I've really got to wonder what you're doing with your Windows install... Yes, we can bash Microsoft all we want, but I and several friends have had 7 for a year and more and we've never experienced anything so serious it'd require a reformat to fix.
I'm content with using 7 and dual-booting to Ubuntu or Fedora when needed.
I'm not an American, so my education system is different, but I can tell you that having to solve a 4 or 5 equations system using a matrix is the best way to make a stupid calculation mistake that can drastically alter the answer you get. Yes, I can add and subtract, but when you have to do it 20, 30 times, a mistake can slip in.
It only gets worse when you encounter large integrals with trigonometrical substitutions or integration by parts. For all of those, graphing calculators are a veritable life saver.
The ordinary Americans let the nutjobs have all the soundbytes, therefore they either agree with them or are lazy or a mix of both. Further, there ARE people who use Fox News as their primary news source...
They might not all be like that, but it's true that the RIAA has a lot of power, that media conglomerates decide what they want you to know and hear and censor the rest... The OP might've worded it harshly, but it's not all that far from the truth.
Give me a break and try to look around yourself. 250gb is plenty for most purposes and I can barely believe you Americans complaining about such a high cap when in Canada the highest you get is around 80gb with excessive fees if you go higher than that (and that's for already extremely expensive services).
Get over the cap you've got, hearing the whines about Comcast just makes me want to punch someone when you compare with what others get.
I've read "heroes of videogames". To me, developers are the heroes. I think everybody would agree; how otherwise could anybody become a "champion" if no videogame was ever made?
Why is half the list consisting of "champions" when there isn't even a mention of such names as Sid Meier, Will Wright, Gabe Newell, Richard Garriott or John Carmack? I couldn't find any other list, so I must assume this is the first one, right?
The OP's point is that you can make pronounceable passwords that for all intents and purposes look and feel like words but aren't. A dictionary attack cannot possibly contain every single pronounceable pseudo word.
Our TomTom GPS has had a few quirks sometimes. It'd drive us through half the country when there was in fact a perfectly practicable road right besides. It also happened that sometimes it would use an obviously pedestrian road for its plotting, leading to the car getting stuck in increasingly tight streets until it couldn't fit. There was also that one instance where it systematically wanted to use that one road that was one-way (the wrong way, obviously) and we had to drive for a good time to make it plot an alternate route (which also went through a one-way, we had to repeat that procedure twice).
Apple also took great care to make their computers be something "else". They never call them PCs. In Average Joe's mind, a Mac is not a PC. A PC with Linux and a PC with Windows, however, is still a PC. Thus, he'll expect his Windows stuff to work out of the box with Linux.
There's also one point which is often glanced over, but which is a big barrier to entry: drivers. They're mostly caused by big corps not giving a damn about Linux, but they hurt the OS a lot. The number of times I've seen fairly knowledgeable people hack at it for WEEKS to get their wireless network adaptor working is astounding, and that's when they get it working at all. This doesn't affect Dell's computers since obviously they'll check whether their hardware works, but outside of those very rare circumstances where Linux is bundled, you will nearly always run into a compatibility problem at one point in time.
The overwhelming majority of tests at my university (physics/maths courses) are done with NO calculator allowed whatsoever. The teachers have simply understood that you don't need to calculate large numbers or complex equations to see if someone understood. It also has the advantage of not discriminating those who do not have the money to pay for a high-end calculator AND it reduces cheating.
The problem is not that people fear nuclear power, it is that they fear it disproportionately compared to, say, coal and oil plants. Nuclear wouldn't give you a bp incident.
Sorry, but do you know the term "gorilla arm"? I don't think pointing devices or touchscreens will be replacing RTS games anytime soon anywhere but in the casual market (which normally doesn't like RTS games anyways, way too much thinking). Yes, the RUSE trailer looked awfully cool, but chances are you wouldn't be able to get that setup even in three years (plus the game wasn't really like what the trailer showed). The sole accurate and remarkably proven input devices that RTS games are known to work with are a keyboard and a mouse. But then, if you put those on a console, you've just got a PC, right? And gaming on the couch with a keyboard isn't really comfy.
