The US and Japan aren't still bombing each other. But Microsoft is still pulling the same stunts. In fact, they never stopped. They just kept doing it until it seemed normal and the government forgot why it was angry.

It's the Microsofting of Google.

...to test the Windows performance of Java programs I write on Linux.

The only reason anyone "needs" more than $60K a year is because of their proximity to even larger concentrations of wealth. To the extent that wages "trickle down", so do prices.

Because the upper middle class is both beneficiary of and political buffer for the uber-elite. If the tax structure made them the new upper class, their wealth and power would actually increase despite their nominal decrease in pay. Their resistance to this is both self-destructive and harmful to the rest of us. If they can't be made to see that, then they should be thrown under the bus.

Some jobs are harder than others, and deserve to be rewarded more than others. But absolutely nobody "earns" more than a small multiple of minimum wage, and this should be enforced with a progressive tax structure based on an algorithm in which the only variable is the minimum wage. At today's minimum wage, astronauts, brain surgeons, and the President of the United States should be making about $60K a year, and it should only go down from there.

...simply by providing the pieces of the J2SE API that are missing from the Android API. And the door is wide open for them to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Google's Android while lowering the bar for developers and raising the quality of apps. Google has a bizarre obsession with making Android run in an ever-smaller footprint when phone and tablet hardware is obviously trending in the opposite direction. The decisions Google made to allow the OS to aggressively limit its memory use require Android developers to carefully adhere to a complex API that forces you to manage a lot of tedious details yourself. And the platform punishes faulty MVC separation more than any other I've encountered. It's a platform for expert developers, which seems contrary to the concept of Android as popular, open, and accessible.

Some of my co-workers brag about working 12-hour days, as if to say they're more valuable than the rest of us. I think it's important to be able to do that in an emergency, but it's no way to operate for any length of time. I don't care who you are or what you do — nobody puts out quality work for twelve hours a day, at least not for very long. And this is especially true when it comes to code. The very best coders can write truly great code for about six hours a day, tops, before they're mentally exhausted.

The Trek universe shows what a post-scarcity world could be like. It also shows what it would take to achieve it: a practically unlimited source of energy and a way to convert it into human sustenance. Fortunately for the chances of seeing it happen in my lifetime, we don't need anything as powerful as antimatter to meet our needs here on Earth.

That's not what the article says at all.

If the boss demands that the builder builds the Great Wall of China in a week, he has nobody but himself to blame when it falls over.

I think the opposite: school should be about differentiating the elite, but it seldom ends up that way.

"there is a residual possibility of it being completely wrong"

Indeed. And what many people fail to understand is that this is true of all empirical knowledge.

"The purpose of school isn't to differentiate between who are the elite and who are the median . . ."

Yes, it is.

The required reserve is currently 10%. Make it 100%.