He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.

He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.

I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.

Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".

For a small fee you can get your bullshit before everyone else.

You numbers do not mean what you think they mean.

This will probably provide the first systematic data on use by regular people for everyday things. If it works and if there is somebody willing to bid.

It probably is. Now the question is where that "dominant paradigm of not questioning authority" comes from. No argument from me that it is real. But we do not know what would happen if we could do away with it. It seems to have basically been there all throughout human history and in basically all places with more than a hundred people or so, hence we have no data. Obviously, said "authorities" have no interest in having their "authority" questioned, and hence we are unlikely to see any larger experiments.

I do have one data-point. People that realize what they are in at some point, when they were born into a cult. These people are independent thinkers under very adverse conditions. So the skill can be found in some people without them ever having been taught. I am not aware on any research that quantifies how many people born into a cult can get out of it on their own because they realize what it is. Would be interesting to know.
 

Funny that there are always some clueless people with mod-points ready to confirm my statements about clueless people.

You fail. If you have "personal axioms", you already are just looking to confirm you preconceptions, not trying to find out what actual reality is. Don't worry, you are the same as around 80% of the human race in that.

Hehehehehe ^^

No idea why anybody modded that "insightful". Probably people with a mental temperature at "room temperature" as well.

In actual reality, "room temperature" is a non-scientific term for "around 20-25C". It serves, for example, for descriptions like "can be stored at room temperature".

And that too. This idea does not even really work for humans.

That said, I am not confident most people can be "raised to think". I think there is a group (the "independent thinkers" at 10-15%) that will always learn it. There are about 5% more that sociology describes as "can be convinced by rational argument on important questions". I think these are essentially the people that can and need to be taught. The 80% rest? You can teach them that experts usually know their stuff, how to recognize experts and tell true from false ones and that they themselves are not experts. But that may be it. I know, this sounds very little for a "knowledge society", but observable reality (also here on /.) shows us that many people are not successful thinkers and many just use their mental skills to justify whatever conclusions they arrived at NOT using these skills.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

I was saying that the US and Israel will have to eventually make some sort of peace with Iran, since they cannot wipe Iran out. They cannot occupy it either. And religious fanatics typically cannot be intimidated into surrendering.

My apologies if that was unclear.

The thing is, there is no general definition of "quantum material".