What a fine example of the failure of the medical profession to treat patients as human beings. I can tell you without question that if I had an infant that hadn't eaten or drunk anything for several DAYS, you better damn well believe that I would not just take the doctor's word that everything will be fine. I would raise hell until I found a doctor who would at least run some simple tests rather than just looking at the child and telling me to go away. Like maybe an x-ray in this case. I would go home only after someone took my parental terror seriously and treated me like they actually cared what might happen to my child.
Instead of realizing that these were just scared people trying to be responsible parents, you hold them up as an example of people being stupid. That's real nice. A perfect example of why people do not trust doctors. It's hard to trust someone who appears to have no empathy toward you and automatically assumes you are a moron the moment you walk in the door.
Oh, and I should have pointed out earlier that your supposition that some sort of feature is being, as you put it, "curtailed" is completely incorrect. The new procedures will still keep seven days of location data downloaded to your phone at all times when location services are turned on, which should be more than enough to let your phone find its relative position. So I honestly don't understand what you think you're raving about. No benefit is being lost whatsoever as far as I can tell. The more dangerous and invasive long term data is being deleted while some short term data is being kept. That is all. I suggest you find something else to be upset about. There is literally no reason I can see for you to be bothered by this issue.
A calendar is only going to show what you choose to put on it, and besides recurring appointments will not automatically show anyone where you have been throughout each day for the past several months or years. Most calendar apps delete expired events after at most 30 days, so any location history that might be derived is limited. Certainly there is still some abuse potential, especially for certain individuals. But calendar events don't even necessarily include any location information. In short, your comparison has almost zero relevance compared to the potentially minute-to-minute long term general location data that can be interpolated from the file in question. It is also quite insane to compare the caching of a few web pages to caching the physical wherebouts of a human being for a year or longer. You have to be mentally unbalanced to defend such a practice as acceptable.
If storing this information long term were a sane and safe thing to do, Apple would not be taking the steps to change their procedure so significantly in response to the well-deserved outrage they have encountered. They will no longer be backing up the file to your computer, they will be erasing the file completely if location services are turned off, the file will be limited to one week of data even when in use, and the next major version of iOS will encrypt the file. They obviously believe that the user's privacy is the most important part of the equation. If this were not a big deal, they wouldn't bother with such drastic changes.
You may have no issue with exposing such private information to any person or agency who feels like taking 30 seconds out of their day to copy it from your phone while you aren't looking, but not everyone has the luxury of forgetting that there are some very bad people in the world who spend their entire lives looking for ways to exploit others. This kind of data is like candy to them. Apple is doing the right thing by doing what they can to mitigate the abuse potential of the data. The only way the feature becomes "sane" is by limiting the data to a few days worth of information, which is all that is necessary to make the location feature work anyway. They have come straight out and admitted that this is the way the feature should have worked all along.
As I tried to point out less than 24 hours ago here, this "feature" is not sane at all. It never was and never will be. Funny how closely Apple came to completely agreeing with my statements less than a day later, especially when saying that they also believe that the phone should not keep this kind of information for more than a maximum of one week.
You and far too many other people fail to realize that it was never "Big Brother" or Apple that made the presence of this information dangerous. Rather, it was and is the potential murderers, stalkers, rapists, thieves, kidnappers and assassins who could use the information for nefarious purposes that make it dangerous. Everyone with a smart phone that keeps this kind of location history is at risk if that information can ever be accessed by a malicious third party (and I'm not talking about advertisers). Keeping the cache limited to 7 days worth of data will help limit the abuse potential while still maintaining the point of keeping the information in the first place, which is to help the phone locate its own position quickly even with faulty or non-existent GPS data.
I, for one, am mildly impressed by the way that Apple is responding to and fixing this issue, although they should have already taken these exact steps a year ago when this type of "tracking" was initially revealed.
Events like this make me feel like I might be the only sane, rational, non-retarded person left on the face of the Earth. I see far too many people blowing this off like it's really no big deal at all for your phone to keep your location history for years at a time. The stupidity of this is beyond belief. People are acting like this information isn't dangerous to you because it isn't being stored anywhere except on your own phone.
What very few people seem to realize is that the biggest threat is not Apple or even the government. The danger comes from criminal elements who can far too easily use this information to make it far easier and safer for them to stalk, rob, murder or kidnap any individual who owns a smart phone. This data can be copied off your phone without your knowledge in a matter of seconds, so you may not even know the information has been stolen from you at any given time.
