First, they wouldn't see how a direct democracy (i.e.: where everybody decides and vote about everything) could scale on a larger scale than classical Greek city-states and small communities. (Where the dozen, maybe hunderd of decision-making citizen simply gather and discuss together).
Their solution back then was instead to keep the Greek city-state model (have a small bunch of people gather together) except that each one of the gathering people is representative of whole regions/populations/etc. (instead of managing to gather every single person of the huge population in a town's central plazza).
Thus was birthed representative democracy.
It might have sounded good back then, but you see the effect now: the representatives tend to prefer representing whomever pays them the best. Power is back in the hand of the elite and big corporation, only with a thick political layer inbetween.

Well technology marshes on, since founding father, communication technologies have simply been on a constant growth. A rather explosive growth.
Thus later on, you can see whole countries like Switzerland that function on a direct democracy. They have moved on from "Landsgemeinde" (the Hlevetic equivalent of greek city-state gathering in the central place) to direct voting accross the whole country, both in election booth and with voting-by-post.
So even if switzerland is bigger than a greek city-state (currently more than 7m people), thanks to the modernization that existed back then (post & phone & railroad) it has since then been able to coordinate country-wide votation and election very regularily (every few months).
The process is completely open and any one can watch and check.

Now Switzerland is still smaller than other European country or even huge continent-sized countris (like USA, Russia or China, for exemple). But, guess what, technology is STILL marching on and has come up with things like internet and cryptology.
(These are already put into production in some parts of Switzerland. Mainly for expatriate and in a few small commune).
And with these technologies, direct democracy can even scale up to larger populations.

The fear of your founding father about democracy being not practical on anything but smaller greek city-state is simply deprecated by technology.

Other fears against direct democracy usually include that people are stupid and might react stupidly due to mass panic, or because they are selfish and only think about quick personnal profit. Imagine if one would vote about a law for definitely supressing any tax however. People will never vote for tax! The state will go bankrupt!
Politicans know better, let's have them take the actual decision, and have only people voting for politician based on approximate general tendency of them.

Well you've seen the result in TFA's study: Politicians do know better, they specially know better how to earn more money by abiding to the highest paying oligarch.

Meanwhile, direct democracies like Switzerland DO VOTE about taxes, and guess what, big surprise: THEY HAVE VOTED FOR TAX INCREASES, SEVERAL TIME.

Thinking that "sheple don't know, politicians know better" is a horribly condescending paternalistic approach.
Yes, voting blunder can sometime happen (see votation about Minarets, about life-sentences or, more recently, the problems between EU and Switzerland regarding migration freedoms). But they can be mitigiated. At the heart, the main problem is information, if "people don't know" perhaps, instead of deciding for them, you might try to inform them so they make an enlightened decision? Modern communication mean can do help a lot here. Mass media like Press, Radio, TV have been around for decades. Internet is newer and offers even more possibilities for communication (including for minorities which might lack the budget to do it on Mass Media).
Also, patience and time help. People new to Swiss politics might wonder that everything is so slow. Well, it helps staying calm and thinking a bit, and nut rush some policies in a hurry. All the various checks and controls help to diminish the risk that some law is enacted due to mass panic (see you Patriot Act). In Switzerland, it has often happened that a people's motion has been submitted regarding a pressing problem, and by the time it goes through the pipeline, politics had time to adjust and propose a better, "less stupid beause I react" proposition to submit during the same vote. It has often happened that the people committee asking for the vote retract their own proposition because they find the new one better and people only end up voting for/against the one by the state.
And there are also internal checks, Switzerland is a signatory of the human rights convention and other similar international treaties. If any new law is deemed to contradict such international law, the new law can't be enacted (see Switzerland's voting blunder about life-sentences).
Meanwhile, USA has such wonders as Patriot Act, DMCA, etc. law that clearly only profit the corporations or organisation which paid the representative for.

Voting IS done online. Currently not enabled everywhere. But's that already a possibility for swiss people abroad, and some comune start to enable it locally too.

Due to Duverger's Law, when there's a single voting round for a single key position (or for a single exclusive composition of a group), system will inevitably degenerate into a bi-partisan mess (see USA), because voting for a less popular 3rd party ends up being "throwing your vote away". And that sucks because usually the two finalist end up being always opposing each other while not doing much useful actually (again see USA).

One solution is to introduce 2-rounds voting (as in France): this dissociates the "trying to support an interesting 3rd party" and "voting against the bigger evil candidate" into 2 separate rounds. You don't "waste a vote" by casting for a 3rd party, you'll have plenty of opportunity to vote for the lesser evil on the next round.

Meanwhile, here in switzerland, the top of the executive is held by a *group of 7 persons* (with "president" being a simply honorific title for protocol purpose passed around in a circle each year). It's a group of person of mixed partisanship.
Currently, that's the only indirect voting system in switzerland (citizen vote for parliament, which is of proprotionnal composition, and the parliament functions as a "electoral college" by electing a similarily proportionned group of 7). But there's no major problems into introducing direct election. (People directly vote for parties and presidential candidate. Group proportion is based on party votes, and then places are populated by candidates based on popularity within party).

The basis for your claim is?

The basis for my claim is three years of seeing how the company operates and what decisions it makes, and how, from the inside.

