I'm surprised that in a Slashdot thread on counting there is no mention (in my browser find attempt at least) of Cantor or Peano.

Oi. As a tail-end baby boomer I would like to offer an alternative view. Every survey of Australians has shown an overwhelming distaste for this filtering. On the other hand, there was always an undercurrent of social conservatism from the 60s until now. With the rise of politicised religious groups and the election of a socially conservative Prime Minister, this sort of crap is bound to happen. The major reason the current PM got in was he was not John Howard, the previous social conservative leader. Internet filtering was a very minor part of Labor party policy along with a bunch of other waffle that would never get up in Parliament.

The ex-free love generation does not want censorship now, anymore than they did then. They do not want governments dictating their private lives.

Where are my modpoints for "Funny" when I need them.

40 years ago I bought crackers to school. I let a string off down at the playing fields before school, just as a teacher drove up behind me. He rolled down the window, pointed at me and told me to report to the principal's office. I then wandered up to the office and waited outside. After about fifteen minutes, the principal noticed me, asked me what I was there for. He described the consequences and dispassionately opened the drawer with his cane in it. I held out my hand, he hit it twice and I headed off. End of story. To me, the consequences fitted the action, so I accepted it. Getting caned was also a "badge of honour".

Your story is one, to me, of over-reaction on the part of the principals. That goes to the heart of the discussion of the topic of discission.

Getting caned certainly didn't stop me letting off crackers around the neighborhood, but I did stop me letting them off at school.

We generally respected teachers who meted out corporal punishment, unless it was enacted out of anger. Once in farm mechanics class (It was an agricultural high school) the teacher lashed out with a yard stick, hitting a boy across the head. Not a good move. The teacher apologised to the student. No idea if there were any consequences.

And I still like lighting crackers. Pity they aren't on the list of publically available fireworks in my territory anymore.

Preview is wasted on me sometimes ;-)

Good pint, and Paul Graham seems to think that starting in a bad economy has benefits. Apple and Microsoft started the the 70s.

I have a couple of anecdotes to back you up. As a system admin I saw two projects, one Java and one .NET, where the managers were panicking about slow applications. The system admins checked out the performance and, at least on the Solaris box, a memory leak was probably the cause. The delivery date was looming. Both managers were seriously looking at spending another 30-40% on top of their hardware budget to "speed things up". In both cases, a day's work by their lead programmer discovered the memory leaks and plugged them. Millions of dollars saved by a day's work.