The fact that this is only "relative" position information is another idiotic defense. Any fool should be able to take one look at the video posted by the recent researchers and see that a real time interpolation of the data points gives a remarkably accurate rendering of your activities over time. It is certainly more than accurate enough to tell any potential home invader when you are likely to be home, and just as important, when you are likely to NOT be within several miles of your home. Anyone who does not believe that this information is dangerous even to those who are not "high profile" targets is truly naive.
When I allow apps on my smart phone to track me, I am doing it for a specific purpose and I fully expect that tracking to stop immediately when I quit the app. Allowing tracking in real time is completely different from letting any person or app have access to information about where I was two flipping YEARS ago and every day in between. It is truly insane to have hundreds of millions of individuals carrying around an easily accessible long term cache of their whereabouts for years at a time. It could be beneficial to the user to keep a cache for a week at the most. Three days would be safer. Anything longer than that is simply crazy, and endangers the user.
Wow. For the first time I'm actually a little bit freaked out by a science story. They're disassembling an atom and making it behave like a different kind of atom? That's spooky. Here's why this spooks me: This strongly reminds me of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which was just a slightly "modified" form of water that was solid at room temperature. It had the unfortunate attribute that it would change any normal water into ice-nine on contact, thus causing a worldwide cataclysm when released into the wild. Until this moment I was unable to really picture how one could "modify" a simple molecule like H2O and wind up with something that was still H2O and thus still be able to call it "water". This technique would make that possible.
I hope and pray (to the mythical God that I don't even believe in) that these people messing with the basic structure of atoms know what they're doing. I've never put any stock in silly ideas like the LHC creating black holes or any of that other nonsense people come up with, but this particular story gives me the willies. Helium is one step away from hydrogen. What if they did something similar to a hydrogen atom and it turned out to be able to create new copies of itself just by somehow interacting with normal hydrogen molecules? To those who would immediately say "pish tosh" without thinking about the implications, I'd have to respond by asking how do we know such a thing can't happen when we go around mucking with the very nature of an atom's structure? It's one thing to go around breaking down molecules into their component atoms, or atoms into their component sub-atomic particles, but I think it may be a whole different ball game to go around creating hybrid atoms (and thus hybrid elements) with possibly unknown or unknowable interactions with other atoms/elements.
Or maybe I'm being silly and the scientists know exactly what they're doing. Riiiiiight...
I'll be even more spooked if I find out this sort of thing can't happen in nature. If they're managing to artificially create something that has never been able to exist in the entire history of the universe, it may be time to pull a Peter Griffin, i.e., "WHOA, WHOA, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whooaaa... Are you sure your math is right and you're not gonna destroy the universe?"
Scientists: "Yes."
Peter: "OK. Nevermind."
Scientists: "Whoops!"
Universe: "BOOOOM!!!"
P.S. The new Slashdot is broken. Good job guys. I tried to post this comment once already and it never showed up, but it's listed in the sidebar of my comment page and it wouldn't let me repost the same comment. Even though the link doesn't exist.
Wow. For the first time I'm actually a little bit freaked out by a science story. They're disassembling an atom and making it behave like a different kind of atom? That's spooky. Here's why this spooks me: This strongly reminds me of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which was just a slightly "modified" form of water that was solid at room temperature. It had the unfortunate attribute that it would change any normal water into ice-nine on contact, thus causing a worldwide cataclysm when released into the wild. Until this moment I was unable to really picture how one could "modify" a simple molecule like H2O and wind up with something that was still H2O and thus still be able to call it "water". This technique would make that possible.
I hope and pray (to the mythical God that I don't even believe in) that these people messing with the basic structure of atoms know what they're doing. I've never put any stock in silly ideas like the LHC creating black holes or any of that other nonsense people come up with, but this particular story gives me the willies. Helium is one step away from hydrogen. What if they did something similar to a hydrogen atom and it turned out to be able to create new copies of itself just by somehow interacting with normal hydrogen molecules? To those who would immediately say "pish tosh" without thinking about the implications, I'd have to respond by asking how do we know such a thing can't happen when we go around mucking with the very nature of an atom's structure? It's one thing to go around breaking down molecules into their component atoms, or atoms into their component sub-atomic particles, but I think it may be a whole different ball game to go around creating hybrid atoms (and thus hybrid elements) with possibly unknown or unknowable interactions with other atoms/elements.
