There's a massive Hitlerian effort to violate all of our civil liberties and force everyone to correctly speak the same
1. Sort of like Palm did with Graffiti - write the way they say or it won't work.
2. In Germany, they do this...every little region of Germany has its own accent (not unlike England, actually), but the schools teach and enforce a single "correct" pronunciation.
Guns allowed the 1700s US populace to feed themselves, protect their property, and provide for the common defense. Unrestricted general purpose information processing devices have interesting parallels.
To counter your point, singing a song that someone else wrote while someone else performs the accompaniment and someone else alters your voice isn't art either.
Dude, I know three diabetics. One has the kind you describe as hereditary. The other two are morbidly obese. Which is more common? I don't know...but don't go flying off the handle if someone comes up with statistics saying the obesity type is...
And this is where the animal rights activists do not get it...many have suggested that science has progressed to the point where test tube or computer models suffice, and animals do not need to be used. This completely ignores the fact that computers have not yet progressed to the state where we can model a single protein, and test tubes are not complete living systems.
Though I'll grant that we don't need to pump rabbits full of mascara just to see HOW MUCH is toxic...
There is no need for comptuers in that. You are wrong. Computers are a force multiplier for teachers; rather than one thread of instruction at a time, there can be many. For $30,000, you can get one teacher or 20 computers...do the math. (Warning - minor parental boasting ahead). I have a child in kindergarten who is learning to read. Most of his classmates are not. Why? Because the school has reading software that paces itself to the student. This is a supplement to the curriculum, not the main curriculum. The kids can learn at their own pace; those who can progress farther faster have an opportunity to do so that they wouldn't have before.
So, this is nice and all, but why do I think it's necessary? Most of the world will work for pennies on the dollar compared to US workers. The only advantage future workers in the US will have are in the educational opportunities offered to them. The more opportunities my kid has, the more likely he'll be able to compete against coders in India.
In High school they braged that we were learning the latest word processor that industry is using, wordPerfect 5.1 for dos. I assume this was in a class designed to give you a job right out of highschool; otherwise, you're correct - the curriculum designers were morons. You should have been using a multiple free word processors to study concepts common to all word-processing systems, such as cut, paste, format, etc. You should have been considering information as a stream of bytes, as in Word Perfect, or a collection of objects, as in Word. You should have learned timeless concepts, not rapidly obsoleted procedures...
do not allow a computer to become the end itself. Hear, hear. I knew of a principal who bought computers for his school because he'd promised parents that their students would spend an hour a week using computers. As much as we all enjoyed playing Oregon Trail, I never learned anything from it. I certainly didn't learn anything by playing it week after week. On the other hand, I learned a great deal that remains with me to this day (though I'm not sure of its immediate applicability) when my science teacher had us spend an hour running a simulation of the process that seismologists use to measure the distance to epicenters of earthquakes, and using that information to pinpoint the epicenter of a quake. That one hour solidified in my mind everything we'd learned about earthqukes during the previous two weeks.
It will never cease to amaze me that there is this army of trolls just lying in wait to come up with the stupidest, most knee-jerk, ignorant and uninformed comment on damn near anything withing moments of its appearance.
Yes...the most prominent ones are called "journalists".
Dude, you are so blind. EVERYONE knows that the "Pentium" was state of the art in 1971, when the US government was finally able to reverse-engineer the computing technology of the scout ships that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Intel is a front through which the Majestic 12 have been releasing CPU technology to US industry over the last 30 years. Moore's law is fine and dandy for civilian applications, but you've got to realize that the government started out light-years ahead and has had a much higher growth factor in the last 30 years. A single state-of-the-art military CPU probably outclasses the combined computing power of EVERY computing device in civilian usage.
First, they came for the Unabomber, and I said nothing because I wasn't a reclusive Luddite crank. Then they came for Timothy McVeigh, and I said nothing because I wasn't not a hyper-conservative nationalistic psycho. Next they came for Osama bi Laden, and I said nothing because I'm not a US funded expatriated Saudi mujahadein. At last they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out...
