As a Californian and a Los Angeleno, I can attest to this. For example, we had "Proposition K" which floated a bond to build more parks and improve existing ones.

Well, everyone understands that more and better parks are a Good Thing so they vote Yes. I think the problem stems from the use of the term "bond" where most people seem to think that it means something like "decision" and not "more debt".

So we get stuck with more debt and even worse, continuing added expense to maintain these parks and facilities - ad infinitum. Where does the money come from to do that? Taxes and/or more debt to be sure.

They spent $180,000 of Prop K money to buy a small vacant lot at a local busy intersection and plant grass, build a walkway, wall, benches, a planter of nice looking plants, and an automatic sprinkler system. And someone has to clean and maintain this "park" - it might be 50x75 feet and I see the city worker with his large truck towing a riding lawn mower and I just shake my head at the added expense. Nobody goes to this "park" - a school kid could throw a football virtually from one end to the other and no parent I know wants their kid playing at this busy intersection, it's pointless.

And not to mention that two blocks down they are building a very small equestrian center (also with Prop K money). I attended the planning meeting for this and informed them that I live adjacent to the canyon that this equestrian center is built in and I've walked the area after a storm and the entire area is submerged and large areas eroded - like in 1998 when a 6' deep 20' wide chasm appeared where near-level ground used to be. It fell on deaf ears, probably because they've already spent thousands of dollars to come up with the plan they brought to the meetings and didn't want that going to waste. So 1.5 million Prop K dollars are being spent as we speak to build a facility that will probably get wiped away within 5 years and rebuilt with debt on top of debt.

I guess because I'm "anti-park", I must be "anti-child" and now a hateful conservative by default, hence the liberal overload in politics here.

That's not a thin client, it's a lengthy and consolidated I/O connection that happens to carry keyboard, video, mouse, sound, and probably USB data. And as such, there should be no practical limitations as there would be with a thin-client implementation, particularly where gaming or the recent UI's with enhanced graphics are concerned.

Maybe you meant "thin client" as in a minimum of hardware at your desk without the box and cables. Then you'd be right, but using the wrong term.

But I like the idea. Even running a centralized server rack with all the PC's needed in the house off in a (well ventilated!) closet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uguXNL93fWg

But we did know that.

I got 20-15-7. Interestingly, I used a pattern to see how the patten-learning machine would respond. I would throw the choice that would be vulnerable to what the computer just played. If the computer played Rock, I'd play Scissors on the next round. If the computer played Paper, I'd play Rock on the next round.

I think that the failure of a pattern-matching algorithm is that most people will play a simple strategy so the machine will learn to expect that. If you try to anticipate, you gain an advantage because fewer people will put in the effort and the machine is less likely to learn those tactics. I'd think that if you played to the third level (anticipating that the machine is anticipating), you may gain an additional advantage.

I think a competition of algorithms would be very cool. Start 'em up and let them play 100 million games and see who wins :)

He's into the "free as in vodka" part of it, I'm sure.

Not really, the Internet is like a series of tubes. Like a Habitrail.

Which, ironically, you can buy at Amazon during a DDoS attack!

If I had a pound for every time someone misused pound as a unit, I'd be rich!

I'e been reading about all these neat projects about microcontrollers in the last few years and in the last month, I've gotten my new AVR dev board up and running, a fun first project on the breadboard, and I'm re-aquainting myself with C. What great fun it is to be back to programming "on the hardware" so-to-speak. I'm rediscovering just how really fast 4MHz can be. The day job/career has evolved more and more towards the business side of things and just no longer feels fascinating or even interesting in many ways. And when it is time to get into code, I'm not really learning new, clever, interesting ways to accomplish something, I'm learning yet another arbitrary framework or library - which I have to in order to keep up in the job market.

I also noticed that in the late 90's the answers to my typical "get to know you" questions when interviewing job candidates changed from "I've always been interested in electronics/computers/technology/science growing up" to "My high school counselor said there are good jobs in computers, so I took some classes ".

I've also noticed that people in the workforce are reluctant to apply themselves to learning office suites. Back in the DOS/Word Perfect days, people would take classes at night school to "learn computers" because it was becoming evident that they would need these skills in their jobs soon. Now I see that since most people haev computers with Windows at home, they all think they "know computers" but cannot find a file twice, can't map a network drive, and constantly go to a local expert rather than look in Help in their application.