Or maybe I'm being silly and the scientists know exactly what they're doing. Riiiiiight...
I'll be even more spooked if I find out this sort of thing can't happen in nature. If they're managing to artificially create something that has never been able to exist in the entire history of the universe, it may be time to pull a Peter Griffin, i.e., "WHOA, WHOA, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whooaaa... Are you sure your math is right and you're not gonna destroy the universe?"
No kidding. If some of her supporters were armed, instead of there being 12 injured people, there'd be just one: the gunman himself.
Yes, sure, because their reactions would be so fast that they'd see the attacker drawing, identify the situation, draw their own weapons and shoot the attacher before the attacker gets a round off. Or maybe this isn't the movies, and the stoormtrooper effect doesn't work in the real world.
I know this may be difficult for non-gun owners to understand, but yes, many of those who choose to get certified and licensed to legally carry concealed weapons actually spend time mentally preparing and training for precisely that type of situation. So there would be a good chance that someone could react quickly enough to maybe cut the death toll in half in a situation like that. Six or more people could be alive today if there were more competent gun owners in the crowd.
You're also implying that without guns, people wouldn't find some other ways to kill each other. That's another fundamentally unsound assumption: guns make killing easier in some ways, but that's all.
I hear this bullshit all the time from Americans trying to justify widespread gun ownership and it's real crap. Guns don't make killing easier 'in some ways' - guns make killing easier period. It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them, and it's accurate
If someone wants you dead, he doesn't need a gun.
That's the wrong logic. If someone would like you dead and they don't have a gun then the obstacles are nearly always insurmountable and the feeling passes. With a gun you can do it any time you want, and that increases the temptation.
You're the one spouting crap. If I want you dead there are a thousand ways I could make it happen, ranging from cars to knitting needles to bare hands or kitchen knives. As the original poster said, guns just make homicide somewhat easier. They don't magically create the desire to commit homicide. That's a separate societal issue that is not created by the mere fact that it is legal to own firearms. Your own argument is not logical in the slightest.
You're a 20-something, aren't you? Come back and say that in another half a century. Life isn't all that "must-have" after a bunch of decades, even if you're in perfect health. The main problem is that after numerous years of life-experience, you start realizing what unbelievable sacks of shit most people truly are. If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
In a world of immortals such a sad state of affairs couldn't last very long. Inevitably, the nasty people in the world will be eliminated one way or another. Either they will learn over time to not be nasty people anymore, or someone will most assuredly get tired of them and kill each and every one of them. There are only so many times you can step on any person's toes before they will snap. If everyone were capable of living long healthy lives for many decades on end, everyone would eventually come to realize that putting up with nasty people is not worth it in the grand scheme of things. Gradually, the world of immortals will end up containing only two types of people: Those who are nice by nature and those who may not be nice by nature but who have learned to at least be polite at all times to avoid making enemies.
Those who don't have the gumption to stand up to the nasty people of the world and either force them to change or eliminate them will most assuredly die out rapidly. The rest of us, no matter how pacifistic we may start out, will eventually become the type of people who will not put up with allowing other people to make our lives unnecessarily miserable. Eventually every single individual, after they've lived long enough and seen enough pointless bullshit behavior, will come to the conclusion that failing to behave nicely toward others in any way is completely unacceptable, and nastiness from others will simply cease to be tolerated. After that, life should be pretty nice.
The much, MUCH bigger problem than what to do with another century or two of healthy life is what to do to stop everyone from having so many babies. If true immortality were actually found, most of the breeding population of the world would immediately have to be sterilized or we would end up depleting the resources of the Earth within a generation or two. Instead of the current growth rate of half a billion or so per year, the world's population would double, then triple and quadruple in rapid succession. If you think we have population problems today, just wait until most people live to be 250 years old.
The only solution is, of course, expansion into space. Immortality, or even a moderate lengthening of human life, will make the emigration of the human race from the Earth an absolute necessity. Heinlein's Diaspora, here we come!
I lost a lot of my passion and motivation for teaching the course that day. It was very disheartening to discover that 95% of my students didn't care if I spent an extra 6 hours a week to make the course interesting -- why should I spend that extra time and effort myself if it wouldn't make any difference for more than maybe 2 or 3 of my students? In the end, I still made an effort to keep things interesting, and I'd like to think my section was more interesting than the day sections which had 300+ student lectures, but I didn't put nearly as much of myself into it as I could have.
