Each student's parents just need to hire an individual full-time tutor for their kid, who can then teach them in whatever way best suits that individual kid.

This ignores the huge benefits in some situations of working together in small groups. Nothing in education is so simple.

If you look at car ownership from a demographic perspective, car makers are getting pretty panicked about the US market. Young Americans simply do not care about cars the way prior generations have. The aspects of "good car design" that won sales in the past are likely to be less important in the future.

Established companies/industries can be disrupted when customer needs change and the companies don't change accordingly. Lutz might be correct that Apple won't just show up after a few years' work with a better car as we know them today. But it's unlikely they're even trying to play quite the same game.

Asimov's own introduction to the books talks about how little action there is. I don't have it in front of me, but here's roughly what I remember reading: There had been a long gap between when he wrote the first book and when his publisher tried to get him to write more material. He needed a refresher, so he re-read the original stories. And as he read, he kept waiting for something to happen but nothing ever did!

Despite that, it was a compelling story and he obviously wrote a bunch more. But why would you make a TV show or movie out of it? There's almost nothing in it that's more compelling if you see it instead of reading it.

You have an opportunity to help make your town a case study for doing it rightâ"which might result in a decision to avoid online voting. You can advocate on security/vote integrity issues by raising awareness of the complexities. Make a strong push for requiring vendors that don't hide their products' inner workings from their customers. Talk about the importance of being able to audit the vote.

The big questions everyone should answer before making a decision are "what do we gain?" and "what do we lose?" I think people often forget the latter.

I've had Cox, probably in the same city as you (given your reference to CenturyLink), for over a decade. Performance has always been as advertised, often better. Service interruptions have been rareâ"less than one per year. I've never heard different from anyone else.

They recently replaced my modem with one meeting a newer DOCSIS standard, presumably anticipating the upcoming service upgrades.

Based on that set of axioms, it can be completely loving to encourage someone to repent of his sins and choose to follow Jesus. Practicing homosexuality is a sign that someone isn't doing that. It would therefore be unloving or even hateful to affirm homosexual relations.

He didn't "encourage someone to repent". He contributed money to an effort to institutionalize oppression in the law. His actions affected others, so those who disagree are entitled to do the same.

But in no way do I support the demonization or boycott of people just because they have a different opinion of something than I do.

This isn't about someone's opinion of wheat bread. This is about oppression based on a common genetic characteristic, and one that isn't anyone else's problem (as opposed to something like psychopathy). The struggle for gay rights absolutely, unquestionably, is analogous to the struggle for civil rights for african americans. You would have been against the Montgomery bus boycott?

The brilliant and hilarious political writer Molly Ivins wrote the ultimate takedown of Camille Paglia's absurd intellectual methods (20 years ago!). Archive.org has a PDF of the original article from Mother Jones magazine.

If you plan to read it, ignore the rest of this comment, but if you're not going to follow the link, here's the final paragraph of the article:

There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "Poor dear, it's probably PMS." Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "What an asshole." Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole.

Every time I've done prints at local store, the color has been awful. Sometimes the image itself turns grainy. The prints I order through iPhoto are wonderful, though I haven't ordered in a few months. I believe they were using Kodak's service, which is getting handed over to Shutterfly?

Apple is pretty predictable -- once they've started showing their hand. They consistently take successful ideas used in one place and expand them as far as possible. Successful user interface paradigms developed for one application later appear in others. The iOS App Store begat the Mac App Store. So it seems pretty obvious that Apple, having introduced Siri, will expand it.

Except for major OS releases to paid developer program members, Apple almost never releases anything with a "beta" label. Siri is labeled a beta, which surely is meant to indicate that more functionality is planned.

Let's say you have to design a connector for a device which is relatively thin, and is expected to get thinner in the future. Existing common connection standards like USB don't provide the functionality you want. What's the most obvious shape? How about a flat line?

Wow, amazing work. I don't think there's much inspiration required.

Apple's products are hardware-software bundles. Apple sometimes sells updated software to use on hardware you already bought from them. They also are a vendor of content -- none of which they create -- with the goal of making their hardware-software bundles even more appealing.

Stupid exceptions that don't change my argument:
  FileMaker (a mostly-ignored Apple subsidiary)
  You can use iTunes on Windows to purchase music & video and never put them on an Apple device. This wasn't the goal of the iTunes Music Store, and doesn't make much money for Apple.
  The legions of 3rd-party products Apple sells online and at their stores have nothing to do with this.

I've had a nytimes.com login pretty much since they started requiring registration to view stories -- late 90s some time? Right after the paywall was announced, I got an email thanking me for being a long-time account holder and offering me a free year's subscription. I took their offer, of course. How many of those 100,000 subscribers are actually paying?

My wife got an email from TiVo, and I got an email from some branch of Disney vacation sales (no surprise -- we took a trip to DisneyWorld like 5 years ago and they still have my email address).

This is affecting a lot of companies.

That works if and only if Apple tells everyone that's what they're doing. While it may be likely based on past experience, you cannot safely assume a company will do anything in particular.

Innovation often doesn't come from the big guys. Experience so far with the App Store has certainly shown that. There's no good reason for Apple to only look at large publishing operations for input.