The calculators my students used were Casios (FX something I think? It's been nearly ten years...) and the backup battery was easily removable. Both sets of batteries were removed before tests. Come to think of it, though, all that's needed is a simple, failsafe memory-wipe method. Someone else mentioned a capacitor that maintained memory for ten minutes; that won't be removable, obviously. I'd have no problem with a calculator that had a paperclip-sized hole with a reset button under it...walk around the room with a paperclip, and in two minutes the room is ready for the test.
great for those who didn't understand the technology Yup. Those who don't understand the technology have NO business using it for teaching. I have more patience for Luddites (those who disallow technology out of fear that it may someday replace them) than technophiles (those who incorporate as much technology as possible, regardless of the benefits) when it comes to teaching.
I'm a former mathematics teacher. You should be. Let me pick your post apart line by line. I'll be quite harsh, so stop reading now if you don't want your day ruined...
I'm sorry, but I draw the "geekiness" line at pissing away your time writing silly crap like that for a calculator. Do you think it's silly for football players to lift weights because there are no weights on the football field? Learning to program in a small space develops excellent mental muscles. Learning to program in Z80 assembler (or whatever language is used) is invaluable to ANYONE who wants to understand computers. YOU don't see the usefulness in it, therefore you conclude it's pointless; I must disagree. I'd point out also (something that you as a teacher MUST come to understand) that anything that motivates a student to learn something, ANYTHING, is invaluable.
A calculator is a tool of science and business, not a gaming machine. Ever hear of a computer? Ever hear of the IBM PC? Speak of facts, not wishes.
I cannot begin to describe the problems that it has caused me as a high-school math teacher. Yes, you can. You go on to do so in the next sentence. It would have been better to say "I can only begin to describe..."
Not only has the rampant Tetris-playing caused my students to stop paying attention in class, but the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests. You have a classroom management problem. The game-playing and cheating are symptomatic. It could be note-passing, it could be talking, it could be throwing pencils at the ceiling. The problem is not the paper, the mouths, or the pencils, it is the students' lack of respect and motivation. Like it or not, responsibility (if not causation) lies with you. Students play games because they have nothing better to do. As for the cheating, you make it sound as if you didn't understand the potential of these "tools", and I have no patience with this. You have no business teaching with them if you don't understand them. I worked with some of the early pioneers of the graphing calculator in secondary mathematics education, and rapidly learned that a teacher who didn't understand the technology would do more harm than good. Students would not only fail to progress in their mathematical skills; they would regress as they lost competence in skills they'd previously developed.
It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams. More evidence that you have NO business teaching with graphing calculators. You apparently hand students a tool, teach them to use it, and test them on their ability to accomplish tasks without the tool. You may as well teach them to do long division with paper and pencil and require oral examiniations in which they do all the work in their head. The analogy is almost exact. Here's what we did to solve your problem. On test days...
1. Students place all books under the desk as class starts; only the calculator and some writing implements are on the desk.
2. Students remove batteries from the calculators.
3. The teacher walks to each desk and verifies that the batteries are out.
4. The students replace batteries and place calculators under their desk.
5. The teacher passes out Part 1 of the test; it measures rote memorization of formulas, proofs, etc. This portion of the test is timed.
6. When Part 1 is completed, the teacher passes out Part 2; students could use their calculators.
This worked quite well for us.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time? I believe they have...
They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation. Right, and Esperanto is far superior from a linguistic standpoint and works better than standard English phonics. But no one speaks Esperanto at my supermarket because everyone speaks English. RPN is a poor choice in a pedagogical environment because you must teach not one, but two mathematical languages. If you want to teach RPN, by all means do so..but teach only RPN and use textbooks whose notation makes RPN obvious.
Alas, I suppose now that HP's discontinuing them, they don't matter to the Slashdot crowd anymore... Not a homogenous group...but you're probably mostly correct.
Some of this has been pointed out in other posts, but I wanted to be thorough. BTW, I'm a former mathematics teacher because I was a bad mathematics teacher. I loved mathematics, I loved my students, and I loved being in the classroom. I just really, really sucked at it. Anyway, I can see the symptoms from a thousand miles. You really need to either leave the field (as I did) or seek some drastic change to your teaching. A few years reflection on my failure has lead me t believe that classroom management (aka discipline) skills are the core competencies of good teachers.
Many (if not most) industry-specific Windows apps are written in VB. Need a data-entry database front end? VB. Need a telemarketing app? VB. Need to access scanned images of documents? VB. Need a really lame data conversion app? VB.
I don't claim to have huge experience - I've only been VB-aware for ~3 years - but every non-web niche Windows application I've ever seen has been a VB app. There's one possible exception, but the company that made it is out of business - to a large extent because of their development costs - though I'm not convinced they don't use VB.
women were better at math To clarify the - women were better at tedious arithmetical calculation. Men were obviously better than women at math(ematics) because there were almost no women mathematicians.
