... is just around the corner. That's another "finding" that the technoworld pundits root out every few years to astound their readers. I view crap like this article to be in the Mark Twain "lies, damn lies, and statistics" category. You could probably show that left-handed red-heads buy more PCs than ambidextrous bald winos, but so freakin' what? This is clearly a move-on-nothing-to-see-here story.
But the point of Asimov's version of psycohistory is that the actions of one person, unless they are a tremendous outlier such as the Mule, don't matter. In the case you give, there's this powderkeg called Ethiopia just waiting to explode. If the lance corporal and his buddies you postulate aren't there to trigger things, some other idiot will. At least one of Asiomov's stories involves one of the Traders trying like crazy to make sure that things come out correctly, only to fail at every attempt. When all looks like failure, the "dead hand of Harry Seldon" reaches in through another agency totally outside the Trader's framework to put things back on track. It's not that a particular match will light up history's bonfire, it's that once history has built the bonfire some match will.
The key issue regarding news delivery is the critical importance of well-researched and unbiased reporting to the health of a democracy. Assuming that the traditional newspaper is dying, a new model needs to grow in which the costs of doing this reporting are covered. If you don't have professional, independently-funded reporters you will not get the in-depth, researched, and verified stories that delve into the dark corners of corporations and Government - you'll get schlock reporting that skims the surface, self-agrandizing (read Rush Limbaugh) reporting, highly-slanted (read Fox News) reporting, and aggregators. Good news reporting need to find a way to get paid for, and not by the Murdochs of the world but by the great unwashed masses. Unfortunately, everyone now seems to think that everything should be free (hear the howls when some big newspaper puts up a paywall), an attitude that is pushed hard by certain political types who see this as to their advantage.
Bottom line - how it's delivered isn't really that important. How it's paid for is critically so, as is paying those who really produce the news a living wage.
Really? Do you think NASA as an institution cares about an astronaut's life? People within the organization do, but the institution itself cares only about one thing - staying alive. Killing off astronauts is bad publicity, and enough bad publicity kills NASA. There are a lot of people making good money working for NASA, and these are typically jobs that last a while (I'm not talking about contractor jobs, this is Government employees). If NASA goes away, so does their good thang. So, billions are spent on cover-your-ass, not on protect-our-astronauts.
This is also an issue for software that works with GPS data and time. The GPS clocks do not "speeka da leapsecond" so the software needs to keep track of things. There was a 15 second offset, and now it's 16 seconds. This has happened often enough that most areas where this might have been a problem have been discovered, but as slashdotters know, there's new code written every second (even leap seconds), and it ain't all finest kind.
A basic problem is that there's no strong constituency for earth environment monitoring from space. Anyone who thinks NASA is in this business is just fooling themselves. NASA is in the research and metal-bending business - build new satellite to do new things. All the space-is-the-place supporters are in this camp. The agency who has the responsibility for routine monitoring, but utterly lacks in both political clout and cojones, is NOAA. Aside from a vocal constituency, the other things missing is a coherent plan for: what monitoring is needed, what space assets are needing to do this long-term monitoring, and how we're going to pay for it. Given that politicians can't see beyond the next election I don't see this being fixed.
As for an earlier post about the military launching everything they need, this is a laugher when it comes to environment monitoring. The DOD needs environment monitoring at least as much as the civilian side of things, yet they have not real plans for weather satellites beyond the two remaining DMSP weather satellites sitting in nitrogen cans awaiting launch. When those guys go, and they're old technology, that's it for a long while.
I purchased an iPad just after the 2 came out - I'm still wondering if that was a mistake. One of the main issues I am always wrestling with is how passwords for website access are handled, or not handled is more like. Safari doesn't have a protected username/password store capability (unless you consider AutoFill to be a nice secure way to store this info on a mobile device), and the third-party stuff like 1Password can't talk to Safari because of sandbox restrictions with iOS. Why is it that strong credentials security for accessing web-based information isn't a major component of mobile OS's? For me, it's now the main reason I don't get an iPhone and will likely turn my iPad into an expensive gaming pad for my grandson. (Yeah, I'm old - bring back Big Iron.)
