Right. So does letting thousands of people stranded on a freeway for 18 hours and children stay in schools overnight. Anybody thought about the overtime pay and economic loss of getting people stuck in a hazardous situation? What IF someone died during this fiasco? Should there be a class action lawsuit against the City, the Sate? If people died because of official decision should there be a criminal probe and charge the Mayor and the Governor with criminal negligence?

Compare to criminal and civil lawsuits the money lost to shutdown a government seems minimal. That is, unless, you want to put a price tag on a human life. If we do, can we start with yours?

I call bullshit.

Google Doc for business requires a yearly fee, per user as well. Adding additional administrative personnel and all, and assuming local hosting (Assuming UK Government is not stupid enough to trust Google's cloud for government data), the cost might came out awash, pending their negotiation with Microsoft.

And guess what, Microsoft does have one of the most effective productivity package, including Access, OneNote, Projects. Excel Spreadsheet is top of the line with data access and all.

Personally I think Microsoft and Google both have quality products. I would hate to see either one go, although with more advancement from Google's suite that might not be too far off. Then Google will simply be another Microsoft and become a menace to the slashdot crowd

Basically, parent post is nothing more than a straw man argument. I do think we need to do more to ensure we have good teachers... I've run across a fair number who have no business leading a class. Whether I bitch about prison guards isn't relevant.

As far as parents "not doing their job" that is simply not true. Studies today show that mothers are just as engaged as their parents and grandparents in terms of quality time. Fathers of today are, overall, more engaged than their parents and grandparents.

I personally spend an average of 15 hours a week working with my 8 and 10 year old working on foreign language, computer programming and their normal schoolwork. Even if I did not spend that much time, I'd still be allowed to complain about the quality of a program that my tax dollars support.

Straw man argument. +5 insightful. Gotta love slashdot.

Brought peace?

;-P

What do you even know about China? Did you know that it was home to the largest and most advanced city humanity would ever see until 19th century London?

It's not just China, East Asia as whole loves to anthropomorphosize things. Jesus... have you seen all the x-tans that come out of Japan?

Well, let's see, they invented movable type printing, a calendar that was as accurate as the Gregorian but developed hundreds of years earlier, percussive cap drilling that was capable of the deepest wells in the early 19th century, paper currency, watertight compartments partitioning ships, dental fillings, dominoes, clockwork escapements, forensic entomology, multi-stage rocketry, pontoon bridges, toilet paper, electronic cigarettes, Non-invasive prenatal diagnostic testing for Down's Syndrome, Synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin, and I know it's cliche, but since you arbitrarily set the period at 1500 years I have to include gunpowder.

You're talking about people who invented the compass. Navigation relative to magnetic fields is kind of a big deal. I'll spare you the litany of other things.

WOOSH.

You have an interesting definition of 'vaporware'.

Not the best example considering a) the US has the highest drinking age in the world, bar none and b) the fact that special rights are being conferred after the age of legal majority for voting and all sorts of other independent actions is ethically incongruent at a minimum.

You should have picked on something sensible, like not allowing tweens to drive.

Now, now Ethanol-fueled, we've been over this before. When you go into a room with a mirror, that's not a different person that you are "meeting".

The drake equation does not take into consideration that most civilizations destroy themselves when they achieve the point of being able to communicate

One other point... we have a data set of less than one to work with, ourselves. I do not think that we can extrapolate based on our experience. Can we say with any kind of certainty that other species would follow a similar evolutionary path as ours? Would a smaller planet result in a slower evolutionary process and less global conflict once intelligence does arise? I don't know the answer to that or the thousands of other questions about how intelligent life arises. Regardless, one data point is worthless in trying to extrapolate to a whole universe.

And the reason why I say we have LESS than one example... our data point is still in progress. Perhaps the last few centuries were growing pains and we will finally mature... perhaps you are right and we destroy ourselves.

Actually it does... it is the last variable "L", the length of time that civilizations release detectible signals into space. By your theory, this L is very low.

I guess they could always move everything back out, then rents could be lower so property owners lose money and unemployment could be higher too, surely that's the great solution these brain-dead leftist idiots want.