I don't like Starcraft, might not be the best person to ask, but just look at the games that aped Starcraft. Just look at the games that aped Diablo. Hell look at WoW and the MMO craze it spawned! Each and every time, they spawned a huge flare up in the game's genre, both in terms of quantity and quality. On the contrary, I think the amount of money Blizzard makes on its successful games is a kick in the nuts to other companies, telling them to make a better product. After all, Blizzard's gotta do something right to sell so much, right?
You forgot RTS games which, despite many attempts, still suck tremendously on consoles. There's a little thing called Starcraft 2 that, even if you don't really like it or care about it, will be making a huge impact on the PC market.
Not just that. Valve understands players (heck, make that consumers) more than brick and mortar stores seem to. Have you ever seen such large sales as 75% off at GameStop? Valve's experiment with Left 4 Dead showed them that people will buy in droves when you reach the market's sweet spot. Instead of arbitrarily defining a value, they decreased said values down to price points that sold. The result? Extreme success, it seems. I hadn't bought games in a long, long time (the majority seemed overpriced for what they offered), but I just can't refuse things like Mass Effect 2 for $25 or the Introversion pack for $5. No, the devs and Valve may not be making as big a cut, but if they get half the cut while selling thrice as many units, then they've won and so did consumers. Further, they'll often get sales they otherwise would never have had, not even later on in the game's shelf life.
I honestly applaud Valve for their efforts with Steam. No it might not be perfect, but it's honestly a DRM that I can tolerate and even like, since it adds value. I wish more execs understood that: don't fight piracy by considering consumers as criminals, fight it by providing additional value and ease of use that you just cannot get with pirated games!
Wait, you want ONE cable to rule them all? You do realize the average consumer already has enough problems understanding how YPbPr cables work (green in green, blue in blue, red in red, no not the audio!)? Making all things unified would just mean more money for BestBuy's installation services. Either that or lots of people would be watching their music and hearing their network.
So the Oxford dictionary is liable if little Timmy reads the definition of "vulva" and Timmy's mom sues for inappropriate content or whatever they can make up these days?
Funny that, because most console games are being directly ported to PC nowadays, so if you buy a PC at the same time as you buy a console, its lifetime should be roughly equal. You could wait 6 months after a console's release to be sure.
It's far, far worse than that. They require everyone to buy Apple. Obligation. Either that or get stuck with a school-lent laptop only for days (wonder how many of those they have, pretty sure it could become an issue). You may have a perfectly workable machine that you bought some years ago, but no, it's not Apple so it won't work! Obviously iWork has features that MS Office/Open Office cannot possibly emulate and that these features are absolutely critical to the courses, so you need Apple.
It should be just like about everywhere else: do what you want. Don't want a laptop? Don't use one. Want Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Amiga, BeOS? Go for it. Honestly, the only "acceptable" requirement would be Linux because you can install that on any machine without spending a cent more, and even then it'd be preferable to just leave it up to the students.
Even teenagers rarely get caught. I know someone whose server has been flooded multiple times over by one of those punks you speak of. He knows the name, address, school, he called the police, FBI, police in the server's country... And nothing. The police don't give a damn about it, despite the entire thing costing him money every month (it's a large dedicated server that's getting taken down). The FBI didn't hear "child porn" or "terrorism" so they also don't give a damn. Basically, he's entirely stuck alone if he can't reach the guy's parents or if they don't do anything.
It's incredible that such a thing is running rampant, though, seeing how it can cost people money and business. I can understand the trouble when facing a "professional" hacker who's so well hidden it'd take weeks to track him back, but when all the data is already tracked down, complete with evidence? The police probably prefer eating donuts all day long for all I can tell (sorry to all police officers who dislike donuts or who would actually do something in such a situation).
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I've really got to wonder what you're doing with your Windows install... Yes, we can bash Microsoft all we want, but I and several friends have had 7 for a year and more and we've never experienced anything so serious it'd require a reformat to fix.
I'm content with using 7 and dual-booting to Ubuntu or Fedora when needed.
