Good post, valid points. I do want to comment on "would we go around praising the merits of pencil based learning?" because it's nice turn of phrase.

Yes.

I remember reading something about the history of pencils, and there were benefactors out there singing the praises of pencils, and producing funding to provide "a pencil for every child", or something about that.

I have to get to work now, else I'd look it up myself for the details in the Font of All Knowledge.

This of course, takes nothing away from your comment, as eventually, every child did have a pencil, and they had to move along to using them effectively.

sr

My SO likes to play online games. The app-driven ones tend to ask for a lot of access. If this Cyanogenmod works, I'll be forever in your debt. You may have my first-born.

thx, sr

PS: Don't tell my SO about the first-born thing.

Can you explain it to me like I'm five? GimmeGimmeGimme!

Interesting suggestion. It would solve some problems. Of course, it seems every time we solve a problem we create a problem.

Junglee has a point in his reply. Governments can be just as perverted as corporations, just as can be people.

Business owners won't be happy because they won't be able to pay less-than-minimum wage. To them, this will be the evil govt taking their rights (profits) away from them.

Unless the workers were somehow subsidized. Maybe they can work out some kind of business welfare system like the corporations and farmers get.

Lobbies are people.

I pay lots for a PPO. I have to wait weeks for non-emergency appointments. I live in America.

Good solution, don't blame you. OTOH, I'd love the opportunity to watch the Dodgers in LA, and am willing to pay the fee. Unfortunately I don't have the option.

Yeah, there's a lot of shit out there. I can't believe what some people want to watch. And, some would have the same opinion of some of the things I watch. I have a DVR, and it's always stuffed full of things that I like and generally don't have time to get to, but it's there when I want it. And there's the skip button for when the commercials become annoying.

If I could get the things that I like to watch off of the net, I would consider dropping the cable and upgrading my networking infrastructure to handle it.

Yeah, I was going to mention this too. Taxing the league then taxing the owners would be double-taxation. A popular notion the world over, but not exactly fair.

Eh, they charge what the market will bear. Don't like it? Vote w/ your pocket-book.

Here in LA, the Dodgers made a great deal w/ Time-Warner for TV rights. Time-Warner overpaid, and the end result is 2/3 of the audience is unable to watch it, for any price. I'm pissed, so I resolved to go to no games this year. I don't like it, but I'm putting my money where my mouth is.

That is all. I've used up my quota of aphorisms today.

stop conflating fact of evol w theory of nat sel.

How is it a tech site can't produce a decent news reader? Come on, this stuff was solved in the 90's or so. I write up a nice posting, I see that all the lines between paragraphs are missing. Let's see, should I manually go and add a "br" between each? Ok, easy enough, but my entire living has been about making computers to the simple boring stuff for me. So I innocently click "options", make the correct selection, and "save". Well, it saved alright. Everything except the posting I had just spent 15 minutes on. Then the web site oh-so-helpfully folded up all the articles so I could see the same lame five that I started with. So, 20 or 30 years after stuff like this was fixed and perfected, we have a site that considers itself a premium tech site making the same damn mistakes one after the other. Here come your fucking "br's", Lamedot...

...happy? Anyways, I've seen people post what they consider a better tech web blog. I ignored them back then because I still was "loyal" to the posters here, but I think it's time to move on. Where are most Slashdotters moving to?

thanks, sr