Let's assume that the general education requirements of most college educations (ie, some smattering of English literature & composition, arts, bit of a foreign language, social studies, etc) actually does result in those students coming out slightly more knowledgeable than if they would have had even an "advanced" kind of technical education.

It's a reach, I know, but let's say they are overall a little smarter (ie, learned some new analytical skills & strategies) and are better informed.

I wonder if we're actually better off from this. Not because people aren't smarter or better informed, but because they're only a little smarter and a little better informed and they overestimate how well they informed they are and how good their analytical skills are.

On a mass scale, I wonder how much our political divisiveness and partisanship is driven by a whole bunch of people, who think they're smarter and better informed than they really are, taking sides -- often quite stridently -- on issues they don't really know about and reaching conclusions they don't really have the analytical tools to reach.

Add in the fact that everyone is an Internet Expert on everything they can read in Wikipedia and you have this recipe for high-quality mass ignorance and confirmation bias trying to portray itself as an educated populace.

If we moved the overwhelming majority of these people into a more advanced and focused vocational education that left out the "well rounded" part, would our *actual* ignorance as opposed to overestimated wisdom make us less partisan? Or would we just be even more gullible, swayed by propaganda, etc?

It's too many laws. One doesn't fit, they'll find another.

And once they find one that fits well enough, than anything goes because resistance to enforcement of a law usually brings the full force of the law with it.

I'm kind of wondering where they would all go.

If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.

Are there vendors that actually support RAID across otherwise independent SANs?

Like if you had SANs A through F, each with a 10 TB volume and you used SAN controller Z (which has no disks of its own) to take those 10 TB volumes and turn them into a single (say RAID-6) volume.

I've done this for laughs with a NAS4Free implementation, using its iSCSI client to mount LUNs from 3-4 different storage devices and then combining those mounts into a RAID LUN which I then exported via ISCSI and used on a client.

It seems like an interesting idea, and put together right seems like it might offer some relatively interesting redundancy versus some of the replication and mirroring options I've seen vendors advertise.

There are some things that reasonably can be ascribed the quality of being a worthy candidate for ridicule.

Certainly the notion that a representative democracy would copyright its laws and attempt to control their distribution for profit or any other motive is worthy of ridicule.

AFAIK the motivation is almost always financial, usually in collusion with some big legal publisher who gets exclusive rights and kicks back to the state. But it's not hard to imagine some kind of conspiratorial intent to restrict information to protect the legal class or bury details.

About the only rationale that makes any sense is to try to maintain an official reference presentation. The state could actually format and print a small run of the code and annotations themselves, which anyone could copy, but that would probably be a non-trivial amount of overhead, so they outsource it to a publisher in exchange for exclusivity.

You're forgetting more functional reasons -- like pain relief?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if more than a few long-time lab rats ended up with orthopedic issues from decades of standing in lab environments.

It's not a stretch from that to morphine synthesis to treat back pain.

I blame airline consolidation.

Fewer airlines, each hiding out in their fortified monopoly hub airports, means less gate competition and less gate competition means airports can probably charge less for gate access. It's probably even worse, because with fewer airlines overall a lot of airports worry about losing their hub status and probably charge even less to the big carrier left providing service or provide other accommodations which save the hub carrier money.

This revenue pinch causes them to turn to commercial providers to install and run their wifi networks or if they run their own, to charge for service.

Flying sucks.

An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.

Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase

Yeah. I mean, there should be, just purely from an economic perspective you should see evidence of this. So we started looking. And surprisingly enough, as I speak here today, in 2013, we have more bees in America than we did in 2007, before Colony Collapse Disorder was observed and named. There is virtually no effect--there has probably been some effect on the price of pollination services, but it's not dramatic. And it's probably only for almonds, the only early-season crop that is pollinated. Not for the other crops pollinated the rest of the year. And this is surprising, given all the discussions of CCD and honeybee health.

We've found there's been no effect of Colony Collapse Disorder on the prices of queens.

It does make a person wonder how many university organic chem labs churn out drugs on the side, even if its only for self-consumption.

