Maybe it's just the cynic in me speaking, but what if the whole thing is a false flag? "Well, if $100M can't fix public education, perhaps we should [[raise|remove] the H1B cap | make it easier to start private schools and give them all the money | some other bullshit]."

In addition, according to the MSN article:

In 2010, Mayor Booker found a loophole in getting money to help fund Newark's educational reform. It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending. Gov. Christie approved the plan, and Booker's job was to find the donors.
[...]
The reform ended up looking like this: taking low-performing public schools and closing them, turning them into charter schools and "themed" high schools. But there was no easy way to expand charters without destabilizing traditional public schools.

In the months following the gift announcement, Booker and Christie still had no superstar superintendent and no reform plan.

(Emphasis mine.) This only happened due to a "loophole" in the law, which tells me that there were no good intentions when it went into place. It was probably just as much a bribe--sorry, lobbying effort--to friends and family of Christie, Booker, or both, as it was a school reform effort. And, unfortunately, even if it was totally legit, it wouldn't have worked thanks to an issue mentioned in the article:

Booker appointed Cami Anderson for the job. She implemented ways to help students and improve schools (all which The New Yorker detailed), but there were roadblocks along the way, like how the students brought the issues going on in their homes with them to the classroom.

You could have the best classrooms, the best tech, the best teachers, and no nagging administration; but if the students aren't getting meals outside of school, if they have to walk to/from school worried about being accosted by gangs or thugs, if their parents aren't around (be it from abandonment or working multiple jobs) and able to be involved in both making sure the student studies and within the school, then scores and the graduation rate will likely improve at a rate that would be considered a rounding error.

If that money had gone to improve the community (primarily through offering local, well-paying jobs to the parents, secondarily through safety concerns) then I believe it would have done far, far more to improve student education then any effort they undertook.

people might wake up and PROTEST

Hahaha, excellent joke! Caught me completely by surprise. Are you a comedian, per chance?

2. laugh track (these annoy the living crap out of me...."hahahahahha"....)

I actually appreciate these. If I'm looking at new shows and one has laughing overdubbed (be it a live audience or laughtrack), it lets me know the show is worthless and saves me a bunch of time. If a show thinks it need to prompt me to laugh, it certainly has horrible writing.

All the comedies I've enjoyed in the past decade have been without such a track. Arrested Development, The Office, Parks & Rec, Community, none of these have laugh tracks as a regular thing (some may have done an ep or two with them as a rip on such comedies); they all tend to have deeper stories than laughtrack fodder, too. I think the last show I really enjoyed that had a track/audience was Frasier.

Just because I see so many friends/family rave about it, I figure one day I should watch at least one episode of TBBT, but the fact that none of those people are someone I'd consider "geeky" in the least does not give me any optimism about such a viewing.

Something else I've wondered about is why, if we believe these people are the worst of the worst, we don't use them as case studies in psychoanalysis/physiology. Sure, few might be willing to participate (any number of offered privileges could be used as incentive, though), and even if they do it wouldn't be an ideal situation (if the examiner/pshrink could even be in the same room, they'd be surrounded by guards and/or council, likely), but they could so provide valuable insight into human development that might allow us to recognize these kind of people at an earlier stage and get them proper help.

Could well be that the people our society are so interested in killing are worth more to us alive than dead.

I think a part of this is that, as we grow up, we think back to the things we loved and give them a deeper look. We find a number of lesser questions and plotholes and try to answer those questions or fill those holes, both within our own minds and in discussions with fellow fans. Over time pockets of the fandom (or even just a lone super-fan) come to a rough consensus on this or that, and it becomes "headcanon". So when we go back to watch the movies, the headcanon comes with us and our glasses stay tinted. But kids, or even people new to the property, have no such glasses or headcanon, and so the more action/CGI-heavy films make it easier to keep them entertained.

The problem is the people that vote because of the last commercial they saw. There are a lot of uninformed, stupid, lazy people who think it is a good idea that they vote anyway.

I don't disagree about people being stupid and uniformed. But the more money you have, the more frequent your ads can be, the more likely they become the "last commercial". So if people vote by that standard (and I'd argue that you're giving them too much credit; many just look for that R or D and call it a day) then "Big X" still controls how they vote through their financial support.

I don't know about recycling--if there really are that many cartridges, you could make some chic video game partitions or something out of them, assuming the only thing physically wrong with them is having some dirt/dust.

What is the possibility for another SOPA-level response? Some internet companies, like Facebook, might like this because they will happily pay for any chance to trounce fledgling competitors, but certainly other bastions of the Internet like Wikipedia would be quite hurt by it.

I doubt any senator (of either party) really gives a flying fuck, and would in fact support this change because their buddies^W^W^W^Wlobbyists^W^W^W^W^Wconstituents told them they should, so only a public outcry of such proportions would do anything to reverse it.

But be wary of their intervention: If they intervened they would put the kibosh on a "speed lane", but at the same time they would probably add a shitload of other things that benefits the NSA and/or "constituents". And funding for a few statues and other non-related issues for shits and giggles.

Aye. The only reason I use Hulu primarily is because I can get it for free, and in exchange for that I'm fine with the ads. But the minute that the free version goes away, or the average commercial time per show outpaces regular TV (right now I believe it's 25% less or so) I will completely drop them and get a Netflix account.

If Hulu Plus were ad free or, hell, I could just watch the "Free" content with no ads for the same (or even double!) the price, I would have signed up years ago. Their excuse for still having ads when Hulu Plus was first announced (dunno if they still cling to it) was that the subscription fees are strictly for paying for the licensing fees of the "expanded content" (which doesn't seem that expanded,) but I (and others here, it seems) suspect that Hulu is an ad-delivery network, where the ads are supported by content, and closing the VPNs was about keeping their various ways of tracking people from becoming less effective.

