Request, approve, order, receive, install... competition over who has what better stuff... these are signs of a power-obsessed organization that's completely lost its mind. Unfortunately, that's seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
Think about it: if it takes $1000 in labor to run an approval process for a $200 item, your authority levels are totally out of balance. Really, just give everyone a reasonable budget to outfit their space in the way that works best for them, and if you want a strict rule, make it a rule against whining and stealing. Besides, if everyone has the same budget, people should be able to appreciate that some will spend it on a nice chair where others want more or larger monitors.
This is Linux, we can have, and need to have, both.
Unfortunately, this endless variety of flavors makes Linux virtually impossible to adopt in the mainstream. There's simply too many options to choose from, so the easiest thing to do is not to choose at all.
Linux needs to collapse into a single desktop/laptop/netbook install, for which 99% of users will customize no greater than to change the wallpaper to a picture of their kids, and it's very doubtful that the various factions will ever agree to standardize on the other's products.
Strange, it seems to me that Google would have some ideas about how to utilize massively parallel processing, as would the supercomputing crowd.
Is the issue here how to scale supercomputing concepts down to desktop applications? Well, for starters, you can dedicate a couple of cores to run all of the background processes (on the order of 70) that my IT department insists must reside on my system, so that I might get at least one which can work on the application(s) at hand.
Terrorists are people who've decided to make people take notice of their views.
Around here, the word we use for that kind of person is "politician."
Terrorism is warfare; warfare is politics by force. "Terrorist" leaders are using religion as a basis to provide meaning to young, foolish men with a desperate outlook on life. Terrorist goals are often political in nature -- such as preservation of self-serving power structures, or modifying power structures to be more favorable to the terrorist leader -- wrapped in the divine guise of a religious crusade. Perhaps we are coming to understand the irrationality of religion sufficiently to recognize that people will do insane (suicidal) acts in its name. It is (sadly) more likely that religious war is simply scarier to the masses, and thus a more powerful motivational tool to politicians with something to gain from it.
The machines record withdrawals, so the bankers know the lucky ones...In the end, the banks will likely debit more from customer accounts than they'd planned on, leaving aside the question of their authority when the customer didn't ask for the extra cash.
Perhaps the ATM was designed to falsely record erroneous transactions, and the difference is skimmed by a maintainer. Meanwhile, the bank recovers their "losses" by billing them in relatively small amounts back to their customers.
This is just an administration's response to the insinuation that they are somehow the first to do unpleasant things "in the service of" their country. This says, "even you Democrats did bad things; not only that, your great Champion Kennedy did some of the worst. We could easily declassify plenty of damaging goods on Clinton the Popular, but we don't want to set that precedent, now, do we?"
This has nothing to do with the past, except insofar as it might distract from the present.
The mantle of "hire the best, no matter the cost" has been assumed by Google. The good ones from MS all burned out long ago, and they aren't going back. The rest of the best in this country would cost MS too much to hire, or won't take any offer because they find MS to be unsavory.
Gates has to look overseas -- it's the only place he has left.
It's important to realize that this is a case of low supply/high demand and not a measure of worth. For example, my wife is an elementary school teacher, and I consider her job more worthy than my own. However, I make well over twice her salary. The district is in the unpleasant position of having to offer higher pay to less experienced teachers because they possess a particular skillset that is in greater demand.
In that regard, I wish the district the best of luck in their endeavor, because it will meet substantial resistance:
Taxpayers don't like paying for teachers as it is;
Teachers' unions are mostly being run by late-career teachers who are setting up their retirement, and won't want to waste dollars that could end up in their pockets
The new teachers come from outside the fold of the educational ivory tower, and that isn't likely to sit well with a whole host of in-system busybodies.
