It's interesting that no one is questioning the basic premise of this article: that the US puts more resources into remedial students than gifted. It makes for just one more thing people can complain and get self-righteous about, but my experience in Virginia schools is just the opposite. Here in Virginia, my gifted friends got to attend special highly-funded magnet schools or got to attend the #1 public high school in the country and the gifted classrooms at my high school got the best supplies and brightest teachers. As someone who was originally tracked in remedial everything and had to fight his way up to advanced-level courses, I can tell you that the remedial classes received no instruction whatsoever and were basically just holding-pens for students until they turned 18 and the system could kick them out.

Maybe some states don't have a gifted program, but before we all go tilting at windmills, maybe we should realize this is a state-level problem, one that does not apply to Virginia, and may not apply to your state either.

You say you " can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative," meaning you took them to prevent infection, so you don't know how many times you could have actually gotten an infection. I did an informal survey of my friends to find out how many have taken antibiotics to fight an actual infection, and the response was 100%. If those infections were antibiotic-resistant, that means 100% of them would have died. I think you're misunderstanding the risk and your comment actually reinforces the danger of infection.

You ask, "How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics?" The answer is very few, but over the course of a lifetime, we experience many scrapes and cuts, and only need to get infected once with an antibiotic-resistant bacteria to die. That's why it's a problem, and it's not being overstated.

Unfortunately, this mirrors my own experience when I bought all the kids on my street laptops on the condition that they spend weeks with me learning how to handle and respect them. One year later, every single laptop was inoperable. Of course, every one of these kids owned an iPod touch... with a broken screen, so there were warning signs.

I think the problem is the portability of these devices. The reason I didn't break my Commodore 64 when I was a kid is because it sat on a desk. If it was portable, I probably would have shattered or lost it at some point too. I don't think we can make these devices rugged enough to survive your average teenager.

This.

Why should I pay $9.99 for an ebook that can be taken away from me anytime Amazon wants, can't be lent out or given away, and can't be resold? When I buy a real book, it's an investment. I can resell it, donate it to my local library, or buy other real books from used book sellers for $0.99. My wife's grandmother just passed away, and her family let me take a wealth of old books from her collection. All the money she spent on those books over her lifetime has transferred to her children and grandchildren. When I die, the hundreds--maybe thousands--of dollars spent on my ebook collection dies with me.

I love my kindle. I love reading ebooks. I love highlighting, clipping, and making notes in them, but there's a very tough tradeoff here. Real books are a material investment, ebooks are ephemeral.

I was thinking the same thing. I keenly remember Microsoft Azure going down for eight hours, right after we migrated to their cloud service. With our old datacenter, we were alerted immediately and their tech support had a bang list to alert all our customers for us that the system was down. With Microsoft, we got NOTHING. Our customers alerted us to the fact that they couldn't access their applications, and we had to go to twitter to @WindowsAzure to ask when the servers would be back up. Then, a year later, the East Coast datacenter went down and we learned that Cloud service does not include disaster recovery and we were responsible for setting up our own recovery solution on Window's Azure's servers.

This. This. This.

My wife and I had our second child two weeks ago. Despite the fact that we had spent nine months working closely with a clinic that had been monitoring the pregnancy, dispensing the proper medications, and who had midwives and doctors working at the hospital we would be delivering at, when we arrived at the hospital we found that they had NOTHING in their systems regarding my wife and her medical history. We then spent an hour telling the triage nurse everything we knew about the pregnancy from memory, until a doctor from our clinic finally showed up at the hospital with a big folder of printouts that no one had time to look at because my wife delivered a half hour later.

When we asked afterwards why the hospital had no record of us despite the fact that they knew we would be delivering there, they explained their system had no way to transfer electronic records and that they were still relying on printouts that would have to be entered by hand. Amusingly enough, they were launching a new networked electronic system while we were there that would enable the transfer of records.

Of course, the hospital staff freely admitted the new system was a complete headache to learn and that they had resisted it as long as possible, but thanks to "Obamacare" they were now required by law to implement such a system. Let that sink in for a moment. Hospitals are perfectly happy to have absolutely no information on the patients that arrive in their emergency rooms in America because upgrading their information systems is a hassle.

People complain about government regulations, but in this case, I'm perfectly happy to have government give the Medical industry a swift regulatory kick in the ass on this. There is no excuse for endangering human lives like this.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do still feel there is something highly 'accidental' to the genius of Card's Ender's series, but I have read some criticisms that damn the books for being highly manipulative in the way they persuade the audience to forgive Ender's actions:

"Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.” I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."