not taken as flame-bait.
Perhaps the nuclear arms race might have been avoided or blunted by allowing openness in nuclear technology.
I wonder if interpersonal violence might be avoided or blunted by allowing open access to personal weapons?
Does allowing anyone to have a (nuclear/personal) weapon work better than trying to deny everyone (nuclear/personal) weapons?
Should we support the right to keep and bear nuclear arms?
Must ... not ... flame ... Must ... remain ... calm ....
Unions fit a particular setting:
Outside of that setting, a union isn't useful and can be harmful in a number of ways that others have pointed out.
As for the legal angle, IANAL but I do have common sense. It's not obvious that his employer did anything illegal or even underhanded.
The outsourcer may have done something underhanded, but their relationship was with the employer, not the guy who got fired. If the employer believed the outsourcer more than the employee, that speaks of a larger problem either with the employer or the guy they let go. Perhaps the outsourcer made a better dollars and cents case or had a better grasp of golf than the employee did, and management made their decision based on that. Hey, it's their company.
While I personally think that outsourcing is generally a bad idea, I can't prove it. It just feels wrong. Maybe that's why I'm not running a Fortune 500 company.
I was working for a couple of departments at a big institution. One of them was stable (fairly homogenous systems, well-defined needs, friendly people), while the other one was a constant source of trouble (heterogenous historically entrenched systems and diverse needs, with conflicting politics entertwining them). The troublesome department decided to fire me. The stable department wanted to keep me.
I decided to use the half-time status to start my own consulting firm, instead of finding another department. I'm still really small, but it pays the bills and there are tremendous benefits to being self-employed, financial and otherwise.
I don't know what your financial status is, but if you have a chance to develop a business, do it. If you have to take a part-time job while your business gets on its feet, do it.
If people are outsourcing your skills, compete with the outsourcers and crush them like the insects they are!
There are many other settings where making something accessible also makes it easier to use for the rest of us:
It's really just about being user-friendly, making your edge cases disappear.
Some of the cleverest, most inventive people I know make their living with a hammer.
Yes, there are carpenters who just do what they're told all day and then drive their Ford Ranger to the nearest bar for the night. I'm not talking about them.
Every jobsite that a carpenter sees is a little different. Some are different enough that a carpenter has to invent, on the spot, a jig, tool, technique, or come up with a plan to get the job done in an efficient manner such that the finished product will be right.
I consider myself to be a fairly inventive guy. I'm in awe at the way professional carpenters attack their problems. The old line "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" should really say "If all you have is a hammer, use it to make another tool."
I actually almost mentioned both of those points - the careful restraint of special effects and the (first?) b&w Dracula. I decided I didn't know who played the Count in the movie I remember. That one gave me a fright enema, too. I was 9, but I literally checked under the bed that night after watching it in mid-afternoon.
This is probably the scariest movie I've ever seen. It was released in 2003, right? If not, it's *still* my pick of 2003.
At first it looks like a juvenile cross between "Conspiracy Theory" and "The Net", but then it shifts gears and scares the living shit out of you.
I'm still freaked (can you tell?), and I only saw it once.
You forgot the freedom to move around.
You don't have a free market with closed borders.
As far as OSS goes, I think it's a moot question. No one will enforce software licenses for a while anyway.
The quote I supplied was from the minutes of the Senate Judiciary Committee as they wrote the Act. It was a clear comment on exactly the topic discussed in SCO's open letter. As the majority of the Supreme Court said in Eldredge v. Ashcroft, "... a page of history is worth volumes of logic."
We don't need to read their minds when we have their expressions, as (from your expressions) I believe you would agree.
You appear to be using "machine" as a metaphor for society, "code" for laws, and "comments" for intent. Which do you mean are well intentioned, the machine, the code, or the comments? The analogy fails in any case, because it's precisely because we aren't machines that we need the comments to understand the code. Comments are especially helpful in debugging code, even when you know in general what a piece of code is supposed to do.
"RealProgrammer" is just a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym; I don't hesitate to admit I'm a wannabe who wastes way too much time on Slashdot.
