I'm genuinely curious where you went to school.

Quite frankly, no, a person of average intelligence could not have aced any undergraduate course I took. Not even the easy ones. In part because of the combination of the fact that schools filter for higher intelligence, and then they target a certain average grade out of every course. It doesn't really matter how hard the fundamental concepts are, the system is designed to move the proverbial cheese such that a 4.0 is unachievable to the average student.

Even with rampant grade inflation, if an average person can cap all courses, then the school is not grading on any metric even close to what I've ever experienced.

Sure you do. In real life, I interact with four sets of people:

1. My friends, who I get to choose, subject only to the limitation that they also have to choose me as a friend.
2. My coworkers, which I don't totally get to choose, but I can choose a profession that is inaccessible to people who aren't above average.
3. People I exchange goods and services with, like retail cashiers, repairmen, waitstaff, etc.. They can run the full gamut, but I honestly don't have to spend a lot of time with them. Unlike school, where you had to spend ~30ish hours a week with the same people whether they are jackasses or angels.

And with things like amazon.com and slef-checkout at grocery stores, even this level of interaction is being reduced to mostly skilled tradesmen or airport security.
4. My family, who I didn't choose (except for a hypothetical future spouse, or technically if I adopted a kid I guess).

Basically every other interaction is either an exception (eg. random police stop, construction workers redirecting me because they're busy fucking up the sidewalk I need to walk on for whatever reason) or by my own choice.

Besides which, the social skills to talk to smart people aren't completely independent of the social skills to talk to not-so-smart people, honestly. There are some differences, but smart people just aren't that special.

It's not usually that difficult to pretend you're a dumbass if smartness is truly a liability. In the absence of a reliable intelligence test, usable by idiots, it can only be a liability if it prevents you from being entertained by something that entertains dumber people

He didn't say equal, he said not better.

Consider: is i > 1? Is i 1.

The world is not composed strictly of totally ordered sets. There's absolutely no reason that, just because some people are stronger than others, smarter than others, nicer than others, etc., that anybody is better than anyone else.

No, not compared to Russian Roulette, compared to the things typical people do in a typical day. Also, with cars, death isn't the only danger. Permanent injury, significant temporary injury, and massive property damage are also dangers.

Typical people live their entire lives without playing Russian Roulette even once.

I don't really know why this is hard. Most people don't do a lot of dangerous things in a day.

In fact, even in terms of death: 22% of people who die between the ages of 1 and 44 in the United States die from a motor vehicle accident. Most of the other itemized are not daily (eg. fire, except for firefighters; firearm, etc.).

http://www.cdc.gov/injury/over...

If there was a more deadly daily activity, it should show up on that list. I mostly see things that are more deadly, but not daily. I have to admit I'm not quite sure what to make of "falls" from the under-45 crowd.

I'd flip it around. An automated car should be required to pass both a road test and a bevvy of simulated scenarios.

Real property has a specific definition that makes it irrelevant to the discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I'm going to assume that's not what you meant. But other things commonly viewed as property do have an expiration date. Consider food, or batteries.

For that matter, consider money. It's intangible property represented at times by dollar bills and coins, but usually by a number in a bank database.

Copyright turns what is "naturally" a communal asset, in that it is trivially duplicated, and turns it into a capital asset. Thus, it is *absolutely* more capitalist than it is communist.

I think you're confusing capitalist vs. communist, with liberty vs. authority.

(I don't find some degree of copyright bad in a capitalist context, nor do I find communism necessarily bad, but it's hard to even imagine how copyright could make sense in a communist context).

None of these are necessarily the case. For instance, Google has obtained a source license to Adobe's Flash player. They can read the source, they can edit it, they can hire people to edit it, and they can redistribute in binary form -- but they cannot redistribute the source code because it is not open source.

This is before we dive into the fine distinctions made between open source and free software.

But even if I agreed, all that implies is that you need a source license, not that you need an open source or a free software license.

What's he doubling down though? That term implies some stakes are being allocated.

It goes on to say he doesn't think the desktop is a kernel problem. Well, that kind of means he's not spending specific resources on desktop, which means that wanting the desktop doesn't contradict "doubling down" on the device market.

The actual part of the article that talks about investing is when he talked about shrinking Linux and about addressing the embedded market.

They are targetting gamers, not servers. Do gamers really use 30GB/day? Other than maybe the first day, when installing Steam and a bunch of content on a brand-new system.

http://images.anandtech.com/do...

I didn't find very good stats on average daily pagefile / hiberfile use for gamers.

The actual law specifies not just digital assets, but also digital accounts. Your Battle.Net account is absolutely an account.

(Do people *really* want to take over Battle.Net accounts when their spouses die?)

Fair in the sense that it was unclear which side would win the war.

Compare the Afghanistan war or the Iraq war, where it was entirely predictable that the coalition and the US (respectively) would substantially "win" in a matter of weeks (though the problems with a long drawn-out occupation are well-documented).

No, it's a revenue earner once sold. It's extremely unlikely that a factory at 0.01% production capacity can ever produce a profit -- and if it can, it means that demand so outstips supply that it is probably critical to society that we get that factory up to near 100%.

You can never realistically operate a business without this understanding, not under any economic system.

So wait, you want people to be employed variably? Nobody is going to sign up to be an employee at a random 0.01% of the time. Yes, there are fields of variable employment, but they are limited.

It absolutely is. What do you think "wasted" means?

Even aside from inefficient use of resources, it costs money to hold the land for the factory (and land costs aren't artificial costs -- you get to use the land because *nobody else does*), and basically everything needs maintenance eventually or it will fall apart. Security to prevent people from stealing all your shit (although in this case, the economy would probably be better off if somebody stole it from a 0.01% production factory and used it in a 10% production factory, making 1000x as many widgets).

I don't know why loss is in quotes here. Again, it's not just the owner's money that's wasted. All the resources invested into producing widgets are being used inefficiently.

There's lots of things we can say about the "dismal science" that I'd agree with, but this is not just economist talk, and things are not wrong simply because economists say this. It's accountant talk, business administration talk, and reality talk.