You don't *need* money, you need good teachers. Paying more for a bad ones who can slither their way through interview, know buzzwords and can use a digital whiteboard won't fix it.

I went to a State school in the UK. Half of the kids were rough as anything, and the other half weren't. There were blackboards ('chalkboards' in the colonial parlance) and textbooks.
This is about ten years ago.

Not a rich school.
The teachers were good, so those who wanted to learn ended up going to a University of their choice, and those who couldn't be arsed weren't allowed to disrupt the teaching. If you'd put shiny e-tech and new age / business school teaching methods in there it would have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

That money is required for success in everything is a curious Americanism. India has more programmers and techs than anywhere else, and their schools run on a budget that couldn't run a US schoolbus.

...you can't fix education by throwing money at it.

Perhaps you have to know what you're doing.

In my case, this is because I am revolted by the IE7 interface, and am pissed off that it can't be turned back to IE6 mode.

The law, as I understand it was proposed, would have made ISPs responsible for monitoring their networks and enforcing the law, which ain't their job.

All this does is open the way for a properly appointed government body to do it.

Bugger.

I wouldn't scream too loudly, Jacquie Smith is still trying to run the country like her own personal penal system...

Nope. Only if has the power to legally declare war on behalf of his country. He's done nothing wrong under New Zealand law, excepting any crazy treaties. If the US wants to do something to him then they have to prove he violated their law within their sovereign territory, then try to get him extradited.

I'm kinda hoping the current president isn't the kind of guy to declare war over a second hand iPod...

Not for me, it isn't. I couldn't care less. The truth is that it is far safer to be a child in the UK now, for good or ill, than it ever has been.

The "problem" is that there are so few instances of this happening that when it does, it gets blown up out of proportion. Case in point, the Madeline McCann thing. Why would parents who lost a child in Portugal benefit significantly from running a "Find Maddy" campaign in the UK, when their child was lost in Portugal?

*BOOM* I contend that it doesn't. It sells more papers, and increases the fervour of the masses to the level where it's guaranteed to add an extra hundred thousand daily sales of your paper. It's a touchy subject because people have been told to think that it is.

Heh, when I was little my favorite game was a Spectrum 48k thing called "B.C. Bill." You were a caveman, and had a club. You bopped women on the head and took them back to your cave, then you bopped walking hamburgers and dinosaurs and took them back to the cave. If you got good at bopping women and food, after a time you'd get young versions of you coming out the cave.

I note that I'm not a violent rapist and animal poacher.

No one cares how many people you can give head to in a year.

Nope. He missed mine, and you're confusing my point. I never said that being a top lawyer means he knows tech, the point I was trying to make is that he's unlikely to use the Blackberry for government business if it's not marked as being used as such since he knows what the law is, and seems to have a big thing about government accountability and honesty.

Using the degree was a straw man argument to some level, but even so - elements of the campaign that he waged to get where he is now suggests that he is either capable of making informed, relevant technology decisions, or doesn't have a problem asking advice of number of people to get an appropriate decision made.

Yeah, IRL, me either. Just don't want to get modded down for being seen to slap down someone's kids...

Could this possibly be the same exact same qualification held by the CEOs and CFOs of major American banks?

You know, the ones who decided to defraud investors by chopping and changing subprime mortgages into AAA rated bonds, thus bringing down every market connected with it?

The ones who've been running the housing market, of critical economic importance, as a Ponzi scheme?

It's a degree that seems to scream "I have a mission to rape and pillage, then get out while I can", which would certainly seem to fit that blueblooded retard's MO.

Let's also not forget that it's not an economics degree. The disciplines are related, but quite different.

Come on - Sarah Palin is either as corrupt as they come, or she's small town stupid. A former lecturer in constitutional law isn't going to anything that daft.

... so it's no different than owning an iPod. Official email will still be made a matter of public record, and he's going to be the first president to use email at all, largely because the former chiefs didn't want it on file.

What you've just written is a monument to the mollycoddling that Western (but particularly middle class American) children get put through. It's utterly ridiculous. Little boys have run around with sticks, knocked each other over, fallen out of trees, and got busted nicking candy from the store since time immemorial, these things are an important part of establishing identity and social boundaries.

If a kid breaks another kids arm when playing with a baseball bat, he's learnt a damn hard lesson and won't do it again. If it's his arm that gets broken he'll learn to stay away from similar situations.

Adults often try to rationalise this behaviour as "he was playing halo, and he just hit his friend with a bat. It's the game's fault", when it ain't. He was being a kid.