Agreed, it would have been nice if they would have just developed an "education shield" for the Pi or the Arduino. For classrooms, an Arduino might have been better as they are very easy to program even for complete beginners: an Arduino and an IDE or CodeBender come close to the pgrogramming ease of the old computers with a BASIC command line. And for advanced students, there's already a whole range of other projects, sensors and shields out there they can sink their teeth into.

GP is right: the old machines were usually programmed in BASIC, with a simple command line interface. It really all starts with "Hello world", and the ease with which one can create that program is a decent measure of how friendly the language is for absolute beginners. On a modern computer, you'll have to find and install the right tools first: a simple interpreter or an IDE. On a phone, you'll probably have to learn about compiling and using libraries, a huge learning curve for beginners. Back then, the computer came with a book designed to teach a bit of rudimentary programming. Today, you can find all you need online... if you know what to look for.

Kids who are interested will make the leap, but kids who might be interested probably won't. They need a little push to convince them "I can actually do this!", and that push is unlikely to come from the Internet. In that sense, I daresay that the old BBC micro met its goals.

So you're the reason grandma's birthday was so exciting!

I don't think the media has ever really used the socialist angle on Nazi Germany, at least not as an explanation for its evils. To do so would be to invite confusion into the media's narrative of Nazism as right wing authoritariansm and the political spectrum -- the NSDAP labeled itself as socialist and implemented policies that looked socialist, so how could they be socalist and right-wing at the same time?

Before you know it people would start calling it the common sense party -- get rid of the unproductive, national pride, a strong military, reign in the rich, support the family man who is the backbone of our country...

That's what's so interesting about fascism, as an ideology it doesn't follow the economically driven left-right political definitions clearly.

The wartime nature of Nazi Germany's economy I think confuses the seperation of business and state in fascism. I also think the power of German industrialists relative to the Nazis is understated. Krupp, Thyssen, etc were extremely rich and influential and the Nazis needed their money and backing and their industries working.

You and what army? Why, this army ... er, where do I get an army exactly? Maybe I just need to get a bunch of smaller government types to go along with me, maybe get a bunch of states together and make our own country? Has anybody tried that? Oh. How'd that work out? Oh.

So, yay America I guess?

So... hypothetical question, exactly what do you have to post in an internet forum to get put on watch lists and no-fly etc?

I'd never read that story, and I consider myself an Asimov fan. Thank you!

I was thinking of this one http://www.galactanet.com/oneo...

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?” “Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

What the title says.

I think that WAS their exit strategy -- just be incompetent enough that they'd look elsewhere for talent.

If you're a consultant/entrepreneur, you can't always know what your clients are ultimately up to so you're often into it before it's too late to just up and quit.

 

If there were large areas with different dielectric constants, they would have stars in them, at least occasionally, and we'd have noticed the weird stars.

I cannot deny that much of what you've said about the mob is true. I didn't mean to say that the mob never did anything well, never provided benefits to neighborhoods or people, etc.

Everyone understands that the mob can "Get things done". And, what's ironic is that, IIRC, you and I have very different ideas about government, but we apparently agree that in some situations, the mob is more effective and occasionally preferable to local government.

That said, I think you are papering over the intimidation, violence, and property destruction done by the mob.

(I'm not papering over the intimidation, violence, and property destruction done by governments, fwiw)

Karma applies to your next life, not this one.

So do you remember or are you just guessing?

I read an interesting short story once where the protagonist died and before being reincarnated was surprised to learn that you could be born before you died. That in fact, you could be born at any point in time and might be interacting with yourself if you happened to be born twice in the same time period, and you wouldn't know because you forget everything when you're born. Then it was slowly revealed that not only could you be born multiple times in one time period, you absolutely were. Moreover, it was revealed that you were in fact the only soul, being born over and over throughout time, interacting with nobody but yourself and literally making your own karma by being the person you were kind to and also the person you were cruel to.

Wish I could remember the name of that story. Or a previous life so I'd know if karma applies to the next life or not. Maybe it's more immediate... sort of insta-karma, which would be a good name for a powdered coffee.

I think fascism as an ideology usually has a predominant nationalistic and ethnic component to it. I think business interests intermeshed with the government is largely a byproduct of a totalitarian political system.

Fascism can be tricky to extrapolate to a specific economic policy because we don't have many functioning examples of governments run by ideological fascists and the ones we do have were short lived and marked by extremes of policy and historical notoriety that make coherent analysis tricky.

The Nazi party (National Socialist German Worker's Party) parlayed its romanticism of the German Volk into some socialist policies while at the same time it coaxed and coerced skeptical German capitalists with big wartime spending.

