That this is true with regards to the Church, this in no way invalidates the original observation. You are trying to invalidate the observation and general position by applying a "guilt-by-association" label with respect to abuses by medieval religious institutions.

Really? How the hell can a theoretical physicist present claims on some complex shit related to, I don't know, string theory so that it can be consumed by anyone? We can water down things to the point of becoming edutainment, but that becomes *that*, edutaiment, not the presentation of a claim with its supporting data.

Can't wait to see Mathematicians making Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in a manner consumable by the general public!

Powershell can get anything done for automating things on Windows, but I sure wish they had done a better job defining the syntax and the cmlets. Seriously, that is some convoluted, dirty shit going on right there. So bad that at times I've considered IronPython a better, more modular alternative (in some circumstances obviously.)

OTH, I do like Powershell's ability to integrate with .NET. That really helps automating certain things when developing, delivering and customizing complex turn-key solutions in Windows. At least that has been my experience, and quite naturally YMMV.

Oh my god, this post hurts to read. Powershell scripting is nothing like Unix shell scripting in general (and Bash scripting in particular). Completely different beasts, syntactically and semantically. It's like suggesting PL/SQL scripts would work when executed by a Python interpreter.

Your mistake is to fail and reading comprehension and/or have a willingness to bring a strawman to the table.

It would have been MY mistake to assume it must take an entire culture to destroy valuable archaeological sites. But I didn't so fuck you very much.

If we rub a few neurons together till they spark and apply the most basic rules of reading comprehension, we see that my reply was specific to this statement :

That is an ambiguously quantified, poorly worded, if not ignorant and malicious statement. A more appropriate statements of the fact would have included something like "Some Egyptians Muslims" or "Extremist Egyptian Muslims" or "Egyptian Religious Radicals". Those provide a more accurate dimension to the problem as opposed to something that can (and will be passed by idiots) as a blanket generalization.

If I see some White dude with Nazi tats screaming vitriol against minorities, I'm not going to say "White People call for race war". I would quantify and qualify the individual or individuals appropriately so as to not open the door to idiots looking to push the "guilt by association" button. This same rule applies to anyone and anywhere regardless of ethnic/cultural/religious background.

I never stated that it must take an entire culture to destroy the pyramids. What I said had nothing to do with such a claim.

It was not my mistake to make. It was your mistake to attribute that on me. But hey, don't let me get in the way to build strawmen for whatever silly and/or twisted reasons that rock your boat.

Capable of paying for. That is a more accurate statement.

It is if you are middle class. And it is not just a public school issue. It is also an income issue. My girl will have a greater chance of success given that

1. I can afford pouring her with educational activities,
2. and that I can afford having one of us parents stay at home to help her with homework,
3. and that I can afford keeping her busy with extra curricular activities,
4. and that both of us are college educated

compared to another kid of the same age and talent potential whose parents

1. cannot afford pouring her with the same amount of educational activities
2. cannot afford for one of them to stay home for them,
3. will inevitably spend more idle time because of that

Neither situation implies guarantee success for my girl nor failure for the hypothetical kid in the comparison. But the conditions and disparities are real, and amount and accrue to tilt the odds one way. No amount of public education the way it is funded nowadays can change that.

We know how to teach. We simply allow a system that permits the existence of school districts better funded than others.

The problem people are discussing here is not about the school system per say, but the system that funds public education which is a) highly local, and b) relies heavily on real state taxes. If there were true state and federal level public education funding systems and/or if we were to diversify local public education funding away from real state taxes, you would see a change.

You can have a great brain surgeon or a world class oncologist, but he will not do his magic if you pay him crap, you only give him a Neolithic stone dagger and a bag of aspirins to do his work, and you measure his performance under such conditions. It is not a problem with his professional potential, but the system that funds him and deploys him.

This is very obvious. So why do we examine public education on a different light? It is not our public education system that is doing this or that. It is the system that funds it, and our culture's ethos regarding the role of state and federal government that are a) vital to our society and b) whose support systems are fundamentally broken.

Either we get Fed/big government involved, or we get local governments to find more equitative (cue morons screaming "socialism!"), more diversified sources of funding away from things that are purely a function of economic brackets/classes (real state taxes.)

We do not want big government involved, but at the same time, we do not do shit to properly fund public education across all income brackets and neighborhoods? How the hell does that make sense? How the hell does this become a fault of our public education system?

Unless we have hundreds of appliances, or more continuously pinging each other (or dozens sending each other barrage of critical data in an uber-QoS menage-a-trois) those will not add up to require "modern internet speeds".

Three words for you: Long term thinking. Replacement of TCP/IP will happen, just not now or in the near future. Tech companies/consortia and academia are simply paving the way. Thank God that not everyone subscribe to the notion of doing something only if it is bound to a near-term execution plan.

A few radicals =/= an entire country/culture. But don't let that get in the way of a good old generalization.

Nothing kills an embarrassingly obvious joke more than a TBU (true-but-useless) tidbit.

Here, read this to celebrate your technically correct moment of glory :) http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

As a person whose first language is not English, I thank you for your gratuitous lecture.

Oh uhmmm, m'kay?

Everything you suggest is possible to implement, but herein lies the fault of engineering thinking: logistics. The logistics of maintaining such a system in a manner that is sufficiently secure are just too damned complex to consider them as practical.

If the equipment stole by ISIS could be disabled by default by not receiving the *good-to-go* signal then every other equipment with similar protection is open to jamming. ISIS fighters (and most fighting forces for that matter) are technically savvy enough to constantly jam signals - eventually, they will jam one piece of equipment operated by us or one of our allies.

With such "enabling" equipment in place, then such an incident (jamming one of our own) is probabilistic-ally bound to happen. And that will most likely mean death.

Another option would be to use dongles that activate such equipment, but then again, logistics. How do you procure them? How do you rotate them? What do you do if you lost the dongle, or if the dongle (and/or whoever that carries it) is blown to bits?

The only realistic solution would be to wire equipment sold/transferred to some (not all) allies with electronic keypads that are possibly redundant (multiple interfaces within a tank for example), with multiple paths and fault-tolerant. Such keypads would be on rotation with operating crews knowing the combinations.

But then again, what happens if the operating crew is killed or incapacitated? Another crew would be unable to deploy the equipment. Multiple equipment/crew sets could share a keypad combination schedule, but then, all you have to do is capture and torture enough crew operators to spit the combinations.

Then there is training and the logistics of adding and removing such contraptions (because you do not want such contraptions in *our* equipment).

Logistics and the realities of war make it hardly unlikely to see any such contraptions in the field, me thinks.