... with the author's conflation of "shooting endangered animals on safari" with the pursuits of a James Cameron, Elon Musk, or Richard Garriott.

So, I guess I took the clickbait, huh.

nope. but if you go java who cares about oracle? as long as they don't fuck up the jvm too much everything is fine. that's sun's legacy. and in if they finally do, there will be a fork.

How about we wait for the final outcome of Oracle v. Google before being quite so confident about that?

Adopting an Oracle solution because you don't like Microsoft is like buddying up with Beelzebub because you don't like that annoying neighbor who keeps trying to get you to join Amway.

And yet the ransoms paid by those countries are few and far between

We have absolutely no way to substantiate this claim.

The DoJ hit Sony with a fine large enough to make Sony miss its earnings significantly for the year, which lead to the CEO leaving

I can't find any other references or details about this at all. Do you have any links to more info?

Wikipedia says only that "The US Department of Justice (DOJ) made no comment on whether it would take any criminal action against Sony." They did apparently have to pay the State of Texas $750K, which at Sony's scale is about the same magnitude as a parking ticket.

What in the world are you talking about? If Sony's CEO resigned, it certainly wasn't over the rootkit. In fact, the executive at BMG responsible for the rootkit was promoted by Sony to President of Corporate Development and New Businesses, and later given a seat on the board at Bertelsmann.

The rush is that life is short and there are more things to learn than any of us will ever have time for. That means you don't want to waste time on things you aren't interested in.

(Shrug) My point is that cursive writing is a hobby, indistinguishable from any number of other worthwhile hobbies. We don't have time to indoctrinate kids in any of those other hobbies, so... sorry, yours doesn't belong in public schools, either.

I agree to some extent. If the time spent learning and drilling long division could be spent instead on mental estimation and (especially) statistics, we'd be better off.

Yes, it would be nice to do all of the above, but that isn't reasonable. There are more new things to teach kids every year. Some old stuff needs to fall off the desk to make room.

cursive writing merits several courses and practice just for the psychomotor training and brain activity involved.

Well, why not just make them spend an hour a day playing Counterstrike instead? That's probably even better for repetitive, thoughtless psychomotor training.

their focus is on training workers and uniforming thought processes. that would be the opposite of education in my handwritten book.

But you just said that was a good thing. I'm confused. Either we should be making students engage in rote, repetitive exercises in classrooms, or we should not. Which is it?
  .
and of course i wonder how you are so sure that there will be many keyobards around in a few decades time ...

Nothing short of a coincident nuclear war, zombie apocalypse, asteroid strike, and nearby gamma-ray burst is going to lead the human race back to handwriting as a data entry method. Anyone who says otherwise has a heavy burden of proof to meet.

Where do you draw the line? Why not make kids extract roots by hand? Run a few iterations of Newton's Method while they're at it? At some point you're just misusing the limited classroom time you have available. Long division probably crosses that line, and cursive writing indisputably does.

Yeah? When was that?

When the scientists were explaining how to blow shit up real good.

We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion

They can start by taking religion out of that list. You can choose your religion. You don't choose any of those other things, at least not without life-changing surgery.

No kidding. Imagine what would happen if I asked their pastor if I could deliver a biology lecture on Sunday.

These things are seldom as black-and-white as they appear at first. From what I've seen in the US, courts often apportion the blame across multiple parties in a civil lawsuit. Let's say that on the way home from the bar, I drive over a curb and kill someone walking on the sidewalk. If the victim's family files a wrongful death suit, the court might decide that I'm 95% responsible, the pedestrian is 2% responsible for wearing dark clothing at 2 AM, and the city is 3% responsible for failing to follow regulations on curb height. The resulting damage award will be split accordingly.

So it's very believable that a court might find FTDI partially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of their deliberate attack against other peoples' hardware. Even a 1% share of the blame for a serious-enough malfunction could be enough to bankrupt the company. They may be morally right, they may be legally right from a criminal-law standpoint, but nevertheless, under US law, they may have cut their own throats if any innocent parties were harmed by their actions.

This was an incredibly stupid move on FTDI's part.

Because some people understand that the election of Reagan, like everything else in politics, was a reaction to something else. In Reagan's case, his success was a reaction to confiscatory taxation, disastrous economic policies, and out-of-control growth of Federal bureaucracies under Carter and earlier administrations.

In the context of the times, Reagan was not wrong when he said that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Where he went wrong was when he climbed into bed with religious fruitcakes, giving them more power over ordinary Americans' lives than even the Democrats had tried to assert.

Other people, including the most vocal on Slashdot (DURR HURR DON'T LIKE TEH GOVERNMENT? MOVE TO SOMALIA!!!11!!) don't understand the action-reaction nature of politics. They assume that things will somehow work out differently the next time their own visions of maximal statism are implemented. The neoliberal statists and Moral Majority Reaganites are just two halves of the same coin, really.