The educational system, for the most part, is responding to this crisis as would any gargantuan corporation: wait for the flood of baby-boom retirees to leave the rolls, then hire two graduates for every retiree. It doesn't matter that half of the newbies will quit within 3 years -- they'll just hire more. There's also a steady stream of wash-ups, burnouts, soon-to-be-moms, and anyone else who can find the spare change to buy enough credit hours to get temporary accreditation. Once you're in, you've got a few years to complete a masters program in night school, (somewhat) publicly funded, of course.
Like that gargantuan corporation (I've worked at a few), some of the newbies will be enthusiastic and talented, and some will suck. Some will discover a lifelong passion for their work; still others will burn out. Some will brownout and become dead weight. It's not a cube farm, but there are plenty of corporate parallels.
You know there's dead weight in every sector, anyway. It's uncomfortable to think that your kids will be taught by some retired-in-place flake, but RIPs are involved in designing your cars, building your roads, keeping your tap water potable, running your government, etc. You have to take it upon yourself as a parent to make sure your child isn't lost to the dead weight. Then again, some of those RIPs are parents, too. Some kids are just screwed.
In the interest of disclosure: my parents were both teachers, as is my wife. I have heard the rumblings of educational bowels my entire life. There are a ton of gifted, wonderful teachers out there. I studied under several, and I'm incredibly thankful for their gifts. There's also a ton of BS (e.g. NCLB) that drives wonderful teachers away or beats them into submission.
Most small single-engine piston airplanes are simple enough that the reason for the crash can be easily discerned from the wreckage.
"Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT)." Pilots can often survive engine and avionics failures by gliding the plane to a landing, so unless there's an obvious catasrophic failure, small aircraft incidents get classified as pilot error. Particularly as more of these small airplanes are moving from electro-mechanical gauges to digital electronic displays, the interest in having more than a steaming pile at the crash site has increased.
I think the iPod thing is a gimmick, to be honest. Most likely it's a playback toy, because I can't see these guys paying to get the iPod past FAA certification.
nobody wants their entire business to be dependent on any one person.
On the contrary, I get the distinct impression that management, seeking to run a lean organization, wants virtually every aspect of their business to be dependent upon single people.
Establishing redundant knowledge requires redundant
("unnecessary") effort. As you cut that out, cross-pollination of knowledge suffers, and the resulting organization becomes brittle. Even the people you might rather let go end up being indispensable. You and I get nervous. The managers are too busy being smug about how "efficient" they are.
The theme of (Engineering != Manufacturing) strikes with every resignation and the subsequent scrambling to pick up the slack. Sure, smart people eventually learn enough about the relics that have been left behind. The task is made easier if the relics include some useful documentation. It's never quite as good, or as complete, as having people who know.
That report smells like a hoax. It's written about as well as your typical post on/. Samples:
Production peaks for non-OPEC conventional oil are at hand; many nations have already past(sic) their peak, or are now producing at peak capacity.
...the Army must insulate itself from the economic and logistical energy-related problems coming in the near to mid future. This requires a transition to modern, secure, and efficient energy systems, and to building technologies that are safe and environmental(sic) friendly.
The quotations are followed by a note of suspicion from the author of the EnergyBulletin column:
The fact that the document does not seem to be online is puzzling. Searching with Google yielded no results. According to a note on page 4 of the report, the report should be available at http://www.cecer.army.mil/, a URL which seems to be obsolete or inaccessible.
The US Armed Forces use a *lot* of energy, so it is plausible that they are actively pursuing energy efficiency technology. It also makes sense that they would seek localized generation and fuel independence to reduce exposure to breaks in supply lines. Nevertheless, I question the authenticity of this paper.
Naw, we're not ready for CPA to be a disease yet. Now that suing tobacco has gone out of style, we have to finish the suits against Nabisco and McDonald's for making us all fat. To jump ahead into CPA suits while the obesity suits are still on -- that would be too much like, well, CPA.
Once our cancerous, fat asses get done with the McObesity suits, we can sue to get our attention spans back. We'll need a better acronym, though, something more like Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD), more commonly known as the "winter blahs" or "cabin fever". Maybe something like Technological Attention Reduction Disorder (TARD).
