Our education system is set up for average and can not handle the two sides of the bell.

We can rail all we want about how the education system is so "stupid", but it's not. It produces exactly the kind of people that a monopoly system is required to produce. Look all around - wherever parents have a choice of schools, they send their kids to the best one, often if the costs are severe.

They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. ...The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. ... Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it. -
George Carlin, Life Is Worth Losing (2005)

Agreed. The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of people in the world: people who like hula hoops, and people who are joyless humorless busybodies. I think we can all agree that Julie's unfortunate problems were completely predictable from her distaste for hula hoops.

"Just" put more money into those programs?

How many more votes will that give the party in power in the next election? Probably none, so it won't happen.

Democracy works hard to please the 51% -- not the 5% of parents that have a gifted child.

Of course those parents pay taxes just like other parents, but that doesn't mean the state has to give a damn.

Democracy doesn't require that the state please everyone -- it only must please 51%. And the system is constantly adjusting to figure out how to screw the 49% to please the 51%. Public education gets caught up in the process like everything else touched by the democratic process.

Does the word "bossy" upset you? Do you need to share your struggles, to empower others to better complain? Worry not, as many people are here, including myself, to read your comments and lovingly mock. Now, please, continue...

We were promised flying cars, home fusion reactors and hoverboards for next year. We already should had sent a tripulated mission to Jupiter, and the world should had ended 2 years ago. Sometimes our expectations have no grounds on the real world.

But anyway, maybe believing in some fantasies (like there is such thing as justice, and in this case, living forever) could improve things, maybe with that belief we could finally care about making our world to be sustainable in the long term.

You're assuming the desired target is within range...

It *IS* easily done, right?!?

What are your thoughts on this one?

Not unless you use a hidden camera. If you use a visible camera and no one objects, you can assume their implicit permission

But if you're standing on a pier photographing a beach, aren't you 'hidden' in that most subjects do not see your camera? 16MP sensors are amazing things when coupled with a good lens.

The large number of persons who also idolized Steve Jobs, I suspect.

The trick with good times is when they don't last. What we see, more so in this cycle that most, is centralization of power and responsibility/regulation (there has never existed a more regulated society than the modern West).

The cost of this is extreme - by some estimates, most people pay 30-60% of their earnings for the year to support such a structure (if you don't understand the average 22% cost of goods as embedded income taxes, google for the Harvard economics study). When we have an extreme downturn, like now (we need 350,000 jobs per month added for 10 straight years just to get back to "Bush era" employment numbers), people can't afford it. Just this week we have the example of Obama saying that people should cancel their phone service to pay for his healthcare scheme, but that's just a glaring example of a pervasive problem.

Only so many people will allow their homes to be confiscated to pay for the ostentatious lifestyle in DC and on Wall Street, while they're having trouble putting food on the table for their families. If trends continue, the USD will lose its place as the national reserve currency (debt-to-gdp is over 100% now; Bretton Woods was agreed upon when the USD was still backed by gold) which will cause a rapid loss of buying power. And the more the US outsources, the less will be there when the USD loses its value. At some point, they can crank up the printing presses to fund poverty programs, but when people stop accepting dollars, there's nothing else to do but to implement wage and price controls and/or seize the means of production. The odds of a revolt go up with each step along the way.

The shame of it is, we can see this coming, and we can recognize that we need decentralization and de-escalation of power, but the political system does not allow for it to back itself down. Even the very name, "lawmakers" is telling - "law-removers" isn't in the lexicon.

Jefferson himself predicted the situation, and even recommended revolution as the solution. I'd rather see a peaceful and economic one.

For a networking or storage appliance, it should get on the network using stateless autoconfiguration.

Hey, man, you've given yourself away as being from the future.

pfSense is a good example of how to do an interface well for network configuration. I'm not sure that defining a network topology in a directory server would be easier or better.

Do you mean that in most countries, if you take a picture of a crowded beach, you'd need six thousand model releases to be legal?

'Cause that doesn't sound sane. Not that most regulations are.

and apparently there's nothing more newsworthy coming across the firehose. I suppose we should take this as a sign that many people have stopped contribuitng to /. Perhaps they're over at SoylentNews now.

So we learned nothing from the 2001 US bombardment and invasion of Saudi Arabia then?

Either Ahmadinejad or Assad are beind this one. It doesn't matter that Ahmadinejad is out of power - he wanted to nuke Israel (it doesn't matter if that was a mistranslation). Assad just needs a good bombing anyway (it doesn't matter how he's going to price his oil).

'Cause Blackwater got BILLS TO PAY (it doesn't amtter that Blackwater changed its name to Xe and then to Academi to cover its tracks). And we've got bombs on the shelf that are getting close to their expiration date! Plus: jobs!

Hey, maybe one of the eds just randomly pushed a journal post to the front page.