At least, that was the misconception of the time...
I'm glad she finally got her chance to shine during the war, but who knows what else she might have accomplished, had someone's idiotic prejudices not dissuaded her into working for the Farm Journal?
Don't dis serendipity. Had she not been discouraged, her life would not have taken the course it had. She's little more than a footnote in history, and computer history at that, but how many of the billions who have lived can even claim that? Had she gone on to major in mathematics, she might have become...a math teacher. Or perhaps she would have gotten her PhD and disappeared into research, occasionally publishing obscure monographs on semihemidemigroup homologies.
An 8-bit CPU can address only 64K AT ONE TIME. The venerable Commodore 128 managed to have 512K available, despite having the 8-bit 6510 as a CPU. It takes some tricks, but you could, for example, make the 1st page of RAM (256 bytes=2048 bits) specify which 64K block of RAM is to be available, giving you a total of 2^2048 *64K of RAM (give or take 2^2048 * 256 bytes:)
It's not going to be fast, and it's not going to be pretty, but you could access huge amounts of information with only an 8-bit microcontroller.
Turing developed some theoretical underpinnings of computer science; the bit I was referring to was the idea that a Turing machine can simulate any other computing device. This can be interpreted (not entirely correctly) that any computer can simulate any other computer (performance considerations notwithstanding). Von Neumann made some of this practical (or at least, was given credit for it).
Oh, I agree absolutely...incremental but SIGNIFICANTLY incremental. Windows 98 was a joy to troubleshoot compared to 95.
I consider 98 to be a pinnacle in MS consumer OS evolution. The two previous pinnacles were DOS 3.3 and DOS 6.22/Win3.11. I have yet to see a significant improvement to 98 in the consumer space.
I am not a fan of porn </understatement>), but folks, this is Germany. Ever been there? i have. I visited several small towns and one moderately large city. Every bookstore and newstand had a large selection of pornographic magazines. In the small town I stayed in, I noted one that featured people in sexual situations in the magazine rack at a toy and school supply store. Think about it - hardcore porn in a store for children in a small town. The newspaper featured frontal nudity most days - sometimes relevant to a story, sometimes not. MTV videos contained nudity.
In short, I think the German politicians (or whoever) that are proposing this can't be taken seriously. I think it would be roughly analagous to US senators declaring that images of people in swimsuits should be outlawed. No one would take them seriously, in the sense that no one would think that it could actually happen. It would be a rhetorical ploy with some other political goal in mind.
P.S. This is why you should travel..so you can spout inane drivel on slashdot and sound like you know what you're talking about:)
You missed one thing in your equation...the Plus! pack. We used to say (at a major OEM tech support center):
Windows 98 = Windows 95 OSR2 + IE4 + Plus! pack. OSR2 included a number of driver upgrades, FAT32, and USB support, among other things.
Regardless, you are absolutely correct when you imply that 98 was merely an incremental improvement over 95.
Re:EZPass & Email :: The Connection
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The point of speeding on the freeway is that you can drive real fast, pull over at a rest stop, take a leak, stretch out, maybe nap for a few, and arrive at your location refreshed.
Bah...those things that have to do with Ordinary Life are worthless. We want FACTS, man; we want to know, down to a hundredth of a millimeter, the actual caliber of a Chinese-manufactured AK-47 knock-off, circa 1973. We want accurate descriptions of the small-unit tactics used in the Nigerian Congo during the Boer Wars of 1987. We want to know, from bootstrapped satellite reconaissance, exactly how many outbuildings in the classified CIA camp in Walla Walla Washington were large enough to house a toilet in 1990.
But what would you have the government do to change it? Simple. Inform consumers of what we pros already know. Before using passport, you must read the 24 point disclaimer on the web page:
"WARNING. ALL INFORMATION STORED IN THIS SERVICE MAY BE ACCESSIBLE BY CRIMINALS."
Call it truth in advertising or whatever, but be sure that NO ONE can call their product secure unless it is.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a massive Hitlerian effort to violate all of our civil liberties and force everyone to correctly speak the same
1. Sort of like Palm did with Graffiti - write the way they say or it won't work.
2. In Germany, they do this...every little region of Germany has its own accent (not unlike England, actually), but the schools teach and enforce a single "correct" pronunciation.