You spend the extra time for the few students who do actually get excited about learning. Because those few students are usually the ones who end up taking the knowledge you gave them and changing the world. The rest of them don't matter. It's sad that you lost your own passion for teaching a subject you enjoyed just because you were faced with a bunch of idiots who were forced to be part of a class they didn't care about. A good teacher ignores the students who don't care and just focuses on the ones who do.
Isn't it awesome when a new version of your OS performs *better* than the last one on the same hardware?
Yeah, like how Windows 7 is better than Vista on the same hardware? Or how most versions of OS X since 10.0 have ended up being slightly faster than the previous version on the same hardware?
Oh wait, were you and your "Insightful" moderators trying to say that Linux is the only operating system that has the ability to improve over time? Sorry. Don't mind me. Back to your regularly scheduled zealotry.
Seriously. Steve Jobs apparently does not have a monopoly on the Reality Distortion Field. Be supportive of Linux by all means, but please do so with with valid reasoning.
What blows my mind is that there is a supposed "animation studio" in North-frickin-Korea. I thought they barely even had electricity up there, much less any sort of higher technology trade going on with the rest of the world. Interesting. Shows what I know.
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Prediction: Even if, ten years from now, the Mac platform is still just as open and general purpose as it was prior to the invention of the Mac App Store concept, people like you will continue to make factually baseless comments like this and continue to be modded "Insightful" on a daily basis during the entire intervening ten years.
If Apple is actually stupid enough to try and lock down a general purpose computing platform that is competing with other general purpose computing platforms, I will be happy to eat my words. In the meantime, every idiot who thinks the entire Mac platform is going to suddenly turn into some sort of locked-down extension of the iPhone next summer is _severely_ deluded. The Mac App Store is just going to be a bonus to the platform, not a restriction, and will make a ton of developers very, very rich in the next few years.
Oh, and totally on topic, Oracle will put out their own JVM for Mac and by a year from now nobody will even be questioning Apple's decision to stop making their own JVM which Java developers were always complaining about anyway because it was constantly one version behind.
Maybe it's just me, but lately the Slashdot community really seems to be in the practice of making mountains out of molehills, even more so than usual. Perspective seems to be all but lost around here anymore.
The very sad thing about this article is this: I was desperately chasing after better desktop Linux performance at least twelve years ago, and twelve years later there are still comments like yours (the same ones I saw constantly so long ago) alluding to the fact that there should be some patches in (wonder of wonders!) THE VERY NEXT VERSION of the kernel that will damn near solve the problem. Oh, and the next version of the Ext filesystem (which is still in development) will help a lot too!
With Linux, unfortunately, it's always about "we'll fix that next week, don't worry". Which is why I finally gave up and became one of the millions who switched to Mac. It still bums me out to this day how little _apparent_ progress the Linux world seems to be making in many of these essential areas that are crucial to competing with other platforms. I continue to try out the supposedly "best" desktop Linux distros every year or so and continue to be exceedingly unimpressed despite all the invisible technical triumphs that I know have been achieved by Linux over the intervening years. It just never seems to add up to much in the big scheme of things.
The fact that people in this community are still telling Linux users to apply kernel patches to get better desktop performance just pretty much sums up the whole Linux world and the reason it is still making very few inroads into the general computing market. In the end, even the best Linux "desktop oriented" distros are made by developers and geeks FOR developers and geeks. And yet, making a simple true statement like this is met with derision and idiotic comments about how Linux is actually perfect or somehow much better than everything else. And you guys think the Mac world has some sort of reality distortion field. Join the club.
Only one problem with this complete nonsense about the platform becoming "locked down" with the creation of the Mac App Store. It's a complete load of crap. The "Mac" and Mac OS X is and will continue to be a general purpose computer system, where you will _always_ be able to install software from any site on the web or install from any boxed CD or DVD or USB stick. The Mac App Store is a brilliant piece of marketing strategy that the Mac users will absolutely adore from day one. When it is in place Apple will have finally succeeded in getting the general public to use something that the Unix/Linux world has been madly barking about for decades: a nearly system-wide package management system. Only Apple will have managed to create a package management system that commercial entities will actually "buy into", so to speak, which has been the major flaw in the package management systems in the Unix/Linux world for so very long. Once again, without even breaking a sweat, Apple is about to something we wish we'd been able to do for the last couple of decades.