OK, I throw the BS flag all over this one. I've been in this business (space weather) for over 40 years, and one of the biggest problems in the whole field are these "OMG the F-ing SKY is FALLING" pronouncements from self-proclaimed space weather experts (or NASA scientists, which is just sad). What this guy has done is a typical "lies, damn lies, and statistics" analysis of the worst sort, and he even kinda admits this with the caveat at the end of TFA's abstract in Space Weather. This is not to say that a big Carrington-magnitude storm came along it wouldn't cause havoc, it most certainly will, but there's only been one of these in our recorded history. That seems to fall well outside the realm of useable predictability. It's in a class of problems the weather service folks who try to predict 100-year floods know all too well. If you only see one instance of something in your record, at best you can say that you get one of those beasts every record-length/2 years (if that). This guy is just blowing smoke to advertise his business.
After working with a variety of US Government agencies over my 40+ year career I learned many lessons about how these agencies work. A major one was how mandated actions or behaviors were handled. It wasn't important that you actually did what the mandate called for, it just needed to APPEAR that you did. This website experience from TFA sounds very much like this behavior.
Amen. And don't make the mistake of assuming that those who want computers that "just run" out of the box are computer illiterates or inummerates. I've been writing code since the mid-1960s, starting on Big Iron and the earliest minicomputers (various DEC flavors), and have been writing code on one platform or another ever since. I don't write code as a living, I use it to do my real job, which is research in the physical sciences. While I love Linux and all my heavy-lifting boxes run Linux, I live on a Mac desktop because, dammit, it just works (by and large).
Are we headed towards more locked-down consumer computers, probably yes. Given all the botnets around, that may not be such a bad thing. However, I do not see GP computers going away because the hardware/content folks need software developers, who can't/won't work on closed systems. There may be battles, and I fully expect I'll be dropping Apple if they continue to try to make OS X become iOS, but a steady-state is always going to have open GP computers. And I believe all this was thrashed out TWO F-ING DAYS AGO.
I was going to respond to this topic, but this response pretty much sums up what I wanted to say. I switched from Linux+Windows in 2004 to Mac and haven't looked back. I've got two iMacs and a MacBook Pro, all running VMware with Linux and Windows virtual machines. I have a number of Open Source packages installed on all OS X setups using macports. There are things about OS X (and Apple) that I don't like, but the damn things pretty much "just work" and I can roll code that I need done and not that my OS needs done. Linux sans the desktop is still my main workspace (space-related research), but everything else that doesn't require Windows is done in OS X.
I recall what happened to Apple last time an outsider became a high-level executive. Damn near killed the company. Remains to be seen how this will all play out, but I think we'll see more commodification of Apple's various lines, pruning out stuff seen as not productive (computers, for example), and a slow decline in "wow" factor as the Jobs gang loses more control and leave the company. The goal will be to maximize the bottom line in whatever way possible, killing off the gold-egg-laying goose. Without a strong leader who can force a company to stay focused on what's over the next horizon, stockholders will force the focus to the next quarter's dividends. Sad, but that's life.
On a slightly-related note, I wonder if Steve's will has been read? There may be a clause in there that requires Apple to change it's corporate name to something like "Greedy Content Whoremongers" or some such.
Crowsource funding for science will come off at best as well as crowsource funding for the arts, which is pretty much what we've had for the last several decades. The masses will fund what tickles their fancy, or their ego, and the smart researcher will tap into that by pandering. Science will end up with its equivalent of Justin Beeber, Hank Williams, Jr., Gwen Stephanie, and the list goes on.
My colleagues and I came up with a great idea along these lines some years ago (I've been in research since 1980) - one of us would grow a large head of hair and dye it white. He'd be the front man for a Church of Researching God's Creation (I think t that's the name we came up with) which we'd take to the airways to surf for donations. If done right, this could bring in serious money. Of course, we'd all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every now and then, but by the number of highly successful (and very rich) evangelicals floating around that must be a solvable problem.
What's really sad is that if the IPCC groups tried to put in a REAL worst case scenario the politicians would have a hissy-fit. From what I have heard from colleagues in the field of climate modeling, the IPCC had to work hard to get a consensus on what would be deemed a politically-acceptable worst case scenario. I look at the official "worst case" setups and assume that they represent our realistic best hope.