Interesting point...
Guns allowed the 1700s US populace to feed themselves, protect their property, and provide for the common defense. Unrestricted general purpose information processing devices have interesting parallels.
Ah, the eternal debate between craft and art...
To counter your point, singing a song that someone else wrote while someone else performs the accompaniment and someone else alters your voice isn't art either.
More silliness:
Internet Security and Acceleration Server, the successor to Proxy Server
Internet Information Server
SQL Server
System Management Server
Dude, I know three diabetics. One has the kind you describe as hereditary. The other two are morbidly obese. Which is more common? I don't know...but don't go flying off the handle if someone comes up with statistics saying the obesity type is...
And this is where the animal rights activists do not get it...many have suggested that science has progressed to the point where test tube or computer models suffice, and animals do not need to be used. This completely ignores the fact that computers have not yet progressed to the state where we can model a single protein, and test tubes are not complete living systems.
Though I'll grant that we don't need to pump rabbits full of mascara just to see HOW MUCH is toxic...
There is no need for comptuers in that.
You are wrong. Computers are a force multiplier for teachers; rather than one thread of instruction at a time, there can be many. For $30,000, you can get one teacher or 20 computers...do the math. (Warning - minor parental boasting ahead). I have a child in kindergarten who is learning to read. Most of his classmates are not. Why? Because the school has reading software that paces itself to the student. This is a supplement to the curriculum, not the main curriculum. The kids can learn at their own pace; those who can progress farther faster have an opportunity to do so that they wouldn't have before.
So, this is nice and all, but why do I think it's necessary? Most of the world will work for pennies on the dollar compared to US workers. The only advantage future workers in the US will have are in the educational opportunities offered to them. The more opportunities my kid has, the more likely he'll be able to compete against coders in India.
In High school they braged that we were learning the latest word processor that industry is using, wordPerfect 5.1 for dos.
I assume this was in a class designed to give you a job right out of highschool; otherwise, you're correct - the curriculum designers were morons. You should have been using a multiple free word processors to study concepts common to all word-processing systems, such as cut, paste, format, etc. You should have been considering information as a stream of bytes, as in Word Perfect, or a collection of objects, as in Word. You should have learned timeless concepts, not rapidly obsoleted procedures...
do not allow a computer to become the end itself.
Hear, hear. I knew of a principal who bought computers for his school because he'd promised parents that their students would spend an hour a week using computers. As much as we all enjoyed playing Oregon Trail, I never learned anything from it. I certainly didn't learn anything by playing it week after week. On the other hand, I learned a great deal that remains with me to this day (though I'm not sure of its immediate applicability) when my science teacher had us spend an hour running a simulation of the process that seismologists use to measure the distance to epicenters of earthquakes, and using that information to pinpoint the epicenter of a quake. That one hour solidified in my mind everything we'd learned about earthqukes during the previous two weeks.
It will never cease to amaze me that there is this army of trolls just lying in wait to come up with the stupidest, most knee-jerk, ignorant and uninformed comment on damn near anything withing moments of its appearance.
Yes...the most prominent ones are called "journalists".
Dude, you are so blind. EVERYONE knows that the "Pentium" was state of the art in 1971, when the US government was finally able to reverse-engineer the computing technology of the scout ships that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Intel is a front through which the Majestic 12 have been releasing CPU technology to US industry over the last 30 years. Moore's law is fine and dandy for civilian applications, but you've got to realize that the government started out light-years ahead and has had a much higher growth factor in the last 30 years. A single state-of-the-art military CPU probably outclasses the combined computing power of EVERY computing device in civilian usage.
Open your eyes...
First, they came for the Unabomber, and I said nothing because I wasn't a reclusive Luddite crank. Then they came for Timothy McVeigh, and I said nothing because I wasn't not a hyper-conservative nationalistic psycho. Next they came for Osama bi Laden, and I said nothing because I'm not a US funded expatriated Saudi mujahadein. At last they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out...
The calculators my students used were Casios (FX something I think? It's been nearly ten years...) and the backup battery was easily removable. Both sets of batteries were removed before tests. Come to think of it, though, all that's needed is a simple, failsafe memory-wipe method. Someone else mentioned a capacitor that maintained memory for ten minutes; that won't be removable, obviously. I'd have no problem with a calculator that had a paperclip-sized hole with a reset button under it...walk around the room with a paperclip, and in two minutes the room is ready for the test.
great for those who didn't understand the technology
Yup. Those who don't understand the technology have NO business using it for teaching. I have more patience for Luddites (those who disallow technology out of fear that it may someday replace them) than technophiles (those who incorporate as much technology as possible, regardless of the benefits) when it comes to teaching.