In general, my experience is that once the walls go up, you're stuck with whatever you got. That sucks.
Utility access on every floor. I just *love* when I pop a breaker upstairs and have to go down two flights to the basement to reset it.
Flexible/expandable wiring. Run large-capacity conduit to multiple utility outlets in every room. If you later decide to add e.g. central audio, you can run the low-voltage or optical (or whatever) cables from the central utility area into each room and connect. Running this through walls (particularly exterior, insulated walls) really sucks after the drywall goes up.
Better switching and programmability. I hate having to work around having only one switched outlet in a room, and having to use wall warts for timed lighting.
As it turns out, #2 is a pain in the butt to build, but hey, while we're dreaming, right?
After the september 11 attacks, NATO 'woke up' and activated the 'an attack against one is an attack against us all' article (article 5 if I'm not mistaken).
The USA government said 'no thanks'.
Years later, they had to come back to NATO because of not being able to handle Afghanistan alone.
That would explain how the US and British special forces entered Afghanistan 07 October 2001 -- less than a month after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months several other NATO countries were also involved in the operation.
The rest of your post is spot-on. The ("hated") French mourned alongside the US on September 11th, yet it seems to require effort to remember that today. The French were not the ones who broke that bond.
...the collapse of the dollar would be the most likely scenario...
AKA "The Next Great Depression". In the 1930s, the US was very much at risk of full-scale Communist revolution, as was happening around the world at that time. As much as the neo-cons would like to believe that FDR was a socialist at heart, the New Deal was a desperate attempt to stave off such a revolution by filling the bellies of the most destitute.
Social Security was a part of the effort, and was also political manipulation of statistics at its finest: cut the unemployment rate by reclassifying massive numbers of the unemployed as "retired".
Interestingly, in the 30s, the US had effectively no debt, so taking a hit to run these massive social programs was more feasible. Today, the US is encumbered both by foreign-held debt and entitlement programs. It would be much less able to respond to a depression today in the way it did in the 30s. If you think the US is unpopular in the world today, wait until it tries to weasel out of $9T+ in foreign-held bonds.
For this reason, the FAA doesn't allow C++ for use in aircraft systems.
Let's say that the FAA may not yet be entirely comfortable with C++ in aircraft systems.
There was a paper or presentation that posited the question "Is C++ the natural enemy of DO-178B?" (I wish I could find a link for you, sorry). In particular, higher certification levels of DO-178B require more stringent proof that all of the software in the system has been exercised*. This proof is more difficult to attain when using exceptions, which can interrupt linear program flow. Templates are problematic in their own way -- for example, it can be difficult to prove that the whole template has been exercised against each of the types that instantiate the template.
The FAA's slowness to adopt to...uh... "new" technology is frustrating, certainly, but it's their job to be the anchor. The reliability of most desktop software is simply unacceptable for most in-cockpit applications.
* Note: I had to run the structual coverage analysis on "printf" on one program, and that was only for Level C verification. You really are checking all of the code.
I've seen enough comments about submission editing and anchor text mangling that dada21's idea to post original submission text should be considered. Link from each article summary back to the original text in the submitter's journal. If the content of the article comes into question, the original is automatically available for comparison.
Along those lines, I'd like to see less emphasis on the sumbitter via the "SoAndSo says" format. Every post has a submitter that is both easily identified and visually separated from the content. Why should articles be different?
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying . They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
I thought the quote was from a Patriot Act thread, but clearly the idea is common enough. It matters not whether the spy is human or machine, or works for the government or a corporation -- a spy is a spy.
Perhaps in such matters the installer should use no default at all: pose the question with a yes/no answer dialog. The NO choice has to work; too many installers provide option boxes that have no effect, and you still end up with the crapware you deselected.
There's probably little to no "Microsoft Tax" in that system, which rings in at $250 after rebate and removing the monitor, certainly not at the ~$100 the individual "OEM" would pay. It feasible that such a worthless hulk might actually be offered at cost.
