The figures in that article are inaccurate for three reasons:

1. It includes money spent in post-high-school education. Our colleges and universities are insanely overpriced for what they deliver, and it is now an industry ripe for disruption. The liberal arts college I attended now costs $50,000 per year, it isn't anywhere near an Ivy League school. I don't know why any kids go there now. I wouldn't co-sign a loan for my own kids to go there. On spending through high school, our spending per student is much lower.
2. Standards of living matter. If a teacher making $50,000 per year in Iceland has a nicer home and car (or access to good public transit) than a teacher making $60,000 per year in the US, then Iceland can spend 17% less than the United States per employed teacher and still hire a higher quality of educator.
3. I suspect - but cannot prove - that US education costs from the study include the cost of providing health insurance to educators and other school staff, while most countries with nationalized health care budget those expenses separately. Even if the comparison does include health care costs from both countries, the US spends three times as much on health care per capita as most countries with nationalized health care. So that could account for the complete cost difference all by itself.

So... no, we're not overspending on education and wasting money. I'm sure there's plenty of corruption and waste to eliminate, and I support programs with that in mind. But it's dishonest to say we're just throwing good money after bad. We're not. We are not spending as much as the nations that are beating us in education.

You have the syntax memorized, but the problem is that the input flags for 'find' aren't the same as the ones for 'xargs' which in turn don't overlap with the ones for 'grep' or 'tar'. So that's four different sets of input flags you had to master. Congratulations on your skill. If you run into a text manipulation that's really complex, you have to use sed, awk, or Perl.

PowerShell has its warts, but the command flags are more uniform and its own help search is simpler. Complex text manipulation isn't as complex to implement because a.) you're working with objects and b.) you don't have to learn sed, awk, or Perl to get the job done.

I hate Microsoft's practices, their use of patents, and the windows registry among many other things. But it only benefits the open source community if we examine their tools closely and learn from them. Not everything they do is an inferior knock off of Unix practices.

Good post. I'm an open source fan or fanatic, but that does not mean The Unix Way (tm) has lead us to paradise. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Microsoft alienated people who weren't paying attention. Server 2012 and newer can be run without a GUI at all. It doesn't matter what they do with Metro UI, it's not a competent sysadmin's problem.

But they improved on the original. Are you really calling Facebook, iPod, and iPhone market failures?

Thank you. It seems to me, then, that whatever this universal language should be, it shouldn't draw from English. And maybe an existing language would suffice.

Thanks.

Thanks for the information. Interesting.

From what I understand - and I could be wrong - most international websites are in English. That may be the standard that ShanghaiBill was implicitly using.

I emphatically disagree with your reasoning.

1. Often times, you can't appreciate the existing solution until after you tried to make something better. An awful lot of the people who love Perl love it even more after they spent some time working with Python, Ruby, PHP, or for that matter Java, C#, or Haskell. If a kid - or an old fogey like us - wants to try to make the next Perl? Go for it.

2. Some times, you genuinely do make something that's an evolutionary step forward. What if, 30 years ago, people thinking like you convinced Larry Wall that C + sed + awk was good enough? It's rare, but it does happen.

3. The whole process of trying to understand what came before and trying to do better is an excellent learning method. If I write my own text editor, even if it's awful I'll probably become a better developer.

Now, basing a business model on trumping what came before is like gambling only more stupid. I wouldn't try to get rich inventing the next Perl, the next Facebook, or the next Docker. But trying to make one for fun.... why not?

I read somewhere that the Hungarian language is extremely regular - i.e. once you learn the pronunciation rules, you know how to read any word in the language. But I can't find a source for that and the linguistic terminology about the language on Wikipedia makes smoke come out of my ears.

First: if you strip that regulatory power from Congress, how are you going to stop them from granting it back to themselves? The only way you're going to get Congress out of regulating is if the majority of voters want them out of it, and continue to want them out of it. It will never happen.

Second: in many European countries, the governments are big and have lots of power, and they aren't letting companies like Comcast, Verizon, Sprint, and so forth fuck consumers the same way it happens in the US. The problem of poor regulation is not fundamental to all governments, it's a specific problem we have that has been solved elsewhere. Our national education policy sucks - the national education policies in Finland, Japan, South Korea, and Poland don't suck. Our regulated broadband internet utilities suck - broadband utility subscribers in places like Denmark have better coverage for much less money.

Most of the people trying to tell you "big government is the problem" just don't want to pay taxes so median income levels can increase. Bad government is the problem, and that's not related to size.

And how would the libertarians stop Congress for amending the constitution to grant itself that power again?

It seems to me the only way to do that is to have a Congress that's really under a tight leash from the voters. And to get that, you need educated voters. And to get those, you need... a decidedly non-libertarian national education policy like the ones in Finland, Poland, Japan, or South Korea.

Yeah. I'm glad I read this flamewar, actually, because I think I'll factor that exact conditioning into my home purchases for the rest of my life.

Now if only I was unethical enough to try to foist my existing home on some poor sap...

Sorry, but I would have trusted the people on the phone too. It's an expensive honest mistake. I wouldn't have thought to look for physical proof. You really went to the house and asked the seller to let you test their internet connection before making an offer?

I consider that totally separate from a normal home inspection for construction, plumbing, wiring, and so forth. Maybe it shouldn't be in the 21st century. But it didn't cross my mind.