Actually yes, your job prospects are quite great. Most universities here have a quite shining international rep.

Just because YOU don't pay for it doesn't mean nobody does. I do. My taxes do. By far not enough if you ask me, and they keep cutting back on money for education to bail out a few banks, but my taxes pay for education here.

Just because public schools are completely fucked up in the US doesn't mean that it can't be done right. All it takes is people in control who actually WANT public schools to succeed rather than enjoying watching them fail because they themselves come from expensive private schools and don't like the idea that someone could get for free what they had to pay through the nose for.

Oh, food sure is a problem around here, too, but tuition fees are not. I don't know what's the current going rate, but back when I went to university, they wanted somewhere around 400 bucks a semester from me.

That's manageable with a part time job, trust me. Just work through the 3 months of breaks you get per year and you should be golden.

Yeah, yeah... what said the philosophy major with a job to the one without? "Want fries with that?"

Getting to the point? We're there. We passed that threshold a while ago. We're already on our way of getting to the point where you cannot recover your college fees during the rest of your working years.

There is very little US-brewed beer that is drinkable. Maybe Sam Adams and some microbreweries but most of the decent ones are imported regardless where these rules don't apply.

When incompetence is pitted against extreme radicalism, I'll take incompetence any day. As bad as Quinn is, he's head and shoulders above Blago or Ryan. However, the Republican would have to be pretty bad, one I would fear would really screw the country up (anyone named "Bush" would do it). In likelihood I'll vote Greenie or Libbie, depending on their candidates.

Not just Kubrick but damned near every other science fiction writer. Hell, Asimov had antique cars that were not only self-driving but sentient, six years from now.

But a few hundred years from now? I don't think ion drives driven by two fusion generators is out of line for that timeline. By then there will be technologies we can't even dream of today.

I did make a huge math error by not actually doing the math and I'm not sure how I'll fix it. Someone pointed out that you could get to Mars' orbit on the other side of the sun in three days at .8G. Damn.

I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.

I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.

If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.

Here's a phone, call someone who gives half a shit.

Fortunately there are still countries where it's not possible to patent every fart you pass.

You sure that's not missing a few 0s?

Welcome to the Internet.

Why would people in the future abandon patents? Because they "learned their lesson"? Because they "got more socially intelligent"? Look back in history and show me one example where we learned from our lessons or where we became more socially intelligent.

Man is a greedy asshole. And the greediest assholes are also the ones that have the power to build something big. Something like, say, some time travel device.

So if anyone ever came up with something like that, what he would bring along is the blueprints of everything that had been invented between now and then and they'd make a beeline for the patent office.

You have a stock exchange. It's almost like placing a bet.

The cynic in me would say that's also the reason why real betting is disallowed. I mean, would you allow a competitor to exist if you controlled the law?

The Greens putting up the Chancellor isn't even necessary. Hell, it's not even necessary for them to be in government to have an influence. That's the beauty (and in some other cases the shame) of it: The threat that people could move from your party to $party because they have $topic on their agenda already does a lot.

In the 80s, the Greens did not really play a role in European parliaments. At least not in a way that you could see them reach any kind of government position any time soon. Yet still, their positions (i.e. ecology and sustainability) were embraced by the established parties quite quickly when they saw that people left them and voted Green instead just because of those positions. The Greens still didn't have a governmental role in the 90s, but their positions and demands were already being usurped by those that are in power, because they feared more voters would move away from them if they didn't.

It's a common misconception that your party needs to rule or be at least part of the government so you can realize your ideas. All it really takes is that those that are in government fear the loss of votes if they don't pick up your ideas.