The very highest priced software is able to offer their sales people the largest commissions and the largest marketing budgets. Thus they can do all kinds of scumbag things such as hire top educators for "consulting" contracts and whatnot. These same educators are then the ones who decide which software is "best" for their school system. Also with a sizeable commission the rewards for selling a fair sized school system on some pile of crap software system are massive. Almost set-for-life massive.

Thus opensource or extremely economical systems simply can't compete. There are no scumbag salesmen using bribery and other underhanded techniques to market these solutions and as we all experienced while in schools there is no real science or evidence used when they claim to be using evidence based teaching. Any time they use studies or evidence to choose one system over another it will be evidence supplied by a large vendor.

For instance, nearly every time I hear of a new solution being implemented in my children's schools somehow one of the top decision makers has a stake in the company. Either they (or a spouse) worked for the company, work for the company, or will end up working for the company. And somehow the government "ethics" watchdogs will approve this because the person filled out the correct forms.

If I were the head person for a large school system I would immediately eliminate all contact with salespeople from all vendors. Then I would have internal committees evaluate the various offerings (including open source and low cost vendors) equally. I would also publish all the findings so that other education systems could exploit the results. But most importantly I would tell the people who were evaluating the various systems that if they have any contact with a vendor that we would immediately eliminate that vendor from consideration. And if the contact somehow were to the benefit of the examiner that their job would be in jeopardy.

When I was a kid most of the stuff one would buy was crap, if it did work it didn't do much and more often than not it either didn't work or didn't work for long.

If I were to bike any great distance there was a good chance that I would need to at least fiddle my bike a bit or maybe even fix it. Definitely I had to regularly adjust and fix my bike. But my nieces and nephews bikes just go on and on working just fine. So in that extremely infrequent occasion when it needs some work they just have the bike shop do it (which would have cost too much in my childhood).

My first computer which was a VIC-20 didn't even come with storage when I got it. Thus any program I wanted I typed in, played with, and when the computer was turned off it vanished. Eventually I got a tape drive and was a marvel. The floppy drive for my C64 was completely over the top.

Then with the first PC we all had to fiddle with the config.sys to squeeze that extra few K that was needed for some program or a sound driver needed for another.

So all these experiences have turned me into somewhat of a technological hill-billy. I am perfectly happy to resolder a failed headphone jack in my laptop or replace a capacitor in a failed monitor. I will make the programs I want using languages ranging from Python to C++ and have zero problems creating fantastically strong replacement parts with just invented composites based on such products as JB Weld. My electric razor had a great cutting mechanism but the battery just wasn't good enough. So rebuilt it using a pair of 18650s and a heat sync to help defend the now slightly overworked DC motor. It isn't a proper Christmas nativity if the star isn't a green laser pointer controlled by an arduino and some 9g servos.

So in my world fixing things, improving things, salvaging things, and making things better are all an overlapping concept. I rented a car this weekend and it was a pile of crap GMC with OnStar. It was all I could do to stop myself from going under the hood to rip the onstar clean out of whatever sewage pit they kept it in and just reinstall it moments before returning the car.

Most of the people around me though stare at me funny when I rip apart an old all-in-one printer in 5 minutes so that I can extract those excellent 10mm rods. Or when I can take a faulty iPhone apart in a restaurant after the person complains of only ever getting 1 signal dot anymore and just wiggling the antenna wire returning them to 5 dot nirvana. As I am simply not taken aback by faulty gadgets or machines, yet I see many people use a cracked screen as an excuse for a phone upgrade.

But this is not just a younger generation thing. I think in the generation before me it was just as bad. They simply didn't have the tools to fix things like their reel to reel tape machines and things broke so fast that it pretty much wasn't worth the effort to fix them. A typical 1970s car that came with any features usually lost those features one by one very quickly. I can remember many cars from my early childhood where the power windows were dead, heater was dead, brakes made funny noises, the car backfired, the car wouldn't shut down when the key was turned off, etc. And these were cars that were only a few years old. But the problem wasn't something that a little fiddle could fix. These were fundamental problems such as all the wiring being wildly susceptible to corrosion; resulting in the car being beyond any reasonable repair. This too resulted in a generation of people who were largely incapable of fixing things.

