As long as they're willing to work for peanuts, regardless of the crap they produce, US CEOs will keep hiring them. I'm watching an outsourcing fiasco in progress at my company. The "smartsourced" apps are blowing up like crazy and executive management screams at the PMs and middle management, neither of which wanted these barely-trained, fundamentally incompetent programmers to begin with.

Define "sensible". This bill is not "sensible" by any definition I can think of. How about forcing states to add their mental health records to the instant background check database? Less than 30 states currently do. God forbid we violate the privacy of fucking crazy people.

Aside from the fact that the technology doesn't exist... What if I want to let a friend shoot my gun, for example when I was teaching someone to shoot? What if I wanted to try a friend's gun so I could see if I liked it? How about collectible guns? The last firearm I bought was a WWII vintage Finnish rifle. What if I wanted to buy a very-collectable WWII 1911? Would that be legal? It's just another blatant attempt to restrict my constitutional rights. If you want to pass gun control, amend the Constitution. Stop wasting our time with this kind of legislative theater.

Of course. Duh.

There's a big difference between threats or statements that might endanger the safety of others and someone stating their feelings towards a religious figure. Just another sign of the Muslim world's complete intolerance, total lack of religious freedom, and complete lack of respect for human life and dignity.

'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'" We? Really? We flew our own planes into the World Trade Center? We attacked the Cole? We shot our own Blackhawks down in Somalia? Get a friggin' grip. We didn't start this war, we're just finishing it.

Easy access to on-line degrees and the for-profit colleges are huge drivers in this. There was no University of Phoenix (or whatever) back in the 1960s. If people can make money at it, you can bet it's going to expand until every dollar that can be spent is being spent.

Spoken like a marketer for RIM. RIM is a dead man walking in the enterprise. Yes, they're the only ones to have their own management software but there are a dozen vendors lining up with mobile device management solutions. Vendors like Good Technology and MobileIron are making enterprise-grade equivalents to BES for the iPhone/iPad and Android space. The problem, as it's always been, is applications. It's a nightmare to write anything for BlackBerry. Comparatively speaking, writing apps for iPhones and Androids is a breeze. RIM's percentage of the enterprise market is falling and will continue to fall. They're going the way of so many market leaders before them who thought that once you got to the top you'd automagically stay on the top.

I highly recommend "Wired for War" by P. W. Singer. Outstanding read. He's also a pretty interesting speaker, if you get the chance to hear him.

Welcome to the Nanny State. We're obviously not capable of taking care of ourselves. Do the Democrats not realize that this is the kind of crap that fires up the crazies and gets Tea Party candidates into office?

I'm relieved that the TSA is finally stepping up to protect us from the threat of three year olds with explosive diahrrhea.

Make them buy a cheap TI-30 and that can be the only thing they use. No programmable calculators, no smartphones, no netbooks, etc. If they can't do an open notes test with just a simple calculator, the deserve an F. And if they can afford to go to college, they can afford a $10 calculator.

There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.

The electric grid has already suffered multiple cascading failures from simple events that led to widespread outage. Look into the West Coast outages of 1996 and 1998 as well as the failure in the Northeast in 2003. There's a lot of interesting science going on around networks, graph theory, complexity and all. There's a really good book on teh subject, "Six Degrees" by Watts.