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Because they are doing something that has never been done before. The unknown is exactly that - unknown. You can make guesses, but they will never be anything but guesses until the problem has been solved a few times.

However, once a problem is solved, it does not need to be re-solved, and so the attention of the company turns to a new unknown problem.

When giving a high-five, watch the other person's elbow and not their hand.

I'll echo this comment and offer to pass along any job opportunities to the students I teach (CS at Manhattan College in NYC).

See the link that started this whole conversation. It has pretty good data, the only questionable part was the fact that their nuclear safety data involved taking self-reported fatalities from the USSR.

Coal is far worse than nuclear by every metric (environmental effects, deaths per TWh, etc etc) in any sane accounting scheme.

Not really. The official report used the numbers self reported by the USSR (not known for its bureaucratic honesty) and TORCH (The Other Report on CHernobyl) was funded by the environmental movement. So we can lower bound the deaths by 4,000 and upper bound them by 1,000,000, but after that you are on your own.

I did my own looking and came to the conclusions that "deaths" is the wrong metric, and "expected years of life lost" is the right metric. When someone dies at age 45 instead of age 60, is that a Chernobyl-caused death? What about at age 50 instead of 60? 59 instead of 75? 2 instead of 70? The answer gets more complicated the closer you look.

Ballpark: tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of "effective deaths" from Chernobyl, where an "effective death" is 45 years of life lost, collected from multiple affected people. Relatively few immediate deaths.

College career fairs.

It speeds up when it hits the paddle. If you do this exercise, make sure to actually time yourself, rather than guesstimate it afterwards - time slips away when you program.

http://www.manhattan.edu -- Manhattan College

38 for arkanoid. The bubble game was 26.

Both I and they used NetBeans.

Free upgrade sounds fine - when were these offered, and how would a person take advantage? I have one of the aforementioned permanent accounts (on jervis, even) and if migrating to a new server means that my site is less likely to fall over, I certainly would do it. However, I just dug through all the emails I ever received from Joyent or Textdrive, and none of them mentioned migrating to another server for free. Lots of stuff about how I could pay more to have more, but since things are basically fine for me (running http://imprompt.us and http://tracyfood.com both of which are low-bandwidth vanilla wordpress sites), I ignored all of that.

tl;dr: how can I go about moving my stuff? To where? And why am I in this handbasket?

You mean some sort of administration that would give people money to work on projects? Like a Work Projects Administration?

Sorry, Roosevelt did that, but nowadays I am pretty sure it would be called socialism.

robots.txt disallows (or did until recently) only "/search". The results shown have "/Search" in the url. Bing screwed up.

Students are not customers. They are products.

Only if a teacher's pay or reward depends on the grade they give their students. Otherwise, it is treating teachers like professionals who worked hard to get where they are.

How recently?

Complexity theory seems to lead practice by around a decade...

The unions? That's your bad guy here? Teachers are poorly-paid and looked-down-upon in our society and you are blaming the only organization which sticks up for them? The unions suck, certainly, but firing teachers only works if there is a ready supply of quality replacements. Plus, if you remove the perk of job security, you are going to have to significantly increase teacher pay to compensate.

Even worse than this, you assume that we have a good way of measuring teacher quality. The unions are a red herring.

Not at all - Google is defecting, but is offering to cease defecting under certain conditions. It's only continuous if Facebook keeps being a jerk.

Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.

"Naive Set Theory" by Halmos is a true gem, and readable, too.

Not true. Income in the bottom 3 quartiles has remained constant or fallen slightly (adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s. We have better tech, but we have also had the rich getting much much richer.

It takes hundreds of pages to get going. Then it goes wonderfully. It't not easy to read, but it is worth it.

And yet, I am confused. I read lots of right-wing op-eds and left-wing op-eds. Why would this particular more-left-than-right op-ed deserve to be treated differently?

Your model of how the world works seems contradictory to the parent's model. In order to decide which model works better in the real world, we can see which more accurately reflects things today.

Netherlands: cheapest rates, entrenched incumbents, good service, unlocked phones, number portability

US: more expensive, entrenched incumbents, middling service, locked phones, number portability

Parent's model more closely matches reality! We have a winner!

This particular market has never been free in the way you seem to think, and the "disruption" you are hypothesizing has some extremely high barriers to entry (first rollout a national infrastructure, second ...), which have prevented it from occurring at all.

Not at all. 95% of references go unchecked, which allows people to just make crap up. [1]

1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.1080

Logo worked for me. If you want to teach a "real" language (Logo is practically a LISP! It's real!) then Python has a turtle module.

Property taxes. Income tax and sales tax has had to rise in response. Unless the income tax rate is highly progressive, the net effect is a more regressive tax system.

States can't run a deficit. Money in can never be greater than money out.

"As technology improves, we should expect higher quality teachers for less cost" --- if and only if we know how to use technology to increase instruction quality. I contend that we have almost no idea about that.

He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less.

The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!).

Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.

It's a chrome bug. Or a Chrome/Java/OSX combo bug. The game plays fine in Safari or FF.