This.

They are so far away from the professional world that anything they learn that is specific to any kind of software or technology will be completely obsolete once they've left school.

They should be doing something fun. The best thing that can be done is to point kids in directions that make them want to do it on their own - self-directed study and show them resources where they can find out how to do things. And let them form groups to create projects and don't limit them to just glowing phosphors on a screen. Lego Mindstorms (and its descendants) comes to mind.

They need to learn that computers are tools for creation and creativity.

Absolutely do /not/ take out all the fun by teaching only fundamentals or just teaching them how to use Word and Excel, aka "marketable skills."

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BMO

A recent GAO report said that $106 BILLION was spent by the US government through 2010 on global warming research. If you figure that was through the end of 2010, that was still 4 years ago, so the number is now much larger.

That number absolutely dwarfs even the imagined amount of money that fossil fuel companies have been accused of spending in campaigns against "climate change". I mean it's easily more than 2 orders of magnitude larger.

Even scientists are human, and they are smart enough to know which side of their bread the butter is on.

Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.

I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.

Honestly.

And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?

Peace.

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BMO/Dan

>clarityray

Is dead.

Acquired by Yahoo.

Just so you can update your spam. HTH.

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BMO

They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.

The former is true

The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.

Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.

So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."

Please, please let this happen.

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BMO

That's the problem isn't it?

Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.

Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein.

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BMO

But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.

This.

And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run /only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.

Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?

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BMO

Technically that is correct, which was the point of this whole topic. But that is the basic intent and they are about as close as it comes.

Just two comments here, though there are many I could make.

First, income inequality is NOT the real issue. Why should you care who is or is not rich? The PROBLEM is poverty.

Second, my whole point was that it is very easy to show that income inequality has become WORSE, the more statist the U.S has become. I'm not saying that correlation proves causation, but the existence of a correlation is indisputable.

Waze wasn't bad about collecting information until it was acquired by Google.

This is a patently ridiculous assertion. A copyright holder can voluntarily place a work in the public domain (that's what GPL and Creative Commons are all about, for example). In fact that's what this whole discussion is ABOUT. Have you read any of it?

Another patently ridiculous assertion. There doesn't have to be a law "allowing" it. That's not how the law works. It would not be possible only if there were a law against it.

The FACT is, not many years ago Congress passed a law that put millions of works that were formerly in the public domain back under copyright. That is the incident that caused EFF to start pushing for a law that would make that no longer possible.

So you are WAY out in left field.

Don't be a jerk. The question is whether all drones should be restricted just because the President is a candy-ass.

A Federal court has already ruled that the FAA does not have authority to regulate drones, except those that enter "navigable airways". REGARDLESS of whether their use is commercial. Their regulatory authority is limited to interstate commerce, which is the basis for the definition of navigable airways.

The solution to the Whitehouse problem is simply to make it illegal to fly drones THERE. Not to regulate them everywhere else.

The FAA has appealed the court's ruling, but based on evidence and precedent it is pretty clear the FAA will lose that appeal.