I think you, the person you responded to, and TFA all agree: money needs to be spent more intelligently.

What people think a thing should cost is entirely subjective; it is perfectly valid for you and the OP to disagree on if the amount of education funding is too much, to little, or just right.

The OP is frustrated because there is a general sense that K-12 spending continues to increase, while K-12 performance continues to decline. If that isn't actually the reality, then addressing the perception is yet another problem that needs addressing.

I think everyone wants public K-12 performance to improve, and I think everyone wants to spend less money to get it (which is just a specific case of "Everyone wants to spend less money and still get the things they want")

So, let's not be so angry with someone who might actually agree with some of your goals -- for instance, better K-12 education -- even if they may (or may not) have a different ideology.

It could be that you're both right: it might be that K-12 really _could_ do better with more money, but that K-12 has already been showered with more money for decades and either not improved or not improved enough.

Perhaps one's point of view depends on why they think K-12 should be publicly funded: is this something that pulls on the heartstrings of people who think about obligations to society and education as a mean of equalization of opportunity?

Or is K-12 funded for pragmatic reasons -- as an investment in a better labor force and a better citizenry, making society stronger?

It's of course both, but which view you identify with may influence your funding point of view: "no amount is too much for this important mission", vs. "I need investments to show a good return or they aren't good investments".

On to the specific issue at hand:

It sounds like step 1 is widely communicating that this information source exists to people in positions to act on it.

Step 2 is to give those people a reasonable amount of time to digest this information and issue a set of findings that are specific to their circumstances, e.g. "we found that in area foo where we have poor academic outcomes, we are using methodology blah which according to the clearinghouse, ranges in effectiveness from "no effect" to "negative effect on outcome". We will stop doing blah in area foo and instead start doing baz. Based on outcomes in other settings, we would expect to see a difference in outcomes in 3 years here"

Step 3 might be to add new information from step 2 to the clearinghouse, and perhaps reward people who successfully implemented recommendations in step 2 and saw improved outcomes.

But there can be offsetting developments as well.

For instance, lets go and pick-up a computer-shopper from 1991. What does a 486/33 DX with 8MB of ram and 64kb of cache cost? Why, its $3000 USD.

What does a 2ghz machine cost today? Why, $300 ?

The raw materials have not become more abundant in 20 years. The cost of labor has not gone down in 20 years.

Yet somehow, despite fewer raw materials, higher labor costs, monetary debasement making everything nominally more expensive..

The computers of today are incredibly cheaper compared to the computers of 20 years ago..

The difference is human ingenuity. We have figured out how to do more with less.

In my opinion, price deflation is the natural condition of human industry; wherever man innovates the most, prices fall the quickest.

In the case of the tech sector, this price decrease has happened even in the face of monetary debasement, raw material consumption, rising labor costs, and increased regulatory pressure.

There are systems where efforts are undertaken to make the _auditing_ subsystem tamper resistant, even from system admins. Windows had made investments in this area. For instance you can configure NT machines to bugcheck when writing an audit record fails for any reason.

It is of course possible as root to replace the portions of kernel code which implement auditing with modified versions, but there is no indication that Snowden independently developed attack vectors against quasi-hardened systems. Indications were that he was a normal admin on a normal network. Such half-measures as hardened/compartmented auditing might have been effective to interdict his activities -- if they had been configured and someone else had been paying attention.

Correct me if I am wrong, but shinkansen sets designed for 320kmh operation typically do not exceed 300kmh, for noise reasons.

I am afraid that we are limited by noise complaints with "conventional" high speed rail. This could be a huge advantage of hyperloop -- it should be very quiet, I suspect.

The Surface RT is very popular in my house. In terms of hours-per-day of usage, my wife uses it more than her mac desktop. My older son also likes playing games on it. I use it occasionally. Having a device with separate accounts/profiles, and user-switching, is essential.

I find that it is a more "social" way of using a computer than actually sitting somewhere to use a desktop or a laptop. It's easier to context switch back and forth between interacting and computing when using a tablet, and I think the RT is a great tablet.

Having the keyboard always there is nice. Sometimes you realize that you're going to do more typing than you had planned (like when writing an FB post) and unfolding the keyboard and getting to work is handy.

Since you said "nowhere", this is false. In general, you are sadly correct.

So here is my clarification:

The majority of rail systems, both urban and long distance, in Japan, are privately built and operated.

In the USA, the Great Northern Railroad was built and operated entirely with private funding. The land it was built on was all purchased from its rightful owners, without state granting or manipulation.

The Great Northern was so successful that the other competing railroads that were already entangled with politicians and subsidies continually used political favor to try and hurt or shut down the GN.

The GN lines today have been absorbed into the Amtrak system as the "Empire Builder" route between Chicago and Seattle.

It's awfully easy to build a bang stick with parts you can get at home depot (and a shotgun shell, but I guess we're talking America, so that's easy enough to get at Wal-Mart.)

FFVII on the PC, back in the day, looked great, because there were so few textures. It was all shaded polygons, so when you bumped up the resolution, you just got sharper polygons and more shading. Barrett's tattoo looked horrible, as it was a texture, and was just upscaled.

FFVIII for the PC, however, was all textures, and didn't take the resolution bump quite as well.

Quite the opposite, if you file and are granted a patent for something that is later ruled invalid, there should be substantial penalties for the filer, because the purpose of a patent application is a government granted monopoly, leveraging the legal power and force of government to suppress other business. If you tell the government that you've done something novel that isn't, and prevent competition through that mechanism, there are substantial social costs (none of the benefits of invention, but all of the costs of a monopoly).

So you target STANDARDS. OGL/OGLES is a universal standard, even Apple supports it.

So, not only do you mention two separate implementations, but you handily leave out the various extensions that are required for various cards to do the same thing.

Whilst it's common (and often justified) to have a pop at the carriers for delaying or preventing updates to devices, it's worth pointing out that I've got access to a whole range of Android devices direct from a number of different OEMs and not a single one of them has yet received an OTA update to fix this vulnerability.

The carriers may still slow down this process, but it's already going slow enough with just the OEMs involved.