Mac OS X has had a sort of package management system (which works very well, BTW) for system updates for... well pretty much forever. Since its inception, I believe. But now, with a Mac App Store, users will have a single source to browse for and download both free and commercial software, have it _automatically_ install itself in the proper location with a single click*, and then keep dozens upon dozens of large and small apps completely up to date with a system-wide single-click update mechanism. Users will know that software from the Mac App Store has been vetted as being safe, having a certain quality level and not being completely pointless. Currently, most Mac applications are pretty smart about telling you there is an update available, and many of them will do a single-click download and update without much fuss. But this normally only happens when you run the app. Unfortunately, when you're starting an app it's usually because you want to use it, so it's kind of a pain to be constantly having one individual app after another telling you there is an update available. With the Mac App Store the users will have a central place to look for and receive notices of application updates, and a single button that will download and apply all relevant updates.
The moment the Mac App Store was revealed I immediately saw that it would change the way the typical Mac user will manage software on their computer, and everyone else will once again be stuck trying to cobble something together and catch up. Microsoft will desperately attempt to have something similar in place in the next version of Windows. Of course they will fail horribly, as usual. What will happen is that the Mac platform will continue to accelerate and gain more and more users on into the foreseeable future, because Apple is completely boxing in all market demographics. Between the iPhone, the iPad and now a new mind-bogglingly simple to use Mac platform, the PC world is going to be in serious trouble. Mark my words. Remember, the paying market could not care less about the kinds of "openness" we're always worrying about here on/. They want stuff that's as easy to use as their TV, and Apple is the only one giving them what they want.
Trust me folks, this is going to be _big_. The few developers who complain that the Mac App Store is too tightly controlled and refuse to use it will unfortunately be completely drowned out by the thundering horde who will be rushing to use it and showering praise on it for the next decade. Those of us "in the know" will continue to download apps from the general internet and use our general purpose computers as general purpose computers. That simply won't change. If it does change somewhere down the line, there's always Linux. Ten years from now I'm sure Linux will be kicking some major ass and still be just as open as ever. And even if the Mac platform keeps growing phenomenally the way it h
Ever since Ubuntu came out, I've never had to recompile a kernel or find device drivers myself. I can still view any media I want, have a bash shell, and have a unix-like OS. I was amazed at how the Ubuntu installation found all drivers (even wireless!) for my wife's HP laptop with a Broadcom wireless chip (and that was 3 years ago on a fairly new laptop).
I really wish that people like you (the lucky folks who just happen to have computer hardware that is fully supported by some random Linux distro) would wake up to the fact that you will never be able to compare the hardware support of any Linux distro to Apple products until your hardware support approaches 99.9%. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely fabulous that Linux hardware support continues to improve incrementally every year, but even Ubuntu is still not even in the same ballpark as any Apple product. I've tried it myself every year or so for the last few years and never been particularly impressed with the hardware support.
You got lucky. It's as simple as that. Congratulations. Whether you are part of a 33% minority or a 95% majority of users of "Random Linux Distro X" who managed to have all hardware working automatically makes very little difference when you are comparing your operating system to a company that has - for all intents and purposes - 100% hardware support for their own hardware. We're talking millions of Mac people who have never even given a single thought to finding a hardware driver for anything besides possibly a printer. If you started talking about how you had to track down and install a driver for your wireless card, they would just give you a blank stare.
When you spend the premium to buy a Mac, you are virtually guaranteed not to have the sorts of hardware issues that would require hours of browsing internet support forums to solve. Geeks in particular have often spent countless hours getting some obscure piece of hardware working with some otherwise nearly perfect Linux distro, and we simply get tired of wasting so much time out of our lives when we could be doing other things. All the "fiddling" just plain gets old. That is why both geeks and regular folks are buying Macs in droves.
I really cannot fathom why it is so difficult for otherwise intelligent people to understand the draw of Apple's devices, and the vast gulf between the concepts of "usually works pretty well" to "almost always works flawlessly". Apple's products are not perfect, but they really do "just work" for the vast majority of users and purposes, and let us get on with doing other things. As far as we are concerned, the cost is well worth what we get in return. The fact that your Linux distro of choice continues to improve general hardware support will make absolutely no difference to most general Mac users or even many geeks who use Macs, until the level of Linux hardware support gets extremely close to 100%. Only then will Linux even begin to rival the experience most of us in the Apple world have become accustomed to.
