First, you can take sample populations that 'exclusively possess" a particular feature, and they turn out not to. That is, it may be common for Danes to be blonde, but you can look at a large group of people from Denmark and see many people who don't have blonde hair, or otherwise don't fit whatever model of how that group should look someone is offering. You can try to filter your sample, for example, looking only at people who have records of descent from natives to that area going back five or ten generations, and that still will give you a population that has many exceptional examples wo don't have all the features you think make up a race. This happens near universally - you can go to more isolated villages or look at whole regions where it is believed the inhabitants lived cut off from other races, and you will still find that there are lots of exceptions. You can test this with 'extreme' examples - If you look at 100 Zulus, maybe half will look like stereotypical Zulus, and there will be 10% that are atypically short, lighter skinned, broader faced, narrower nosed or even with a "roman" nose, etc. (And it won't be the same 10% for each feature). Yeah, you're probably not going to find a blonde Zulu with epicanthic folds that stands 4" 3" as an adult in a sample of just 100, but you will find a lot of people who look not quite like what the standard model Zulu (or Polynesian Islander or Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be.

        Second, those physical racial features have mostly evolved over periods as short as 10,000 years. You can find cases where they may have had longer periods of isolation, but even those are pretty short as regards human evolution. For example, the best estimate for when proto-Asiatic ancestors of the Native Americans crossed the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska might be as high as 20,000 years, but most ethnolgists think that, a) people kept following along on that same route until much more recently, and b) the various Pacific peoples also made it to the New World sometimes by oceanic routes. So, even the differences between a 'typical' North Korean and a "typical" Cherokee probably accrued over less than 10,000 years. (And the differences between "atypical" ones of each group? They took the exact same total time. Try to visualize that.). That's set against an evolutionary history of roughly 100 times as long for the development of tool use, fire, and other innovations that show original thinking, invention, creativity, general intelligence and what some people still call progress. The genes that let some of our ancestors figure out how to make a better clay pot than the last design have been steadily circulating among populations and leaving behind artifacts in all cultures. If those genes are still very rare, then the claim is that genes for being smart, creative, and adaptable don't have any better survival value than the others, as they get into populations the same ways as the genes for short Zulus, but somehow, they are not being selected for, over periods 100's of times as long. In fact, it's a claim that creative intelligence has negative survival value.

The reason this "science" on racial differences is nothing but good old fashioned racism follows from these two points. The argument becomes "Intelligence has no survival value. Nature selects against it except under very special circumstances such as Ice Ages. Inferior genes water down the superior ones unless the superior ones are kept isolated from them." Ultimately, this becomes the "one drop of black blood makes you black" argument of the Civil War era American South. And none of that, from the claim that bad genes can water inherently good genes down until they vanish, to the echoes of apologetics for American slavery, is science.

Lots of times, you see something wrong, and you want to point it out, but by limiting commenting to people with rep, if you don't have rep on that particular board, you are prevented from correcting the error. That means that there's wrong information without any hint that it might be wrong. So the worst-case scenario there is pretty bad.

By contrast, if you remove those limits, the worst-case scenario is that people who don't know what they're doing might say that it is wrong, at which point you'll have to investigate to figure out who is right. And if they're wrong in saying that it is wrong, you (who also probably have no rep) can comment and explain why they're wrong about it being wrong. And if they're right, then you saved yourself a lot of swearing.

So the worst-case scenario is considerably better without those limits (ignoring spam, of course, but that can largely be taken care of by a combination of a proper reporting mechanism, disallowing links by posters without reputation, etc.).

As for whether you can trust people with more rep to know more, for the most part, people who get upmodded more are, in fact, people who do know more. Mind you, there's always the possibility of an echo chamber effect, but that's a possibility no matter what you do. By using a weighted voting scheme, people who have shown more knowledge (and thus are more likely to be correct) can overcome voting of people who haven't (and thus are more likely to be wrong). Statistically speaking, this approach makes sense, at least on the average.

