Marked paper ballots. Done. Braille versions can be made for the blind, different language versions (what, voting based on a person's preferred language, that's just crazy) and so on. Optical scanning is old, tried and very well tested technology, and you can always fall back to hand counts.

I do have a problem with a lot of the for-profit schools this measure is attacking, but for different reasons. Because it is way overpriced vocational training, not an education.

As expected, the attacking the "college is stupid, why would anybody get a degree in {liberal arts field}, because you can't get a job with it" line thought was well represented. Congratulations, you'd just brought into the mindset that the economic and power elite wants; that nothing is valuable without dollar signs attached to it.

Yes, think that higher education isn't a public good (hint, that why there are state schools, and they were subsidized for a long time with tax dollars), but instead treat it as job training that employees, not employers have to pay for. Reduce and eliminate anything that require critical thinking or actual unique thought, because that's a luxury for the rich. I mean, we can't have tax dollars and contributions going to a bunch of intellectuals that aren't smart enough to teach at a "real university". That's a waste.

And forget college preparation in high school, because who needs to be able to write a original essay or be critical of, well, anything. Just funnel everybody in a public school into a job. If you aren't wealthy, you don't deserve to have ideas, you just deserve to work mindlessly. No pursuing higher ideas for you. I mean, those classes were so annoying. Having to process new ideas, having to study things that don't interest you, having to do things you don't like or want to do? What's the point in that? Being exposed to diversity? Pfft.

This story doesn't end well. Usually, it's violent and a lot of people die. If you are lucky, it's more peaceful, but still really bad for business. But, the reduction in real tax rates for the truly wealthy can't be stopped. Increasing taxes to restore revenues to schools and education? Insisting that corporations and those that profit from them have to contribute a better society? That's insane big government talk.

Hell, just send them to a code boot camp. Those are great jobs. If want to learn stuff, just go on the internet, because, all that stuff on the internet that is useful just came out of nowhere, right? The fact that PhDs are on food stamps and can't find jobs is a canary screeching in a coal mine. Damn straight college administration needs to answer for this, but we all have to answer; we need to value real education in this country.

It's a sign that years and years of mismanagement maybe didn't completely kill the ability for them to come up with interesting stuff This is exactly the kind of thing they need to do. Shore up HP Labs and solve some neat problems and ship cool stuff. Sure, let's be skeptical, but good for them for trying.

Wow, that's too perfect.

Granted, this $4649 is for a system with three graphics cards, but only one CPU socket! That one CPU is a hex core, but still, if you're making a fantasy computer for the stupid rich that want "the best there is", you should have at least dual Xeons.

Sure, employers want critical thinkers, just as long as they come to the wanted conclusions. If you don't, err, not so much.

I'm dealing with an attempt to move software engineers off of dedicated workstations into a VDI environment. And the way they did it was the stupidest way possible. But will management listen? No. A few conversations with the software engineers at the start would have saved a ton of waste. But management doesn't want anything but validation and blames us for being unreasonable about we what we need to do our own jobs.

So, trying to find another contract next year somewhere else. Thank goodness I'm not full time. But, I'm odd, I don't want to waste time waiting for my computer to unfreeze, even if I can bill it.

This is just a ploy to shift blame on toxic work environments driven by greed and short-sightedness from companies and major stockholders on the public. Here's a hint, if you actually listen and act on suggestions, your workers will probably start thinking critically again.

Sorry, there are many legitimate worries about digital divide stuff, and there are even more about ISP business practices. But this red herring about your education being compromised because your video link is only 1080p, that's just stupid. Why not worry that rich people's cars accelerate faster than poor people's cars? Is that causing a "kinetic divide" that we now have to worry about? The difference between the "poor" 171/122 Mbit/s connection and the gigabit connections will basically turn out to be just as unimportant to society. Let's focus on solving the real social problems, which are still many.

I don't often use OSX, but I'm a little mortified that the system font is dictated by the whims of Apple, instead of being selectable by the user. When I install Windows, one of the first things I do is to change the system fonts. In KDE I used to, but now I'm happy with the defaults. But it never occurred to me that there might be a modern OS that doesn't give you this option!

Make it 2050 and I'll offer you $10 instead of $1. Nothing gets commercialized in 10 years, not even the soundest of science. It took more than 50 years to commercialize the laser after Einstein figured out stimulated emission. Cold fusion isn't even theoretically sketched out. Of course it won't be commercial in 10 years, but neither will anything else that is not in the prototype stage today.

Right, and since not one of those sheets is going to be maxed out across the board, you have to pick the one which best fits with what you think is best for your child.

I think it's too easy to justify grueling jobs with bad work conditions and inadequate compensation by saying "Oh but the people who take them do the work out of loooove!" We do the same thing with teachers: Their jobs suck, their hours suck, their pay sucks, they deal with absurd bullshit, but all that is ok because allegedly, "they loooove kids and receive intrinsic rewards from their work."

We don't think this way about accountants or dentists. We don't expect them to loooove replacing fillings or mastering actuarial tables. We pay them so that their jobs are worthwhile even without the love. And I wish we would apply this standard to all jobs. A coding job where you produce games should be compensated like a coding jobs where you produce financial software, or anything else.

I guess I'm saying that for personal flourishing in the real world, CHA, WIS and CON are the traits that matter most. And as parents, that's what we want - or should want - for our kids, right? INT has been shown to be negatively correlated with happiness. I would still hope that my kids get a high INT, STR and DEX, but I'd be happy to let the dice fall where they may. But if I could affect only a subset of their traits, as with this zygote selection method, I would focus on the traits that give them a happy temperament, CHA, WIS and CON.

Not really. Remember, this is a process where you create lots of zygotes, test them all, and implant the ones with the most desired trait combinations. It's limited by how many eggs can be extracted from the mother - maybe a few dozen? This is not a process where you're splicing genes, or doing any other kind of trait engineering. This is just zygote trait prioritizing. You'll be choosing from a very finite set of "natural" (randomly generated) offspring.

I think you underestimate how easy it will be to mechanize "intelligence" work. A hint: The cost of running code is falling at Moore's exponential, the cost of hardware is basically stable. Janitorial work requires hardware, intelligence work is just running code. Picking stocks, searching law precedents, designing bridges, and many other smart-person jobs, are already being done by computers. Yes, I wouldn't want my kids to end up in a profession from which humans will disappear, but if she ended up a chef or a real estate agent - just picking jobs that don't require a ton of raw brainpower - I would be a proud father. What matters is that she's happy, and that depends a lot on her genes, as it turns out.

Maybe it's because my wife and I are both academics, but when it comes to the intelligence of my kids, I'd be happy to let the dice fall where they may. But because we both have some serious melancholy in our families, the intervention that I would find most tempting is the one that will prevent these dispositions from manifesting themselves in our kids. I don't think that a high intelligence improves a life anywhere near as much as a sunny temperament, and I would never prioritize the genes that predispose for the former over the latter, if my kids couldn't have both.

I'm sure that Slashdot is full of munchkins who always try to max out the stats of their characters, but please, don't bring that attitude with you when you're designing a baby. If you want the best for your kids - and I hope you do - you should basically do the opposite of what you would do for D&D - prioritize charisma, wisdom and health (CON). Don't worry so much about STR, DEX and INT. All of these traits have genetic correlates.