That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange aeons even death may die.

One bit was five documents relating to an environmental issue in a small town. The exam asked the student to analyze the documents, looking for biases the sources may have and flaws in their reasoning.

It did a good job of measuring ability to synthesize and analyze sources, but it definitely would be harder to recognize more focused improvements in reasoning ability.

1. The exam was supposed to be administered 3 times, Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years. I took it my Freshman and Senior years.

2. The exam was not a normal exam. I won't say it was pointless, it definitely measured something, but it's hard to say exactly what. Imagine you have to make an exam to measure "learning" and this thing was about as close as you could come to getting one. But that's still far off the mark.

3. The sample was not representative. Taking the exam was opt-in, and the college put forth a variety of incentives to get people to take the exams. Despite this, they definitely had a high drop off between sign-up-for-everything freshmen and I'm way too busy to spend three hours taking another exam seniors.

I believe there were schools where it was not opt-in, but even so, I can't imagine any of the students taking this exam had grades riding on their performance. And given that it was a single exam, it was dependent on the students' state of mind on the particular day they took the exam. Three data points per person, over four years. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this data.

If you mean to say what you're saying, that Flashblock doesn't make a significant change from unrestricted Flash, you're dead wrong. Wireless transfer is a notable driver of power consumption, but generally it being on is the main driver, not use. CPU on the other hand draws much more under load, and Flash will put it under a lot of load.

As is data portability. This isn't an anti-competitive move, this is a pro-openness move.

  s|s/_/*|  s/_/*|

If papers and research are exemplary, I see no reason that exams should disqualify someone from obtaining a Doctorate. The bar should be somewhat higher, but not to the point that the only way you can get a PhD without passing all the exams is to win a Nobel.

I don't know how well that applies to this specific case, however.

I mean, he seems to be making the statement that someone who produces excellent papers and research but is incapable of coming up with a coherent response to an arbitrary topic in a short timeframe is unworthy of a PhD.

It seems to me there's a place for people who can't think on their toes, even among the ranks of the official Doctors.

And it definitely discourages commenting in low-traffic threads when the average isn't normalized for viewers.

And the thing is, hardware H.264 will almost certainly be in every phone built until the patents expire, so ragging on a free alternative is just going to jeopardize their existing revenues, for a shot at the hacker community's websites like Wikimedia running H.264 and paying royalties - which will never happen anyway. Meanwhile most likely future for WebM is that some forward thinking companies serve WebM if you're using Firefox/Opera, but most are lazy, pay their H.264 tax, and require you to use IE/Safari/Chrome.

That's an unanswerable question. In order to determine how much taxes will have to be increased to pay for current expenditures, you would need to be able to predict what the economy will be like in a year. If the administration's economic initiatives were successful, there's a possibility taxes will not have to be raised at all. So you're getting angry at Obama because he can't predict what your company's revenues will be in a year, which is totally unreasonable.

I think that applies more generally to most of the points you raised. The Obama administration didn't make the world unpredictable, it has always been that way. I don't even think another failure in the economy makes anything the administration has done categorically bad decisions. I don't think we're in a worse position now than a year ago, and I don't think the fall can be any harder now than it could have been. (Because it could have been atrocious.)

In general I think it's reflective more of business leaders' politics, and those on the left will say that times are hard, and those on the right will say that Obama and the Democrats are making times hard, which again, is totally unreasonable.