Somebody once tried to explain fascism as the weird marriage of progressivism and racism into one ideology. I think it's a strangely apt definition that encompasses some of the strange outcomes.

I can't believe I'm going to contribute to this side of the discussion. "Loathe" is the mildest word I can think of for how I feel about a government accessible decryption system, but I'm going to explain why it's not infeasible to maintain security and have government access, unlike so many posters seem to assume.

Lets take cell phones as a starting example. The encryption of my phone isn't done with the password I put into the phone when I reboot it, the encryption is done with a randomly generated key which my password decrypts. There is no reason the same key that is actually decrypting the phone couldn't be encrypted with a phone manufacturer password. That government mandated password would encrypt the real decryption key just like my password does, but the government password wouldn't change when I change the password I'm using.

Note the government password isn't the same for multiple phones, it's unique to each phone. The government password is a randomly generated complex string of numbers, letters and symbols and it's not stored on the phone.

The government password for my phone is created at OS installation time and then the phone manufacturer encrypts it with the public key provided by the government. Those encrypted password media are sent to the companies selling the phones and those companies keep that media physically secured.

The government must subpoena the key for a specific phone in order to decrypt its contents.

The government password is now protected by:
A) A PKI private key stored by a government agency
B) Physical security at a non-governmental agency
C) The somewhat abused but best available legal processes of our government

Encrypted computer drives work the same. The assumption in both scenarios is that people fall into one of these groups:
A) don't know it is there
B) use the system their device came with
C) don't understand how to change the system

That covers 99.999% of people, probably even 99.99% of criminals. I may repartition my drive and install varying operating systems, and I may install a different OS on my phone, but normal people don't. Even drug dealers and terrorists are unlikely to do that when there are far easier ways to avoid incrimination. The fact is we could have such a "backdoor" already in play and we wouldn't necessarily know about it. I'm geekier than most by far, and I don't recompile the kernel on my boot partition to make sure it matches the one that is actually there. Granted, I do tend to wipe drives and start fresh, but if Redhat and Canonical are compromised, the NSA is good enough at their jobs, that I'll probably never notice. Do you know for sure the signature of your running kernel matches the one that you could compile for yourself?

I've worked as an SMB consultant and almost every SMB owner I've run into is some kind creepy, shifty guy who is coming as close as he can to "the line" and often crossing it. At a minimum it's every conceivable tax dodge imaginable -- luxury company car as a daily commuter, no-show family members on the payroll, tons of business-paid home technology for personal use, and so on. Who knows what it is at maximum. Probably outright tax fraud, siphoning cash, cheating employees, whatever.

You could make a believable narrative that has two small-time entrepreneurs looking for investors and/or work are just *used* to the kind of slimeballs that are out there and don't really ask too many questions. Call it conditioned ignorance.

I don't know how cost of living translates, but I do think their incomes, especially the guy with a regular job (IIRC) would make them be a little more selective. That part I find kind of fishy.

But it's also not hard to see once they saw they were dealing with guys with guns that going along with it but with willful incompetence wouldn't have seemed like a totally unreasonable strategy. What are your choices? Run away and look over your shoulder for years?

Have you ever lived anywhere where there was a significant mob presence?

I haven't, and for good reason.

Your plan is a really great plan if you assume that the mob has absolutely no penetration whatsoever into the local police department.

I don't know why you'd assume such a stupid thing, though.

So here is how your suggestion really goes.

You walk into the local PD. On your way there, some kid recognized your face. He has instructions that say that if he sees a guy who looks like you walking into the police station, he calls a number and gets a bonus.

When you come home, something is different. Either your family is already dead, or, there's a note that makes it clear that your family is vulnerable and that you've fucked up - but there is still a chance to not get your family killed. Who knows what the knob is set at for the "first contact" - but there's a clear indication that you don't want to continue talking to the police.

Now, if someone inside that building is actually connected - and usually, somebody is - maybe they're the person who interviewed you. Maybe they're the person who looks at the signin/signout sheet at the station. Maybe they are somebody who files paperwork or types things up for other people.

Zillions of little people are needed to make the machine of government operate, and the mob targets precisely those people to be their eyes and ears. It uses combinations of carrots and sticks to keep them cooperating with mob goals, without letting them get too familiar with what those goals are or who is executing them.

Point is, if the mob has any power in your city, that includes eyes and ears within, or effectively within, the police department.

Part of the mob's effectiveness is that it destroys trust in the normal functioning institutinos of society. You never know for sure who is and isn't. It effectively isolate frightened individuals from the facets of society that might help or protect them. It always makes it seem like it's 1 person against the entire mob - it paints that same picture to lots of separate people.