How did it come to this? I think it started in the post-WWII era and the GI Bill. While this was an overall good idea (train the returning service men and women for jobs in the new post-war economy) the focus on doing it all through universities started the process of changing universities into glorified vocational training mills. Having a college degree became, rightly or wrongly, seen as an entry card into better jobs, even though these better jobs didn't necessarily need that degree. The univerisities liked this influx of new money, and didn't "screw the pooch" by pointing out that much of what they were doing wasn't really "university" training. Then along came the Vietnam war, and every male of college age stayed in college as long as possible to avoid the draft. Any male high-school grad who could was headed for college, whether he was ready for it or needed it or not. For the universities - ca-CHING, more dollars for scholars. By now, the university system is so bloated and torqued out of shape that I don't believe it will recover.
The first *nix editor I used was vi on Solaris boxes many moons past. Now that I'm on Linux boxes I'm saddled with vim. Pretty much I'm OK with vim, but PLEASE GOD why is there this non-disable-able mode called "recording" or some such??? I never ever use it, nor do I want to use it, but I always find myself IN that damnable mode by accident when my fumble-fingered keyboarding hits the wrong key (which happens several times each and every day). I then have to fuss and fume and get back to normal mode. I'd be OK with this if I could just disable this behavior, or change the keystrokes required to enter that mode to something like PleaseStartRecordingModeForMeNow, but for reasons best known to Conan the Destroyer you either cannot disable this mode or the method by which you can is not known to mere mortals. Yes, I know that if I just gave "recording mode" a chance it would change my life and help me hook up with beautiful [gender choice here], but I don't want to learn a new trick. I want to have this mode go away. In the words of my 3-year-old grandson "don't want to can't make me."
As TFA points out, the FAA isn't all that sure it wants these beasties flying around in US airspace being controlled by people who are focused on chasing something on the ground and not watching what they're doing in that airspace. An FAA rep says that most local orgs flying these things don't have FAA approval, which ought to raise some red flags within a community that's supposed to be all about law enforcement. Even if there's a good consciencious pilot at the controls, it's not easy to keep track of the surrounding airspace AND as TFA also points out, these things go rouge on an all-too-frequent basis. Since arguments about "police state" aren't going to stop these bozos from buying/flying these things, perhaps the best offense is to go at them through the FAA. Maybe it won't stop the buying, but it can stop the flying.
This is a reflection of a serious problem in the area of hiring decent techie folks. There's a difference between a "marketable" skill and a "useable" skill. A marketable skill gets you hired by people who are clueless about what makes a good techie (hardware or software) and only know buzzwords, whereas a useable skill is what the people who you're going to work with and for HOPE you have. Sometimes skills overlap between marketable and useable, but my own observation is the larger the company doing the hiring the less overlap there is.
Any effort like this is doomed to failure if there's no agreement on what "good" means. Does it mean all the teacher's students pass the standardized tests? Or maybe all the teacher's students stay out of jail all year? Perhaps all the teacher's students earn (your favorite percentage here) more than other teacher's students over the next 50 years? We can't even agree what the schools are supposed to impart on the poor souls that pass through them, so how are we to determine what a good teacher is?
That aside, I think everyone will agree that they could tell you which of their teachers were "good" in the context of their coming-of-age passage through the school system, and which were "bad" in some way (or all ways). However, if we wrote down why we thought a particular teach was "good" or "bad" (or perhaps more precisely "!good"), I suspect that we'd see a very wide range of criteria. This will end up as "what the Gates Foundation thinks good teachers are" more than anything, and will be only a source of more battles between the various stakeholders in teaching our kids (district management, teachers, unions, parents, politicians, etc).
The bottom line is that we need to decide just exactly what it is we want the schools to be doing for our society. If what we want is to produce fodder for the corporate engine, that needs one type of teacher. If we want to produce fully-functioning citizens of a free society who are able to think for themselves and sort out the difference between facts and bullshit, that requires quite a different skill-set in the teachers. Answer this question first, and the rest can follow. Ignore this question, and we'll never agree on what a "good" teacher really is.
Every time one of these "sky is falling, OS X is being attacked by new malware/virus/trojan" articles floats around the 'net, it seems like the source document is from one or another AV builder or a computer security outfit with things to sell. The first clue is how vapid and vague the article is, and how little useful information it provides. Another clue is when one part of the article tells the story a bit different than elsewhere in the same article. For OS X users, there are a handful of good, indepdent, computer security sites (apple.com NOT being one of them), and if it aint there, I ignore it.
