Do you mind if I come back now then? You know, because my statement actually comes not only from being all those things, but also actively working with several teachers when it comes to certain kinds of education in a country where public education is done better than average private education in US.

Not that your "american exceptionalism" type would listen. Either you're right or messenger is wrong. There is no other way. That's why most US based exchange students short out when they hear someone has it so much better than them. It just flies too hard in the face of what they were told their entire lives and not very different from the muslim men trying to "assault western women who are "dressed indecently because we can't help ourselves". It's hard to battle that nature which you have been taught from birth to adulthood.

Ah yes, the fallacy of "everyone is born equal". It openly spits in the face of reality, and serves only one function: to give those who had privileged life an absolution of guilty conscience.

In real life on the other hand, best equalizers are the one that place children from good families together with those bad ones. This provides strong unifying force for the society. On one hand, those from bad families follow the example set by children from good ones. On the other hand, it dispels the myth of "worse people" that many from privileged families tend to have about those that exist in lower societal strata.

Few children end up suffering from it. Vast majority benefits in a huge way however, and this majority covers children from both ends of the spectrum. Society benefits also from massively reducing the social strife between people from different social and financial backgrounds.

One great example of this has been US having same schools for people of various ethnic backgrounds instead of firmly segregating. The new generations that studied in such schools are typically far less racist than their parents who didn't. Are they not racist at all? No. But the situation has markedly improved.

Same can be observed in many countries that do not allow easy schooling segregation based on economic background, like Nordics.

And if everyone lives by that principle, no one will have a good life.

That is the problem here. Exceptional egocentrism destroys things. If in grandparent's case everyone was sending their children to public school, it wouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous, as there would be a lot of "good" students. These would quickly balance out the bad ones, improving the situation.

Taking out the good students, and leaving the bad ones among themselves is what causes schools to become bad. Many egocentric people use "it's not my responsibility" excuse to wash their conscience clean, and you end up with system that cannot properly function, starts to become massively inefficient and many people who could have had a good life among the "bad" students if they had a decent environment in school lose out because they don't get.

That's the reality of it. You can wash your hands off it, but it certainly doesn't make you a good person. And fact is, when there are too few good people in the world, it goes bad for EVERYONE.

In MOST Western European countries, public schools are GOOD.

In some, they are best in the world. Like mine (Finland). I had more a few discussions about it with US exchange students back in university, and not a single one of them could ever get their head around the fact that "best public schools in the world according to international tests many years in a row" also function on basis of "no child left behind" and "tests aren't that important until 8th-9th grade". They'd accept the former, and then their brain would short out completely when hearing the latter two. It's like trying to convince someone that black is while. I actually got accused of lying several times. Nowadays, I just post this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8601207.stm

Frankly, after having the same issue a lot of times with people from very different parts of US I suspect that you're being fed a line as a nation to make you want to have the system you currently have to line someone's pockets.

You misunderstand. Hollywood is the propaganda arm of US government. As a result, while it does enjoy significant protection of US government as to enable it to perform its task (financially self-sustainable domestic and international propaganda), it most certainly does not command US government beyond its ability to influence the puppets, otherwise known as politicians in the same way that other similar agencies can influence the same puppets.

It still has to combat all the other agencies, and in that game agencies like NSA and CIA hold much stronger cards as they have blackmail material on everyone, as well as ability to simply remove people they do not want.

It doesn't. However reasonable compromise, such as not using perfume within offices of a worker who is strongly allergic to it is perfectly reasonable. Essentially as long as these things are luxury goods (i.e. perfumes) or select easily avoidable foods (i.e. peanuts) most people should feel compelled to assist the person by not bringing these to workplace.

You can eat nuts and use perfume on your free time after all, while the person cannot avoid you at work.

I'm rather surprised that someone would seriously consider that it's okay to threaten someone's life because they want wear a strong perfume or similar lifestyle luxury choice. I'm not allergic to anything, and I would find it to be my duty as a decent human being to take colleagues with dangerous allergies into account when making decisions about things like deodorant or food I bring to workplace.

No, not at all. It means that you can bypass the old cruft, but you have to pay for it with teething problems from new tech you replace it with. Both methods have their good and bad points.

MS has no new geographical markets. It's very mature and omnipresent. The only way to grow is to either expand into completely new markets product-wise which is what it tries to do with varying success rate (xbox, windows RT, zune etc).

In markets largely under their control (desktop, office suites, etc) they can only grow by leeching more money from the customer.

Actually it's "dying" which is a word that certain type of nay-sayers use for "growing" faster than during the recent past, mainly because of consoles losing ground with generation change. Right now, if you want gaming, PC is where decent money can be made.

Pretty much everyone who thinks it's dead should just be shown star citizen or similar projects. People are willing to pay tens of millions while the game is still on the drawing board. Piracy? So what?

If anything, most of the people who got called "paranoid" were actually too conservative in their estimates. That's the scariest part about it.

Actually it started in 1952 because during summer olympics coca cola company entered Finland and started their glass bottle recycling system.

Many people seem to miss that this isn't a legally mandated system. You don't have to use it. But with everyone expecting it, you will face backlash from customers who will ask why you as a company aren't making a basic effort to recycle your bottles.

Wikipedia page does mention that this scheme is in fact unique to Finland and no other country has a system like ours. Which is a bit of a shame, as it's very efficient - they claim over 90% recycling rate across all bottles and cans they work with.

I guess basic compassion is a sin where you come from.

Here in Finland we actually have a very functional PET and glass bottle recycling system. When you buy a drink, your bottle contains a "PalPa" symbol (palautuspantti - english "return pawn" as in pawn shop) with price of the bottle. You pay this price on top of the drink when you make the purchase. Then you can return the bottle into machine at the shop that will read the bar code, recognize the worth of the bottle and print you a voucher for total value of all bottles, cans etc you return. You can use the voucher in the shop for your next purchase.

The old system which was mainly used for glass bottles was fairly complex. They had things like smell detectors used to detect if bottle was still not clean after washing cycle since you couldn't actually break the bottles - you reused the same ones. Many glass coca cola bottles sold here back then had distinct marks of wear on the outer sides where machine probably grabbed them for washing and refilling. They were apparently reused about 33 times on average before they were crushed and glass mass was reused. But the process was somewhat costly because of the smell detectors and other extra hardware needed to ensure safety of the returned bottles.

Nowadays PET bottles just get crumpled up by the machine itself and then sent to factory for melting and being recycled. According to wikipedia http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa they get shredded and then reused as anything from new bottles to things like raincoats, bags and even ties.

Same thing is done for aluminum drink cans (apparently we have about 96% recycle rate on cans because of it).

The general idea is that you basically you pay a bit of extra for the container when you buy the product, and you get that money back by returning it into the machine at the shop. I.e. the container is pawned to your, and you get your money back when you return it for recycling. This creates strong incentives to recycle the product rather then just put it in the trash.

Your graphene question has been addressed by bobbied, and the answer to your other question is: right now. Modern GPUs can produce constant 60+FPS on crysis 1 at full details quite easily. In fact, they can do that for crysis 3 (think nvidia titans in sli). It'll just cost you quite a lot. But it's already doable.

The next stage is going to be 4k rendering, and for that, we're not quite at 60FPS+ yet. Though there we are not only hitting the output of modern GPUs, but even the GPUmonitor interface starts to be pushed to the limits.

In all the honesty, at least one part of sony (entertainment division) apparently got the message and has been trying to reform pretty hard. PS4 is a great example of it.

Remember: if you punish someone for past mistakes forever, what incentive is there to improve?