I agree completely.

This is also why I don't believe these "horseless carriages" will ever take off. Horses are actually pretty smart creatures. They don't want to run into obstacles, go over cliffs, etc. And they don't use any of these new-fangled "combustion engines" (which are basically filled with explosives!) to do their job. And these new "engines" have thousands of parts? Do you want to try and figure out what is wrong with one of these devices?

To put it bluntly, raise your hand if YOU want to be the first carriage manufacturer to make a carriage for which you are potentially liable for any mechanical failures that occur in this vehicle, from the day it's sold until the day it's scrapped. Any takers? How much...etc etc...

Similar arguments for trains, airplanes, medicine, robotic surgery, computers, etc.

If you really think the potential for legal liability is going to prevent the chance to make a buck, I think you need to have a little talk with history.

Most successful? Someone at Blizzard [wikipedia.org] might not think the same way...

Yes, most successful

Diablo I sold 2.5 million million copies
Diablo 2 sold 4.2 million copies
Diablo 3 was not by any stretch of the imagination procedurally generated.

Minecraft has so far sold 11 million copies. Almost double what Diablo 1 and 2 ever did. And it's still selling very well.

Stats sourced from here and here

Methinks that in a decade or two some natural process will start to decrease carbon levels

Mewouldalso like to point out that your arrogance and self belief is quite astounding if you think that you're more knowledgable than the world experts.

I dunno, ledow (319597) is quite possibly right about some natural process decreasing carbon levels if we don't do anything...just wrong about the timeline.

See Malthusian catastrophe for more details.

I highly doubt that we will are capable of altering our climate in such a way to destroy all life on the planet. However, we very well might be altering it in such a way to make it very uncomfortable for us.

Ebay's purchase of Skype was the most random purchase ever, it was for a quajillion dollars (Ebay lost virtually all of it) and they didn't even buy the source code.

No...Ebay eventually made money on the Skype purchase.

They bought for 2.6 billion in 2005

Sold 70% of it for $1.9 billion in 2009

Made an additional $2.55 billion when Microsoft bought the remaining 30%.

So they actually made 1.85 billion on an initial investment of 2.6 billion. Not terrible over 7 years.

Walmart profits on necessity spending. How many cell phone apps fall into that category?

So Walmart has stopped selling movies? video games? toys? cosmetics? junk food? electronics? photo services?

Sure Walmart makes a lot money selling clothing & food, but they also make a tidy profit on non-necessities.

I agree completely. Let's work towards population reduction.

You go first.

And while I'm at it, why in the hell does wikipedia have articles about the TV series, movie, and video game but not the damned books?

WTF are you talking about?

Dune (Novel)
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
God Emperor of Dune
Heretics of Dune
...etc

I know I don't fly anymore unless unavoidable due to TSA.

Really? Personally, I didn't even notice when the TSA came into existence. Possibly it's due to being a Canadian, but I do fly to the US occasionally. It doesn't seem like the regulations / security / processing in the US is significantly better or worse than anywhere else. Heck, I remember being split into male/female lines & patted down/groped in Venezuela well before the establishment of the TSA in the US. And I don't remember any dignity-impacting activity the last time I flew to California.

However I've also never lost a single piece of baggage, so maybe I'm just lucky.

Then what damages does Apple deserve for what Samsung did?

Should it be ok for one company to do this to another?

None. And yes, it should be okay.

Did you actually read the memo? It looked like UI design 101, they just happened to (unfortunately) use the iPhone as the example of how it could be done right.
It had such amazingly original nuggets such as:
- increase the size of the daily schedule to make it legible
- Don't allow duplicate icons to be placed on the home screen
- Don't allow the keyboard to overlap the text entry screen
- Reduce the number of steps required to toggle Wi-Fi

These are the basis of a patent?

As the years progress, an ever increasing majority of people are forced, through various agencies, into a state of poverty

That would be a very sad fact. Except that it isn't true in the United States. Or globally

Why is this tagged science? This is simply a publicity piece, not a science piece.

As geneticist Steve Jones says in the article itself:
"At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any,” said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London.

This is a standard "fluff" piece that academics are forced to put out every so often in order to obtain continued sponsorship.