A bit of deja vu when I saw this posting, as I've been wondering for the past week or so why doctors don't make more use of computers in making diagnoses. I don't mean that the computer's diagnosis is the end-all/be-all, but rather a tool to get the doctor looking in the right direction (or directions) based on known information. While I know that expert systems were seriously oversold (what IT product hasn't been?) in the 1990s, but there are potential tools there IF the doctors would make use of them. I know that would require the loss of some serious Marcus Welby/Doctor Kildare syndromes within the profession, but the potential payoffs are large. Not to put all the blame on the doctor side of this, patients would also have to come to grips with a computer being a major part of the early diagnosis process.
That said, I think I can guess one major reason why we aren't seeing diagnostic computers - the other profession we all love to hate: lawyers. A fellow in my company developed a triage tool for the US Navy that would allow corpsmen on submarines to make early diagnoses of head trauma to determine whether or not an injury was severe enough that a helicopter should come out and fetch the patient back to shore. This is not something done lightly, as the transfer process is a dangerous one. Anyway, he developed an expert-system-based tool which worked pretty well. He looked into taking it into the commercial market, and the first lawyer he spoke with told him he'd be a complete fool to do so. The first time the software missed a diagnosis he'd be involved in a lawsuit. Given that nothing is 100% certain, he bailed on the project. If patents don't kill off innovation, litigation will.
Reading TFA, it sounds like the problem is not in the OS, but in the Safari browser. A nuance might be that the problem is in the OS, but only Safari uses the OS for cert authentication and other browsers roll their own authentication. At any rate, I read TFA to say if you're using some other browser than Safari you're OK. Granted, the usual Mac "Joe Sixpack" equivalent is probably running Safari and is left hanging, but is this a correct read of the article?
You could build a high-rise building out of sugar cubes if you tried hard enough, but why? Is there really a need for yet another OS, built on yet another language-to-save-the-world? What this tells me is that there was this person who had way too much time on their hands, and rather than do something really useful with this time they decided "hey, wouldn't it be crazy-cool to have an OS written entirely in C#?" and there was no significant-other around to slap them upside the head.
Slashdot Mirror
... is just around the corner. That's another "finding" that the technoworld pundits root out every few years to astound their readers. I view crap like this article to be in the Mark Twain "lies, damn lies, and statistics" category. You could probably show that left-handed red-heads buy more PCs than ambidextrous bald winos, but so freakin' what? This is clearly a move-on-nothing-to-see-here story.
... and this:
Old Fortran Geek
... people will start lining up to be the first to get a prostate exam.
But the point of Asimov's version of psycohistory is that the actions of one person, unless they are a tremendous outlier such as the Mule, don't matter. In the case you give, there's this powderkeg called Ethiopia just waiting to explode. If the lance corporal and his buddies you postulate aren't there to trigger things, some other idiot will. At least one of Asiomov's stories involves one of the Traders trying like crazy to make sure that things come out correctly, only to fail at every attempt. When all looks like failure, the "dead hand of Harry Seldon" reaches in through another agency totally outside the Trader's framework to put things back on track. It's not that a particular match will light up history's bonfire, it's that once history has built the bonfire some match will.
The key issue regarding news delivery is the critical importance of well-researched and unbiased reporting to the health of a democracy. Assuming that the traditional newspaper is dying, a new model needs to grow in which the costs of doing this reporting are covered. If you don't have professional, independently-funded reporters you will not get the in-depth, researched, and verified stories that delve into the dark corners of corporations and Government - you'll get schlock reporting that skims the surface, self-agrandizing (read Rush Limbaugh) reporting, highly-slanted (read Fox News) reporting, and aggregators. Good news reporting need to find a way to get paid for, and not by the Murdochs of the world but by the great unwashed masses. Unfortunately, everyone now seems to think that everything should be free (hear the howls when some big newspaper puts up a paywall), an attitude that is pushed hard by certain political types who see this as to their advantage.
Bottom line - how it's delivered isn't really that important. How it's paid for is critically so, as is paying those who really produce the news a living wage.
Really? Do you think NASA as an institution cares about an astronaut's life? People within the organization do, but the institution itself cares only about one thing - staying alive. Killing off astronauts is bad publicity, and enough bad publicity kills NASA. There are a lot of people making good money working for NASA, and these are typically jobs that last a while (I'm not talking about contractor jobs, this is Government employees). If NASA goes away, so does their good thang. So, billions are spent on cover-your-ass, not on protect-our-astronauts.
