Every technical revolution in education since Edison's wax cylinder phonograph or prior has been prophesied to replace classroom teachers.

A brief list:
The Gutenberg press.
Edison's phonograph.
Classes by mail.
Voice radio.
Television.
Two way video.
Multi user computer terminals.
Microcomputers.
Multimedia software.
The internet.

This too will become a minor fad, blossom, fade, and find a very minor place in the ongoing art of education.

(lest see, how liberals who like to say that "you have rights for your opinion" and then mumble "but only, if we agree" assholes are going to react :)

Since you asked -- having a right to an opinion doesn't mean having a right to be protected from social consequences from your actions taken in airing that opinion.

Which is to say -- you're allowed to be an ass in public. Other people are allowed to be an ass to you in public as well; such is the market of public ideas. Mistaking people who don't want to be friends with you / listen to you / do business with you in response to your positions with people who would censor you (that is, invoke government action in response to your speech or act to make make that speech illegal) is a mistake.

You might ponder what it means that you believe in what you're saying enough to shout it from the world only from a position of anonymity (or, in Cito's case, pseudonymity). If there are people you respect for holding their convictions, did they do likewise?

We'll have to see if sudo is installed.

Sure, but part of that is recognizing the extent of the real world exposure.Imagining it to be limited to a small portion of farmland is not realistic.

It's not just in agriculture though. It's hard to find decorative plants that haven't been treated with it.

I believe you must mean the Democans and Republicrats. I see no evidence that either has any intention of butting out of people's lives.

There are many variations of this. One I *think* works (but I don't have the skill to check) is that the universe is "sort of" like a simulation, where only macroscopic items have a defined state, but the macroscopic items have defined contents and a defined energy spectrum, and when you arrange to "look closely" at one of those items, it alters the state of the rest of the item in a computationally conservative way, such that you can't detect the difference until you start getting really close to the limits of the simulation, at which point you get results that are statisticly chosen to confirm the conditions of the macroscopic item. So if you split off a bound pair of subatomic particles, they are so pair has defined characteristics, but there is no definition of the components until you look.

Think of it as a way of simplifying the model so that it can run faster on the host computer. The actual "host computer" may not really exist, but if it did, this would be the most efficient way to program it.

I don't think you appreciate the magnitudes involved. Picture the biggest forest fire you've ever heard of. Here's a dime store squirt gun and a canteen. Go put it out. Good luck, we're all pulling for you.

Now realize that it's nowhere near that easy.

A better approach is to make the copyright holder a legal steward of the work until it enters the public domain. That is, they have a legal duty to maintain it in the best possible form and make sure it gets handed off to interested parties when it enters the public domain. Failure to do so is a breech of the contract resulting in handing all profits from the work during copyright to the public (that is, a massive fine).

If the cost of maintaining the work exceeds the value, they may choose to terminate the copyright early, but must give sufficient public notice.

Even being a native is no guarantee of safety. Even if you are a native, there is bound to be some asshat from another tribe who wants to see you dead because they disagree with your interpretation of what some deranged child molester said 1400 years ago.

Would you provide it just run full speed until it burns out?

Actually, it wasn't my statement, but I did defend it as not too far from true.

Because many over 60 have very little experience with computers, you have more knowledge to backfill in order to teach them about computers (starting with de-mystifying the magic box). Again, not a question of intelligence or educability, just a matter of experience.

That will be true for many (more often than not), but clearly is far from universally true.

I have little doubt most of those things are magic to most people, but through using them for decades, they have learned to deal with them from a black box perspective. The 60 somethings who have recently found a good enough reason to bother with a computer will get there too.

Cheap and well built. I recently bought a $250 from the local Microcenter and first thing I did when I got it home was to take it apart. Let's just say I was impressed with the quality of the parts inside. Very much reminded me of Apple, expect it was easier to put back together, all the screws were the same size and had standard heads on them that didn't require a special tool to deal with. I buttoned it up and installed Linux. Go Acer!

That explains the human sacrifice to appease the Volcano Gods - so they can release all that pent-up frustration in virgin territory