For example, just the other day I saw an ad that said something like "AAPL! Could you turn one thousand dollars into one hundred thousand dollars almost overnight?"

That's known as a "Pump-And-Dump Scheme" Arguably such an advertisement should be illegal, but this is America!

To teach critical thinking, would be for example to teach schoolchildren not to trust advertising.

The right wing quite forcefully opposes such forms of instruction.

Actually that is precisely what the US Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is for.

Perhaps money changed hands.

The key words here are "PER UNIT".

I expect you know very well that just about all software costs less than a penny per unit to deliver into the hands of customers.

As I recall, in 2002 the Oxford Semiconductor OXFW911 Firewire/IDE storage bridge chip cost eight bucks apiece, when purchased in quantity. It was a little small than a dime.

For eight bucks, you got a 32-bit ARM7TDMI microprocessor, 64 kB of Flash for your firmware, 1800 bytes (yes, really: BYTES) of RAM, an IDE core for talking to your disk drive, a Firewire link-layer core (for talking the logical 1394A protocol), and a serial UART that was thrown in just for grins.

Now that was in 2002. What would that same chip cost now, if it were designed and manufactured today? Probably about ten cents.

However I expect the logic diagram, the physical design of the chip - that is, the mask pattern that is printed onto the silicon wafer - the verification of the design before manufacturing, a few rounds of bad silicon and design revision, cost tens of millions of dollars.

So in reality, it is quite possible that DARPA, or one of its contractors, could blow a billion dollars on the design of a chip, that when actually cast into silicon was a very small chip. The price of manufacturing just one chip is, for the most part, it's "real estate". That is, the physical area, like one square centimetre.

The wholesale price of the chip is then determined for the most part by how many you make. There are HUGE economies of scale in silicon manufacturing.

You are correct to the extent that you are discussing the proposed Pay It Forward plan, in which tuition is free, but one pays a fixed fraction of one's income for twenty-five years after graduation. One does not have to pay if one does not have income, and one's debt is forgiven after twenty-five years.

But to the best of my knowledge the Pay It Forward plan has yet to actually be implemented anywhere.

Student loans are funded by banks, and guaranteed by either the states or the federal government. The government pays the interest while you are in school, but if you are not enrolled - even if you haven't graduated - you have to start paying, even if you don't have a job.

A while back I calculated that student loans are actually just welfare for the banks. For the government to pay the interest while you are in school, as well as to guarantee the loan, so that the government pays if you default, costs the taxpayer more money than if the government just gave you the money outright, say with the Pell Grant that I received starting in 1982.

However if any legislator were to propose that we eliminate student loans, but then used the money saved to give outright grants, the banks would see to it that that legislator loses the next election.

When I was six years old, I figured I was old enough to ask for an allowance.

"Mom? Can I have an allowance?"

"No Mike."

"But Mom! I want to buy my own candy bars."

"No Mike."

I begged and pleaded for like an hour. Finally Mom agreed to twenty-five cents a week. That meant that every two weeks, I could buy my own candy bar!

The following week I asked for my allowance. "What allowance?" Mom replied. I broke down in tears. "But Mom, you said I could have twenty-five cents a week." "No I didn't."

She did finally give me just that week's twenty-five cents. After that I gave up on even asking.

I have an older sister. When mom would treat the two of us to a movie, she would give my sister the money for both of our tickets. Mom pointed out that because Jean was older than I, she was more responsible with money.

I was down with that. Jean was three years older than I; the maturity difference between six and nine years old was obvious to me even then.

But when I got to be nine, Mom would still give Jean the money when treating us both to a movie. Even when I was in high school.

The end result of my own mother not trusting me with money, and not wanting to teach me to handle my own money, is that I did not finally figure out how to handle money ON MY OWN until I was a half-million dollars in debt! I am not fucking kidding.

Even the IRS, while the hassled me quite a bit, wrote me off as uncollectable. The California Franchise Tax Board, Maine Revenue Services and Canada Revenue Agency didn't exactly write me off. They just stopped calling.

I expect Citibank would like to know where I am. If they ever find me, I will declare bankrupcy.

But now, I'm a wizard with GNUCash, OpenOffice Calc, Excel and Quattro Pro. I don't have no accountant. I don't need no stinkin' accountant. I know how to read financial books.

However it is quite unlikely that I will ever purchase a home again. If I ever do it will either be because I scored options with a successful startup, or a start a successful business myself.

If you have a child yourself, you could save them - and yourself - a lot of trial and tribulation if you buy them a piggy bank at the very first opportunity. That would be when the could be trusted to handle a penny - yes a one cent piece, or your own national currency equivalent - without sticking it in their mouth and asphyxiating.

Get one of the ceramic piggy banks that does not have a cork stopper, so you have to break it open with a hammer.

When your chillun sees what has become of his financial management upon cracking open his or her piggy bank, raise his allowance to a nickel.

Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school. He was promoted to manager at McDonalds when he was eighteen, and had only just the week before graduated high school.

