But how often do the kids in the situation I've described actually get to the gifted school?

If they're lucky, they'll stumble across a teacher who's good/interested enough to get paperwork started to get he kid admitted (provided the school isn't full with a waiting list). It's not likely that the gifted school is near the bad neighborhood, so the kid is either going to need daily rides from their parent (hah!), or hope that the school district has the resources to bus them in.

And even then, they're still going to get beaten up at the bus stop, because they're different and misunderstood by the other children.

I appologise for the OT rant. This issue just hits a little close to home. /rant

There, fixed that for you. In all seriousness though, there will always be people who failed on their own, and people who were given no chance to succeed.

Maybe you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but then turned around and used the spoon to cook up a hit of heroin.

Or maybe you were born into a poor, abusive family, but had a natural aptitude for science & math. Unfortunately, you'd get beaten to a pulp in school if you actually showed off your talent, and made the self-defense decision to learn to play football instead.

Of course every individual's situtation is different, but I never assume that every person has a chance to succeed in life. The best we can hope for is to get as close to 100% of our overall potential as we can, and "try to make your child's life better than your own".

Looking at human history as a whole, we're doing much better now than we were 100, 500, or 1,000 years ago. I do fear though that we're nearing the point of diminishing returns, and that scares me.

It's not like this would be the first time the US government came up with false positives...

I've got to disagree. Movies keep breaking box office records, because there's no way to pirate the experience of going out to the theatre. If anything is going to kill that, it's going to be the bad economy.

DVD/Blu-Ray sales also continue to increase. I just read an article yesterday stating that legal music downloads are growing faster than illegal ones. The only explanation is that priacy is just not as rampant as it's being made out to be. In reality, most people (read: average consumer) would sooner go out and pay for a physical disc instead of figuring out how to pirate the movie/music.

I get the feeling that if there were a magical statistic machine that were right 100% of the time (if only!), we'd see that the ratio of pirates:paying customers is rediculously low, and that a relatively few people are the cause of a relative majority of pirating.

It's been said before, but I'll state it here again: Movie/music executives are using the fact that piracy exists at all as an excuse for any decline/slow increse in their sales numbers. In reality, it's more likely a bum economy, and a lower quality of product (though 2008 was an incredible year for movies) that's causing the dip in sales.

That's what she said. [/ducks and runs]

Would you prefer it work well, or look good?
Besides, I don't think it's ugly at all.

The problem was actually a lack of drinking (ie Caffiene). My appologies.

You must be drinking the wrong beer, sir. Please step away from the Bud/Coors/Miller.

The mechanic has been short on work recently, so he put a quart of oil in your gas tank after your last visit, to make sure that you come back again.

It's all in the marketing. Also, I'm not sure you can count fuel weight as being part of the machine. The single-use nature of rockets also makes them questionable choices for counting here.