Nah, it was just a memory leek.

Wrestling with this problem makes my blood Boyle.

Turn about is fair play.

The entities delivering those services usually make horribly inefficient and crony-based choices in doing so.

It seems to me that the GP attempted (inarticulately, perhaps) to note the lack of consequences for those entities when they screw up. Your point indirectly addresses this - we who allegedly vote for such things (really just for the representatives who then make the inefficient decisions) should hold them to account. We hold no fine-grained way to do this (can't withhold taxes for what we don't like), and we allow them to trick us into wasting the blunt-instrument 'vote' that we can use.

Wachovia trafficked in $387 billion of money laundering for drug cartels, kept a nice chunk of it, and was fined a small fraction when caught. Nice net benefit - can you and I get in on the action? Hell no, we'd be strung up by the family jewels.

Will any of us visit similar chastening on any politician for that? Or do we accept (with lots of political encouragement) that we have a de facto two-tiered legal structure where the elite go unpunished as a matter of course? Seems an unoriginal endpoint for a country that started with a rather different idea.

And that's a good thing?

The damage that MS has done by barging, elbowing, and carpet-bagging their way into business and slowing the development of computing to a crawl is exceeded only by the damage done by the original Unix vendors and their standards-hegemony wars.

One needs no college education to imagine the explosion in innovation and entrepreneurship that could happen without software patents and copyright bullying - just learn to code, then try to do something useful. Those lawyers (another college over-product) will come quite quickly to school you.

Perhaps all we need for world peace is a big enough love button.

If you push a love button gently a few times, it gets a little bigger.

ObPython

You'll need a lot more areas if you're going to replace something as concentrated as nuclear power with solutions as diffuse as the ones you suggest.

Example: Try campaigning to get the Kennedys to put up offshore wind power as a lasting legacy to Ted. Far enough out in the Atlantic to be barely visible on the horizon on a clear day - and the wind conditions there are quite good. Engineering, renewable power, liberals, topicality - everything is poised to make this the time to proceed with such a worthy project, yes?. Oh wait..

Or, just run the numbers. Kwh/mi^2 for wind, solar, tidal show that if we carpeted the country with these, using *every* available space, we could gin up a big 15% of our energy budget, max. Wanna commute to work using those numbers? Get out your rickshaw ...

Yeah, because the Palin-bots are so clever with the 'look-over-there-instead' gambit. No college perfesser type can withstand its subtle twist on the false equivalence fallacy. And it hasn't even been tried in other Internet forums than this one.

Now come back and say "Well, I'm no Sarah fan, but ...". That'll really suck 'em in.

Ssh! Don't it give away! See you all at the Farm .... the password is 'mondegreen'.

They'll take care of that remotely - remember, the government is here to help.

Or you can translate^Wspin it another way.

FIFY.

Or is there some path I'm missing that "feeds back an error term" to these students that will distinguish between your version and the OP's? If so, please detail it ASAP - we seem to have a lot of upper-crusters that have gone "open-loop".

Erm .... a very small shell script ? (to coin a phrase)

Yeah. Americans 15-20 years old generally can't read, barring lolspeak.

Pass it on down, dude, don't sit there slobbering on the end.