Personally, I'm done paying for ads. It's the same reason I don't buy magazines anymore; I had a subscription to Wired for a few years, but when I realized that each issue contained more pages of ads than content I stopped renewing (I spent a fun 10 minutes finding and ripping out every page in one issue that was an ad on both sides, and after that the issue felt 1/4 lighter and still had ads almost every other page.) I'm willing to deal with ads or pay money (as possible), but not both.

Just want to give a second to T-Mobile. While their coverage is paltry compared to Verizon, I dropped Verizon (and had a poor time with their customer service trying to get pro-rated) back in October and am quite happy with my decision, even with that extra pain.

Since I barely use my phone I got a pay-as-you-go plan and, at least as I was informed, I can easily upgrade that to a monthly no-contract plan if I need to. (I'll be testing that next month when I upgrade briefly since I'm going on a trip I think I'll be using it a lot on.) So far I've paid about $10-15/mo, compared to my Verizon monthly bill of $75 (they required me to get a data plan since I had a smartphone, which is another reason I dropped them since I didn't want the data.)

That sounds like a lot of work. I opted-out months ago simply by switching to T-Mobile.

(I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing something similar, but I find Verizon more sinister, and with T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan I'm paying about $10/mo for the privilege.)

Whether it's $20MM or a more-reasonable-but-still-high sum, like $500K/yr (more than the President makes) and then force the person to retire forever, it still wouldn't stop such crony antics because there's still no downside or punishment to working for the industry prior and then working for the government to oppose *winkwinknudgenudge* some industry practices. Then the person retires altogether, their evil deeds already done and money absconded with.

Instead there need to be constraints for blocking those who would obviously be conflicted, but writing those rules (or even just guidelines) is no easy task. You can't simply ban everyone who has worked in the industry or hasn't spent the last X years outside the industry, because a clueless person would make things worse by ignorance rather than malice. You can't favor certain companies/groups over others (I'm sure many of us would love to see someone from the EFF be appointed to the FCC) because then it just makes the industries work hard to get "their guy" into the favored company, even as lip service, and then still get the President to appoint the person to do their dirty work. (As a tangentially-related example, see the "approval" for OOXML.)

Really, the problem here (as in most things political these days, it seems) is Congress. Certainly President Obama (and Bush, and whoever replaces Obama in 2016) is no innocent party here, but Congress is able to raise the red flags and block appointing. Unfortunately, any blocking recently has been mostly along party lines and done not because they oppose the appointee for potential corruption/conflict of interest, but because their party doesn't control the White House and so make mostly-unrelated reasons (http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/28/lindsey-graham-vows-to-block-obama-nominees-until-benghazi-survivors-testify/). The "minority" side would be just as happy to pass through such blowhards when their turn comes again.

Of course, "fixing" Congress is a far harder and larger task than fixing the "revolving door", but I don't know how we get that second one done without doing the first. If we, as The People, could start a popular cause to appoint from within (so someone who has been with the department/commission in question for some time), rather than someone who hasn't recently worked there (or ever.) It doesn't guarantee a lack of cronyism, but it would give us a look as to what the person did or proposed for/against the industry (when possible; another issue is that most of their work will be that ordered from the crooked head), rather than just "for" the industry.

(And, of course, Congress could be "fixed" through the will of the people, but the Establishment Party has become quite good at playing the sides off each other so they won't even consider a third party or even someone of their own party who speaks against a "big issue"--which too often is really not that big--for fear of the "other side" gaining power.)

Honestly, the idea that Humanity is the most advanced race in the universe scares me infinitely more than the thought that we are alone in it.

maybe if they spent more time dealing with people who are not then they might find it easier to not treat everyone like they are.

Long ago, when I was still a member of TotalFark, one of the "open" threads started talking about anime. TotalFark is more general (though usually silly) news and so is equal parts jock/average joe/nerd. Here on Slashdot I probably don't have to explain what anime is to anyone, but on TF you might run into the odd person who does.

Anyway, so we're discussing our favorite Anime and giving recommendations, and one guy comes into the thread and just goes apeshit at everyone participating, asking how we could possibly enjoy that filth and accusing us of all sorts of things. After questioning him about just why he thought it was all horrible, we found out that his only experience with Anime was as part of some anti-child-porn group or task force (I believe it had to do with FBI investigations, but this was quite long ago...) and he had only ever seen lolita/CP hentai. Perhaps he was older or somehow managed to avoid any utterance of Dragonball Z in high school, but since that was his only experience with Japanese Animation he thought it was representative of all Japanese Animation. As I recall, it wasn't hard to make him realize that what he experienced was a only small portion of hentai, which was only a small portion of anime in general.

If the police only spend their time dealing with human filth, and the only decent people they meet are police, it could easily explain how many get the us vs. them mentality. It doesn't excuse it, but it does give a starting point to remove it. It might also help explain the "Blue Code of Silence", because they think that even if a fellow cop does something bad it would be worse to turn them over to the criminals (i.e. everyone who is not or was not a cop.)

As with your idea, requiring police to rotate between "enforcement" and "public service" roles would probably do a lot to mellow out the antagonizing ones and be far easier than any current attempt to actually bring them to justice when they abuse their position. It wouldn't solve all the problems, but would go far to bridge that gap.

I'll be honest, I came here not to read his "article" but to read all the posts complaining/slamming him. So perhaps Slashdot is counting on ad revenue from that (except that my Karma gets rid of ads...)