I would imagine by now that the precursor chemicals for relatively easy synthesis are controlled, but I would think a good PhD in organic chemistry would merely take that as a challenge and attempt a more complex synthesis which made the precursors.

Hell, if they were clever they may even be able to some of it (or even all of it) as a legitimate project if it somehow advanced the synthesis know-how. I think I've read that the total synthesis of morphine is ridiculously complex but that it would be highly desirable to develop a synthesis that avoided any kind of opium base.

It's what collection agencies do with lawsuits and what many mortgage holders have done when going after homeowners.

The collection companies have gotten bad press from filing bogus lawsuits with inadequate documentation. Like sending summonses for their suits to the wrong address, resulting in bench warrants being issued to people who never got the notices and ignored the default judgements that resulted. I don't think most county level civil courts did much about it, though.

The mortgage industry I think earned more heat from bankruptcy courts when they showed up with bad documentation that basically couldn't prove they owned the mortgages. I think some judges got annoyed with the mass litigation many engaged in and started discharging the mortgages unless they could provide accurate documentation, but I think it only happened after a few savvy defense attorneys began to understand the maze of paperwork and lack of legal documents (ie, pen and paper notarized paperwork) that actually proved the plaintiffs owned the mortgages.

IMHO, there ought to be a set of steep progressive penalties imposed on both counsel and plaintiff who file serial/mass litigation with flimsy or substantively inaccurate documentation. Like the first one is a slap on the wrist, the second within some window of the first is a $10,000 fine and the third in the same window is a $100k fine, risk of disbarment to counsel and perjury charges to the plaintiff. You need these kinds of penalties to restrain counsel and clients.

If they want an easy, comfortable patient relationship they should have gone into dermatology, not oncology. Dying and cancer go hand in hand, and I would expect such a profession to be better skilled at handing those issues than the general public. As a medical practice, they should be willing to engage allied professionals like psychologists or social workers to promote more realistic goals.

By the time we had that meeting with the oncologist, the suffering of my mom was was really evident. I didn't think she had much of a chance of recovery and another round of chemo would have been very difficult for her and difficult for us.

This is a larger topic, but the US doesn't do dying well and it costs all of us dearly in desperation measures. The patients and their families pay in pain, heartache and treasure and the rest of pay in treasure. Recognizing a point when recovery or meaningful life extension isn't possible and switching to palliative care makes so much sense. Plus it often gives patents and their families some time to use the the health/energy they have left for living versus making them sicker from treatment before they ultimately die.

I don't think volume explains it completely. The most expensive components in an IP camera (camera, network, controller) are mass produced in incredible quantities already, whether it's for smartphones or dashcams or Gopros or point and shoot cameras, and stuff like smartphones with far more technology included (super hi res touchscreen, LTE modem, battery, flash, vastly more complex software) are cheaper than all but the junkiest 720p IP cameras.

*Components* isn't the reason, the components are dirt cheap. I don't even think assembly is a big reason -- security cameras are ubiquitous, so assembly, case parts, etc. should be widely available, too.

Really the closest you come is game cameras, which mostly are missing the networking part but kind of make up for it in complexity with motion sensing.

IP cams' web interfaces are one of the few places, though, where it's nearly ubiquitious.

I'd say it has more to do with junk Chinese electronics compaies all buying the same core tech package and minimally changing it to suit their branding.

What's truly obnoxious are the perfectly usable cameras which haven't upgraded their firmware to ditch activex for javascript.

I think there's a ton of money being dumped into the walking dead.

When my mom was at stage 4 of metastasized breast cancer, we had a family meeting with the oncologist to discuss my mom's situation. When asked what -- if any -- chances she had for life extension (not a cure, but more than 12 months) he was totally equivocal about it and was basically looking to start another round of chemotherapy. I felt like he was just looking for another round of payments before she died. They give you the thinnest hope to try to get you to keep using their services.

I've heard similar stories before from other people with older relatives, very sick and unlikely to every recover in any meaningful sense of the word yet the doctors insist on expensive and invasive treatments. The only explanation I can think of is that it's good business for them.