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Comment Re:They always blame the wrong thing(s) (Score 1) 61

When I was in elementary school I played a game on the Apple IIs where you had some machines you could put in a row and your part would go through them and get rotated, punched or painted. You'd get a shape and you had to place and configure the machines in sequence to make it. Some shapes could be made in various ways, some only had one right answer. As far as I know, only I ever played it at my school.

Even more usefully, those of us in GATE got inductive word puzzles and were taught how to solve them with diagrams. This person is this thing and this other thing but not that thing, the person who did these things didn't do that but did do this, etc etc. Nobody else got to do this.

Another thing I was lucky enough to get to do was be trained to speed read using a machine that took a film strip and scanned across the text to limit what you could see at any given time. Then they'd test us to check our retention.

There's lots of activities like this which kids could be playing if there was time, but the curricula don't leave room for that. Instead we make sure they're force-fed whichever "facts" we want them to retain, with nothing to hang them on. In particular we teach kids in elementary school a bunch of utter bullshit about how the world works and why our government did things. Then we act surprised when they can't navigate reality. Well, it doesn't fucking work like we told them!

Comment Re:deploy broadband? (Score 2) 21

AFIK, ATT has NO plans to provide fiber to the entire state.

That's not relevant to net neutrality, though yes, you're right. And they have taken literally hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for that purpose (government grants, not customer payments) which they then clearly handed out to shareholders and/or executives because they obviously didn't spend them on last mile internet.

Comment Re:I'm still wondering (Score 1) 170

One way that doesn't attack anyone's mental state is term limits.

It's inappropriate not to attack anyone's mental state. Their lack of competence is exactly the problem. We need for everyone in government, not just congress, to be able to pass at least a basic mental competency test. The People should never be paying for an incompetent to hold a public position, and that's arguably the least important principle at issue.

Comment Re:Embrace and Extend. (Score 1) 51

You're right they're not at the extend phase... yet.

History tells us we should watch out for that.

They deserve all the hate for the late 90's with their extended proprietary JVM or with playing dirty in office file format standards with Open XML. But those are a decade and a half ago.

Microsoft has become worse in many ways over that time, there's no reason to believe they are better in this way as well.

Using a tool and giving back is the premise of open source and giving grief over changed bad behavior is pretty counter productive to progress.

Microsoft is still engaging in a lot of bad behavior, so there's no reason to believe that anything that is good will continue, or that anything that looks good is good.

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