I was really fortunate because he was giving a presentation in my city last night, sponsored by the Center For Inquiry.

He was vibrant and sharp, but clearly not in the best of health. He talked about recently going through chemotherapy and then later having open-heart surgery. I'm really glad I got to see him.

I hope I'm doing so well in my 80s.

Several of the prepaid smartphone plans come with data included. Mine is $35/month for 300 minutes and unlimited text and data. Virgin Mobile and Straight-talk both have some decent Android phones with unlimited voice and data for under $55/month.

> I'm a programmer but I don't spend all my day programming. There are long periods of time where I do no programming at all, I'm helping out others, answering questions,

Imagine now you help five colleagues solve their problems - they get the credit because they did the commits, and you get fired for being unproductive.

I once worked for a guy who said, "be careful what you measure - you'll get more of it".

Here it is:
Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life~, in the cases of the third and fourth planets their surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide-in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.

He also referred to Mike (the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a "pocket of negative entropy".

Throw in something about metabolism and you probably have a pretty good set of parameters for identifying life. Including "negative entropy" eliminates fire from being a life form, since while it does reproduce and energy is metabolized, it is also increasing the entropy around itself.

> but life could generally be defined as the ability to actively resist entropy

Indeed, that's what I thought of too - I think it was in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that he used a phrase something like "phenomena of localized negative entropy".

There's no need for a special tool. Just put unique serial numbers on each rag. Note which ones you check out at the beginning of a process, then make sure you can account for all of them when you're done with the process.

Sure, putting serial numbers on rags is more expensive than normal rags; but not as expensive as losing a satellite.

I bought one once from this company:
http://pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=PCK&Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=UltraClassic

It was nearly identical to the lab full of "original" IBM keyboards we had.

I've never used it myself, but I once worked with a librarian who tried out Koha and found it pretty feature-full.

http://www.koha.org/

It might be a bit of overkill, but it has a large user-base and probably has every feature you could want.

One thing to remember is that Idaho is pretty large in land-area and pretty small in population. There are lots of small towns with really small schools.

One thing this will help enable is kids in these small schools being able to take a wider variety of courses, or more advanced courses that their local school district simply can't afford to offer. Imagine a high school so small that there is only one "science" teacher for all science subjects. Now imagine you're a kid in that school and you love physics and would like to take AP physics so you can get a leg up going to college.

In Boise (over 100k population) there's no problem - there are plenty of teachers and plenty of courses. But if you're in Twin Falls or an even smaller community (like the one Napoleon Dynamite was set it), you're screwed as a kid.

Another thing to consider is that for everyone, the future of education will be web-delivered courses. If you've ever done one, you'll know that courses delivered this way require a different kind of discipline than a "forced to sit in a seat" class. If you agree that the idea of k-12 education is to prepare students for life, then it makes sense that part of the education process is to teach kids how to learn using this relatively new method.

By requiring it of all schools (large or small), it forces the issue of establishing the infrastructure to support it and it also helps level the playing field for kids who are at a geographic disadvantage.

Agreed. I don't give any biller direct access to my accounts but instead I use my credit-union's bill pay to transmit all payments (except one). The exception is the federal student loan folks... I let them auto-draft my payments because they give me 1/4% discount on my interest for doing so. Sadly, that's significant enough to make a difference in my philosophy.

In a similar way, I never use my "visa debit" card that's attached to my checking account as a credit card for the same reason. I only ever use it as a debit card where I have to key in a PIN.