Still, how many of those crippled machines does Dell actually sell? You're not meant to buy that -- it's a sales hook. Once you're in, well, you really should consider a few modest upgrades.
Dropped honors for regular english 2 years into H.S., not because it was too hard, but because it included countless hours of random busy work that wasn't worth the time.
I skipped out of the honors English/Lit track in 8th grade for the same reason.
My boredom with school was not the result of having a great deal of free time because I completed my assignments quickly. I was bored because the pace of discovery was too slow. The beginning of the new lessons and the discovery of new knowledge held my interest right up to the point where the exercises clearly became rote. After that, it was on to catching up on tedious work for other classes or daydreaming.
My experience may differ from many others in the honors track. I suspect it is common among many here on/. Perhaps we lack the focus or drive to find that excruciatingly fine detail between two points of knowledge that will land us a PhD. I think it's because it takes too damn long. We're explorers, but not quite like the oceanic explorers of 500+ years ago -- more like the early "barnstorming" flyers.
"First of all, this is a private high school. The First Amendment does not apply to private organizations..."
This is a First Amendment issue that is unrelated to the public or private funding of the school. What's interesting is that most are arguing about it as a free speech issue, which it is not. It is a free press issue.
The "press" to which the Constitution refers is the printing press. It seems alien in the context of modern communication technology, but even in the early 20th century, there were only two ways to communicate a single idea to a large group of people. You could either stand on a box in the center of town and give a speech, or print and distribute your ideas via the printing press. These were the only mass media at the time of the Constitution.
The First Amendment does not attempt to construct vague interpretations of "speech", as many do today when seeking its protections. It explicitly protects all known mass media from censorship. It guarantees to every person the right to disseminate political opinion through all available media of the day. In effect, to the Constitution, everyone is a journalist.
An industrious student at the school should be blogging this entire event, the reactions of the school administration, teachers, parents, and students. Done well it would be fascinating journalism.
Patents and copyrights are really the anti-christ of free markets.
Not necessarily. Imagine that you and a competitor manufacture widgets. You create a process that radically improves the efficiency of manufacturing widgets. Free market: you can keep it for yourself and reap the rewards of your efficiency relative to your opponent. As long as they don't figure it out, you win. Alternatively, you can patent the improvement. It exposes the idea to your opponent, and if the cost savings for implementing your patented process is greater than the cost of paying you for it, your opponent implements it, and you still make more money. Perhaps your opponent improves it further, and reduces the cost of making widgets yet again. In the end, all the widgets get made more efficiently, and competition can bring the price down.
Perhaps you meant that modern patenting practices are anti-free-market. On that I could agree; the point isn't to profit from your idea into eternity; it's to set good ideas into permanent practice so that better ideas can come from it.
Evidently, Jack believes it to be acceptable to harass video game developers, but sees this as a one-way street.
This is what freedom of speech is all about, Jack. Say what you will. You are free to listen to what others have to say in return. Harassment law ought not prevent you from being hung by your own words.
Slashdot Mirror
Request, approve, order, receive, install... competition over who has what better stuff... these are signs of a power-obsessed organization that's completely lost its mind. Unfortunately, that's seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Think about it: if it takes $1000 in labor to run an approval process for a $200 item, your authority levels are totally out of balance. Really, just give everyone a reasonable budget to outfit their space in the way that works best for them, and if you want a strict rule, make it a rule against whining and stealing. Besides, if everyone has the same budget, people should be able to appreciate that some will spend it on a nice chair where others want more or larger monitors.
Unfortunately, this endless variety of flavors makes Linux virtually impossible to adopt in the mainstream. There's simply too many options to choose from, so the easiest thing to do is not to choose at all.
Linux needs to collapse into a single desktop/laptop/netbook install, for which 99% of users will customize no greater than to change the wallpaper to a picture of their kids, and it's very doubtful that the various factions will ever agree to standardize on the other's products.
