Often (at least in US public schools) teachers aren't compensated for time spent developing their curriculum and lesson plans. These are done off-hours and are just expected that the teachers do them. This is why frequently you see pisspoor teaching in public schools; the few teachers who can't be bothered to develop a lesson plan that addresses their students just use the crap from the books, and frequently fail to update them when the new version of the book comes out.

If teachers have an avenue to make money by developing decent lesson plans and better curricula(?) then we might actually see some improvement in the quality of education in US public schools.

On a few occasions I've found myself *needing* to code something while having an alarmingly high fever. Sometimes this is because something is actually due and sometimes it's because I just think I understand something.

The surprising thing about this was when I had a fever of 103.4 and was snowed in so I couldn't get to the hospital so I stayed awake all night. I programmed a 3d graphics engine... without properly understanding what I was doing... and it worked. It took me the next 2 weeks to figure out what I'd done, why it worked, and what it was doing before I could improve it. Took me almost that long to verify that I hadn't just cut and pasted from random websites while in my delirium. My browsing history was full of all sorts of random crap. I'm still not sure how it happened.

Suffice it to say that I now believe in the Ballmer Peak.

Reinforcement for that - the Sony Playstation 3 enables HDCP whenever it is outputting to an HDMI connection, whether you're playing "protected content" or not. Even though the act of playing a video game should not be content-locked, if you start up anything in HD on the PS3, it runs copy protected.

Why did they do that? Pick one of three reasons:

1. It's just plain easier to make the HDCP module always on.
2. It makes it less likely that somebody will find a backdoor way of disabling the HDCP module when playing protected content.
3. They can sell special PS3s to media outlets for inflated prices so they know who is making videos of their content and get extra cash to boot.

Maybe "4. All of the Above."

The downside to this is that it creates an artificial cost-of-entry barrier for independent video game media. It increases the cost of ownership - people with older HDTVs which do not support HDCP cannot play their PS3 in any of the digital HD modes, so it necessitates the purchase of more expensive hardware. What's the actual benefit for Sony? The HDCP was still bypassed by simply copying from the BD-ROM when running the official Linux installation for the PS3. As the parent said, it's a completely uninformed decision caused by simply not considering the negative effects.

They ditched that in the iTunes store... after figuring out people preferred not to have it.

It would be worth disclaiming that the only thing I've ever bought from iTunes was actually deleted by one of their software updates with no chance of refund or re-download so I will never use their services again... But the kids around here seem to like it (major university.)

If Apple has done anything for us (consumers) in the last 10 years, it's been demonstrating with iTunes that when consumers have an easy legal avenue for acquiring digital media vs an only slightly more complicated illegal avenue, consumers will tend to go for the legal way. Why? Because Americans (and apparently most Europeans) are willing to pay for convenience. If this was not true, food delivery services which charge 2-3 times as much as traditional sit-down restaurants and 6-10 times as much as home-made food would not have a business at all.

If they build it, we will come. There will still be the grumpy Guses who want everything free-as-in-unicorns and refuse to participate, but that percentage of the population is so vanishingly small as to not even constitute a demographic. People will buy more product from legal avenues if those legal avenues are convenient, structured to encourage compulsive spending and impulse buying, and have a broad enough selection to provide the illusion that you can get anything from them. They'll do that rather than download illegally, even if they don't have the money to buy something, with only rare exception.

For an added bonus, distribution channels which are free of DRM restrictions so they can use the media in whatever fashion they like get half the grumpy Guses as well, in addition to attracting more of the illiterati simply because non-DRM media in compatible formats work on pretty much everything.

It might be worth suggesting that the only valid measure for intelligence should be whether or not you are capable of determining and willing to determine if the input you are given is garbage by comparing it against other input.

Or whether you are capable of adjusting a belief when you discover inconsistencies between realities and your construction of it which forms the basis for that belief.

If you believe Von Braun invented rocketry, you would be expected to revise that belief when learning of hwacha if you were to be considered intelligent. If you instead denied that it ever happened and clung to your belief, you would by that metric be regarded as less intelligent than average.

See Holocaust deniers, biblical literalist creationists and other individuals who cling to ideas solely by denying the truth of all evidence counter to that belief. If, however, either party had by rational process discounted the relevance of that evidence, while some people might consider them a crank, they would nonetheless at least be exhibiting some measure of intelligence by that proposed metric.

We won't get any unless we start asking for some and putting up the money to make it a reality.

What good would volunteering now do, when they'll tell you you ought to be ready to roll in 2020? If you're, say, 40 now, in pretty good health, feel like you've accomplished a lot on earth and are ready to cast yourself away to the depths of space never again to see mother earth except via video camera so you decide to volunteer for a one-way mission to build the first Martian colony, then you're told, "OK great, sign here, see you in 10-15 years," that's not exactly productive. In 15 years you'll be 55, might have developed all sorts of health problems which didn't bother you when you were younger and what had seemed like a good amount of time in good health to produce a colony (say, 25 years of good health and another 15-20 of passable health barring cancer or heart problems due to damage) has shrunk to a lot less time.

We'll get volunteers - there's absolutely no doubt of that. We just need to build the mission. If you could launch next month, you could find at least 30 academics, scientists and good old fashioned laborers who would sign up just for the shot at making human history who would have their bags packed in half a day and be asking for their airline ticket to Cape Canaveral.