As for whether the [Ff]ramer's intent or current popular will should prevail, or whether that's even the question, I think we'll have to accept that our opinions differ.
The intent of the author of a document isn't relevant? That's clearly bogus. I could take your comment, parse it phrase-by-phrase, and give it a meaning you never intended. After all, you wrote that in the past; I should interpret it according to the present. Put a different way, if the author's intent isn't important, then it's useless to write anything down, since the reader's opinion is the only one that matters.
What's more important here is that the Framer's intent and Congress' current legislative intent are in lockstep agreement. See this post from Dec 9 for a quote from Congress about its intent for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995, the legislation scrutinized in Eldred v Ashcroft and totally mischaracterized by SCO's McBride. Congress made it clear that copyright wasn't primarily about profit, just as the Framers intended.
Your local telco store may help. You know, the place where they stock extra phone books, overpriced telephones, and try to sell you an overpriced cell phone plan. They sometimes have secondhand relay racks, or as I found, even full-sized server cabinets, for which they don't have a use. Ask for the person who buys commercial customer premises back office equipment.
I went to a bankruptcy auction and bought three Motorola telecomm cabinets for $1.50 (that's right, a dollar and a half). These are only about 60" high by 18" deep, so they're really just dressed up relay racks. I gave one to a client and kept the other two.
Adding rails to one of them was about $60. I ordered them through my local telephone company, because it was cheaper and better than buying angle iron, drilling holes, and threading them myself. I added wheels and some paint. My total expenditure was just over $100 per cabinet.
I also bought a used high-end server cabinet for a client from the local telco for about half the price of a new one.
Our local recycler has a division that deals with computer stuff. Anything computery they separate out and try to resell. The nice thing is, they sell it by the pound! I bought several rackmount cable management modules for about $20, less than the price of a single new one. They were just sitting in a pile on the ground. I cleaned them up, and they made a nice addition to my cheap server cabinet.
If you want to put your rack in a closet and maintain a reasonable temperature, you can buy a bathroom fan and thermostat for not much money. I think a nice quiet fan is about $75, but in a closet noise may not be an issue.
Oops, you're right. It was Job that gave me that. Unless I was in the wrong universe at the time ....
Serves me right for not looking it up after 20 years.
The parent is redundant. I've seen it posted verbatim before.
I think this is the prototypical Heinlein book. It starts with a basic premise about something that's different from reality, and explores the consequences of it.
Not as juvenile as the movie, this book will challenge a young adult and their beliefs about citizenship, the military, and life. I think it had a profound influence on my decision to join the Marine Corps and to stick it out.
The word "grok". 'Nuff said. (This was my first Heinlein book)
This book is premised on an inventor who creates the first domestic robot, something like a Roomba but a little smarter. The times we're living in now remind me of this book.
It was the work in progress when he died, and it's not what his other work was. It did give me the line, "Did the universe just shift again?"
No, it's more like: say you had a product named "Fjord", an amphibious retrofit for Ford SUV's. The word "ford" in English predates the company by that name, and means to cross a small body of water. You're doing your best not to infringe on their name by changing it slightly.
The word "window" in English actually predates Microsoft's product. It's use WRT computer software does, as well. In fact, The X Window System was introduced in 1984, at about the same time as Microsoft's Windows product, and the two names were not interesting even then. What else would you call a product that put windows on the screen? "Boxes"? "Widgeted Rectangles"?
Microsoft is abusing the court system to squash a competitor. "Lindows" rhymes with "Windows". So what?
Maybe they should change the name to "Lindoze", since the "Windoze" spelling is more familiar to some of us anyway.
The count should be done in as many redundant ways as possible.
The voting machine should SSMTP email the totals over the network at the end of the day. Yeah, that has a security downside, but the upside is that it's FAST.
The voting machine should print out its results on paper. Little old ladies then total up the paper results from their polling place and telephone them in. That's pretty fast, too.