Strange, it seems to me that Google would have some ideas about how to utilize massively parallel processing, as would the supercomputing crowd.
Is the issue here how to scale supercomputing concepts down to desktop applications? Well, for starters, you can dedicate a couple of cores to run all of the background processes (on the order of 70) that my IT department insists must reside on my system, so that I might get at least one which can work on the application(s) at hand.
Around here, the word we use for that kind of person is "politician."
Terrorism is warfare; warfare is politics by force. "Terrorist" leaders are using religion as a basis to provide meaning to young, foolish men with a desperate outlook on life. Terrorist goals are often political in nature -- such as preservation of self-serving power structures, or modifying power structures to be more favorable to the terrorist leader -- wrapped in the divine guise of a religious crusade. Perhaps we are coming to understand the irrationality of religion sufficiently to recognize that people will do insane (suicidal) acts in its name. It is (sadly) more likely that religious war is simply scarier to the masses, and thus a more powerful motivational tool to politicians with something to gain from it.
From the editorial:
Perhaps the ATM was designed to falsely record erroneous transactions, and the difference is skimmed by a maintainer. Meanwhile, the bank recovers their "losses" by billing them in relatively small amounts back to their customers.
It's almost as good as Office Space.
...then again, maybe putting it in the clothes washer had something do do with that.
This is just an administration's response to the insinuation that they are somehow the first to do unpleasant things "in the service of" their country. This says, "even you Democrats did bad things; not only that, your great Champion Kennedy did some of the worst. We could easily declassify plenty of damaging goods on Clinton the Popular, but we don't want to set that precedent, now, do we?"
This has nothing to do with the past, except insofar as it might distract from the present.
The mantle of "hire the best, no matter the cost" has been assumed by Google. The good ones from MS all burned out long ago, and they aren't going back. The rest of the best in this country would cost MS too much to hire, or won't take any offer because they find MS to be unsavory.
Gates has to look overseas -- it's the only place he has left.
It's important to realize that this is a case of low supply/high demand and not a measure of worth. For example, my wife is an elementary school teacher, and I consider her job more worthy than my own. However, I make well over twice her salary. The district is in the unpleasant position of having to offer higher pay to less experienced teachers because they possess a particular skillset that is in greater demand.
In that regard, I wish the district the best of luck in their endeavor, because it will meet substantial resistance:
The educational system, for the most part, is responding to this crisis as would any gargantuan corporation: wait for the flood of baby-boom retirees to leave the rolls, then hire two graduates for every retiree. It doesn't matter that half of the newbies will quit within 3 years -- they'll just hire more. There's also a steady stream of wash-ups, burnouts, soon-to-be-moms, and anyone else who can find the spare change to buy enough credit hours to get temporary accreditation. Once you're in, you've got a few years to complete a masters program in night school, (somewhat) publicly funded, of course.
Like that gargantuan corporation (I've worked at a few), some of the newbies will be enthusiastic and talented, and some will suck. Some will discover a lifelong passion for their work; still others will burn out. Some will brownout and become dead weight. It's not a cube farm, but there are plenty of corporate parallels.
You know there's dead weight in every sector, anyway. It's uncomfortable to think that your kids will be taught by some retired-in-place flake, but RIPs are involved in designing your cars, building your roads, keeping your tap water potable, running your government, etc. You have to take it upon yourself as a parent to make sure your child isn't lost to the dead weight. Then again, some of those RIPs are parents, too. Some kids are just screwed.
In the interest of disclosure: my parents were both teachers, as is my wife. I have heard the rumblings of educational bowels my entire life. There are a ton of gifted, wonderful teachers out there. I studied under several, and I'm incredibly thankful for their gifts. There's also a ton of BS (e.g. NCLB) that drives wonderful teachers away or beats them into submission.
"Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT)." Pilots can often survive engine and avionics failures by gliding the plane to a landing, so unless there's an obvious catasrophic failure, small aircraft incidents get classified as pilot error. Particularly as more of these small airplanes are moving from electro-mechanical gauges to digital electronic displays, the interest in having more than a steaming pile at the crash site has increased.