For maximum effectiveness, though, such a scheme should be combined with automatic flagging of any post whose reputation changes too far or too often, for future review by other subject-matter experts.

A self-signed certificate is never more secure than a CA-signed cert. Period. The only benefit to self-signed certs is cost. Any other perceived benefits are merely side effects caused by forcing you to do extra security checks to make up for the lack of a CA—checks that you could do anyway, but probably won't.

For example, if you're paranoid about a CA issuing a cert for your organization to someone else, then you might add code in your app to do your own set of checks to decide whether a cert is valid (such as ensuring that a specific cert issued within your organization is part of the chain of trust). You can do such tests on a CA-signed cert just as easily as you can on a self-signed cert. Even if that your policy is to trust only a pre-distributed set of self-signed certs, you can do the same thing by pre-distributing CA-signed certs.

Thus, in the worst-case scenario, the CA-signed cert gives you no less protection than the self-signed cert, and in the best case, it gives you additional protection.

So for some children there may certainly be a benefit to less vacation.

This really points to a need for a less formal summer education program, where parents can send their kids while they work, but where the kids aren't penalized for being gone when the parents decide to go on vacation. Each week be split between two classes for half a day every day with the subjects varying throughout the summer. One week might be "sculpting with clay" and "iambic pentameter unleashed". Another week might be "the science of butterflies" and "math in the real world". We actually had something like that at the university in my home town, though it only ran for a week or two, IIRC. It would be great if there were something like that throughout the entire summer, rather than the mostly non-educational summer programs that are fairly common.

Well, it parses now, but it still looks as archaic as K&R C.

That's the difference between learning and memorizing. To learn something, you incorporate it into your way of thinking. You might be able to pass the test by rote memorization, but that's not the same thing as truly understanding it.

Unfortunately, schools tend to overemphasize memorizing rather than understanding, which is a big part of the reason why kids forget so much over the summer. As you said, they never really learned it to begin with, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word.

The key word was "professionals". By definition, a profession is a job that requires specific training or skills. Flipping burgers at McDonald's is not really a profession, per se; it's just a job. That's a subtle, but critical distinction.

Also, there's a college education, and then there's a college education. Just because you can major in underwater basket weaving doesn't mean you have a degree that qualifies you for an actual career. :-)

Not really. College has a lot of filler, too, and kids have it drilled into their heads that they have to make good grades so they can get into college, and they have to go to college if they want a good job. As a result, about two-thirds of Americans go on to college, not just folks who truly want to learn. And although I've known plenty of high-school students that I consider to be basically adults, I've known orders of magnitude more college students who I don't. :-)

I'm similarly unconvinced of the need for education degrees, and that's coming from someone whose parents are both retired from teaching. It seems like a degree for the purpose of having a degree, rather than because it truly equips you to be a good teacher.

In my opinion, to teach well, you have to know a lot about a subject and be truly excited about sharing that knowledge. At its core, teaching is about finding ways to explain the material that the students can relate to, which means you have to really understand the subject so that when you notice a student who doesn't seem to grasp a concept, you figure out a different way to explain it. You have to constantly adjust your way of presenting material based on the composition of your class, because the explanation that worked well for one class may not work well for the next. One student may learn well through his ears, while another learns better through her eyes. And so on.

And to recognize when the students are struggling, a big part of teaching is finding ways to relate to the students, to get them to care about what you're teaching, and to get them to be open and honest with you when they're struggling, rather than a couple of weeks later when they fail the test. And IMO, the best way to get students to care enough to ask for help is to get them excited about learning the subject, which requires you to be excited about the subject. And the teachers who are most excited about a subject tend to be the ones who have immersed themselves in it.

In short, IMO, the best way to learn how teach is to first learn everything you possibly can about a subject, then actually teach other people about the subject. All else is meaningless.

