AC is fundamentally correct here.

One main thing to realize is that these things are real tools available across society *today*. They are not going away. There is no job where they will not be available when these students graduate. They are not cheats. Treating them as such is doing the students a disservice. Yes it is hard, because we don't yet know how very well (and what) to teach in the presence of these tools, but really *that* is the thing to solve for here, not how to 'catch', or even discourage use of them.

EOM

I don't think those charts show BTM supplies (e.g. rooftop solar).

For something to be a major milestone towards opening up new opportunities, there is a need for various influential people and powerful people to say that it's not possible. If a large group of influential and powerful people already agree that something will probably work, then it's probably just an incremental improvement, and one of those influential people would have already made it happen, or be working on it.

Breakthroughs are usually first seen as fallacies and follies. If they are not initially seen that way, it's probably not a breakthrough.

I'm not saying that all fallacies and follies are breakthroughs, but it's a necessary phase for it to be considered that way. All breakthroughs were first broadly considered to be fallacies and follies at one time.

People can't fly, they aren't meant to, flying is for the birds. Starting a car company in the 20th century, and having it make electric cars is doomed from the start. A rocket company startup is doomed when it's trying to make rockets that come back and land vertically, and will never lift payloads cheaper and more reliably than the incumbents. All those things had been broadly considered proven to be bad ideas that will fail. People tend to have short memories and have forgotten how negatively those ideas were perceived originally.

Yet, they happened and changed everything.

Never mind that the booster is never in an orbit.

Sure it is! It just happens to be an orbit with a periapsis smaller than the Earth's radius.

Fucking DRM is a whole 'nother problem!

Fuck off, fascist. There's a HUGE FUCKING ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE between a spy agency spying on other countries and it spying on its own citizens.

Not only would I prefer not to see people with negative reputations, but I'd actually prefer to filter on a relative basis in terms of people who are clearly much better than me.

You've got a game theory problem there: why would those better people want to see you?

Why should any random asshat running a website expect to be compensated? It used to be the case -- before the sociopathic marketing droids invaded -- that people put up websites because they wanted to, not because they expected to profit. And the Internet was better that way.

Take off your rose colored glasses for minute. First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way.

I am writing to "notify" you that any business using with this attitude is run by shitty people and deserves to fail. You don't get to dictate what I'm "meant" to do!

Please direct all responses to no-reply@gofuckyourself.com

Sometimes when I have a choice of companies to buy a product from, Ill send an email or fill out the web form asking the same question to multiple companies.

And that's the other asinine thing about bullshit web forms: they force you to send the message to one recipient at a time. As a slightly different example, say I want to write my Congressmen about something. Instead of just writing an email and putting three names in the To: field, now I have to answer a slightly disjoint set of (potentially) invasive questions three times over. It's not that it's hard or even that time-consuming; it's that it's galling because I shouldn't have to jump through hoops like that.

Think about it - if you were running a very large company, would you rather: a) have a catch-all email that runs the gamut of issues, feedback, etc. b) have a way to submit categorized feedback via web forms?

If I were running a very large company, I would want everyone to be forced to just give me their money instead of having to go through the trouble of actually selling something to them in return.

But I wouldn't be entitled to that -- just like how companies are not entitled to be able to dictate communications terms to their customers, either!

Nope. Fuck that class of company too, because it's ultimately the same damn thing. Fundamentally, companies are either willing to engage on the customer's terms... or they aren't. And the latter don't deserve anyone's business.