Me too. Just thought it was spam...

Sorry, but human religious beliefs/assertions make contradictory claims. They cannot all be equally true and valid at the same time. A and (not A) cannot be true at the same time. It is possible that all could be wrong simultaneously, but all simply cannot be equally true and valid at the same time.

In a multi-cultural society - especially one with unprecedented access to information - the solution which provides individual liberty and responsibility for choice is to have free and open discourse among willing participants. Truth does not fear scrutiny. This requires listening and not talking past one another. No one is served by strawman arguments. A Christian professor, Gordon Fee, put it like this, "I cannot say, 'I agree,' until I can say, 'I understand.' " For Fee, the test was that one party could express the other party's argument in their own words with the result that the second party agreed this accurately represented their belief. Fee's position (and I agree) is that then and only then, could one have meaningful dialog. By the way, I think Fee's standards work in any venue prone to disagreement.

That said, one should be able to opt out of those conversations by choice.

Let me answer your first objection. if done poorly, you are correct. We home schooled our children from grades 3-8. They went to public high school from grades 9-12. We augmented home lessons with group lessons, church youth group, and scouting. When our children entered high school, they were already well-socialized and made new friends easily. Their teachers were pleased that they were already self-directed learners. This enabled our daughter to take a second year of calculus in high school as independent study under the direction of their most senior math teacher. The decision of whether to choose home schooling, private schooling, or public schools is a decision that needs to be carefully considered by parents. I would note that the optimum choice may be different at different stages for any specific child.

I will address your second point by noting that a parent's primary responsibility is to see to the needs of their own children. When feasible, this is done in community because we are interdependent. That said, there are times when our neighbors make choices - such as not enforcing sufficient discipline in schools or forcing values that a parent finds repugnant, that the parent must vote with their feet. I agree that we are a multicultural society and there are benefits to learning about other value systems We always taught our children to treat others with different views with courtesy and respect, trying to truly understand the position before deciding whether to agree or disagree. That did not mean that we needed to embrace every belief and accept that all beliefs were equally true or valid.

I could not agree more with the importance of the "other factors" you listed. I think they are more important than technology. Technology is simply a tool - and like any tool it can be used well or abused. Consider the work of Salman Kahn of Kahn Academy. He started tutoring his cousins in math. Because he was doing this long distance, he started making you-tube videos. He reports that his cousins preferred the videos to "live sessions" because they could pause them and fit them into their own schedule. His work has grown into Kahn Academy that many schools are using effectively. At a higher level, I would point to the on-line machine Leaning class by Prof. Andrew Ng of Stanford. This uses technology very effectively but requires a self-directed and self-disciplined student. These same tools are abused by those who make poor choices.

At the elementary and secondary level, I view education like a three leg stool - where the parents, teachers, and administration are the three legs supporting the student (the seat.) If any part fails to perform, the whole system suffers. Parents must value education and require respectful, disciplined behavior from their children at all times; teachers must use all the tools at their disposal to create instruction plans that effectively communicate the material to the student. Technology is only one of many tools. The administration must make sure that teachers have the needed tools and help enforce discipline. When rowdy, disrespectful, and non-performing students are kept in the classroom, it ruins the environment for everyone. if the state must educate these problem students, they need to be segregated to a boot-camp like school that deals with their special needs. At some point, you cut your losses. It is a question of return on investment. The ultimate objective is to turn the student into a self-directed, life-long learner who takes responsibility for their own education. We now have unprecedented access to information - more than at any other time in history. Ignorance is the result of a string of bad choices and the individual bears significant responsibility.

We have a local clothier with the motto, "an informed consumer is our best customer." I think this applies to publishing.

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the book publishing industry that rivals the previous one in music publishing. There are some hopeful signs. I think the market will produce more. Consider the changes in the Amazon Kindle service. It has grown rapidly such that now their two largest sellers are Kindle editions. Note that we can now view our content on multiple devices, view sample chapters before purchasing, and rent books. We do this after reading reviews. We see similar encouraging moves from O'Reilly such as providing DRM-free electronic copies of purchased content. Dealing with lending of resources by libraries is the next challenge. No publisher will ever release content if the public can get the content free from a small number of libraries. The parent is correct - that is not a sustainable business model. Safari Books Online is one possible model. It is still a bit pricey for my budget.

As customers, we need to vote with our purchases. Reward vendors who provide good content at fair prices with more purchases. Use the review system to say that we think content is over-priced. At the same time, we need to have realistic expectations. We are paying for infrastructure. Storage for electronic books is not free to the publisher but is likely much less expensive than warehousing paper products. Bandwidth to distribute them and all the infrastructure for secure payment is not free, but is likely less expensive than a distribution channel for paper. Editors, graphics designers, and those who convert the author's electronic input into the proper format for the final document creation software provide valuable services. So do those who market the electronic titles to the distributors. Nobody works for free. That said, we consumers want to share in the cost savings that come from the transition from paper to digital. I think the changes in the music industry suggest that we will have vendors that can thrive when they provide value to their customers. The key will be to find a subscription service that is affordable to the consumer and makes it worthwhile for the publishers to produce and distribute the content.