Today, college teachers are subject-matter experts. High school teachers are often subject-matter experts. The farther you get below that level, the more it becomes a mixed bag. And that's a big part of what's wrong with our education system today. In our quest to retain the basic architecture of the one-room schoolhouse, where a single teacher teaches the kids every subject, we've created a system where the teachers are not subject-matter experts. They teach the things they're told to teach, and they do so by learning what they need to teach. This tends to result in a teaching style where teachers just regurgitate the textbook without adding anything above and beyond it. This style of teaching, of course, is not significantly better than just telling the students to read the textbook.

In an ideal schooling situation, you'd have a separate teacher for each subject, from the very beginning, each of whom was skilled in the subject area. You'd have a music teacher who was an actual musician. You'd have an art teacher who actually knew how to draw. You'd have a history teacher who loved history. And each of those teachers would make the subject exciting, because he or she would eat and breathe that subject. Those teachers would spend most of their college careers learning that subject, with remarkably little time spent on the mechanics of teaching.

After all, if you learn the most from the teachers who have the deepest understanding of a particular subject, then someone who spent most or all of his or her college career learning how to teach is likely to be uniquely qualified to teach pedagogy, and not much else. It's not that there isn't value in learning teaching techniques, but there are only so many hours in a college career, and every hour you spend learning about pedagogy is an hour that you could have spent learning the subject matter that you're actually going to teach, which in the long run, will likely be much more valuable, both to you and to your students.

Second, I and many of the teachers that I have worked with *really* like the year round schedule. I can't speak for every teacher, and there are certainly a lot of teacher that prefer the traditional schedule, but I find the year round schedule to give me more useful freetime. On the one hand, I can more efficiently plan for shorter periods of time (I can make plans and have a chance of getting to them before I have completely forgotten what I was thinking---late September to mid December is a much easier period of time to plan for than mid August to mid December). On the other hand the year round schedule means that I am off when other people are still in school (and since year round schedules can vary quite a lot, even if everyone were year round, I would still be off at a different time from many people), which means that I can get into tourist attractions (Yosemite or Disneyland or whatever you prefer) without having to fight massive crowds. My experience with working in year round schools has been much better than my experience in traditional schools.

On the flip side of it, those advantages are also disadvantages. I recently left a company where I worked for just shy of 13 years. Despite my best efforts to block my vacations into long blocks, I still found that I could never take a long enough break from work to fully recover from work stress before I was thrown back into things. I find that most people need long breaks—or as you put it, to completely forget what they were thinking—to maintain sanity. Without that, they'll always be running at about 75%.

And the idea of arbitrary vacation schedules that are different from other schools might sound good in principle, but when you start to look at it more carefully, it doesn't work. First, at least in the U.S., pretty much everybody wants to visit family around Thanksgiving and Christmas. This results in a strong tendency to make one of the breaks between grading periods include the period from Christmas through New Year's Day. Once you nail down one vacation, assuming you make all of your grading periods the same length, you basically end up with everybody having roughly the same vacations in spite of your best efforts.

And if you do somehow manage to buck the trend and get a completely different vacation schedule, you now have the problem of your kids wanting to go spend time with other members of your family. "Sorry, kids, but they're not on vacation until next month, and you're back in school by then. You can always go visit after you finish college." Not to mention that families in which both parents teach at different schools might find themselves unable take a vacation at all. It's bad enough having spring break fall at different times. Been there, done that. But not having any common breaks all year? That would just be miserable.

In short, no, year-round education is a terrible idea. I understand the argument for it, but over the long term, the downside in terms of mental health far outweighs any possible benefit from the increased learning. If you really want kids to learn over the summer, IMO, you'll do a lot less harm by handing every student a camera and telling them to take pictures of things while on vacation, then try to figure out what those things are via the Internet, and do a show-and-tell in front of the class when they get back in the fall. This has the advantage of not feeling like homework, while encouraging them to look for opportunities to learn in their everyday lives outside of class. And that, right there, is quite possibly the single most important thing to teach the young people of today.

And that means you can't bring them anywhere near consumers, since they're basically bombs waiting to go off at the slightest provocation.

So are batteries, gasoline tanks.... Use a lot of small flywheels instead of one big one, and make sure the casing can contain the pieces if the flywheel fails catastrophically.