I think the iPod thing is a gimmick, to be honest. Most likely it's a playback toy, because I can't see these guys paying to get the iPod past FAA certification.
On the contrary, I get the distinct impression that management, seeking to run a lean organization, wants virtually every aspect of their business to be dependent upon single people.
Establishing redundant knowledge requires redundant ("unnecessary") effort. As you cut that out, cross-pollination of knowledge suffers, and the resulting organization becomes brittle. Even the people you might rather let go end up being indispensable. You and I get nervous. The managers are too busy being smug about how "efficient" they are.
The theme of (Engineering != Manufacturing) strikes with every resignation and the subsequent scrambling to pick up the slack. Sure, smart people eventually learn enough about the relics that have been left behind. The task is made easier if the relics include some useful documentation. It's never quite as good, or as complete, as having people who know.
That report smells like a hoax. It's written about as well as your typical post on /. Samples:
The quotations are followed by a note of suspicion from the author of the EnergyBulletin column:
The US Armed Forces use a *lot* of energy, so it is plausible that they are actively pursuing energy efficiency technology. It also makes sense that they would seek localized generation and fuel independence to reduce exposure to breaks in supply lines. Nevertheless, I question the authenticity of this paper.
Naw, we're not ready for CPA to be a disease yet. Now that suing tobacco has gone out of style, we have to finish the suits against Nabisco and McDonald's for making us all fat. To jump ahead into CPA suits while the obesity suits are still on -- that would be too much like, well, CPA.
Once our cancerous, fat asses get done with the McObesity suits, we can sue to get our attention spans back. We'll need a better acronym, though, something more like Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD), more commonly known as the "winter blahs" or "cabin fever". Maybe something like Technological Attention Reduction Disorder (TARD).
In general, my experience is that once the walls go up, you're stuck with whatever you got. That sucks.
As it turns out, #2 is a pain in the butt to build, but hey, while we're dreaming, right?
That would explain how the US and British special forces entered Afghanistan 07 October 2001 -- less than a month after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months several other NATO countries were also involved in the operation.
The rest of your post is spot-on. The ("hated") French mourned alongside the US on September 11th, yet it seems to require effort to remember that today. The French were not the ones who broke that bond.
AKA "The Next Great Depression". In the 1930s, the US was very much at risk of full-scale Communist revolution, as was happening around the world at that time. As much as the neo-cons would like to believe that FDR was a socialist at heart, the New Deal was a desperate attempt to stave off such a revolution by filling the bellies of the most destitute.
Social Security was a part of the effort, and was also political manipulation of statistics at its finest: cut the unemployment rate by reclassifying massive numbers of the unemployed as "retired".
Interestingly, in the 30s, the US had effectively no debt, so taking a hit to run these massive social programs was more feasible. Today, the US is encumbered both by foreign-held debt and entitlement programs. It would be much less able to respond to a depression today in the way it did in the 30s. If you think the US is unpopular in the world today, wait until it tries to weasel out of $9T+ in foreign-held bonds.
Let's say that the FAA may not yet be entirely comfortable with C++ in aircraft systems.
There was a paper or presentation that posited the question "Is C++ the natural enemy of DO-178B?" (I wish I could find a link for you, sorry). In particular, higher certification levels of DO-178B require more stringent proof that all of the software in the system has been exercised*. This proof is more difficult to attain when using exceptions, which can interrupt linear program flow. Templates are problematic in their own way -- for example, it can be difficult to prove that the whole template has been exercised against each of the types that instantiate the template.
The FAA's slowness to adopt to ...uh... "new" technology is frustrating, certainly, but it's their job to be the anchor. The reliability of most desktop software is simply unacceptable for most in-cockpit applications.
* Note: I had to run the structual coverage analysis on "printf" on one program, and that was only for Level C verification. You really are checking all of the code.
