By getting a college degree, you are ensuring a literacy level of at least what would have been a seventh-grade education 30 years ago. With just a high school diploma, one's literacy level would only be at about a third grade level 30 years ago.

Computer programming is of little value without the ability to communicate.

I have to hire college graduates to change diapers at the school I run -- to ensure that when they do speak to the children, they do so with correct grammar.

But you see I am not sure that is helping. I am very fond of the idea of playing with stuff. Crayons, paste, paper, scissors, blocks, and Popsicle sticks.
Way too many people can not fix the simplest things around the house or build anything.
I think that a child that learns to use the physical world at an early age will be better able to use all the tools available.

I see to many kids and teens that think they know how to use technology but in reality they only know how to be technology users not creators.

Google News and Twitter are great sources for breaking news, and I use it for that, but it's inherently sensationalist. The topics that are the most talked about get put on the Google News page, not the best or most relevant. You're just as likely to see an article about Tiger Woods as you are about Iran's enrichment program, but any of the in-depth, after-the-fact commentary or articles about issues that for whatever reason didn't catch the public eye are left out.

Since when? Or do you make a distinction between "government" as an abstract entity ("they") and the actual person? ("Der Fuehrer", er, pardon, the "Commander-in-Chief").

For now, they are just recruiting "volunteers" to watch for "suspicious behaviour" and report "unreliable elements".

Just the most obvious problems (as mentioned in other posts)

• how long until "not volunteering" is deemed "suspicious behaviour"?
• how long until people wronly accuse others for financial gain or just for fun?
• how long until you'll have to prove your "reliability" by filling your snitching quota?

Another thing to keep in mind: The so-called "War on Terror" can be used to outlaw anything and anyone.

Soon after a high-profile Cyber-Attack all knowledge of critical infrastructure(tm) will become classified. Too bad for those lacking the official clearance for things they already know. The state will have to place such persons in "protective custody" camps to keep the terrorists from expoliting their knowledge. Unfortunately, even a short time spent in a such a camp will disqualify you from ever getting back to your former life: While they could'nt prove any previous contacts to "unreliable elements", now they know where you have met them. Finally, once the "unrecovereable elements" are confined to the camps it wont be long until some politician wants the money wasted on their upkeep be spent on his constituency instead. That is where the "showers" come in ..

Note that the 0th law isn't really a law, it's an application of the first law. The logic is that the collapse of human society will cause harm to large numbers of humans, therefore protecting the abstract 'humanity' protects individual humans. By this stage, robots were sufficiently advanced that first-law decisions were complex. Almost any action can be interpreted as harming a human and so the robot has to weigh the harm done against the harm prevented. If the difference in potentials is very small, then the brain is damaged. If the difference is large (in the positive direction), then it is fine.

In Robots and Empire, one robot performs an action that will kill millions, but potentially save all of the others. This causes a significant conflict. In the later books, Daneel is shown to have applied the zeroth law successfully, but presumably with far greater differences in harm-caused and harm-prevented potentials.

Another possible outcome was described in 'That though art mindful of him...' where the problem was in defining a human. Two robots were allowed to build their own model of what defines a human. They concluded that things like empathy and compassion were more important than physical attributes and that they were the most human creatures that they had encountered.

Sure, but that's the pop culture definition of "evolve".
In the context of biology its basically an abbrevation for "improves from generation to generation because of reproduction, variation and unintended selection".
If you create harder to swat mosquitos by only swatting the ones in your room that you actually CAN swat its evolution in the biological sense, since the mosquitos are adapting to the swatter (as opposed to you intending to breed better mosquitos).
If a car manufacturer takes the bestselling cars from last year and varies them a bit he is doing this to make them sell better. That's not evolution in the biological sense, at best you could call it "car breeding". ;)

I disagree. Correlate the dates of troughs against the dates of crests and see that each crest happens the day after a trough. Sure, correlation by itself does not imply causation, but it does raise a red flag that causations are worth investigating.

During his last two decades, Ludwig van Beethoven lost his hearing. He was completely deaf when he composed
his ninth symphony (famous for e.g. "Ode to Joy"). That doesn't mean that a hearing impairment enhances songwriter skills.