At its core, the purpose of government—and by this, I mean any legitimate government, as opposed to tyranny—is to protect the powerless from the powerful. Nation states with organized governments can out-compete other forms of organization precisely because they limit abuse by those with power, allowing those without power to flourish, thus creating a larger market for goods and services.

The reason we have labor laws is not merely that some companies will abuse workers, but rather that any labor contract is inherently not an agreement between equals. With the exception of people who have enough money to retire, the employee will always need the job more than the employer needs that particular person in the job. Therefore, the employee is relatively powerless in any negotiation, and the employer is powerful. Governments regulate those agreements to ensure that companies do not abuse their power to harm individuals who have little choice but to continue working (unless they want to starve).

Labor unions are another approach to balancing employers' power. These groups have many advantages and disadvantages. Their biggest advantage (IMO) is that by pitting the needs of the group as a whole against the employer, they have more leverage to negotiate better terms. Their biggest disadvantage (IMO) is that over time, they tend to become bloated organizations that have trouble representing their members adequately. Either way, to a large degree, labor unions' sole purpose for existing is as a workaround for governments not doing their job properly.

Similarly, the fundamental problem with the argument that free markets are the most moral form of dealing because of a lack of coercion, is that there isn't really a lack of coercion. When you're talking about a local-level free market, there isn't much coercion. You can always go to another store if you don't like the way one store behaves. But when you start looking at companies whose industries have high barriers to entry, such as high tech, infrastructure, and so on, that ceases to be true, because those industries tend to consolidate into monopolies or oligopolies that have much more power than consumers by their very nature. Governments can help restore the balance of power between consumers and those companies in many ways—regulation, socialization, trust busting, and so on. In the absence of action, in such markets, abuse runs rampant.

Space Vampires? They're Space Romans, not really even Space Romanians or Space Transylvanians...

I hope audiences are not too tired of "dark", because Guardians set audiences up for one of Marvel's darkest ever story lines. "Darker" than the "Dark Phoenix Saga"? Try darker than 14 year old Kitty Pride with inoperable ovarian cancer.

Warning - Spoiler below, but about an old comics series, not about this movie

Jim Starlin loves to draw comics where Death is the punch line. In the Star Reach underground line, he wrote a story titled "The Birth of Death", and one called "Death Building", Marvel gave Starlin the opportunity to reboot a heroic character one time, and he brought Adam Warlock back as a character who swiftly learns that, within a few years at most, he will kill most of his friends and then die by suicide, in the process of creating a timeline where the schizophrenic anti-messiah he will otherwise become doesn't end up creating the most spectacular genocide evah! ).

End of spoiler
                                   

True, and it looks like we'll never have another Star Wars movie.

Weren't three enough?

One of the points of classical Capitalist Econ 101 is that, if a particular sector of industry consistently makes more than the average profits of business as a whole, tremendous, inexorable, possibly literally transhuman forces, (sometimes called the invisible hand) will push it back into line with the rest of the economy.

When a sector is making a 20% profit against an average for businesses of only about 3.4%, then classic Capitalism would say the forces trying to steer that sector back into line with the rest are about like a bunch of Mind Reading Giant Anime Robots, piloted by D&D 23rd level wizards and led by the Archangel Gabriel, doublewielding Nuclear Powered Uzis and riding the love child of Samatha Stephens and Hellboy.*

          Which makes it really bizarre to see people defending the sector's record profits as though they believe fervently in this free market/invisible hand stuff, but think the problem can be solved by debating with those people on Slashdot who 'just don't understand'. Yeah, shooting straw wrappers at him will stop Godzilla, too. How does it feel when the same theory that tells you it's morally right to defend this enormous profit margin also says the forces acting to take it away are literally more powerful than the combined nuclear arsenals of all the nations?

        Of course, you could believe that Adam Smith missed something there, but if that's so, where does this sense of absolute moral rightness, and the resulting tremendous need to fix all the people who disagree, come from?

* to use a metaphor that should be clear to the typical Slashdot reader.