This is also an issue for software that works with GPS data and time. The GPS clocks do not "speeka da leapsecond" so the software needs to keep track of things. There was a 15 second offset, and now it's 16 seconds. This has happened often enough that most areas where this might have been a problem have been discovered, but as slashdotters know, there's new code written every second (even leap seconds), and it ain't all finest kind.
A basic problem is that there's no strong constituency for earth environment monitoring from space. Anyone who thinks NASA is in this business is just fooling themselves. NASA is in the research and metal-bending business - build new satellite to do new things. All the space-is-the-place supporters are in this camp. The agency who has the responsibility for routine monitoring, but utterly lacks in both political clout and cojones, is NOAA. Aside from a vocal constituency, the other things missing is a coherent plan for: what monitoring is needed, what space assets are needing to do this long-term monitoring, and how we're going to pay for it. Given that politicians can't see beyond the next election I don't see this being fixed.
As for an earlier post about the military launching everything they need, this is a laugher when it comes to environment monitoring. The DOD needs environment monitoring at least as much as the civilian side of things, yet they have not real plans for weather satellites beyond the two remaining DMSP weather satellites sitting in nitrogen cans awaiting launch. When those guys go, and they're old technology, that's it for a long while.
I purchased an iPad just after the 2 came out - I'm still wondering if that was a mistake. One of the main issues I am always wrestling with is how passwords for website access are handled, or not handled is more like. Safari doesn't have a protected username/password store capability (unless you consider AutoFill to be a nice secure way to store this info on a mobile device), and the third-party stuff like 1Password can't talk to Safari because of sandbox restrictions with iOS. Why is it that strong credentials security for accessing web-based information isn't a major component of mobile OS's? For me, it's now the main reason I don't get an iPhone and will likely turn my iPad into an expensive gaming pad for my grandson. (Yeah, I'm old - bring back Big Iron.)
OK, I throw the BS flag all over this one. I've been in this business (space weather) for over 40 years, and one of the biggest problems in the whole field are these "OMG the F-ing SKY is FALLING" pronouncements from self-proclaimed space weather experts (or NASA scientists, which is just sad). What this guy has done is a typical "lies, damn lies, and statistics" analysis of the worst sort, and he even kinda admits this with the caveat at the end of TFA's abstract in Space Weather. This is not to say that a big Carrington-magnitude storm came along it wouldn't cause havoc, it most certainly will, but there's only been one of these in our recorded history. That seems to fall well outside the realm of useable predictability. It's in a class of problems the weather service folks who try to predict 100-year floods know all too well. If you only see one instance of something in your record, at best you can say that you get one of those beasts every record-length/2 years (if that). This guy is just blowing smoke to advertise his business.
After working with a variety of US Government agencies over my 40+ year career I learned many lessons about how these agencies work. A major one was how mandated actions or behaviors were handled. It wasn't important that you actually did what the mandate called for, it just needed to APPEAR that you did. This website experience from TFA sounds very much like this behavior.
Amen. And don't make the mistake of assuming that those who want computers that "just run" out of the box are computer illiterates or inummerates. I've been writing code since the mid-1960s, starting on Big Iron and the earliest minicomputers (various DEC flavors), and have been writing code on one platform or another ever since. I don't write code as a living, I use it to do my real job, which is research in the physical sciences. While I love Linux and all my heavy-lifting boxes run Linux, I live on a Mac desktop because, dammit, it just works (by and large).
Are we headed towards more locked-down consumer computers, probably yes. Given all the botnets around, that may not be such a bad thing. However, I do not see GP computers going away because the hardware/content folks need software developers, who can't/won't work on closed systems. There may be battles, and I fully expect I'll be dropping Apple if they continue to try to make OS X become iOS, but a steady-state is always going to have open GP computers. And I believe all this was thrashed out TWO F-ING DAYS AGO.
I was going to respond to this topic, but this response pretty much sums up what I wanted to say. I switched from Linux+Windows in 2004 to Mac and haven't looked back. I've got two iMacs and a MacBook Pro, all running VMware with Linux and Windows virtual machines. I have a number of Open Source packages installed on all OS X setups using macports. There are things about OS X (and Apple) that I don't like, but the damn things pretty much "just work" and I can roll code that I need done and not that my OS needs done. Linux sans the desktop is still my main workspace (space-related research), but everything else that doesn't require Windows is done in OS X.