Sometimes it is because, for whatever reason, the "IT High Priests" won't listen to the senior technical staff and at least consider what we have to say. Let me cite two examples:

1. A few years ago when we moved our SEM lab from film to digital imaging, we bought some nice HP laserjets for making lab prints. The LJ was equipped with a JetDirect box. My colleague called our IT High Priest to set it up. Since I was the lab's scientist with the most experience with digital imaging, the group leader asked me to help explain our needs to the ITHP. I asked the ITHP to set it up on the same subnet with the instruments and let the users send prints directly to the JetDirect interface. No, this wouldn't do. The ITHP set up a print queue on a server miles away across the corporate backbone. If an ITHP can't see what's wrong with this, they are incompetent. As you might guess, many times during high network demand it took 5-15 minutes to print a couple of pages with images. I tried to get the ITHP to change it and they argued with me. I finally got frustrated and set it up myself and guess what, the pages printed in less than 30 sec. But no, I am the "troublesome user" to the ITHP.
2. I am a senior scientist specializing in image processing and analysis with large images. I write a lot of code and handle big images. Time comes to get new workstations. Do they ask what my needs are? No, they bring me the same workstation they give a secretary who just writes short Word documents and handles email. I am not trying to denigrate the secretary's work - it makes me more productive. My point is that my workstation needs are different and the ITHP saw us both as little boxes to check off a list and not to make sure that I got the tools I needed to do what the company hired me to do.

My main point is that the terms "IT High Priest" and "Preventer of Information" were not generated solely because users didn't get to use their toys. Sadly, there are some IT professionals who are the BOFH. There are also some that truly care about their users and go out of their way to help us. I have been privileged to have worked with several of the latter. I did everything i could to express my appreciation to their management and to let them know how the admin's attention to detail helped me to create value to the company. I have also suffered under quite a few ITHPs that simply would not seek to understand our needs. My employer was the big loser there because important projects were delayed or compromised because of the ITHP's arrogance.

if it's a device that you need for business purposes, the business will provide it for you. (Or should, if it's a genuine need.)

In an ideal world, yes. I really wish I worked in one. I work in an organization under "severe budget constraints" (unless you are senior management, then it looks pretty cushy to those of us in the trenches.) If we don't buy and use our own stuff, we have to limp along with "stone knives and bearskins" (thank you, Leonard Nimoy and Star Trek). Our choice is to work around IT or get hammered at performance review time for "not getting the job done."

I think all sides would benefit from seeing this as a symbiotic relationship and treat each other with mutual respect. Yes, IT staff needs that troublesome salesman who rakes in the orders. That salesman also needs IT support to be productive. And those managers are really only effective when they create an environment where their minons can do what they hired them to do.

The system breaks down when any one group deludes themselves into thinking they are more valuable to the organization than they are. In my case, I remind myself that even the "lowly janitor" who cleans my lab (always with a smile) and keeps the dust away from my sensitive instruments, the skilled tradesman who fixes the water chiller that keeps my electron microscope running, and the technician that refills my liquid nitrogen cylinders enable my productivity. They each deserves my respect - and admiration. It is honest labor; tasks that I don't like to do or am not good at. It is a much more pleasant work environment when everyone realizes that the whole is more than the sum of the parts...

You are correct. Note the migration of many to Xubuntu. I was planning to move off of Mandriva because of their continued churn and was concerned about the bloat of both of the new KDE and Gnome desktops. I was many pleased with Xubuntu and gave it a shot. I am generally pleased. Most Linux distributions give the user more choice than they realize; the variants of Ubuntu simply packages these conveniently.

If I read things correctly, they are basically repackaging a Debian variant. Many places with specific needs do this. CERN did this when they created Scientific Linux. The proliferation of such repacking schemes suggests that it is not as much of a time/resource hog as one might think.

My comments could apply to a municipal government as well. I would be surprised if a metropolitan area such as Munich did not have at least one data scientist on their payroll looking at economic data and doing the kind of studies that municipalities do to guide setting tax policies to attract jobs. Such an employee would have different needs than the typical office workers. Besides, the post I replied to was far more general than the parent...

You are, of course, correct. However, in most organizations, your first model would work for most office staff and production workers but not for some, albeit, limited R&D staff and developers. For the latter, I think both greater control and greater accountability are required. I am one of those .1% in my organization (I do instrument automation and image processing/analysis.) I have a good relationship with our IT staff. If I break something, I fix it. If hardware crashes, they help (they have the parts warehouse.) If I need access to corporate licenses, they either give me access to the share with the licenses or lend a hand. If something is outside my expertise, I ask for a consult before I start the project. The key requirement is mutual respect and high expectations.

I could not disagree more. Do you work on complex documents or spreadsheets? As a scientist in an analytical lab, I do so all the time. I could work productively from the old user interface because it was easy to get where I needed to go with a minimum of key strokes/clicks. That coupled with a VBA macro recorder made automating tasks reasonably painless. The new Office interface is horribly inefficient. Having to code VBA from scratch (since they removed the macro recorder) is more time consuming. They really screwed up the scatterplot and regression functions. After trying to use if for a year, I still abhor it. That, coupled with the objections from the statistics community concerning the unwillingness/inability of Microsoft to fix some errors and misleading choices in several algorithms has caused me to migrate away from their products to the older (but better maintained), open source tool chain of R / Sweave / LaTeX. Yes, there was a BIG learning curve, but my work is much more modular and reproducible now. And I don't need to pay Microsoft for "improvements" that I don't need and don't want.

I agree with you. Richard Stallman tells the story of giving his copyright speech/proposal to a group of artists and authors. He was surprised by the reception he received to his proposal to limit the copyright term. He was expecting to get a lot of complaints. Instead, the audience was largely supportive. The biggest surprise was that the authors thought his proposed copyright term was too long. Evidently the publishers hold the copyright and don't do anything with it and then preclude the authors from making derivative works.

You might enjoy the book. To your point - Denninger also shows that the labor participation rate has also dropped steadily. The unemployment rate typically reported does not capture those who have stopped working. One might also note that 60% of households now receive some kind of government subsidy. Not a pretty picture...