Imagine the works of those artists if they weren't bound to cover the area they're working on.
They might've raised the bar of perceived perfection to even higher levels.

I'm sure some anasthetics could cause complications for at least one in a million. Even if its not the anasthetic itself, maybe someone has some serious sleep complicatins? There is never a solution to any medical problem that will work for everyone, so having multiple methods is always a plus.

Others include

• Firebird
• Ingres

And there are many more, relational and non-relational, out there.

Surgeons don't wear scrubs outside of the O.R. As soon as they step out of surgery, the scrubs come off and they're back in their nice preppy clothes. The reason for their scrubs is because they're cheap and sterile which is required to keep their patients alive. Airline pilots wear officer's uniforms which signify rank and authority. I seriously doubt that the management intends to give the helpdesk guys ultimate power to dictate over everyone else in the building. So neither of these applies in this case. This is much more comparable to a janitor or fast food worker.

As someone who started on the "Help Desk" I remember what I used to wear to work, tattered jeans, t-shirts, etc. Now that I have progressed in my IT career which is to the point where Business casual and the suit are the norm. I also happen to work for a Fortune 500 company that has a healthy work hard to play hard mentality. Anyways, Our Help Desk is also visible but as I look at some of those people I tend to be judgemental by what they are wearing. I Shouldnt be I was once like them. But I guess at some point I succumbed to the corporate culture. /shrug I wouldnt be upset too much of the change. Remember you want to dress for the job you want not the one you have. :)

The latency problem is of course the most apparent and thus the most discussed but there are others.

One I wonder about is what kind of servers they are supposedly using. The problem is that modern games demand a modern GPU to look good. The kind of processing needed cannot be done on any sort of reasonable processor in realtime. Also, GPUs aren't really set up to work in parallel these days. What I mean is if you try to have a system with multiple GPUs and running multiple 3D games on them, you are going to find that doesn't really work. That sort of thing is coming, DX11 generation hardware is much better at multi-tasking and such, but it requires apps to be rewritten for it and still isn't there.

So what it comes down to is that to run a modern 3D game, well you have to have a desktop system more or less. You need to have a system running Windows with a powerful GPU at its disposal, and it needs to be tasked to running that one game.

Well that isn't a situation I'm seeing as working real well for a hosted business model. You have a whole bunch of individual desktop machines set up that then load up the software and whatever handles the encoding.

If they are claiming they are doing it with "virtualization" then I'm saying they are "lying." As it happens, doing virtualization related things is a big part of my job, so I'm fairly up on the tech. When it comes to 3D with VMs there are two things that are true of every technology that supports it:

1) It doesn't work real well. It is on the slow side, and there are bugs of various sorts. It is for sure usable, but nobody is going to confuse it for being 100% good to go, and newer games are the thing it has the most trouble with.

2) It requires a 3D card on the host. All of the virtualizaiton solutions do 3D by processing the guest 3D calls and translating them in to 3D calls to the host. 3D hardware is then needed to do the actual rendering.

I'm afraid I don't buy that these random guys have a more advanced technology than VMWare, Sun, Microsoft, and so on. If you could easily virtualize a system and emulate full modern 3D in software, well they'd be doing it. Hell, MS would be interested in doing it non-virtualized. Be a cool selling point of a new Windows if you didn't need a GPU anymore.

So the only way I see this working is lots and lots of systems with big graphics cards in them. This I do not see as a profitable proposition, even assuming all the rest of it works flawlessly.

I'm not defending Gnome in any way. Personally I've always found their defaults and UI design non-intuitive. However, one of the things I've always believed is that "ease of use" is more subjective than we imagine. People new to the Linux desktop may find it counter-intuitive compared to the Windows desktop they've used for years.

But imagine if we were blank slates with no pre-conceived notions of how a desktop should behave?

For example, when I sort things in a desk drawer, I don't put my pens near my printer because they both start with the same letter or they both put images on paper. I put labels on my DVDs and MiniDV tapes and I label the items themselves, not the box where I put them in. In short, I mix all types of media. The current desktop metaphor completely breaks this free-form approach that many of use have. I don't think it's a technical barrier; just that people are used to doing things a certain way.

So, though I don't agree with Gnome decisions I do give them credit for trying to do new things (as difficult and bizarre as those decisions can be).