I'm a former mathematics teacher. You should be. Let me pick your post apart line by line. I'll be quite harsh, so stop reading now if you don't want your day ruined...
I'm sorry, but I draw the "geekiness" line at pissing away your time writing silly crap like that for a calculator.
Do you think it's silly for football players to lift weights because there are no weights on the football field? Learning to program in a small space develops excellent mental muscles. Learning to program in Z80 assembler (or whatever language is used) is invaluable to ANYONE who wants to understand computers. YOU don't see the usefulness in it, therefore you conclude it's pointless; I must disagree. I'd point out also (something that you as a teacher MUST come to understand) that anything that motivates a student to learn something, ANYTHING, is invaluable.
A calculator is a tool of science and business, not a gaming machine.
Ever hear of a computer? Ever hear of the IBM PC? Speak of facts, not wishes.
I cannot begin to describe the problems that it has caused me as a high-school math teacher.
Yes, you can. You go on to do so in the next sentence. It would have been better to say "I can only begin to describe..."
Not only has the rampant Tetris-playing caused my students to stop paying attention in class, but the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests.
You have a classroom management problem. The game-playing and cheating are symptomatic. It could be note-passing, it could be talking, it could be throwing pencils at the ceiling. The problem is not the paper, the mouths, or the pencils, it is the students' lack of respect and motivation. Like it or not, responsibility (if not causation) lies with you. Students play games because they have nothing better to do. As for the cheating, you make it sound as if you didn't understand the potential of these "tools", and I have no patience with this. You have no business teaching with them if you don't understand them. I worked with some of the early pioneers of the graphing calculator in secondary mathematics education, and rapidly learned that a teacher who didn't understand the technology would do more harm than good. Students would not only fail to progress in their mathematical skills; they would regress as they lost competence in skills they'd previously developed.
It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams.
More evidence that you have NO business teaching with graphing calculators. You apparently hand students a tool, teach them to use it, and test them on their ability to accomplish tasks without the tool. You may as well teach them to do long division with paper and pencil and require oral examiniations in which they do all the work in their head. The analogy is almost exact. Here's what we did to solve your problem. On test days...
1. Students place all books under the desk as class starts; only the calculator and some writing implements are on the desk.
2. Students remove batteries from the calculators.
3. The teacher walks to each desk and verifies that the batteries are out.
4. The students replace batteries and place calculators under their desk.
5. The teacher passes out Part 1 of the test; it measures rote memorization of formulas, proofs, etc. This portion of the test is timed.
6. When Part 1 is completed, the teacher passes out Part 2; students could use their calculators.
This worked quite well for us.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time?
I believe they have...
They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation.
Right, and Esperanto is far superior from a linguistic standpoint and works better than standard English phonics. But no one speaks Esperanto at my supermarket because everyone speaks English. RPN is a poor choice in a pedagogical environment because you must teach not one, but two mathematical languages. If you want to teach RPN, by all means do so..but teach only RPN and use textbooks whose notation makes RPN obvious.
Alas, I suppose now that HP's discontinuing them, they don't matter to the Slashdot crowd anymore...
Not a homogenous group...but you're probably mostly correct.
Some of this has been pointed out in other posts, but I wanted to be thorough. BTW, I'm a former mathematics teacher because I was a bad mathematics teacher. I loved mathematics, I loved my students, and I loved being in the classroom. I just really, really sucked at it. Anyway, I can see the symptoms from a thousand miles. You really need to either leave the field (as I did) or seek some drastic change to your teaching. A few years reflection on my failure has lead me t believe that classroom management (aka discipline) skills are the core competencies of good teachers.
Many (if not most) industry-specific Windows apps are written in VB. Need a data-entry database front end? VB. Need a telemarketing app? VB. Need to access scanned images of documents? VB. Need a really lame data conversion app? VB.
I don't claim to have huge experience - I've only been VB-aware for ~3 years - but every non-web niche Windows application I've ever seen has been a VB app. There's one possible exception, but the company that made it is out of business - to a large extent because of their development costs - though I'm not convinced they don't use VB.
women were better at math
To clarify the - women were better at tedious arithmetical calculation. Men were obviously better than women at math(ematics) because there were almost no women mathematicians.