It occurred quite a long time ago, but at the time no solution was proposed.

Regular steel bolts have hexagonal heads that are flat on top. Bolts made of high-strength steel are marked with three - if I recall correctly - radial lines.

You can see that it would be easy and cheap to mark a regular steel bolt with those three lines, then sell it for the high-strength premium.

This caused at least on death: a worker who was torquing a bolt while building the first Saturn car factory snapped the head off a bolt and fell to his death.

An Army general commented that when he took his battalions tanks out for training in the desert, their tracks were littered with bits of broken off bolts, as well as the occasional tank tread.

What they actually did about this was to test samples of bolt shipments, but such testing was very expensive and so could not provide good coverage.

However it has been years since I last heard about it. Has the counterfeit bolt problem been solved? If so how?

That's why, if you watch TV, you should use broadcast, or watch streaming media over the internet with The Onion Router.

If you have cable, or your use Dish network, your provider can tell what shows you watch and when. In principle they could tell when you change channels in the middle of the show, either because you dislike or disagree with what you are watching, or are excited about something else.

Obama already experimented with individually-targeted TV ads during his 2008 campaign. During this year's congressional elections everyone will be doing it.

I will be writing up a submission about it but if you want to do it yourself, be my guest. I read about it in The Columbian the other day, the Vancouver Washington paper.

... to prevent malaria. That's more or less an amount of ladies' nylons, just enough to cover your bed, but many in the developing world do not have that much cash. Really they don't. So they die in a horrible, cheaply and easily preventable way.

- out with soap!

• IBM's Watson computer has parts of its memory cleared after developing an acute case of potty mouth at the RISKS Forum

It seems that Watson learned some bad words when IBM turned it on to the Urban Dictionary.

I only have a vague understanding of databases.

Actually I was heavily into scientific computing when I was in school. I'd like to get back into that.

I don't know whether it's changed any, but in 1993, the FORTRAN code used in high energy physics was an awful rat's nest. There was a movement afoot to rewrite it all in C++/

Plenty of them are coldly rational, yet completely unaware that they are floridly delusional.

Almost forgotten these days is that CERN wasn't established to discover anything. Much like the Olympics, it was established to give World War II's former enemies something peaceful to do with each other, in hopes of preventing World War III.

I expect that if you read the actual journal paper, it will go to great length to measure and state just what the correllations are, but is unlikely to do more than suggest avenues of further research into the cause.

I have no doubt whatsoever that if a paper were to claim a cause based purely on a correlation, then the peer reviewers would kick it back. It just wouldn't get published until it stopped making that claim.

It seems reasonable that genetic damage caused by aging could be the cause. For example it is well-established that our Telomeres become damaged with age. But that's the best one can hope for - a reasonable speculation.

Instead the actual cause could be something that is correlated with age. For example high blood pressure is common in older people, so they are advised to eat less salt. Maybe eating less salt makes your children Schizophrenic or Autistic. Young people tend to eat a lot of salty food you see. Now this is a contrived example, but it could work that way, where some other factor that is correlated with age is the actual cause.

On the other hand, I repeatedly point out online, that smoking a lot of marijuana before your brain finishes forming at the age of twenty-five, increases your chance of become Schizophrenic as an adult. Note that the actual cause of this has not been established, but the correlation has been established for many years.

Quite commonly, I am met with the response that those who are predisposed to later become Schizophrenic, like to smoke dope when they are young.

The people who respond to me this way just pull this statement out of their asses. We do not know yet, whether those who are in any way predisposed to become Schizophrenic, also tend to smoke more pot. We only know that they tend to become Schizophrenic after they have done a lot of the evil weed.

If you murder someone, your male children are unlikely to die for your crime in a Vendetta.

Yes that's the original meaning of Vendetta. Renaissance Italian courts decreed them. Fuck up bad enough, and any male from the offended party's family, had the right to murder any male from three successive generations of the offending party's family - but only when that right was provided by a court of law!

If you have the wherewithal to post to Slashdot, then the life expectancy of your children is likely to be around seventy years. While there are parts of the world that have not made much progress in life expectancy, people in those parts of the world tend not to have computers or Internet.

I reiterate the points that some others have made: your children could be the ones to bring peace and prosperity.

I myself am deeply in debt, profoundly mentally ill, totally busted broke even if I weren't in debt, but I know a great deal, mostly learned through hard-won experience. So I work to educate others, for the most part mostly through my writing, all of which is available online for free, none of which earns me a penny.

But I should say, other than being well-taught by my father, it wasn't any kind of connection that got me into Caltech.

An ex-girlfriend of mine at Tech was from a deeply impoverished family. When her father broke the bad news that he could not pay her fees anymore, so she would have to leave Caltech, she burst into tears. Someone advised her to consult the financial aid office, who fixed her right up.

She went on to earn a PhD in Mathematics, and is now a cryptologist for the NSA. Sorry but I feel it would be a bad idea to tell you her name.