Here is what they should have done, to wake up all the system administrators who didn't happen to notice the announcements: Gradually wean people off the old version by shutting down the ClamAV server for an hour, then six hours, then a day, then three days, and finally shut it down permanently. At the end of that process I guarantee you there would be almost zero affected systems left to break after the permanent shutdown deadline. The better admins and bigger systems will notice the problem immediately during the short shutdowns and have plenty of time to upgrade. The systems that are still vulnerable after the entire weaning process need to be broken anyway so that someone will finally pay attention and fix them.
Shutting it down permanently, even after making "announcements" for a few months will never allow every single user of any product sufficient time to notice that something is about to happen. It's a simple fact of life, not every system admin is a computer expert, not every admin knows what the last admin did or is subscribed to the same mailing lists or visits the same technical websites. Stopping an external service like that on a temporary and gradually increasing basis would allow almost 100% of the end users to finally figure out or do the research to realize what was happening and upgrade their systems in time for the final permanent shutdown.
Things like this always remind me of the Hitchhiker's Guide where they posted the "announcement" that the Earth would be destroyed, giving everyone on Earth plenty of time to leave. Unfortunately the announcement was posted in an office on the home planet of the aliens who came through and destroyed the Earth, so no one on Earth ever saw it, and it was only posted for like 30 days anyway. People always have this weird idea that just because something is "announced" to a specific community that is paying attention it means that everyone else will magically know you made an announcement, but that isn't how the real world works. People also have this weird idea that not knowing everything about everything in the technical universe is somehow the same as being incompetent. The world is not perfect. Upgrade procedures and policies for any external software service must acknowledge this or suffer the wrath of the 90% of the system admin community who are NOT God-like in their omniscience.
Beating up all the bullies you ever encounter should be a last resort. Unfortunately, a simple school scuffle is now attributed virtually the same importance as murder, which is why so many individuals now give up on the system and figure, "Hey, if I'm going to have my life basically ruined for the foreseeable future by being expelled for punching a bully in the mouth, I might as well just go all the way and get some real satisfaction by wiping out everyone who ever made fun of me or stood by and ignored me while I was being bullied." This is how you end up with students bringing bags of weapons to school for a killing spree where they kill students and teachers alike. They obviously don't see any other usable option for their lives besides violence, which has been declared universally evil even if it's just punching someone who deserves it in the mouth. This is the idiocy of "zero tolerance" policies. There is no longer any middle ground where a simple tussle between aggressor and victim can defuse an issue before it takes on epic proportions in the mind of the victim.
No, the real solution is education. Parents and teachers must be educated to understand how detrimental it becomes to allow any form of bullying behavior without at least trying to do something about it. Bullies must be identified as early as possible (if teachers had their f*ing eyes and ears open this really wouldn't be a problem) and educated about the damage their behavior is doing to themselves and others.
As another poster has already pointed out, bullies are not cowards. And last time I checked they have a tendency to travel in packs. Without an excessive level of aggression, fighting skill, or deadly weapons of some sort, it is very difficult to make a dent in the mental state of a unified gang of any size just by resisting their actions. The school and social systems need to be smart enough to nip bullying behavior in the bud, long before the victims are pushed into feeling like they have no recourse but extreme violence. Advocating fighting just perpetuates the cycle of learned aggression rather than solving the root of the problem. I think it comes down to awareness of self and awareness of the affect we have on others.
Oh, and making the decision to not be expelled (or even arrested) for punching a bully isn't cowardice either. It is usually a very difficult decision to make, and it has to be made virtually every day due to the fact that the current school system is completely broken. Violence is the simple but socially (and legally) unacceptable solution. It takes a lot of courage to take the harder path of just putting up with it until graduation (after which most of these problems simply evaporate, blown away by the winds of real life).
Pardon? As long as the schooling meets minimum state testing requirements, it is and should always be the right of the parents to choose whether to put their child in public school, private school, or homeschool. Depending on where you go, the public or private school education available in your area may involve significant amounts of religious and philosophical propaganda which you won't necessarily want your young child subjected to, even here in the US where that isn't supposed to happen. What's important is that the child ends up getting a testably equivalent (or better) education to what public schooling provides, not that they be forced into attending a state-approved facility.