At least, that was the misconception of the time...
I'm glad she finally got her chance to shine during the war, but who knows what else she might have accomplished, had someone's idiotic prejudices not dissuaded her into working for the Farm Journal?
Don't dis serendipity. Had she not been discouraged, her life would not have taken the course it had. She's little more than a footnote in history, and computer history at that, but how many of the billions who have lived can even claim that? Had she gone on to major in mathematics, she might have become...a math teacher. Or perhaps she would have gotten her PhD and disappeared into research, occasionally publishing obscure monographs on semihemidemigroup homologies.
P.S. To my comment of just over a minute ago:
I didn't note the bit about bankswitching until I'd hit post and back...DOH...sorry for pointing out the obvious.
An 8-bit CPU can address only 64K AT ONE TIME. The venerable Commodore 128 managed to have 512K available, despite having the 8-bit 6510 as a CPU. It takes some tricks, but you could, for example, make the 1st page of RAM (256 bytes=2048 bits) specify which 64K block of RAM is to be available, giving you a total of 2^2048 *64K of RAM (give or take 2^2048 * 256 bytes :)
It's not going to be fast, and it's not going to be pretty, but you could access huge amounts of information with only an 8-bit microcontroller.
Turing developed some theoretical underpinnings of computer science; the bit I was referring to was the idea that a Turing machine can simulate any other computing device. This can be interpreted (not entirely correctly) that any computer can simulate any other computer (performance considerations notwithstanding). Von Neumann made some of this practical (or at least, was given credit for it).
Oh, I agree absolutely...incremental but SIGNIFICANTLY incremental. Windows 98 was a joy to troubleshoot compared to 95.
I consider 98 to be a pinnacle in MS consumer OS evolution. The two previous pinnacles were DOS 3.3 and DOS 6.22/Win3.11. I have yet to see a significant improvement to 98 in the consumer space.
What do you think?
I am not a fan of porn </understatement>), but folks, this is Germany. Ever been there? i have. I visited several small towns and one moderately large city. Every bookstore and newstand had a large selection of pornographic magazines. In the small town I stayed in, I noted one that featured people in sexual situations in the magazine rack at a toy and school supply store. Think about it - hardcore porn in a store for children in a small town. The newspaper featured frontal nudity most days - sometimes relevant to a story, sometimes not. MTV videos contained nudity.
:)
In short, I think the German politicians (or whoever) that are proposing this can't be taken seriously. I think it would be roughly analagous to US senators declaring that images of people in swimsuits should be outlawed. No one would take them seriously, in the sense that no one would think that it could actually happen. It would be a rhetorical ploy with some other political goal in mind.
P.S. This is why you should travel..so you can spout inane drivel on slashdot and sound like you know what you're talking about
Go read Von Neumann and Turing.
You can do ANYTHING with an 8-bit microcontroller. It just isn't necessarily easy.
You missed one thing in your equation...the Plus! pack. We used to say (at a major OEM tech support center):
Windows 98 = Windows 95 OSR2 + IE4 + Plus! pack. OSR2 included a number of driver upgrades, FAT32, and USB support, among other things.
Regardless, you are absolutely correct when you imply that 98 was merely an incremental improvement over 95.
The point of speeding on the freeway is that you can drive real fast, pull over at a rest stop, take a leak, stretch out, maybe nap for a few, and arrive at your location refreshed.
Bah...those things that have to do with Ordinary Life are worthless. We want FACTS, man; we want to know, down to a hundredth of a millimeter, the actual caliber of a Chinese-manufactured AK-47 knock-off, circa 1973. We want accurate descriptions of the small-unit tactics used in the Nigerian Congo during the Boer Wars of 1987. We want to know, from bootstrapped satellite reconaissance, exactly how many outbuildings in the classified CIA camp in Walla Walla Washington were large enough to house a toilet in 1990.
You, sir, are full of Pablum (tm).
But what would you have the government do to change it?
Simple. Inform consumers of what we pros already know. Before using passport, you must read the 24 point disclaimer on the web page:
"WARNING. ALL INFORMATION STORED IN THIS SERVICE MAY BE ACCESSIBLE BY CRIMINALS."
Call it truth in advertising or whatever, but be sure that NO ONE can call their product secure unless it is.