Lots of life is about tradition and ceremony. The President uses the SotU to pose his major policies for the year with the biggest audience he'll have. Even if the proposals go nowhere, they at least start the debate and inject the topics into public discourse. I've been reading minimum wage threads everywhere. Would you prefer he email his proposals to each citizen?

Being dismissive and checking out doesn't make you cool.

Try them where? Last time we even suggested it, all the states called foul and started a "zomg a terrorist comin' to arr state" campaign. I think it was only NY that accepted a trial at a considerable "security upgrade" charge to the feds.

It was a projected surplus. Been a while since I followed all this, but because government accounting is so tricky and projects go out sometimes 10 years in advance, the surplus wasn't money in the bank, it was projected savings. Of course, there was a loud "give us our money back" campaign on the right which gobbled that all up and then some.

Steering something that size and that irregular shaped to a safe landing (on land, away from inhabited lands, yet not so remote as to be inaccessible) isn't trivial.

In that case, release it into the market quickly. Like at about 25,000 mph.

Our space program is going backwards. About the only salvation we have is the Chinese trying to land on the moon and inflaming nationalism.

That's the kicker w/ a hosted VM. Once you need more than one virtual machine, hobbyists are probably priced out.

If the interface doesn't have a low learning curve, they're probably not going to waste time with it. I was at a university that used Blackboard, which would be great if it worked as intended. But, it was slow (sucked for students) and apparently has a terrible interface that professors have to go through (I never heard a positive word from them). As a consequence, I'd guess about 1/3 of my professors didn't use it, 1/3 used it sparingly, and the other third made a graduated use of it with a handful relying on it almost totally. I don't think I had one professor that didn't have to rely on their own website to pick up the slack, and many just said "hey if I have to set up my own website anyway, why bother learning Blackboard on top of that?"

I second this comment. The "college is a waste of time" mindset seems to be popular on Slashdot and couldn't be further from the truth. If you can't understand how some of the formal learning you're getting in college doesn't help you as a developer, you're not thinking hard enough about what you're being taught. College isn't about teaching you to write a web page for a specific job. Formal education is teaching the best way to tackle fundamental problems the most efficiently.

I just completed a degree after about 14 years in the field and I took A LOT from my curriculum (and I mean in EVERY class).

I'm guessing the old one was on Windows XP; probably time to retire him anyway.

I find that hard to believe, seeing as both the Flintstones and Rubbles have young children with young, attractive wives.

I'd agree with you, except Assange doesn't have some intrinsic power to information. His "power" is that he's trusted to release this information with the wides disbursal. The moment he develops the appearance if cherry picking, he loses that power and whistleblowers will use other outlets.

The media doesn't like competition. When Assange started dropping major headlines he 1.) took eyeballs away from the latest Kim Kardashian sightings headlining in the MSM thus costing them money and forcing them to do real work, 2.) Made the MSM look trivial and incompetent since they obviously hadn't been paying much attention or care, 3.) endangered the cozy relationship media has with government by dsrupting their monopoly relationship.

Think about how many times some moron has shared information about a crime they committed on Facebook. I think they care, but they don't understand how quickly information spreads.

At first, I thought FaceBook users were a bunch of popularity whores looking for scores of friends and their own reality TV fix. Now, I simply think users just don't make the connection to a bunch of online connections and how quickly and easily their activity propagates to each other.