The voting machine should print out a ballot with two identical halves. You tear half off and drop it in the locked box. That's the official ballot. You keep the other half to do with what you will. The ballots are then handled by the usual means to get the official total. This is slow, but secure.
If any of these methods disagree by enough to arouse suspicion, an audit can be done since the raw data is still around.
An auditing feature of this system would be for the machine to hash an ID for the voter, using for example the machine's ID, the date/time, and the picks made. That unique ID gets printed on the paper ballot, but the time doesn't (so the little old ladies can't deduce how you voted).
The tallies should be sorted by this ID when printed. There is no association anywhere between the individual and their vote, but an individual can use the ID on their paper copy of the ballot to inspect the list to make sure their vote was handled correctly. Similarly, the official ballots can be compared to the paper printout or even an online version.
A paranoid watchdog group could even collect a large sample of the paper ballots and check that against the published results.
It included NDA language, said I couldn't redistribute it, and it said I had to pay to use it after 90 days or something. I was just looking to see if they left a Linux distro accidentally online, and didn't want to bother with their stupid developer secrecy.
I think it even said I couldn't divulge the contents of the EULA. Right. Sue me.
Monday night and into Tuesday morning I downloaded several files from the SCO ftp site, including /pub/ls-lR, a legal notice saying they had removed Linux, and kernel-source-2.2.13.rpm (I think). I just wanted to verify that yes, they still had Linux source available for download. I also downloaded a 650MB iso of a developer CD that turned out to have a nasty EULA, so I deleted it.
The transfer speed was a consistent 74.9 KB/s, which I noticed because it was much lower than I typically get. My download speed at home is usually above 250KB/s, since I have a cable modem in a small town.
That was probably the optimum time to do a download, and the big file was a good test. Unless you and I have exactly the same bottleneck, I think 75KB/s is the max throughput of their network connection.
They call the investment "passive", but they have control over SCO's biggest asset, the litigation division. They're watching this like a hawk, just as we are.
Pot, kettle, black.
Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after.
Fun with statistics, tactic #1: always assume causation. Just because I come home 90% of weekdays just before sunset doesn't mean I cause the sun to set by doing so. There may be other factors at work.
Entrance to technical fields is cyclical, following supply and demand and what's trendy. The pressure of immigration on the job market more constant, since people want to come to the U.S.
The expansion of H-1b quotas was in response to the dot com boom, which had resulted in high demand for tech workers. When the bubble burst, there was suddenly a glut of workers (most of whom were and still are domestic). They can't find jobs at the pay rate they're used to getting. Add to that the burst bubble itself, which gave tech careers the aura of risk.
Calling the downswing in the cycle the government's fault is no more correct than giving the government credit for the upswing.
By the way, I notice your name's not 'Bruce'. That could get confusing ... we'll have to just call you 'Bruce', then.
Claim 978: The placement of a penguin on a television set, which set consists of a television receiver or any other television, for the purpose of presupplying, or supplying a premise in a visual or other manner, or for any other purpose concerning response to queries about the television schedule. Upon receipt of a request such as, but not limited to, queries for what such prerecorded or live programs might be displayed in the immediate future, or other future, or other classification of time or space, the answer will then involve said presupplied penguin.
I feel proud posting a comment having not Read The Fine Article.
(Pssst - hey, buddy: your tinfoil is showing.)
It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?
It also seems to me that the "corporate elites" have even less influence on the education level of the average citizen than the government does. To the extent that they do have influence, I see them pouring billions of dollars into research at universities. They want English-speaking engineers and knowledge workers. Next time you see a job ad from a company which is a front for the "corporate elite", see if it doesn't say "excellent communication skills" or some such.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the public school system. Blame parents who refuse to discipline their kids and refuse to let the schools do so. Blame teachers who are more interested in inculcating politically correct ideology than in teaching hard stuff. Blame education lobbyists who want to shut down home school competition, even though home schoolers are demonstrably better off than their public school counterparts. The foregoing is by no means an exhaustive list, but I don't think the government or "corporate elites" can be added.
There are plenty of villains. There's no need to invent more, or to lay the problem at the feet of the wrong ones.