Of course it is in decline. University/College/school is out for the summer as students try to earn money to cover the next semester. I just love for profit everything, including education. Wanna buy a masters degree, we have a ghost writer for you, real cheap". Our university has no buildings, ergo, degrees are cheap to come by, and while you are working to pay for that diploma, we'll keep you to busy to write to /.

Where are the well educated? In countries where education is low cost. Almost every country has geniuses that are able to obtain PHD and other degrees. Oh yes, the degrees are in earned in Spanish, French, Portugese, Hebrew, Aisian (Chinese/Japonese/Korean) and yes, English too.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

Its time to return most of California to Mexico, and the lands back to the native indians.

Jerusalem and Jordan and the current land of Israel were always inhabited by Jews. For over 100 years Jews were buying up land in that area. There is no way that Israel will tolerate terrorism against it.
Hamas has refused to recognize peaceful co-existance. Their charter says to have muslim world domination and death to infidels and Jews. Had Hamas concentrated in building infrastructure, schools, universities, roads, etc, the hundred of millions of dollars poured into cement walls for tunnels was a theft from their citizens.

Israel wants peace. Trade with neighbours would have helped Lebanon,Jordan, Gaza, Palestine, and more to improve the life of all residents. Shame on power blind leaders--only 1 religion allowed, and Christianity is amoungst many excluded.

From the corner drug store. Duh.

Any Nexus branded device running Cyanogenmod. Or any non-Nexus device that CM supports (there are literally dozens)

In which universe do you live where ads on a webpage total up to half of the bandwidth to deliver said webpage?

They don't make it easy but they don't make it all that difficult either. Buy a Nexus, Developer Edition, or one of the multitude of carrier branded phones that are rootable. Install one of the multitude of ad blocking apps that are available, AdFree being my personal favorite. Problem solved.

Whatever increases government net revenue would be the guide for the best solution. Please note, some of that money would come as party donations. Gas, Electric, Nuclear, wind, coal, water, they are all financing one or other political party.

Why think that the governments (fed and state) are going th be in favour of hybrid car subsidies?

I have always subscribed to yahoo.com @ 20/yr. This last renewal, they rejected my visa payment because they were not equipped to have Visa transfer my payment directly to my provider for approval. And there is no way for anyone to contact yahoo.com. No way, I discovered, and no ombudsman, I could not get my payment processed. SHAME

So now I am getting the same repetitive annoying add from a dating service. I will try the following... Edit my profile and change my age to 12 or 13. Just to stop that repetitious dating stuff. I am of the belief that we need a free from adverts NET NEUTRAL internet. If I pay my ISP for a connection, I expect him to not count the adverts in my download allotment. Fortunately, using Thunderbird, I got rid of most of the stupid adverts.

Set your age to 12 for youtube, twitter, gmail, hotmail, and whatever, and see what happens.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

Do you pay taxes on services. Get the car repaired and pay for labour and taxes? In most parts of the world, labor is value added and is therefore taxed. Are your phone services taxed?

When a bank's or other stupid organization calls on using a password with a Capital letter, an integer and a minimum of 8 characters, and two adjacent characters not the same, it is recipe for easy hacking. Mathematically, easy.

I protect my passwords by including the wonderful €, and symbols which are on my standard keyboard.

yours
  sekalf nroc

(read backwords)

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.