That takes effort, and last I checked, an annual fee. The effort part is the deal-breaker though.

Three words: Rare Earth Elements. Being in the hardware business, having a private supply of RE's will be a crucial buffer against price spikes, tariffs, shortages, etc.

This is nature problem, not nurture. Good people choose right over wrong, regardless of personal cost. Blaming others, the family, community or system is merely a convenient, and unfortunately effective way of dealing with the ensuing personal guilt, which ultimately destroys the only natural corrective force available to combat the problem: ones sense of personal responsibility.

In the enterprise, the tablet will replace the laptop once efficient docking, keyboard, mouse and multiple monitor support exist. High-end (as opposed to the current cadre of browser-based office apps) productivity software will also be paramount (esp., the bastion of finance, the spreadsheet).

Law can never hope to be perfect, only effective. That being said, what better legitimacy can a government hope to achieve than its people united in belief of its divine ordination?

GP was referring to a rising water table and its effect on ground stability, not sea level.

See the second link under the "Advanced" filter: Apparently reading level is not based entirely on the quality, density or accessibility of ideas in prose, but in the element of situational humor as well.

Throughout history, every library sale and used bookstore has had its opportunistic patrons, only difference here is that knowledge of the medium is no longer required. What before could only be accomplished by a select few bibliophiles, every patron can now perform. The constant "Oh look dear, see if that nice gentleman over there with the scanner can help you find what you need." factor can't help morale much either.

That would explain the uneasy feeling I get when misspelling a word, usually before I've even had a chance to look at the screen to see what was typed.

"After reading this book and applying the principles it contained on increasing one's abilities..." Great that these inmates were able to do some good with this program, but it is based on Scientology, there is nothing misleading here.

Not to mention the fact it won't take ISP's long to optimize for these kinds of tests, rendering results less than meaningless.

No, those kids and neighborhoods are all the worse for their own neglect of their own obligations to their families and futures. Parental discipline and example only go so far -- whether one is a good person or not lies entirely on the flame that burns from within.

Usually a man's expository mode is much easier to judge than his private life, as the quality of a man's work stands on its own merit where the quality of his parenting can only ever be told through subjective accounts, often one-sided and thus characterized by omission of crucial detail.

So left-right (analytical thinking, creativity) balance is cited as increasingly crucial to success in the marketplace, and has been shown to deteriorate when influenced by the promise of monetary gain. Interesting -- if one thought for one moment that given a random sample of the population, the mere promise of financial reward could somehow enhance those qualities. But in science it is often necessary to demonstrate a principle, however obvious, before moving on to more interesting experiments. Any meritocracy should provide numerous tools useful in identifying those few individuals naturally exceptional in this area (absent any incentive), and whose attention top employers will naturally compete for (often financially). For the talented, financial reward is not a stimulant, but potentially a retainer and definitely an enabler -- it ensures these individuals' needs are met outside the workplace, so they are better able to focus on the higher level problems at hand. It would seem the question here becomes: how do organizations identify, attract and foster this talent amongst the general workforce, knowing financial reward is not the answer? It would seem we should continue to focus on predisposition, identifying those individuals demonstrating a high degree of interest in an array of left-right subject areas, and an ability to attack problems in novel ways.

SMTP message bodies are quite often HTML. POP and IMAP may suffer the same fate as NNTP in another 10-20 years if the signal-to-noise ratio continues to diminish (goes from 99% to 99.999% spam). BitTorrent uses HTTP for tracker communications, but will never be considered mainstream while it is primarily used for copyright infringement, and IM clients may not be running on port 80 yet but they are increasingly using HTTP (if not HTML formatting as well), specifically to minimize the barrier to adoption posed by firewalls. So these examples support the spirit of my previous observation quite well, thanks.