I'm not an American, so my education system is different, but I can tell you that having to solve a 4 or 5 equations system using a matrix is the best way to make a stupid calculation mistake that can drastically alter the answer you get. Yes, I can add and subtract, but when you have to do it 20, 30 times, a mistake can slip in.
It only gets worse when you encounter large integrals with trigonometrical substitutions or integration by parts. For all of those, graphing calculators are a veritable life saver.
The ordinary Americans let the nutjobs have all the soundbytes, therefore they either agree with them or are lazy or a mix of both. Further, there ARE people who use Fox News as their primary news source...
They might not all be like that, but it's true that the RIAA has a lot of power, that media conglomerates decide what they want you to know and hear and censor the rest... The OP might've worded it harshly, but it's not all that far from the truth.
Give me a break and try to look around yourself. 250gb is plenty for most purposes and I can barely believe you Americans complaining about such a high cap when in Canada the highest you get is around 80gb with excessive fees if you go higher than that (and that's for already extremely expensive services).
Get over the cap you've got, hearing the whines about Comcast just makes me want to punch someone when you compare with what others get.
I've read "heroes of videogames". To me, developers are the heroes. I think everybody would agree; how otherwise could anybody become a "champion" if no videogame was ever made?
Why is half the list consisting of "champions" when there isn't even a mention of such names as Sid Meier, Will Wright, Gabe Newell, Richard Garriott or John Carmack? I couldn't find any other list, so I must assume this is the first one, right?
The OP's point is that you can make pronounceable passwords that for all intents and purposes look and feel like words but aren't. A dictionary attack cannot possibly contain every single pronounceable pseudo word.
Our TomTom GPS has had a few quirks sometimes. It'd drive us through half the country when there was in fact a perfectly practicable road right besides. It also happened that sometimes it would use an obviously pedestrian road for its plotting, leading to the car getting stuck in increasingly tight streets until it couldn't fit. There was also that one instance where it systematically wanted to use that one road that was one-way (the wrong way, obviously) and we had to drive for a good time to make it plot an alternate route (which also went through a one-way, we had to repeat that procedure twice).
Good times.
Apple also took great care to make their computers be something "else". They never call them PCs. In Average Joe's mind, a Mac is not a PC. A PC with Linux and a PC with Windows, however, is still a PC. Thus, he'll expect his Windows stuff to work out of the box with Linux.
There's also one point which is often glanced over, but which is a big barrier to entry: drivers. They're mostly caused by big corps not giving a damn about Linux, but they hurt the OS a lot. The number of times I've seen fairly knowledgeable people hack at it for WEEKS to get their wireless network adaptor working is astounding, and that's when they get it working at all. This doesn't affect Dell's computers since obviously they'll check whether their hardware works, but outside of those very rare circumstances where Linux is bundled, you will nearly always run into a compatibility problem at one point in time.
The overwhelming majority of tests at my university (physics/maths courses) are done with NO calculator allowed whatsoever. The teachers have simply understood that you don't need to calculate large numbers or complex equations to see if someone understood. It also has the advantage of not discriminating those who do not have the money to pay for a high-end calculator AND it reduces cheating.
The problem is not that people fear nuclear power, it is that they fear it disproportionately compared to, say, coal and oil plants. Nuclear wouldn't give you a bp incident.
Sorry, but do you know the term "gorilla arm"? I don't think pointing devices or touchscreens will be replacing RTS games anytime soon anywhere but in the casual market (which normally doesn't like RTS games anyways, way too much thinking). Yes, the RUSE trailer looked awfully cool, but chances are you wouldn't be able to get that setup even in three years (plus the game wasn't really like what the trailer showed). The sole accurate and remarkably proven input devices that RTS games are known to work with are a keyboard and a mouse. But then, if you put those on a console, you've just got a PC, right? And gaming on the couch with a keyboard isn't really comfy.