I've seen enough comments about submission editing and anchor text mangling that dada21's idea to post original submission text should be considered. Link from each article summary back to the original text in the submitter's journal. If the content of the article comes into question, the original is automatically available for comparison.
Along those lines, I'd like to see less emphasis on the sumbitter via the "SoAndSo says" format. Every post has a submitter that is both easily identified and visually separated from the content. Why should articles be different?
To quote an oft-quoted post from the DMCA Abuse Widespread article:
I thought the quote was from a Patriot Act thread, but clearly the idea is common enough. It matters not whether the spy is human or machine, or works for the government or a corporation -- a spy is a spy.
Perhaps in such matters the installer should use no default at all: pose the question with a yes/no answer dialog. The NO choice has to work; too many installers provide option boxes that have no effect, and you still end up with the crapware you deselected.
Sure to be a hit with the kids
So what do you get when you Break the Bracelet?
There's probably little to no "Microsoft Tax" in that system, which rings in at $250 after rebate and removing the monitor, certainly not at the ~$100 the individual "OEM" would pay. It feasible that such a worthless hulk might actually be offered at cost.
Still, how many of those crippled machines does Dell actually sell? You're not meant to buy that -- it's a sales hook. Once you're in, well, you really should consider a few modest upgrades.
"Dell Recommends:"
"Dell Recommends" $628 worth of "upgrades", making it a nearly $1000 system. I think there's plenty of room for the MS tax in there, don't you?
I skipped out of the honors English/Lit track in 8th grade for the same reason.
My boredom with school was not the result of having a great deal of free time because I completed my assignments quickly. I was bored because the pace of discovery was too slow. The beginning of the new lessons and the discovery of new knowledge held my interest right up to the point where the exercises clearly became rote. After that, it was on to catching up on tedious work for other classes or daydreaming.
My experience may differ from many others in the honors track. I suspect it is common among many here on /. Perhaps we lack the focus or drive to find that excruciatingly fine detail between two points of knowledge that will land us a PhD. I think it's because it takes too damn long. We're explorers, but not quite like the oceanic explorers of 500+ years ago -- more like the early "barnstorming" flyers.
This is a First Amendment issue that is unrelated to the public or private funding of the school. What's interesting is that most are arguing about it as a free speech issue, which it is not. It is a free press issue.
The "press" to which the Constitution refers is the printing press. It seems alien in the context of modern communication technology, but even in the early 20th century, there were only two ways to communicate a single idea to a large group of people. You could either stand on a box in the center of town and give a speech, or print and distribute your ideas via the printing press. These were the only mass media at the time of the Constitution.
The First Amendment does not attempt to construct vague interpretations of "speech", as many do today when seeking its protections. It explicitly protects all known mass media from censorship. It guarantees to every person the right to disseminate political opinion through all available media of the day. In effect, to the Constitution, everyone is a journalist.
An industrious student at the school should be blogging this entire event, the reactions of the school administration, teachers, parents, and students. Done well it would be fascinating journalism.
Not necessarily. Imagine that you and a competitor manufacture widgets. You create a process that radically improves the efficiency of manufacturing widgets. Free market: you can keep it for yourself and reap the rewards of your efficiency relative to your opponent. As long as they don't figure it out, you win. Alternatively, you can patent the improvement. It exposes the idea to your opponent, and if the cost savings for implementing your patented process is greater than the cost of paying you for it, your opponent implements it, and you still make more money. Perhaps your opponent improves it further, and reduces the cost of making widgets yet again. In the end, all the widgets get made more efficiently, and competition can bring the price down.
Perhaps you meant that modern patenting practices are anti-free-market. On that I could agree; the point isn't to profit from your idea into eternity; it's to set good ideas into permanent practice so that better ideas can come from it.
Evidently, Jack believes it to be acceptable to harass video game developers, but sees this as a one-way street.
This is what freedom of speech is all about, Jack. Say what you will. You are free to listen to what others have to say in return. Harassment law ought not prevent you from being hung by your own words.