Why do they even bother with domain names anymore? Wouldn't it be easier at this point to just get an easy to remember IP address?

I'm an ex-physics major in my 40's and regularly hang out with 20-somethings who are studying chemistry, physics, and programming. Something I noticed that totally and completely shook the earth I stood on was how much smarter they actually are than people were when I was 20. Kids today grow up with insane amounts of information at their fingertips. They don't have to open an encyclopedia to learn something not taught in school, and they're not limited by the half-page description in that encyclopedia. They were exposed to complex and detailed facts about the world that were nothing more than fantasy or religion two or three decades ago. Their brains grew up with so much information that their brains learned to cope and understand it all in ways my brain never had the chance to do.

The one thing though that I have over them is experience, caution, and patience. I have the ability to do something right the first time even though it takes me longer. They are faster but it takes them more tries to get it right and many times my one try is much faster than their 10 tries. You've got to use what you have to your advantage. If my boss needs something done quick-and-dirty style he asks one of the younger people. If it needs to be perfect he asks me. We all have a place here and by combining all of our strengths together as a team we kick some serious ass.

Wait....did you just say you're interested to see if they can do better than Jersey Shore and Honey Boo Boo? Seriously?

This is why it's so backwards to accuse capitalism of being "bad" when it's government that's the actual problem. The purpose of government in a capitalist society is to make sure monopolies can't ever exist since a monopoly is the enemy of capitalism. It also has the duty of doing things like making sure people have a method of due process that they can use to punish those who hurt people with their products, or creating offices that set safety standards that must be followed. It also must handle industries that are natural monopolies so private people can't exploit them for their own profit, like water distribution, fire and police protection, and sewers. Without all that you can't have capitalism and any attempt will fail. Then you'll get to hear the cries from scores of people who have been tricked by politicians into believing it really wasn't their fault.

Try DailyRoads. It's got the G-force auto-save feature and it can record in the background so you can still use google maps for navigation.

Sorry but it's the source of a great deal of frustration and contention. I got an android before my wife got an iphone. If I wanted to put some music or movies on my phone it was as simple matter of plugging a usb cable and dragging and dropping files. It took both of us an hour to figure out how to get a movie on her phone. Anytime I want to update my media, it only takes a few minutes. When she wants to do the same thing I hear swearing and frustration and how complicated the process is. The final straw was when she got a laptop and synced her phone to it and it wiped everything off her phone, since Apple has decided for her that she can only sync to one library on one computer. So bitch all you want about the snotty anti-Apple bias. Slashdot is a place for geeks who like to be able to actually do what they want with their technology and really don't like it when a company tells us how we will do things, especially when it makes the things we want to do harder and more complicated, if not impossible.

The reason you're paid on-par is because American wages have dropped a massive amount in the past few decades. It's a plan that's been at work for decades. We were warned about it but failed to listen.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

"To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

"So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out."

So yeah, it's great for people who come from other countries to work, but it came at the expense of the American people who used to be able to afford vacations, health care, and college but now no longer can.

Yes! Very much yes! The reason he mentioned the article ignoring the energy input of sunlight is because that's the whole reason we're using these energy sources to begin with. You're twisting it and trying to make it sound like he's talking about perpetual energy. The reason these things are energy sources to begin with is because they contain the energy of the sun and by extracting them we end up with a net gain of energy.

The energy it takes to extract and refine coal, oil, and natural gas is less than the energy we get from burning them so there is a net gain.
The energy it takes to extract and process corn and other biofuels is more than the energy we get from them so there is a net loss.
That's why it's stupid, because we have to burn fossil fuels to even have biofuels in the first place. Until it takes less energy to produce and process biofuels, biofuels will be dependent on fossil fuels to exist and we'll just be wasting even more energy than if we skipped the whole biofuel thing in the first place.

You're assuming the whole point of the class is to teach you about the subject. The main thing you learn in high school is how to learn. Different subjects require different methods of learning and without many of them you're not going to do well in the rest of your life. You may not need to know any of the physics you were taught, but you most certainly have needed the learning skills you gained in that class. The ones who weren't paying attention anyway will suffer the rest of their lives being unable to learn as fast as you and it will most certainly show if you ever have to work in the same job as any of them. Very few people will ever need to know how long the 100 year war lasted, but you will need the ability to learn seemingly useless facts later on in life.

I went to Merriam Webster to look up the word liberal.
6 a : of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism

I then click the link to "liberalism" and it said:
"Political and economic doctrine that emphasizes the rights and freedoms of the individual and the need to limit the powers of government."

and

"In the economic realm, liberals in the 19th century urged the end of state interference in the economic life of society. Following Adam Smith, they argued that economic systems based on free markets are more efficient and generate more prosperity than those that are partly state-controlled."

and then

"After World War II a further expansion of social welfare programs occurred in Britain, Scandinavia, and the U.S. Economic stagnation beginning in the late 1970s led to a revival of classical liberal positions favouring free markets"

I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore.

The Red Cross has lobbyists. They're not doing it just for the.....oh wait.....

What's next? They just might make smoking marijuana illegal.

They're not nearly as cool as Garbage Pail Kids.

While reading that, the "Who's on first" routine kept going through my head. One of the many reasons I stopped using FF. I might try it again in a month when they get to version 28 though.

We're already focused on alternative fuels. We're making massive leaps in that area too. The problem is that those alternatives are still more expensive and less efficient than oil so they can't replace it. Forcing a switch would drastically increase the cost of energy for millions of poor people who would only become far more poor than they already are now. That would guarantee that any politician forcing such a change would never be re-elected.