So... would a foundry based on this tech... be a "wood-chipper"?

These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.

Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.

What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.

The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".

Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.

In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.

For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.

Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.

That sort of logic holds true when moving between languages that are very similar. The transition between Python and Ruby or Java and C# spring to mind.

However if I need a C++ programmer and need one pronto, I'm not gonna hire a guy who has only JavaScript on his CV no matter what. Learning C++ is not merely learning a different way to create an array or slightly different syntax. To be effective in C++ you need to know how to do manual memory management and do it reliably, which takes not only domain knowledge but more importantly: practice and experience. You need to understand what inlining is. You very likely need to understand multi-threading and do it reliably, which takes practice and experience a pure JS guy is unlikely to have. You need to be comfortable with native toolchains and build systems: when the rtld craps its pants and prints a screenful of mangled symbols you need to be able to understand that you have an ABI mismatch, what that means and how to deal with it. Unfortunately that is mostly a matter of practice and experience. You might need to understand direct manipulation of binary data. There's just a ton of stuff beyond the minor details of the language.

Could the pure JS guy learn all this stuff? Of course! Will they do it quickly? No.

Much more than 40!

For every string theorist, there are two string theories (something to do with pair production....).

I already paid for my internet service. Why should I have to pay again?

You are advocating the Verizon/Netflix model.

Then thank god we aren't a democracy! We're a republic.

In case you *want* to run someone over? Brilliant!

mailto:feedback@slashdot.org

OMFG! The RED mark!

You've solved the gender inequality problem in STEM!

More men than women are red/green color blind!

They didn't have their souls crushed by getting red marks, they thought they were doing well, and so continued on in STEM! By the time they realized that they had actually been screwing up the whole time, they had already been writing Java and .Net code for 2 years!

Well, he worked on the Tesla battery technology for years, and then open sourced the patents.

I expect that as soon as he's satisfied it's tweaked to the point it's working as intended, he will open source the curriculum for the school.

I suspect that, should this happen, it's not going to change much about education, since really public education is how to get promoted to the point you are an administrator, and can start raking in the 6 figure salaries, and really has dick-alll to do with teaching kids these days.

Actually, it's closer to Montessori.

There's nine Montessori schools in the Los Angeles County area, so it's not like he couldn't have just paid for the kids to go to one of those.

There's not a lot of public Montessori's, however they are becoming more common (e.g. North Shoreview and ParkSide Elementary in San Mateo), but they tend to be Magnet schools, and there tends to be a lottery to get in because everyone wants their kid to get in. On the plus side, if you have multiple kids, once the older one gets in, there's a bump in the lottery for your remaining kids, and (A) once in, a kid generally gets to stay as long as the parent remains in the area, and (B) they don't totally screw up.

Frankly, if it's a choice between sending the kids to a private school, and building your own, and it's going to pretty much cost your the same for tuition either way, it's a hell of a benefit he's giving his employees (IMO).

Having spent part of my time in a system set up like you describe... it's the *ABSOLUTELY WORST* thing you can do to a high achieving kid: take away their opportunity to reach even greater heights, in exchange for keeping them busy by becoming an unpaid teaching assistant.

Thankfully, it really didn't work out (having a 4th grader teach 6th graders math just gets that 4th grader beat up during lunch and after school), and they backed off eventually. Which was fine with me, because I was already working on calculus, organic chemistry, and college level reading that the bookmobile lady snuck me after doubling my number of books checked out quota over everyone elses.

If you want to go back to the "Little House On The Prairie"-style one room schoolhouse, good on you, but please do not drag high achieving kids back there with you, or worse try to "socialize them at their grade level", because I'm telling you, you might as well buy them a T-Shirt with a target on it.

Musk may not being anything new -- and he's really, reading the 3 articles, just describing Montessori with a couple of tweaks, like taking the grade level away -- but at least at his school I don't think you'd be holding back those who are able to vastly outpace the slower learners.

Yeah, I agree with the growing sentiment that whilst Ive is a talented hardware designer, he is also seriously overhyped (by Apple, not himself).

Case in point: how long did it take for Apple to make a larger iPhone? A long time. I read a story about Ive in a magazine. It described the process of them deciding to make a bigger screened iPhone. The design team milled dummies of a bazillion different sizes and carried them around to try and figure out the perfect larger size. They spent ages on it. They tried literally every size. Eventually they produced something ..... just like their competitors. You know what? Apple ignored the trend for years. Then they procrastinated because their holy design team can't do anything fast. They could just have looked at what was selling well - it's not always a good idea but it's not always a bad idea either. But they made a mountain out of it.

Why do Apple's products have almost no customisability? Why did it take YEARS for them to even support setting a wallpaper image in iOS? Well, probably because:

Ive’s decision to offer choice was a challenge to Apple’s recurring theme of design inevitability. In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.”

He was probably talking about a Motorola phone. But I guess that's why everything Apple makes is white. You wouldn't want to "abdicate your responsibility" by letting people choose colours! Well, unless it's a watch, of course.

If you read the whole New Yorker article you'll get an overwhelming sense that the design team there live in a bubble where they feel it's OK to spend months on a trivial detail and then produce something almost exactly the same as what their competitors did in a week. Apple has been consistently behind the Android market for years now when it comes to features and even new design ideas, and reading the article will reveal why.

Nope. The taxi drivers would compete for too few passengers by trying to undercut each other, skimming on costs thus reducing the safety for passengers etc.

Except that taxi prices are controlled, either by the state (yellow cabs) or by Uber. Taxi drivers don't dynamically adjust prices on an hourly basis by themselves.

Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.

Markets are hardly mythical. They're rather common.

Anyway you're arguing with things he never said. Obviously the laws exist. Obviously Uber cannot decide what the laws are. The only part you're disagreeing with him on is "they exist for a reason", but that's the crux of the issue - some people believe that reason is bogus. Limiting the numbers of cabs specifically to fight congestion is so indirect it practically screams corruption. You solve congestion with congestion charges, that apply to all vehicles equally.

Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.

Given that your post criticises Uber for "throwing a tantrum" your own writing comes across as extremely shrill. The problem is the existence of the law. You seem to think that all laws must be righteous and good and no organised group of people who give themselves a name and a logo should ever object to a law or try to get it changed (and good luck getting taxi laws changed agains the incumbents without a large large consumer group to back you up). That's an increasingly non-viable position in our world: governments create laws at prodigious rates and the effort needed to get them overturned is too large for individuals to take on.