Whether every single person should work depends on your definition of "work". If that is defined as what we currently call work-for-hire, then probably not. At the other extreme, somebody who sits in front of the flatscreen all day eating chips isn't doing anybody any good, including themselves. There's something truly fulfilling and human about serving your fellow person.
Throughout history, when we have too much labor to handle our necessities, we invent new sorts of "jobs" to get more people to do to give us more...something. That's what allowed us to build cities, and even factories. The entire entertainment industry is built on that. We have professional bloggers, for Pete's sake.
If we got to the point where we gave everybody a living wage just for breathing, I suspect that a lot of people would be doing little things like blogging, playing on one of 29,347 quasi-pro sports teams (admission is free, but the hot dogs are five bucks), taking up music (so you can afford a local live band for your kid's birthday party) or art (why buy prints for your walls when you can tell an artist what you're looking for). For most people, you couldn't earn enough to live on by doing this, but if you were just looking for a little differential pay to buy some of the finer things in life (like that five-dollar hot dog at the East Overshoe Kumqats baseball game), it would be worth doing.

"We oppose the teaching of...programs...which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs"

First off, learning is always about behavior modification, and usually about challenging fixed beliefs. Teaching math focuses on changing student behavior when encountering numbers and symbols on a piece of paper. Phys. Ed focuses on changing student behavior when swinging at a ball. If you haven't changed their behavior, you haven't taught them anything.

As to whether the language of the plank refers to things in the generic or the specific, note that "Higher Order Thinking Skills" is capitalized and noted as an acronym. While I can't find it in Google, this at least implies that there is a very specific definition for that term. It's entirely possible that there is a known "Higher Order Thinking Skills" curriculum that is nothing of the sort. But there is certainly ambiguity there that they should have cleaned up, if they're talking about a specific program or curriculum.

When they say they oppose "critical thinking skills", they didn't say "Critical Thinking Skills", "'Critical Thinking Skills'", or "the so-called 'Critical Thinking Skills' program proposed by those Godless Democrats for the purpose of teaching free love and atheism". There is nothing in their text that implies that they mean anything but the generic sense of critical thinking skills.

The authors had plenty of opportunity to spin their words properly, if they meant anything other than actually opposing the teaching of critical thinking skills. If they couldn't be bothered to do so, neither should we.

You say that like we're wrong about it most of the time...

Okay, that's just about enough of this. I understand that Christians are in the world's minority (as is every faith, or lack of faith), but that is uncalled for.

First off, the FSM was invented as an example--even it's creator never claimed it to be true.

Secondly, Christianity has evidence. Sure, it's not slam-dunk proof, sure things can be argued either way, but there is evidence. You want miracles with physical evidence? Google "incorruptable saints". Look up the eucharistic miracle at Lanciano (http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html).

Also, look at the Bible. The Old Testament is a history, written over thousands of years by dozens of authors. Then comes a story of one man who not only fulfills prophecies written over the millenia, but even causes many of the segments of the Old Testament much more meaningful (example: Why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice his only son as a test? Because God did it for real). One person, or a tight team of people living in the same century, could make something like that hang together. But is it easier to believe that a group of authors could do this over millenia without a guiding hand, or with divine intervention? Apply Occam's razor there.

Yes, there are counterarguments, and there are those that doubt the evidence. But to dismiss it as if to say "if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you" is uncalled for.

Your profile won't let me send you email. If you're in the Massachusetts, USA area, my company (http://www.litle.com) is hiring. No embedded stuff, but I think a credit card processor always needs networking savvy.

Thanks for the reference. So this law is a special import/export clause in copyright law. I was afraid that this was a case of Intimidation By Attorney, hoping that you'll settle out of court before realizing that they don't have a leg to stand on. So the publisher's complaint appears to be legit to me.

I'm definitely missing something here. I legally buy a copy of a book, in India, for $9. I bought a copy, and have rights to the physical copy. I don't have the copyright, so I can't copy it, but I have rights to the physical book. I can read it, share it with my friends, prop up a table leg, rip the pages out and paper my room or the bottom of my parrot cage with it. I really don't see how copyright law applies here. I could see how international trade agreements apply here. What are the relevant laws?

Big difference here. With (as far as I can tell) the above treatment or just about any antidepressant treatment, it is impossible to get "high" off of it. Above a certain dose, it doesn't increase your pleasure levels like many recreational drugs. So there's no drive to keep upping the dosage...or voltage. The "droud" works by stimulating the pleasure centers directly, if that's even neurologically possible. This does nothing of the sort, so there's really little risk of going into full-on junkie mode.

That would have to be a pretty cagey crook. The breach occurred January-February. Global reported the breach to Visa, MasterCard, and Federal authorities once they detected it last month (source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=125339&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1678656&highlight=). The news only came out Friday to give the Feds enough time to investigate without tipping anyone off. Truth in posting: I work for one of Global's competitors.

From the article: UW researchers also created software to work with the Robot Operating System, a popular open-source robotics code, so labs can easily connect the Raven to other devices and share ideas. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of open source and I use it all the time. But this isn't desktop software, server software, or mobile device software. This isn't mission-critical software, where a bug can mean only millions of lost dollars. This is life-critical software--when it fails, someone dies. That's right up there with nuclear reactor controls, submarine life support systems, fly-by-wire, and such things. NASA knows how to do this right. See http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html for how they do it. In part, they do it by keeping the scope as small as possible and re-defining the term "anal-retentive", from requirements to testing and beyond. Their stuff runs on the bare hardware, not the operating system, because there isn't an operating system in the world that is stable enough for this. The rest of us don't know how to do this right; there are probably less than a thousand people who know how to make software of this quality. If there's an open-source interface that reads data from the machine, I'm all for that. If you can use open-source software to control this thing, I'll make sure that my surgeon _isn't_ using it the next time I go under the knife.