What "the market" represents is doing things in a financially sustainable way that people support with their actual money, rather than just moral support. "The market" means you have to convince people, rather than taking their money by fiat. "The market" means having the right to say no.

So, yeah...having the right to say no, and require that I be convinced...I'm a member of that cult, though I do realize that there are free rider problems and stuff like that. But I want space privatized not because I believe that its a waste of money, but because in my experience everything that government everything touches turns to sh*t. I'm ready for private space travel to do what it did for private aviation.

How about we do everything like this, and have an actual democracy? Half of the country pays no taxes anyway.

That means that their second and third attempts will be absolutely #$(*#& horrible.

Ah...that clears it up. Pity the reporter whose job it was to do that couldn't have made it more clear.

Amazon doesn't sell firearms, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure they don't. The article is non-commital about whether the package was actually FROM Amazon. So, I think what happened here is that this dude ordered a TV for his wife, and in a totally unrelated incident, received a mis-shipped rifle. Of course, that's not as cute a story, so trim out a few details, leave a few false impressions, and Bob's your uncle.

Boomba?

Biometric is great, but it's only useful locally to the biometric hardware. Beyond that, all there is is ones and zeroes, whether they originated from a biometric sig or not. I suppose you could use these biometrics to generate a key pair...but then you have a problem both of non-repudiation (the actual bits of the private key are compromised...what can you do?) and unintentional repudiation (I'm pregnant, now I can't log into my bank account).

You're right, but for an even more compelling and less debatable reason than you've specified - even if we implemented the statist wet dreams, as you say, the other statists in the world are going to laugh their asses off at us and burn fossil fuels.

If, on the other hand, someone makes some real progress with nuclear, we get a vastly better trade-off that everyone will rush to copy. My money is still on the Polywell, or some development in that direction.

What you fail to appreciate is that this story, Slashdot, and your (ahem) analysis ARE the free market.

>> if the marriage turns sour, it's better for the kids if the parents go find happiness somewhere else

Assumes facts not in evidence.

I think you've been unfairly tagged on the flamebait item...I'm conservative, Texan, and heavily armed. I think it's true, and it spills over unconsciously into a situations where, of course, no one is armed.

There's a great old Bruce Lee quote (probably original with him): respect to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to lessors, nobility, and to all - CAUTION.

Why is there, then, such overwhelming, crushing, queues lined up to Mars demand for such jobs?

Exactly. If Khan doesn't work, it will fade away. The same is not true of public schools. Look, I don't even think most teachers are going to disagree with this - the public school system doesn't allow for adjustment and experimentation - it just can't. The reasons why are political, and don't really matter. But the system hasn't worked for about a generation and a half now, nothing is going to change from the inside.

I've been a programmer for about eighteen years (Economics, B.S. from UTA). In that time, I've worked with dozens of programmers. Maybe, tops, a third of them actually had CS degrees. Probably more like a fourth. The reality is that, outside of kernel development, and some deep blue compiler stuff, programming is much more of a craft than a science.

While such do degrees exist, you wouldn't walk into a wood shop and expect that everyone had degrees in woodworking science, or whatever you would call it. It's just not how things are expected to work - you expect that at some point in the past, the person picked up the craft because they were interested in it, and developed their skills bit by bit. What one knows is nearly irrelevant - it's what one has done, and this is doubly true in IT and IS.

BTW - for I.T., per se, e.g., support and network operations, I've NEVER known anyone with a CS degree.

That's the key. People often have a weird authority relationship with their doctors. The reality of that relationship, at the end of the day, is that he/she is a consultant - just like the consultant you might hire to fix your sink or cut your grass - just better educated and better paid.

I don't begrudge doctors anything they earn honestly - they went to school for ten years, for Pete's sake. But remember that they're human beings and they're made from the same crooked timber of humanity as all of us.