Wow. You get to miss the point of my post AND show yourself a smart-ass all in one post. Such efficiency!

When I went to college the internet was but a fetus compared to what it is now. And regardless, my classmates were not tasked and paid to teach me something; the guy up front with the diplomas on his wall and the chalk in his hand was. To give a pass to the person who has an assigned responsibility and fails, only to put that responsibility on your buds isn't as clever as you make it sound.

More than half of my engineering curriculum was taught by prolific researchers who couldn't teach worth a damn. I was a tutor through most of college and found myself "reteaching" a lot of the stuff they would teach to others who came looking for help. Not because I was bright, see I struggled to understand the same topics, but I was able to break the topics down in a way that made more sense. Tying "building block" concepts progressively, until the process showed the complete picture, at which point I could teach them to myself for my own understanding, and then to others. That's when I realized good teachers require the whole package of skills; proficiency in their subject and a mind to educate by facilitating the process of connecting concepts.

Sounds like a good place for a free market to open up. What teaching is worth should lean heavily on a feedback/review framework like Amazon's such that people don't end up paying for a class that sucks, by every student's experience, because the professor can't communicate concepts, or communicate at all. Like the time I spent almost weeks trying to figure out what the foreigner in my Space Systems course meant by "papamaaa". By the way, that's "performance".

Yup. Took a stroll down down there myself. Someday I'll post a photo I took of some clown holding a protest sign getting his shoes shined, another clown wearing the commie fist on her shirt, and another with a sign asking for donations for tobacco because he'd run out of smokes. A true circus of ignorance that is a fertile ground for useful idiots.

Congratulations on being a useful idiot.

From the Occupy DC planning meeting of August 2012:

http://youtu.be/z-hc8BjlukI

Here's another one from their own organization meetings with a former NYT "reporter" saying how they don't want to "out themselves" by explicitly stating their goals of overthrowing capitalism.

http://youtu.be/Ogg5wZXyXVQ

http://youtu.be/em4btiNve4Q

Even if you still don't need one. That's why Apple gets to be the company with one of the highest net worths ever and posts the biggest corporate profits ever. I'm glad to have done my part. My wife's iPad sits next to her MacBook by the bed.

Stand by for Occupy Wall Street to protest obscene profits at Apple's headquarters, in three, two; uh nevermind.

Instead of systematically targeting conservative groups by sitting on their paperwork, they should burn it for fuel.

They could have "gone back to their roots" by dumping all the common electronics that you can get anywhere and addressing the do-it-yourselfers by hopping on the robotics/Arduino bandwagons. Turn the retail floorspace that used to be occupied by crap TV's with a robot combat ring or workshop, focus on hands-on projects again, have in-store Arduino workshops and local demos of user projects and robotics competitions. Connect with the local high/middle-school to supply robotics/coding extra-curriculars, sponsor robotics workshops and have those kids drag their parents into the store after class to build their own projects. I don't even participate in most of that stuff, but I could see those would have been great paths to pursue a new market share.

They would still need to close many locations and better compete with the mail order business, but they would have created a different customer segment that would be more enthusiastic than the "I need another charger for my phone" crowd rather than reduce their own business to carrion for the vultures. This was a missed opportunity.

That will lead to more and bigger instances of being affected by the error. The error is always there to a degree, no? But you are only affected by the error when you read the clock and produce a "bad calculation" based on that reading.

Not sure what the answer would be software-wise, but maybe more use of elapsed time routines (vs absolute time) that would account for the corrected clock.

It seems you too are missing the point, just like the aptly named Anonymous Coward above. Why was this actual baby born, or why should it not be? The criteria used to answer this question is at the heart of the matter, and you're standing on legal definitions.

"Congratulations, new human! We've decided not to run you through the blender! Since you've made it this far, here are your inalienable rights!"

Law? How shortsighted! No; it's about what we value, and how we make choices about life and death, and what makes us human.

That woman opened up her body to her mate and that little person ended up there through no fault of its own. Mommy and daddy decided to ignore basic human physiology and now it is, in fact, the end of the story for that kid that ends up like it went through a blender. Your hand is a part of your body; ever tried to put your hand in a blender?

Wondering; what are these "basic human rights" that actual human babies are denied at the rate of 50 million a year?

Take for example the right to freedom. Nobody has to take care of the orangutan for it to exercise this right. But for a baby to exercise its right to freedom, it has to be nurtured for around 18 years or so, and that's much too inconvenient. It takes work and selfless sacrifice, both of which suck. (Speaking as a parent of one, and another on the way)

So how exactly does this make us more compassionate people? When we're willing to free a monkey because it's easy, and prefer to to stop a human heart because keeping it alive is harder?

De-facto trampling of the separation of powers seems to be the order of the day. If I go into a bank with a weapon and tell a cashier I'm going to take money without declaring and announcing I'm committing a bank robbery, I'm still robbing the bank, right? Doing something informally or explicitly has the same effect. Maybe it should open up the possibility of an appeal.

From the President, to Congress, to the Supreme Court, nobody seems to be taking seriously the bit about defending and preserving the Constitution. It seems that when you come from the Ivy League you don't need to keep your oaths, or even think about what they mean because you know better anyways. "Why should I obey boundaries and go through a process when I can affect change right now with the stroke of a pen! That's getting things done!" That's only part of the problem and there's plenty of blame to spread around.

It's good old fashioned human pride. Ignoring human experience to inflate our own egos. We have so much more useless information and new ways of sharing it now that there's no way we can't make things better. We're doing it with politics, education, social/cultural norms, etc. We don't need the insight of history when we have all this information and an infinity of new ways of connecting our collective ignorance. And we call it "progress".

More on Reid's shenanigans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368369/harry-reids-obstructionism-andrew-stiles