I recall what happened to Apple last time an outsider became a high-level executive. Damn near killed the company. Remains to be seen how this will all play out, but I think we'll see more commodification of Apple's various lines, pruning out stuff seen as not productive (computers, for example), and a slow decline in "wow" factor as the Jobs gang loses more control and leave the company. The goal will be to maximize the bottom line in whatever way possible, killing off the gold-egg-laying goose. Without a strong leader who can force a company to stay focused on what's over the next horizon, stockholders will force the focus to the next quarter's dividends. Sad, but that's life.
On a slightly-related note, I wonder if Steve's will has been read? There may be a clause in there that requires Apple to change it's corporate name to something like "Greedy Content Whoremongers" or some such.
Crowsource funding for science will come off at best as well as crowsource funding for the arts, which is pretty much what we've had for the last several decades. The masses will fund what tickles their fancy, or their ego, and the smart researcher will tap into that by pandering. Science will end up with its equivalent of Justin Beeber, Hank Williams, Jr., Gwen Stephanie, and the list goes on.
My colleagues and I came up with a great idea along these lines some years ago (I've been in research since 1980) - one of us would grow a large head of hair and dye it white. He'd be the front man for a Church of Researching God's Creation (I think t that's the name we came up with) which we'd take to the airways to surf for donations. If done right, this could bring in serious money. Of course, we'd all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every now and then, but by the number of highly successful (and very rich) evangelicals floating around that must be a solvable problem.
What's really sad is that if the IPCC groups tried to put in a REAL worst case scenario the politicians would have a hissy-fit. From what I have heard from colleagues in the field of climate modeling, the IPCC had to work hard to get a consensus on what would be deemed a politically-acceptable worst case scenario. I look at the official "worst case" setups and assume that they represent our realistic best hope.
How did it come to this? I think it started in the post-WWII era and the GI Bill. While this was an overall good idea (train the returning service men and women for jobs in the new post-war economy) the focus on doing it all through universities started the process of changing universities into glorified vocational training mills. Having a college degree became, rightly or wrongly, seen as an entry card into better jobs, even though these better jobs didn't necessarily need that degree. The univerisities liked this influx of new money, and didn't "screw the pooch" by pointing out that much of what they were doing wasn't really "university" training. Then along came the Vietnam war, and every male of college age stayed in college as long as possible to avoid the draft. Any male high-school grad who could was headed for college, whether he was ready for it or needed it or not. For the universities - ca-CHING, more dollars for scholars. By now, the university system is so bloated and torqued out of shape that I don't believe it will recover.
The first *nix editor I used was vi on Solaris boxes many moons past. Now that I'm on Linux boxes I'm saddled with vim. Pretty much I'm OK with vim, but PLEASE GOD why is there this non-disable-able mode called "recording" or some such??? I never ever use it, nor do I want to use it, but I always find myself IN that damnable mode by accident when my fumble-fingered keyboarding hits the wrong key (which happens several times each and every day). I then have to fuss and fume and get back to normal mode. I'd be OK with this if I could just disable this behavior, or change the keystrokes required to enter that mode to something like PleaseStartRecordingModeForMeNow, but for reasons best known to Conan the Destroyer you either cannot disable this mode or the method by which you can is not known to mere mortals. Yes, I know that if I just gave "recording mode" a chance it would change my life and help me hook up with beautiful [gender choice here], but I don't want to learn a new trick. I want to have this mode go away. In the words of my 3-year-old grandson "don't want to can't make me."
As TFA points out, the FAA isn't all that sure it wants these beasties flying around in US airspace being controlled by people who are focused on chasing something on the ground and not watching what they're doing in that airspace. An FAA rep says that most local orgs flying these things don't have FAA approval, which ought to raise some red flags within a community that's supposed to be all about law enforcement. Even if there's a good consciencious pilot at the controls, it's not easy to keep track of the surrounding airspace AND as TFA also points out, these things go rouge on an all-too-frequent basis. Since arguments about "police state" aren't going to stop these bozos from buying/flying these things, perhaps the best offense is to go at them through the FAA. Maybe it won't stop the buying, but it can stop the flying.
