I've worked in education. I see it up front. I run the studies, the numbers, the stats.

American business has little loyalty to American people. Outsourcing, shipping manufacturing overseas, begging for increases in H1B visas, it's all there for people to see, yet so many "Tea Partiers" and "Libertarians" love to back the party that bends over for this stuff. In the 1970's a CEO of a large multinational collected a low-end 6 figure salary and sent his kids to public schools. Now they all get 7 or 8 figures, from pay and incentives (stock options, bonuses) and do you think they'd send their kids to a public school, even the best ones in the country?

Biggest contributing factor to student academic achievement is in the home. A good home, supportive parent and you can go far. Parents who fight all the time or are ambivalent about how much time you spend in chat-rooms or killing zombies in some virtual universe aren't helping.

The problem with Teaching To The Test is you aren't preparing these students for anything, but taking tests.

The worst bit is having to memorize your entire evil plot so you can soliloquize in front of the hero, while you think you have him/her utterly at your mercy, so they can then make an improbably escape and foil your plot.

But then, it can't be all milk and cookies at the hero academy, having to practice your improbable escapes and practice remembering entire evil plots, so you don't leave anything important out while foiling them. Nothing more embarrassing than finding that female reporter rotting away in a dungeon cell several weeks later, when all you had to do was rip the door off its hinges.

Not supporting Public Schools is Child Abuse on a Mass scale.

The worst thing that has happened to Public Schools in America is they have become a political weapon used by one party against another. Rather than improve the schools, we keep getting assholes who call themselves Education Candidates -- in a way, they are up front, they're going to teach you how not to run your schools.

While public school systems in many countries are great successes, the American public school has become a target of derision, blame and shame. Not quite lofty goals, not what they could be.

I do believe teachers should be held to account, but so should parents. I had good parents and I attended excellent public schools, which received the full support of the community. It should be that good everywhere, then private schools would be the joke.

o the government lies

o corporations lie

o hiring practices favor imported, low-cost labor

o older, sicker technical people are treated as unemployable and fireable if already in place

o arbitrary degree requirements place artificial barriers between employment and many technical people

o HR departments operate by rote and bean-counting, not "find a great employee"

o congress sets the immigration rules for imported tech labor

o congress is wholly corrupt and beholden to corporate direction via funding pressures

If you want to be truly successful, you'd better cultivate some creativity and start your own thing. The employment situation is horrible and constantly getting worse, with no end in sight. And if anyone thinks an artificially inflated number of STEM grads is going to do anything to alleviate any of this, they're out of their minds. The slope is only getting steeper.

requested the ability to treat Windows security bug reporters as being in league with terrorists by invoking the Patriot Act.

My head is spinning.

Not to mention...
This needs to have an online multi-player component...
With less content and more DLC, plus shit they can buy, like new skins or clothes and stuff...
With always-on DRM so that those evil pirates won't copy our games... and can we use that to pipe more ads into the games too? Live?
Oh, and that ending is too polished. Leave it hanging so that we can bring out episode IV next year...

Most of that doesn't come from the dev-deam

Then I guess that - similar to VC++ - anybody using those extensions will have to deal with the issues of non-portability. I've not really seen most of those before so I can only guess at how much they're used.
Best to avoid them if you can, unless you're working on something that's OS-specific anyhow (Linux kernel module, whatever).

That does assume some level of global altruism. One possible result is a utopic world. Another likely outcome is what tends to happen with humans when classes and/or beliefs mismatch: war.

Indeed, there are books and websites dedicated to old laws that would seem crazy by normal standards but are still on the books. They've never been removed, it's just that they ceased to be prosecuted. Perhaps pot use will fall under this.

The problem is, though, those laws are still on the books. They could be used for malicious or targeted prosecution. How about getting fined for bothering bullfrogs in Arizona, or a 30-day sentence for flirting in Little Rock Arkansas?

Dropping prosecution is a good start, but eventually outdated laws need to be removed.

That's depressing. The Eloi of this world are likely to be pretty fat and unhealthy. They wouldn't taste very good...

Good for you, but I don't see the assumption that the "average" trucker doesn't have an electronics degree etc is insulting. It's not just truckers. A *lot* of people specialize and tend to get sunk into a particular career/education path.

Sure, some of them will be able to fall back onto some other skill. Some will be able to turn hobbies into great jobs. It happens, but not that frequently.

I was starting school as the lumber industry began to fall back in my home province. Some of those guys moved to an IT path and were great at it. I know another guy who became an electrician. Whatever the outliers, there were *lots* of people in my class (coming from the lumber industry) who had no place in IT. They simply couldn't grasp the concepts, or - when they did - there were struggling in the face of others who had more aptitude. So why choose IT? There were simply no more jobs in the industry they'd worked for 20+ years... or at least none that would pay the bills. Everyone was being told "IT is the future of jobs" so they ended up in my program. But frankly, people who'd been working in remote locations for half their lives or more simple didn't have enough exposure or grasp of technology for that industry. It ended up swamping classes with people who dropped out, or barely passed tests by studying 24/7 but who had no real aptitude for the work in a real-life situation.

If the human-driven transportation industry started to be replaced by automation, how many "truckers" would find themselves in dire straights? I'd guess it would be similar to the lumber industry. Some people would move to [industry that supposedly has jobs] but find themselves without an aptitude. Some would drop out, some would scrape through. Others would find a natural skill for something else and do OK. There would be lots though who would simply find themselves struggling to find relevance in the current job market, and go through hell for it.

It's not about being incapable of doing anything else. It's being capable of doing something else that pays the bills and has job opportunities available before you go bankrupt. When you've got a wife, kids, and mortgage, it's not easy to just pick up and move on. Education is expensive and takes time. Other skills may not necessarily equal any sort of immediate job opportunity. It's not that you're incapable, it's that the opportunities might not exist for the average person, especially when the markets would be saturated by your fellows also suddenly looking for work and have bills to pay.

You can't personally consume, but you could have a small army of concubines popping out kids who do.
For some of the world's hyper-wealthy, this isn't far from reality either...