But lastly it is almost certainly economics. In the 70s things were changing so quickly that in many cases it was better not to fix it but to buy the new and improved version. Now it might not be worth the time and money to fix things. I have collected a bunch of nice tools and skills for fixing things. I have various glues and epoxies. I have nearly every conceivable small screwdriver. I have soldering stations. But I also have so many years of experience that I can take apart that thing that is very hard to take apart. I have the replacement part. And I have the skill to put the new and potentially better part in place. So I might take out the LM7805 and replace it with a LM2940 and a 22 uf capacitor so that the now smaller batteries will last longer. So for someone who was a young adult in the 70s it might have been more efficient to not repair things, and a young adult in 2015 might find that things are so cheap that again it isn't worth their time/money to fix things. But for someone who was a young adult in the 40s might have found things were so valuable that fixing was well worth their efforts, and someone of the 80s might be so good at it now that it is worth their efforts.

We are still basically monkeys. I don't think that we monkeys can possibly work well in a group of 3,000. I am willing to bet that in that facebook nightmare that people have banded together into little micro tribes and even littler squads. The natural numbers would be in the ballpark of 150 and 7.

So in an "open" office I would personally group people into small groups 5-7 in a single room and then cluster the rooms into a community of around 150 or less. Then basically don't depend on much real interaction between the communities except in the most general ways.

This seems to be about how we evolved. I would think that facebook would already have figured this out in that I don't care how many "friends" you have on facebook that very few people would stay in contact with more than 150 in any real way and probably only have around 7 solid friends at any given time.

Although there are probably a few outliers who do regularly stay in contact with many people and have a larger circle of friends but at the same time there would be a matching number on the other end of the bell curve who live a solitary existence. So unless a company is prepared to only hire from the 0.01% of humans who can manage 1,000s of lines of friendship then open plan is just wrong. It would be like working in an airport departure gate.

Every bloody math book blah blahs about the great figures of math and I am sure that I have heard about the story of Gauss summing 1 to 100 in grade school 5050 times. I have pretty much zero interest who figured out the for loop, and pretty much zero interest in holding Knuth as some kind of Euler and forcing generations of programmers to learn even how to pronounce his name. Much of computer science happened because it was ready to happen.

Even in science many people were just doing the right work in the right area at the right time in history; while others truly made massive leaps such as Maxwell. It is just stupid to waste a single brain cell to learn who discovered Argon simply because he was a scientist at the time that everyone was in a race to fill in all the elements on the periodic table.

I have long thought that this historical crap was taught as a combination of a desire for immortality combined with pandering to the stupid who can learn history more easily than the paradigm in question.

It would be like naming the 100 meter dash the Miller-Crombit run because Miller-Crombit were tied in the first 100 meter dash held in the Olympics.

Do we want the 5% of programmers born in the US to be able to command good salaries, or do we want the tiny number of company owners to command massive profits on the backs of their poorly paid programmers?

Sadly you are very correct. The wonderful thing is that eventually reality bites their heads off. They distort reality so that things look bright so they can give each other bonuses, raises, and as the organization fails, retention bonuses. But other groups, forces, or intelligent people will recognize that the market has become so distorted that it actually creates a massive opportunity. Often the old will actively fight the new causing the new to be nimble and quickly culling the weakest of the new until only super predators remain who then destroy the old guard like a lion hunting a tuna thrown onto the Serengeti.

Usually the last gasps of the old are things like using regulations to protect themselves but again this just makes the competition that much more brutal when it figures out a way around them.

A great example of this was when the people who had the early transatlantic communication cables charged absurd amount of money per letter basically ended up driving the development of wireless communications. Then when wireless was invented and maturing to the point where it could compete they immediately turned to a combination of patents and laws to try and stop wireless. But basically their fat cat days came to a nearly instantaneous end. It wasn't even that wireless could handle the bandwidth and eliminate cable but that it was a source of competition that they could not control.

The other key was that they extracted agreements from most North Atlantic countries that they would be granted a monopoly as a trade for investing so much money to lay the cables. So they thought they had the competition locked out.

A well typed argument devoid of logic and fact. Thank you for proving my point. You go through a "Getting to Yes" playbook of straw man arguments, baseless supposition, and wishful thinking being assumed to be reality.

Now go back to twisting whatever company you work for into knots pursuing metrics that exist wholly to create reports that you can massage into powerpoints that you have to fly to HQ to present to your fellow MBAs denying that your MBA free competition is eating your lunch.

Merry Christmas.

One of the things that they teach at MBA school is that long badgering documents can make up for things like facts and logical arguments. If you look at the documentation in MBA paradises such as military procurement it easily runs into millions of pages for even the simplest of military kit. Often these pages are generated from much more compact groupings of facts which then helps to obscure the reality that these projects are usually total BS. For a simple comparison someone who needs to get to the point where they have completed a doctorate in physics might have used portions of textbooks that totalled in the 100,000 page range. So short of records that simply were an endless list of telephone calls or some such that level of documentation is almost certain to be designed to overwhelm not illuminate.