Probably the same thing that spurs paranoia about automated taxes today. The government knows enough about us that they could easily auto-file/fill our forms every year but people are afraid of admitting how much is known about us.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

The most crime-ridden location in the US is 80% white. Both violent and non-violent.

And there is black flight. Most definitely.

At least, won't everyone who's paid a middle to upper middle class wage, buys a house and saves for retirement eventually be a millionaire?

If you want to retire at 65 and have enough money to live a decent life for 30 years after that, you need pretty close to a million dollars plus a paid-off house. And, frankly, it's not that hard to accumulate a million dollars of net worth over a ~40-year career, assuming reasonable returns on your retirement account and modest appreciation on your home. I'm actually targeting net assets of two million for retirement, given that it's still 20 years away and I expect that inflation will roughly halve the value of the dollar between now and then.

Procedural rules trump right and wrong.

What's that meme going around say? Something like, "Everything Hitler did was legal - everything Schindler did was illegal."

aside: you. You who is just jumping up and down to invoke Godwin's Law. Wiki it.
 

Regardless of the number of exclamation points you use, Mountain View and SF housing do affect one another. I know several people who have lived in both areas and who have opted for one over the other based on questions of price and convenience. Said (insane, IMO) prefer to live in SF, but some choose MTV because SF is too expensive. Lowering the cost of housing in MTV further -- and making it more convenient to the Google campus -- would induce some more to leave SF.

1. Kids shoot up schools. Why schools? Why not shopping malls before Christmas or movie theaters during blockbuster premiers?

1) Kids are in school 30%-40% of their waking lives. It's normal that a disproportionate amount of everything that happens to them happens at school.

2) They don't really shoot up schools. Statistically a kid is much more likely to be shot outside of school than in school. It's just that "school shootings" have become a thing for the media, so the threshold at which one will become a national news story is much lower than, say, a bunch of gang members shooting each other in a drive-by shooting, or a bunch of teens being killed in a car accident. Despite the impression you get from the media, if you want your kids to be safe from shootings, you're better off sending them to school. Normalize for the time they spend in school (#1 above) and statistically they're even safer.

3) When a shooting happens at a school, the vast majority of victims are other kids simply because of the demographics of the people in the area. So it gets classified as kids shooting kids. When a shooting happens outside of a school, the majority of victims are adults. So it gets classified as a "regular" shooting incident even if a significant number of kids were victims

This is just the flip side of Windows RT. Microsoft developed RT to hedge their bets. If the market stayed with x86, they could sell regular Windows. If the market switched to ARM, they could sell Windows RT. RT didn't need to be successful, it just needed to be there.

Now Intel is doing the same - they're hedging their bets. If the market stays with Windows, they can can sell CPUs for Windows machines. If the market switches to Android or whatever OS over Windows, then can sell CPUs for those machines.

That's really what the phrase "Wintel is dead" means. It doesn't mean there are no more Wintel boxes being made. It means the Microsoft-Intel partnership is no longer an exclusive partnership as if they were one company. They're starting to treat each other as just another disposable business partner.

This. The tablet was held back for nearly a decade by Intel and Microsoft insisting that it had to be a convertible laptop. Microsoft wanted to make sure each tablet sales was a Windows license sale, and Office too if they could. Intel wanted to make sure each tablet sale was was an x86 CPU sale, and a high-end CPU too if they could. Consequently, the tablet PC market stagnated at fewer than 100,000 sales per year for close to a decade.

The real technology that led up to tablet market space wasn't the smartphone; it was the netbook. Suddenly people realized that most of the stuff they did on laptops (email, web browsing, myspace/facebook, listening to music, watching movies), they could do just fine on devices which didn't run Windows and didn't have a PC-like CPU, and consequently could be cheaper than a laptop, not more expensive like tablet PCs were.

Utter nonsense.

There are problems -- lots of them -- but peaceful civilian control of our government has not yet failed. Things aren't bad enough to justify civil war, but that doesn't mean it will never get to that point.

Of course they intended it to be amended. Which means that if people would like to ban civilian firearm possession, they should amend the constitution. Not that any such amendment would have a prayer of getting ratified.

Well, if you want reasonable housing prices in the face of climbing demand, then it's your problem. Without new housing in quantity in Mountain View, existing housing in Mountain View will cost more, and the same effect will ripple out to surrounding communities, including SF. The increased number of commuters will also increase traffic on the roads (though not as much as it could, thanks to the Google buses).

If you don't care about housing costs and traffic in the region, then it's not your problem. I don't live in the area, so it's certainly not my problem.

Very good point. I stand corrected.

Putting something into LEO with an elevator would probably require lifting it well beyond LEO to get something close to the right orbital velocity, then applying thrust to fix up the resulting eccentric orbit. It'd still be cheaper than lifting it from the ground into LEO... though it occurs to me that the reason it would be cheaper is that it would get its orbital velocity by taking energy from the elevator. That could be restored by lowering a mass from geostationary orbit.

I hadn't consider it before but it seems like a space elevator would need station-keeping thrusters to maintain its orbital velocity since it would be sapped a bit by every kilogram lifted from the ground. Without thrusters you'd need so send a like amount of mass down, which means for every kilogram you lift up and want to keep in orbit you'd need to find a similar mass to send down. Maybe ore from asteroid mining operations? Of course, then the source of the orbital velocity you're using to restore the elevator's velocity is the thrusters that put the ore into the right orbit to go down the elevator.