They are a bigger liability to the community at large than they are to a doctor's office. Refusing to treat them just makes them an even bigger liability.

So you have some crazy who won't get their kids vaccinated, and no sane doctor will see them, so they go to a quack who sells them diluted snot and pronounces them cured, and tells them don't worry about the lingering symptoms, they'll go away, ship those snot-noses back off to school.

How the hell does that help anyone?

Maybe, but dry erase markers release VOCs, so you're damned either way.

While their reasons are crazy, running wired networks is the better thing to do. Keeps the spectrum clean for devices that actually need to be wireless. A classroom full of WiFi easily saturates to the point where performance degrades, especially when you have a bunch of students all loading material on cue from the teacher. While it's technologically possible to do it right with 5GHz if you control the client hardware selection, that is not what people who try to cut corners using wireless are doing; they chintz on APs as well.

I've seen a lot of colleges abandon their wire plant in favor of wireless in the dorms and even in the classrooms. Eventually they will end up putting it all back in as PoE is starting to prolifierate, and may make it into laptops as their power envelopes converge with what PoE can offer. At that point, in addition to all the building-integration devices and IP phones, they'll have demand again for wired connections from the end user. Unfortunately by that time, they'll have spent orders of magnitudes more money than a wired plant costs these days into remodeling, during which time they will have unwittingly allowed contractors to cut wires and leave them stranded in the wallboard with no record of where they are situated.

Wired networks these days are actually pretty cheap. Once you discount the top switches which you need anyway for APs and building integration, access switches can be had for short change.

I don't know, I found the chapter on EnterpriseInterfaceThunkClassEnterpriseGeneratorCOMParameterInterfaceThunk32 COM_Enterprise_Enterprize_ENTERPRISE very illuminating.

Something tells me "hi this is IT, we just finished creating your account. We set the password to 63SHhe737EHS#&7sh#77s73773. You should change it." might actually result in people changing their passwords. Of course the only security it would improve is job security, since they would put in stupid passwords, but at least they are completely culpable at that point.

Wherein lies the problem with our tax system. Were it not for rich folks making all the rules, we'd not have had this silly "income tax" notion in the first place. It's pretty much the very definition of a tax designed to prevent upward mobility.

In a property tax system, you do not have to pay the tax on your basket of oranges by taking oranges out of the basket. You can just as easily pay it with apples from your basket of apples. If a person has unwisely accumulated a disproportionate amount of illiquid wealth, they would just mortgage some of it, or the government could assume an ownership share. However in such a system, people who knew they would be paying tax each year would avoid doing so, and this is a good thing, because it provides disincentive against destructive asset bubbles and encourages productive use of property.

Yep, other than the government being owned wholesale by the rentier class, the real problem is here, you nailed it. For the forseeable future, there will always be a sovereign entity that caters to wealth horders' needs, so any move towards a property tax system would have to be accompanied by some rather ingenious legislation and enforcement (and when is the last time you saw that happen?)

The other big problems used to be the intrusive measures necessary to prevent the hiding of wealth and the giant bloat of the accounting industry such a system would produce, but since we have an engorged financial/accounting sector anyway, and the government and corporate institutions seem hell bent on making privacy a thing of the past for reasons of control and profit respectively, those are no longer obstacles.

Ownership of media conveys more rights than licensing it, in that the First-Sale Doctrine is entrenched case law for hard product, wheras applying it to digitally streamed media is still subject to some legal churn, so only applies to those than can afford the tort. Also given current trends, first-sale rights are only likely to erode.

Well, I suppose the leet retro-format people are into LD instead, which is still analog but doesn't wear so much. Of course, while there are some things that were only released on LD, more was released on VHS, so if getting at un-transcribed publications is the goal, one just has to hope there's well preserved stock.

The sad thing is that sites like Facebook are not adding all that much value. If you think what it would take hardware-wise to just run it all as distributed P2P we're talking basically about the cost of a wifi AP and a USB HD, given the ISP costs are foregone. There's some software value added, but most of their software development is for their own benefit (dealing with scaling issues solely because it's a hub-and-spoke architecture, and figuring out how to monetize) not for the user's benefit.

So this "free service" probably is a freebie to the tune of maybe $10/year, yet people flock to it as if it is the greatest bargain ever.

Some people lack the ability to understand Perl code, and fear what they do not understand.