When a company feels that they must stoop to such measures so as to bamboozle people like this they have made it clear that what they are doing is very very bad, legally, morally, ethically, and not acting in the public interest. This last bit is critical in that we allow them to use public goods such as the airways which are a limited good. I am sure that other companies could be found that would serve the public interest in a cleaner way. Simply put these companies should lose access to these public goods.

I will save my concern for people stumbling around in the dark on an uninhabited island for the 22nd of never. You must be one of those health and safety types.

You must be an puritanical American who has been brainwashed that all sinners need to be punished old testament style. How about thinking with your brain for once and asking, which is better for society: To take some dimwit and throw him into the justice system which will chew him up and destroy whatever small(especially in America) chance he had for even a crummy life, or to educate him into being a better citizen and send him on his way?

And before you even spend one keystroke defending America, 70% of Americans approve of the recent torture that was revealed. So my suggestion to you is to stop listening to your American Echo chamber and regurgitating the rhetoric that either the left or the right have told you to regurgitate.

I live in Canada and feel sick every time our present government adopts another American flavoured policy and it makes me sick when normally genuinely free countries do the same.

And your grandmother wears army boots!

I would have thought that your analogy would have required an extra special level of dimwit except:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

and then there is this nincompoopery:

http://m.wpxi.com/videos/news/...

But my thing is that I like to shoot a laser across say a body of water at the storage building miles away which presuming some common sense results in zero harm. But few would debate the harm in shooting up at an airplane. The key being that a few would debate the harm; a few dimwits. But assuming no harm few would debate that hitting things with a laser is fun as many would think that hitting things with a 50 cal would be fun too. Just clearly more dangerous.

Actually I think that box office statistics would show that it would be likely for someone in his income range and ethnicity to have seen most if not all of those movies. And highly unlikely that a white person in the same pay range would have seen even half of them. And almost no people of other ethnicities would have seen any of them.

So oddly enough people in their business would have about a solid a grasp of the movie viewing demographics of any people alive. While it may have been meant as a racist remark it may be that the would have equally speculated that George Bush liked Top Gun and Ghost.

I am not condoning this behaviour, and as a pilot would be royally pissed (if I wasn't dead) if someone did this while I was flying. But I recently got a bright green laser and love to see just how far I can shoot the beam to hit things. Basically if it is a clear moonless night I can pretty much hit a target out to the horizon. But if I were a bit of a dimwit I could clearly see the temptation to try and hit airplanes in that it would be cool to hit something moving and at that height.

So while punishing people who do this I certainly hope they take into consideration that most people doing this would not be criminal terrorists so much as criminally stupid. Thus the proper punishment most of the time should be to scare the crap out of them and then ban them from owning a laser pointer for a decade or two. Keep in mind that the goal will be to prevent the dimwits from doing it again; it is generally quite hard to prevent them from being dimwitted and thus identifying the occasional dimwit and training him will be far more effective than trying to somehow reach the dimwits and convince them from doing it trough draconian laws which will largely serve to make the dimwit's lives far worse than they already probably are.

For instance when flying the reports are that the lasers often are coming from trailer parks vs the nice end of town.

You are probably right that the SEO types would eventually game the system. But if it were way better than google for even a year then google could lose out big time. But my long term prediction is that the best search engines will end up being highly curated. Nothing beats going into a library to look for a book and they introduce you to a local guy researching to write that very book's replacement. It blows an automated card catalogue out of the water. But in that example it is not that the automated cart catalogue is bad but that the two together are very powerful.

At a glance I can tell if a site is aggregated or original with few errors (I did find a recent site on lasers that looks about as domain squatting as is possible but wasn't).

I am thinking of a whole new algorithm; just like Google did to lycos, yahoo, altavista, etc. Basically with those search engines you looked up gravel and got porn, looked up bird watching and got porn, looked up pictures of cute pandas and got porn. Then suddenly google came along and you would search gravel and get gravel. Now with google you search gravel and get a wiki page on gravel (which any idiot could build) and then you get things like yellow pages and other aggregate sales sites; basically SEO porn.

But most importantly if I search a very specific search for things like local pizza places I am unlikely to find their poorly SEO'd sites while aggregators will dominate for page after page.

So it I don't see someone beating google by a slightly better system but an aha system that is fundamentally different and completely blows aggregators out of the equation.