MS has been on the way down for a long, long time.

If you think Balmer's job is to take it to new heights, I personally think you're stupid. He's not the man for that kind of job, and everyone knows it.

His job is to keep the ship afloat as long as possible, to make the inevitable decline as slow and smooth as possible. And yes, he has been doing quite well on that task. Time and time again we on /., nerds in general and sometimes even the tech press have predicted MS imminent demise, but Balmer has managed to prevent any serious crash & burn.

You need to brush up your knowledge. You have a great opportunity because the sun is currently entering a rare low activity phase (google "Maunder Minimum").

More importantly: The Sun cycles are an extensively studied subject. We have a very good knowledge about them and their effect on climate. And, guess what, this effect is figured in when scientists talk about climate change.

Yes, it has happened many times. The earth is a huge ball of rock, it'll survive pretty much no matter what. It won't give a damn if temperatures go up to a couple hundred degrees - see Venus, she's also doing just fine.

Except, of course, that there's almost certainly no life there.

Climate change isn't about protecting the environment. It's about protecting us, you stupid idiot. The only retard in this discussion is you, because you don't understand what the effect of changes in climate really is. Go ask some people who know about global food production, because you can already measure it there. In a few years, you'll be able to measure it in casualties. Human casualties.

Laughing about people isn't the same as killing them.

Especially not when it's the kind of people who tell you the sky is pink when you just need to open your eyes to see that that's not the case.

Religious indoctrination is not teaching. There is a very important difference between science and religion: One is evidence-based, and the other isn't. In one a teacher shows you things you can then do for yourself, and build upon. In the other, you are asked to believe with no evidence or proof. In one, if you can show your teacher was wrong and a different answer is better, you are a hero. In the other... well, fortunately the times where you'd be burnt at the stake are past.

Religion and science could not be further apart. The fact that people talk about them, including teaching and "teaching", is about the only thing they have in common. Don't confuse them because of a random correlation.

He said "Vatican", not church. He certainly meant the institution and not the plot of land, I'll grant you that. From the way he consistently spoke about the Vatican, not the church, I would not assume he means something he doesn't say. Even within the catholic church, the Vatican is a special case.

Would it? I'm pretty sure the old men who enjoy the pleasures of having their own tiny state would disagree violently. There have been a few power-struggles within the catholic church regarding the position of the Vatican over the past decade or two. I don't think that would happen if it doesn't matter.

The incidents I read about that led to the doctrine of Crew Resource Management were from American carriers. Captains would try to do everything themselves and ignore their teammates.

We're talking about a human interaction failure mode, not some exotic Asian culture thing.

There's a difference between being a common man with common sense and being someone who claims he holds the keys to heaven, knows right and wrong and is entitled to teach everyone else.

I'm surprised that needs to be explained.

Because those who claim to be the masters of moral need to demonstrate so through their own actions, or else all their claims about knowing right from wrong are in doubt.

What is this? It is neither an argument, nor even coherent. Meaningless rambling does not make a point, you know?

The necessity of the Vatican is a valid question, given that it didn't exist before 1929 and that there were times in history when Rome wasn't the (or not the only) seat of the pope.

The church is not identical to the Vatican. You are not addressing the GPs point but a similar one you invented yourself.

In other words, the non Fed attendees can't be trusted to act like adults, so the con is warning the Feds not to attend. That really engenders trust in the hacker community. Good move!

But privacy advocates are not winning. They are losing.

That's because of two, connected things. The first is that most privacy advocates sound and act like raving paranoid nutjobs (and for the most part they are). The second is that this has lead them to scream "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" so many times that nobody listens to them anymore.
 
The there is a third thing, one the nutjobs don't grasp and don't seem to even realize the existence of: most people don't care. Nor have have the nutjobs been able to frame a cogent, coherent case for people to care.

Not necessarily true. You will still have top students and you will still have bottom students. You will get the same type of students at the top now that you did before.

It's not the type of student that's under discussion - it's the type and content of their education, which is something different entirely.
 

The type of people that aren't affected by your "feel good science projects".

An assumption based on a) bias about 'rop students', and b) the assumption that all top students are the same, and c) all top students are budding scientists.
 

Even if most of the people that are interested in it now aren't capable of becoming experts in it for one reason or another they still gain valuable knowledge and at the very least respect for the science.

Um, no. The curriculum is content lite, because it's not aimed at education. It's Mythbusters, which gives people the misapprehension they know about science and leads to no respect as it's demonstrated not as a process to respect but as something 'fun'.

Seriously, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

These are only promotional introductory rates, good for the first 24 months. After that, the charges revert to "standard" rates, the details of which are not available anywhere.

Even the NSA has not been able to find any information on what they will have pay at the end of the promotional period.

What would be the point? It isn't a word processor or some other standalone PC application. It's a tightly bound hardware controller - half of the "code" isn't in bits and bytes, it's out in the actuators and sensors. (Not that a tenth of the OSS community would even understand the problem domain.)

The first era of the PC ended with Byte. This was when people actually put computers together, actually understood what the computer was doing, and wasn't obsessed with memory and clock speed unless it actually improved performance.

By that definition, there never was an era of the PC because virtually nobody who wasn't a professional understood what the computer was actually doing once CPU's got more complex than the 4004. The same goes for memory and clock speed, whether hobbyists or early adopters, nobody has ever had enough of either.
 
As is usually the case with such claims, you're looking through rose colored glasses into the golden fields of fantasy - because the golden era you describe never existed.

All of these garbage political/social projects to supposedly increase American kids' achievement in science are just that: feel good garbage. Lowering standards only goes so far until real work and real achievement are required.

Yep. I've said it before and I'll say it again - infotainment and edutainment and meaningless feel good "science" projects are doing a vast disservice to a whole generation of students. They don't actually learn anything and they don't learn how to learn. When the history of current education is written a century hence, STEM will be seen as a total failure.

Over here in Europe, we are already talking about the "long arm of the USA", and even the mainstream media is wondering out aloud why our governments keep so quiet and friendly.

I would be really, really surprised if any serious consequences would come to anyone high in the hierarchy. There might be a few pawn sacrifices, but the fact that our government doesn't go absolutely ballistic over this alone is proof enought that nothing serious will happen.