Wikipedia puts it best:
"emphasis on publishing may decrease the value of resulting scholarship, as scholars must spend more time scrambling to publish whatever they can manage, rather than spend time developing significant research agendas."

These are some interesting ideas, and possibly contains the start of a a research topic, but without data, evidence, research methodologies, etc, this is pure speculation.

such as replacing the staff and hring a private company to run the school

Only in the most extreme circumstances:
From http://dese.mo.gov/divimprove/nclb/QandA.html:

What are the consequences of not achieving AYP?
NCLB spells out an array of consequences for schools and districts that repeatedly fail to meet the AYP goals. Any school that fails to achieve AYP for two consecutive years in the same subject area will be identified by the state as “needing improvement.” Initially, a school that does not make AYP for two consecutive years must, if possible, offer students the opportunity to transfer to another, higher-performing school within the district. After a third year, schools must offer “supplemental services” (such as tutoring) for students. Schools that do not show adequate progress after five years may be forced to take tough “corrective action” such as replacing school personnel or extending the school year.

I see nothing about required privatization, just the possibility of hiring additional (possibly private) tutors.

That being said, why not force lower student/teacher ratios for schools that do not achieve AYP or require increased state funding? These seem like more obvious beneficial solutions than "send the students to a different school"

Yes, cause what I want my kids teacher doing is repeating the same damn work that's been done countless times over by other educators all over the world.

It's a little like someone asking how to sort an array in Java and being told "write your own sort algorithm, that's what a programmer is supposed to do anyway".

Rather than having every single teacher re-invent all of the same assignments, I'd rather they spend some time studying methods for teaching to different learning styles. Or developing on standard exercises to make them more engaging and entertaining to the students. Or learning interesting background information on the subjects they are teaching. Or pretty much anything else than all repeating the exact same work.

Of course, it's only on the new kiddie-infested "skool sukz" new Slashdot that such a comment would get +4.

To what purpose? Doing it just to do it serves none. Like saying frm now all Ducks shall be called Nozzes! New label, same concept, no net change.

Not when the entire populace already knows how to think in one and not the other. Ever had to retrain an enitire corporation after a fundamental software package switchover? That would be a walk in teh park compared to this. Being able to think in a system of measurements is such a low level function of the brain its nearly impossible to completely retrain it to fluency levels in the new one. And the use of language related words is intentional because it's nearly at that level of brain function.

Being from a country (Canada) that made this exact change during my lifetime I have to say you couldn't be more wrong.

There are numerous advantages to making the change:
- Labeling for exports becomes significantly easier and cheaper as you don't have to consider target market.
- Textbooks don't need to be specialized for imperial units
- Costly engineering mistakes that occur due to unit conversion wouldn't happen anymore.

Being able to think in a system of measurements is such a low level function of the brain its nearly impossible to completely retrain it to fluency levels in the new one.

Bullshit. I suppose you would also claim that people can never be as fluent in a second language as they can in their original one. Perhaps you would be unable to retrain yourself, but most people could manage quite fine if they put a little effort into it.

Just like they fail to consider that metric (or more accurately SI) has its own idiosyncracies.

I see you conveniently fail to give any example whatsoever....

where its naturally superior or advantageous to use it over metric. (hydrology is a good example; several conversions reduce to 1.0x)

Again, any examples of these "several" conversions which don't work exactly the same in metric?

It's just math, and conversion is not particularly hard anyway...

Exactly. I've given several examples where using this antiquated system costs actual time and money. You've provided some vague hand-waving for why metric shouldn't be adopted. If it's just math, and conversion is not particularly hard, why not do it. Once it's done, the entire country would be 100% converted in 100 years or so anyways.

Disclaimer:
There is one obvious advantage that imperial has over metric, as it's units of length & weight do tend to be divisible by 3. But fractions really aren't that scary, and imperial measure has the same issue when dealing with fractional inches.

No, Virginia didn't. The shitty summary just made it look like they did.

To be fair, the shitty NPR article also made it look like they did.

From the article:
"Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities."

The article claims the board "looked at test scores" and then "proposed new passing rates". This implies an equivalence between the "test scores" and "passing rates", whereas in actual fact the first refers to student's actual scores, and the second refers to the target for the % of students of each race that must pass in order for the school to be judged as "successful".

It's still racist as heck, but the actual standards are not at all what the summary claims.