This is a reflection of a serious problem in the area of hiring decent techie folks. There's a difference between a "marketable" skill and a "useable" skill. A marketable skill gets you hired by people who are clueless about what makes a good techie (hardware or software) and only know buzzwords, whereas a useable skill is what the people who you're going to work with and for HOPE you have. Sometimes skills overlap between marketable and useable, but my own observation is the larger the company doing the hiring the less overlap there is.
Any effort like this is doomed to failure if there's no agreement on what "good" means. Does it mean all the teacher's students pass the standardized tests? Or maybe all the teacher's students stay out of jail all year? Perhaps all the teacher's students earn (your favorite percentage here) more than other teacher's students over the next 50 years? We can't even agree what the schools are supposed to impart on the poor souls that pass through them, so how are we to determine what a good teacher is?
That aside, I think everyone will agree that they could tell you which of their teachers were "good" in the context of their coming-of-age passage through the school system, and which were "bad" in some way (or all ways). However, if we wrote down why we thought a particular teach was "good" or "bad" (or perhaps more precisely "!good"), I suspect that we'd see a very wide range of criteria. This will end up as "what the Gates Foundation thinks good teachers are" more than anything, and will be only a source of more battles between the various stakeholders in teaching our kids (district management, teachers, unions, parents, politicians, etc).
The bottom line is that we need to decide just exactly what it is we want the schools to be doing for our society. If what we want is to produce fodder for the corporate engine, that needs one type of teacher. If we want to produce fully-functioning citizens of a free society who are able to think for themselves and sort out the difference between facts and bullshit, that requires quite a different skill-set in the teachers. Answer this question first, and the rest can follow. Ignore this question, and we'll never agree on what a "good" teacher really is.
Every time one of these "sky is falling, OS X is being attacked by new malware/virus/trojan" articles floats around the 'net, it seems like the source document is from one or another AV builder or a computer security outfit with things to sell. The first clue is how vapid and vague the article is, and how little useful information it provides. Another clue is when one part of the article tells the story a bit different than elsewhere in the same article. For OS X users, there are a handful of good, indepdent, computer security sites (apple.com NOT being one of them), and if it aint there, I ignore it.
A bit of deja vu when I saw this posting, as I've been wondering for the past week or so why doctors don't make more use of computers in making diagnoses. I don't mean that the computer's diagnosis is the end-all/be-all, but rather a tool to get the doctor looking in the right direction (or directions) based on known information. While I know that expert systems were seriously oversold (what IT product hasn't been?) in the 1990s, but there are potential tools there IF the doctors would make use of them. I know that would require the loss of some serious Marcus Welby/Doctor Kildare syndromes within the profession, but the potential payoffs are large. Not to put all the blame on the doctor side of this, patients would also have to come to grips with a computer being a major part of the early diagnosis process.
That said, I think I can guess one major reason why we aren't seeing diagnostic computers - the other profession we all love to hate: lawyers. A fellow in my company developed a triage tool for the US Navy that would allow corpsmen on submarines to make early diagnoses of head trauma to determine whether or not an injury was severe enough that a helicopter should come out and fetch the patient back to shore. This is not something done lightly, as the transfer process is a dangerous one. Anyway, he developed an expert-system-based tool which worked pretty well. He looked into taking it into the commercial market, and the first lawyer he spoke with told him he'd be a complete fool to do so. The first time the software missed a diagnosis he'd be involved in a lawsuit. Given that nothing is 100% certain, he bailed on the project. If patents don't kill off innovation, litigation will.
Reading TFA, it sounds like the problem is not in the OS, but in the Safari browser. A nuance might be that the problem is in the OS, but only Safari uses the OS for cert authentication and other browsers roll their own authentication. At any rate, I read TFA to say if you're using some other browser than Safari you're OK. Granted, the usual Mac "Joe Sixpack" equivalent is probably running Safari and is left hanging, but is this a correct read of the article?
You could build a high-rise building out of sugar cubes if you tried hard enough, but why? Is there really a need for yet another OS, built on yet another language-to-save-the-world? What this tells me is that there was this person who had way too much time on their hands, and rather than do something really useful with this time they decided "hey, wouldn't it be crazy-cool to have an OS written entirely in C#?" and there was no significant-other around to slap them upside the head.