Another option: Lobby for regulation to make this kind of move against the communications utility illegal.

Thank you for that link to an 8,000-word article which doesn't initially seem related to your comment. Can the point be addressed in a key quote or summary paragraph?

That's always what it seems like to me, too. I haven't yet heard a coherent explanation why quantum entanglement is any different from that.

(My own metaphor involved two differently-colored hamsters in an opaque tube, yours is probably better.)

"Or is there anybody here naive enough to believe that other nations don't do this?"

I believe there's quite a few nations that don't even have the technical capacity to record and search every citizen's phone, email, video, and text communications. Of course the U.S. was first in that regard.

You always get that in the first 5 minutes of an economics course (to theoretically cover their ass), and then the rest of course is about money. They don't really have any way to verify, measure, or make predictions based on that piece of dogma.

I agree, but I don't think that the singularity breaks into the Top 3 sci-fi faith-based initiatives. I usually count them like:

(1) Technology will reduce our work hours until almost all of us are leisurely, creative, artist-types.
(2) Automated warfare will result in conflicts occurring in which almost no humans die.
(3) There is intelligent life in outer space that we can possibly contact.

Obligatory xkcd. Look at the House since 1992.

It wasn't poorly worded, it was the exact opposite of the truth.

P.S. The fact that GP got scored "5: Insightful" is among the worst signs for Slashdot that I've seen to date.

Disagree. What is "hypothesis testing" (a well-established element of inferential statistics) if a hypothesis is "without a way to make or test predictions" (according to you)? And other problems.

"For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it." [Wikipedia: Hypothesis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis_test

So you're talking about a theoretical free-market company that doesn't exist. The rest of us are talking about actual companies as they really exist, which are generally irrational, poorly run, anti-democratic, and at the whim of some possibly charismatic but out-of-touch business owner. Small or large. Whether with natural, artificial, or no monopoly.

"There are no 'corporate-style administrators' in public schools..."

Pretty much all of your statements are factually false, so I'll just deal with the very first one as an exercise. Consider where I teach: the City University of New York, the largest public urban university in the country. Ultimately CUNY is run by its Board of Trustees (mostly appointed by the mayor and governor). In the last 25 years, how many corporate executives have been on the board? 24 (53% of the total). How many corporate lawyers have been on the board? 12 (27% of the total). How many many labor leaders have been on the board? 0 (zero). How many of the current trustees have a PhD? 0 (zero). How many make their living teaching at a university? 2 (out of 15).

http://www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/may-2014/cuny-trustees%E2%80%99-index

I read this as whining that an administrator just doesn't want to do any friggin' work as part of their job (namely: document and prove that a teacher is negligent). Here is a study on when unions are more involved in hiring/firing of teachers, and the result is that they are far more aggressive about firing teachers than administrators.

"Nonetheless, CTs [consulting teachers] rose to the challenge - not in all cases, but at a much higher rate than principals - and when necessary, they recommended nonrenewal... The result was that out of 88 new teachers who were in the program in its first year, 11 (12.5 percent) were not renewed for employment... In the year immediately before PAR [peer assistance and review], only three teachers out of a teaching force of almost 3,000 were not renewed."

I've also seen this kind of thing first-hand. At my current job observations are done by fellow teachers (sit in my class for an hour, fill out a detailed 7-page report, have a sit-down conversation with me after I read it, every semester). At my prior job observations were to be done by the assistant dean (bagged it off for 3 years, I begged and pleaded to get something on file, he sat in on an introductory computer class for 5 minutes, wrote down a notecard-sized piece of garbled nonsense totally unrelated to the class content). In summary: Administrators are pretty lazy about doing their job.

And yet all these better-performing countries have more leftist governments, stronger social safety nets, more concern about equity, and less economic inequality.

I think your Google glasses were set on "opposite vision" when you read the article.