Not really.

While people on slashdot might agree with this proposal, politically it is no different than all those other 'stunt' bills that have no chance of passing. The people proposing it get to stand up and say 'look what I did!', while being safe from any negative publicity from effects of their actions if it did pass. This IS pretending to lead.

I suspect that for most people it is not even a matter of 'I don't care as long a I am safe', but of 'if I do not vote to keep my representative in place, one from the OTHER side might get the seat!', so most just get reelected over and over no matter what they do.

Well, the only two possible outcomes are there is either systemic sexism, or women really are inferior otherwise they would meet the same standards and the meritocracy would see similar advancement and careers.

The inverse is often used as a test too, and is not considered offensive.

It should also be noted that in media, the number of projects that fail the reverse is negligible, while the former is extremely common, even in content that passes the first.. Thus the inverse is useful in demonstrating just how minimal the requirement should be and how unidirectionally it tends to fail.

Well, long term, it is a problem to be solved. Each leap forward has generally resulted in more medium income jobs being replaced by low income ones than high income ones. Each wave has resulted in a increased standard of living for a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. This might not initially sound like a problem if one pictures himself being on the winning side of the shift, but the bottom can only get knocked so far out before you run into problems with insufficient consumer demand or outright civil unrest.

'Quantum Computing' is the current buzz technology that will finally 'do it', thus it is being being held up as the big hope in a number of fields that have gotten bogged down in just how difficult their respective problems are.

You do realize that Al Gore never made such a claim?

Like everything else, regulation requires maintenance and tuning.... not to mention iteration since this is all new stuff as far as civilization is concerned.

It is also the conservative equivalent of new age, since it involves essentially looking into yourself and 'feeling out' who the bad guys are.

Well, yes, I would feel very different about a powerpoint presentation talking about raping and eating babies vs people actually doing so. I imagine the babies in question would also feel very differently about the two types of events.

Am I missing something? As far as I can tell the document just outlines what they can do, not what they have done. Having been through countless meetings with powerpoint presentations outlining what a department 'can' do, I can appreciate just how far apart these two things could potentially be.

There is often a trade off, but it is not inherent. Security and Liberty are not diametrically opposed, but that false dilemma has proven an effective way to package power grabs.

Yeah, but we can still be annoyed with their actions.

The problem with 'equalizers' is they become a vector for both the good and the bad. The point the OP seems to be trying to make is that they are not only speeding up access to information and good things like that, but they are also focusing and concentrating the type of stress and bullying that happens among school aged children.

One thing we tend to forget as 'geeks' is that new technologies have to be examined across the ENTIRE population, not just 'people like us'. Like it or not, there are potential problems that can not simply be written off by accusing anyone who brings them up as a 'dinosaur'. Technological shifts have consequences, and sticking your head in the sand never helps, it just makes you look blind and weakens your argument.

I keep seeing people say things like this, yet when I look around (even working at a school), I rarely actually see what you are describing. I wonder is it region, demographic, or selective vision?