you can't assume that printing money here will incur inflation, as money is being just sucked up by the system right now - a lot of it in the form of housing prices falling (and thus falling off the assets sheets of banks)

> But what's the point of trying to catch cheaters if it hurts the class dynamic and if those who get caught don't even get suspended? The students are clearly OK with cheating otherwise the cheaters would be ostracized by the other students. The school management clearly doesn't care, since they don't take action against those who are caught red-handed.

So, what you're saying is, it's too hard, the risks too great -- therefore we shouldn't try?

I'd offer that the it would have gotten Google zillions of video conferencing clients and a leg up on implementing that into their VOIP style offering. Instead, we're looking at Microsoft struggling to fit into an online platform that has almost no users. Now, if they integrate more Skype functionality into their Office suite, that could be interesting.

Corporate clients wouldn't use skype just because google started using it. They sure as hell would if Microsoft started using it, though.

> I think the delusion may stem more from the fact that there have been far more software engineers than say, lawyers, law enforcement agents that have had a huge impact on society.

Is that so?

Abraham Lincoln ring a bell? Didn't do too bad for a lawyer.

Law enforcement has a HUGE impact on society try to imagine the world without it for about an hour or so.

Really, the delusion that we have a huge impact on society is to the detriment of seeing how much other professions, both individually and collectively have on our society and that we are only able to function in our respective niche because others do their work.

Even garbage disposal is essential and has huge impact on society and it's one of the most menial jobs.

I had to reread your first sentence quite a few times. You're saying that software engineers in total have had more of an effect on society than lawyers or law enforcement officers? If this is really what you're saying, I think that you are taking the work of these two groups of people completely for granted. Software engineers have affected society, but universally more than lawyers and police? I highly doubt this. You recognize that the vast majority of politicians in the US (for example) and other makers of policy tend to be lawyers, right? That almost every major court proceeding that determined interpretation of legislation and the Constitution have primarily been lawyers? Law enforcement agents also have a huge impact on society...by preventing it from imploding.

I'm not saying that software engineers aren't reshaping the world, but let's not use this as a springboard to downplay the (very important) contributions of other members of society.

Only when comparing to other J2EE frameworks.

it would be nice if there were a number (a rank of sorts) along each result

The default order is to sort by time (week or year), so the concept of rank doesn't apply consistently. So I omitted it.

This is really about freedom, education/opportunity, justice. Whereas there really was a stratification, that's becoming flattened. As you say, the pessimistic part of me thinks that all of those things I just listed are being reduced for that segment of population formerly known as the middle class.

It is easy to confuse consumer goods and an easy life with what is means to be middle class.

. the middle class does indeed collapse

. the collapse of the middle class will have easy to reduce the size of the professional class, in particular doctors and professors as noone will be able to afford their services

. everyone will continue to confuse having an smartphone and a flat screen with being rich

. cars and houses will become luxury items, we become a renters society (serfdom)

. the loneliness and islotation of the previous two decades will only accelerate and increase with the advent of more mobile powerful devices

. the quality of human relationships will continue to suffer

. this will effect politics in a profoundly bad way

. also, the birthrate will drop precipitously

. the gap between what we know we don't know, and what we don't know we don't know will grow even larger - more because of arrogance that we everything than humans actually learn more despite increased cheapness of information (inability to separate signal from noise)

. the principals of the enlightment will be essentially dead for the majority of the world

. something smarter than human will arise

. the power of transhumanity or AI will be restricted to a solitary few - noone will see why this is initially an incredibly bad development for all of the human race (well, maybe nobody outside this forum)

. a new dark age will arise as orwell's visions come to fruition

. the new dark age will be nice and short due to the effects exponential evolution

Things smarter than humans do already exist, in most every specific feild. Whether the 'hard problem' of AI can be solved remains to be seen, and the current political/economic feedback in industrialized countries leads t a different distopia.

As monopolies grow, wealth is focused into smaller and smaller groups, and political lobbyists get more and more influence. Things stop changing, much new research is suppressed because its destabilizing to the powers that be. We don't get nanotech, or strong AIs, or supermedicine, not because they're hard, but because they destabilize incumbent interests, and the incumbent interests are huge, self interested, and hold all the money.

Moral of the story? Buy rental properties. Be a landed noble.