Sure thing. All it will cost him is his life savings plus whatever debt he incurs.

They should have gotten Bose to design the sound. Then it would have been marketing squared!

Yep. Very much so.

Every once in a while Illiad sticks in a new story line, but it's getting more and more rare. I was just struck by the reference to goatce.cx.

Well, I think you went above and beyond a little by actually melting down rock :) I have some projects with the kids - those "science" kits from the teacher/parent store, Mindstorms, Hour of Code, that sort of thing... but melting rock in a forge is pretty hard core.

Indeed. The challenge now seems to be teaching the kids to vet information since it is now trivial to access. I'm struggling a bit with how to do this, but I think surfing the internet with them seems to be effective.

I think this depends heavily on your local chapter. I was extremely unimpressed as a child, and my kids have not gotten into Girl Scouts/Cub Scouts - though there is of course still time.

Unfortunately that won't work for London: Tibetans can't dig inside the M25 or their shovels spontaneously combust.

Sorry, yes, you are correct.

Your argument smells.

Yes, more skilled people in general earn more. But (and in the words of Ben Goldacre: It's a big but) there are exactly two issues with this in our modern hypercapitalism, and they are related:

a) A class of very low skilled workers has moved to the top of the food chain and takes a massive part of the total wages for itself

b) The general level of pay is staggeringly low. If you compare the wealth of your western nations to the wealth of the average individuals within, you should be frightened. Most western countries can spend a few billions here and there without so much as shrugging. As nations, we have more, much much much more money available than ever in history. The most lavish spending of any king in history pales compared to everyday infrastructure, science or military projects of today. As people, we are richer than the average middle ages peasant, but in comparison to our nations wealth, we have less.

The main issue is that no one seems to agree on what to measure. "Student performance" is too fuzzy. Does that mean "proficiency"? Well, that's straightforward. But then you have problems graduating students who never become proficient, and it points out just how unfair society is. No one likes that! No one has created a metric that gives all parties an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling for all parties, that is very true.

It was "commercially viable", but so were it's plethora of competitors. The clones took over the world (except for maybe education and the Mac's eventual niche markets).

Except, unlike a group of producers acting in concert to exert market power; an employer still has many other options for labor. They can outsource, refuse to sign a contract and bring in replacements, move to another non-union location; unlike a monopoly where there is no other source of the product. Granted, those are not easy things to do but hey still are viable competitors to a union workforce. The government has intervened in the workplace in many ways, sometimes to the workers favor (unions, labor laws) and other times to the employers (non-competes, right to work laws,letting bankruptcy abrogate contracts and pension liabilities).

And inside, a modern x86 processor is actually a giant hardware emulation of x86 instructions with a RISC/VLIW core... You call it cheating, and I call it optimizing.

But this would happen with a macrokernel as well... you can't just magically make networking overhead disappear...

I wasn't intending on saying that CISC was superior to RISC... what I was more saying is that there has been more money put into CISC processors, and so they develop faster.

It's just a simple fact of money == better access to stuff to make more money.