I don't see that the privatization of government services is necessarily a "dark side". If the services can be delivered more effectively and efficiently by private organizations then they should be. My only problem is with those that would campaign for privatization when there is good evidence to suggest things will be worse as a consequence just because they are anti-government.

My car is over 10 years old and will still go about as fast as it did when I bought it, new. My iphone 4 is way younger and runs nowhere near as quickly on the latest iOS as it did on previous versions. These apple cars will be real unpopular after about the third software version upgrade when they can only do 20 miles/hr and need to be traded in for something thinner.

I would have thought that they would be better off creating a number of single-color sub-channels and spreading data across them. I would think that white light would have group delay problems.

My complaint about perl (and for that matter clojure too now) is that so many symbols have special meaning. and sometimes it is context dependent too. If your code contains $#`'~_ all over the place it makes it hard to read for anyone not intimately familiar with it. Sure, there are some well used conventions like _ for anything or triangle brackets for collections of types, but there comes a point where using a symbol to convey really important and subtle meaning is far harder to read than just putting in a keyword. All I can say is thank god Unicode was not invented earlier or there woudl have been 1000s of other characters involved.

Quit bragging that you look so good with your shirt off that 1800 women conspired to watch you split logs.

That's why it's on the test

wouldn't:

public void printNumbers (int n) { if (n > 0) printNumber(n-1); System.out.print(n); }

Have been better, ie. shorter, fewer loops (or stack frames if no TCO)

What was it like being a squid ?

Well then make it next day pickup from your first or second choice of the regional stores. But even if they were just a caching front end to pololu, adafruit, sparkfun, batchpcb and digikey with a few small warehouses with 3d printers and cnc cutters per state they could have offered a wide selection of parts and services alongside all the other things they did. If I buy a few parts from each of adafruit, sparkfun et al even ground shipping quickly adds up to more than the cost of the parts themselves and I'll bet some of those hobby suppliers would have been amenable to merchandising a network of warehouses that they too could ship from around the US.

Didn't RadioShack already maintain warehouses to service the retail franchisees ? I'm sure one or two of the larger retail locations could have doubled as warehouses, these are small components, not large wild beasts and moving them to the warehouse frees up retail space in the other stores. My point being, once you already have a high-street retail presence and a logistics setup to handle distribution then they may have well found something to do with it.

Radioshack squandered every advantage. There was nothing that would have stopped them creating an online business that really leveraged and complemented their highstreet presence and distribution network. But the management team apparently chose to plunder rather than innovate

Really, how much would it have taken to recognize 5 years ago that they could allow someone to order their choice from a wide range of items before noon and pick it up in-store after 5pm same day, next day for more exotic items that had to come from an out-of-area warehouse. Not only would that be a faster way to order things, but would be a much better way to offer a returns policy and give a chance to sell cables and other accessories.

For the geeky well endowed, could they really not have offered 3d printed parts on a similar delivery schedule (or even in-store) or small scale manufactured parts. Could they not have had a travelling maker demo that moved from store to store every Saturday hawking maker slide or raspberry pis or some such things.

For the less geeky at heart could they not have let people order in-store as they consult with someone who can guide them - Amazon would sure get a lot more business out of my parents if they somehow improved their comfort levels with buying online.

It's not like they would have had to stop selling cell phones if they didn't want to.

Property is not a good word I agree, but absolute responsibility I think is. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. Empower the parents to make all choices but make it clear that there are consequences to those choices.

In the case of vaccination, aside from the risk of disease, the consequences should be no access to public schools without a certified (reasonable) minimum vaccination record or medical exemption. I would stop at that.

I think that's enough but I would have thought that most insurance companies would require vaccinations as a requirement for medical insurance too, which (in the US at least) makes it an employment issue. Then there's any brush with the law, any conviction could include a vaccination requirement. Any welfare recipient could be required to show vaccination credentials or bring them up-to-date within a certain time to continue receiving benefits. Need a driver's license, need a criminal background check for some reason, perhaps to coach kids, that could include a certification requirement... In short, any time an individual brushes with the commonwealth there is an opportunity to bring pressure to bear, I'm not in favor of exercising it to that degree though, the idea is to apply pressure to encourage childhood vaccinations, not to make it impossible to live in society at all.

Religion is not really a problem because it is also a choice, there is a right to chose your religion; did I mention that with that come responsibilities ? It applies to non-spider people too.

By now my SSN must have been stolen several times from several different organizations that simply did not do their jobs properly. If there are consequences of this breach for me and I sue Anthem they'll just point to any of the many other ways in which my PII has been mishandled as a reason to dodge blame. Everyone uses the SSN, even costco asked for my SSN to join (I refused, but I bet there are many who didn't).

The change has to be in the meaning of the SSN, If the government wants a unique numeric name for any individual I understand, but it's not the same as proof of ID. Proof of ID needs to be either something biometric or something to do with your relationships to other people (but then, Anthem gave away as much of that as they possibly could too).

But when the schools attempt to illustrate things by cutting up paper or rearranging puzzle pieces, it is attacked as not being "proper math" by the usual suspects.

Also, math in the K-4 grades was painful for my kid. He was way ahead of the class and they just wanted to force him into lockstep. That has very much improved in middle school, his teacher is clearly very familiar with the subject and I quite like the common core / Smarter balanced ideas. The problem looking forward to high school is that he will "run out of math". These are things that simply don't happen to a home schooled kid.

I'd send my kids to private school but we spent all the cash on vet bills for the dogs.

Don't they need three electrodes for a transistor ?

Say what you like about Hell's Angels, but they're clearly not uneducated. The emails are (so far as I can see) well composed, grammatically correct, use proper spelling, indeed they read as if a lawyer wrote them. I don't think many on /. would get past the Angel's written entrance exam (I wouldn't want to try the practical exam).