I don't like Starcraft, might not be the best person to ask, but just look at the games that aped Starcraft. Just look at the games that aped Diablo. Hell look at WoW and the MMO craze it spawned! Each and every time, they spawned a huge flare up in the game's genre, both in terms of quantity and quality. On the contrary, I think the amount of money Blizzard makes on its successful games is a kick in the nuts to other companies, telling them to make a better product. After all, Blizzard's gotta do something right to sell so much, right?
To clarify, yes I meant that Steam adds value making its DRM tolerable. Should've phrased that better...
A logarithmic scale from zero to 30*pi then?
You forgot RTS games which, despite many attempts, still suck tremendously on consoles. There's a little thing called Starcraft 2 that, even if you don't really like it or care about it, will be making a huge impact on the PC market.
Not just that. Valve understands players (heck, make that consumers) more than brick and mortar stores seem to. Have you ever seen such large sales as 75% off at GameStop? Valve's experiment with Left 4 Dead showed them that people will buy in droves when you reach the market's sweet spot. Instead of arbitrarily defining a value, they decreased said values down to price points that sold. The result? Extreme success, it seems. I hadn't bought games in a long, long time (the majority seemed overpriced for what they offered), but I just can't refuse things like Mass Effect 2 for $25 or the Introversion pack for $5. No, the devs and Valve may not be making as big a cut, but if they get half the cut while selling thrice as many units, then they've won and so did consumers. Further, they'll often get sales they otherwise would never have had, not even later on in the game's shelf life.
I honestly applaud Valve for their efforts with Steam. No it might not be perfect, but it's honestly a DRM that I can tolerate and even like, since it adds value. I wish more execs understood that: don't fight piracy by considering consumers as criminals, fight it by providing additional value and ease of use that you just cannot get with pirated games!
A simple Faraday cage can protect the cards from EM radiation.
Did we already forget the IP over Avian Carriers standard? It's been proven reliable in the past with an averaged 4.44 Mb/s transfer speed!
Wait, you want ONE cable to rule them all? You do realize the average consumer already has enough problems understanding how YPbPr cables work (green in green, blue in blue, red in red, no not the audio!)? Making all things unified would just mean more money for BestBuy's installation services. Either that or lots of people would be watching their music and hearing their network.
I think the price is a little high. You can buy a senate office for a lot less than that.
Hell for that price the office with come complete with your own Senator.
Yeah, that's why the price went down that much.
So the Oxford dictionary is liable if little Timmy reads the definition of "vulva" and Timmy's mom sues for inappropriate content or whatever they can make up these days?
Funny that, because most console games are being directly ported to PC nowadays, so if you buy a PC at the same time as you buy a console, its lifetime should be roughly equal. You could wait 6 months after a console's release to be sure.
It's far, far worse than that. They require everyone to buy Apple. Obligation. Either that or get stuck with a school-lent laptop only for days (wonder how many of those they have, pretty sure it could become an issue). You may have a perfectly workable machine that you bought some years ago, but no, it's not Apple so it won't work! Obviously iWork has features that MS Office/Open Office cannot possibly emulate and that these features are absolutely critical to the courses, so you need Apple.
It should be just like about everywhere else: do what you want. Don't want a laptop? Don't use one. Want Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Amiga, BeOS? Go for it. Honestly, the only "acceptable" requirement would be Linux because you can install that on any machine without spending a cent more, and even then it'd be preferable to just leave it up to the students.
Even teenagers rarely get caught. I know someone whose server has been flooded multiple times over by one of those punks you speak of. He knows the name, address, school, he called the police, FBI, police in the server's country... And nothing. The police don't give a damn about it, despite the entire thing costing him money every month (it's a large dedicated server that's getting taken down). The FBI didn't hear "child porn" or "terrorism" so they also don't give a damn. Basically, he's entirely stuck alone if he can't reach the guy's parents or if they don't do anything.
It's incredible that such a thing is running rampant, though, seeing how it can cost people money and business. I can understand the trouble when facing a "professional" hacker who's so well hidden it'd take weeks to track him back, but when all the data is already tracked down, complete with evidence? The police probably prefer eating donuts all day long for all I can tell (sorry to all police officers who dislike donuts or who would actually do something in such a situation).