There are many people, particularly in the US, who would argue that you are utterly wrong on this point, and the law is behind them. Quite a lot of the folks who support homeschooling are NOT right-wing religious nuts, as you seem to imply with your subject line.
You know, Slashdot should really have a method where we could give truly informative posters a "tip" in the form of micro-payments. Every post like yours helps clarify the issue involved, focus the discussion, and probably saves thousands of readers a lot of wasted time reading comments that end up having nothing to do with the actual issue. Thank you.
Now, from a more informed viewpoint, I can say that I can't believe the US granted asylum to people who were completely unwilling to simply have their homeschooled children take the standard tests that allow the state to recognize that a child/citizen has been given a suitable education. This isn't about the homeschooling at all. I also can't believe that the rules here in the US will allow these homeschooled children to actually graduate without taking the standardized American tests which allow the US to recognize that a child/citizen has been given a suitable education.
These are the kind of people that create dangerously ignorant or brainwashed offspring and end up damaging the fabric of our society. They give a bad name to both homeschooling and freedom of religion.
Just to throw a small voice of reason into the mix for those who equate homeschooling with religious nuttery, I myself was homeschooled for a few years in grade school for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. In fact, my family isn't religious in any particular way. I was homeschooled because my ADD (which remained undiagnosed for another 20 years or so) made it virtually impossible for me to pay attention and learn anything in public school classrooms full of children and other distractions. I would literally go to school every day in first grade and come home knowing no more than I did in the morning. My brain was much more interested in the stuff outside the window and the antics of the other children than in paying attention to the rote instruction from the teacher. At the time, ADD was relatively unknown. All my mother knew was that I was going to school and failing to learn, despite being apparently intelligent enough to do so quite easily. So she pulled me out and homeschooled me for a few years.
Oddly, to this day I often feel like I learned more in those three years of homeschooling about basic grammar, history, word origins and several other areas than I did in the remaining several years of public education. The stuff I learned in homeschool, I remember. Public school was mostly a blur where we got slowly coached on the minimum information to pass the tests and progress to the next grade. I got placed in advanced math and English programs when I went back to public school, simply based on the fact that I had been homeschooled for a few years. That suggests that school admins recognize that homeschooling is often superior to public schooling. Which doesn't speak highly of the public school system in general.
So, just remember that homeschooling, while often used by ultra-religious parents as a platform for brainwashing their children, is not inherently a bad thing. Especially in the early years where a good solid foundation is needed for a child to do well later on in school, and life.
No wireless chipset, of course. Because after 15 years of WiFi being in common usage worldwide, there still isn't a single chipset available with full support for 100% free software. That's just sad.
Anybody who buys this instead of a Mac mini, which does include 802.11b/g/n, gigabit Ethernet, DVD burner and better graphics for virtually the same price, is a fool.
And why stop there? Lenovo has also asked itself how often users press the F Function keys. On the new laptops, the F Function buttons are reduced to secondary controls, in place of laptop controls like screen brightness. Now, you'll need to hold the Fn button to use keys like F11 (while screen brightness can be pressed without holding Fn).
Now that is a dumb decision. I use function keys all the time, and having to hold some other key for them to work would definitely be a dealbreaker. My Microsoft keyboard has an "F Lock" key which is like the Fn key but toggleable (think Caps Lock instead of Shift). That's a much better design.
No, the better design is the one that allows the vast majority of the market buying the product to use the product more easily. For most people that means it is useful to have dedicated hardware control functions attached to the function keys, whereas someone who grew up using WordStar can go into the keyboard preferences and switch things back so that they can use the function keys normally again. At least, on the Mac it is possible to do this with a single click, I don't know about any particular PC keyboard. If it isn't possible to change the default mode of the F keys on the Lenovo keyboard, that would definitely be bad design.
A Fn lock key doesn't seem like a good idea to me at all. It would only be necessary if you're constantly switching back and forth between using the dedicated functions and the regular F keys. Normally you'd just keep the keyboard in the mode you use most often and learn to press the Fn key for temporary access to the other mode. Most people would just get massively confused when their dedicated keys stopped working every time they accidentally toggled the Fn lock key. No other meta key on the keyboard except Caps Lock is a toggle key for good reason. Operating the keyboard without realizing that a meta key is toggled can wind up with some very bad results. Caps Lock is the exception because whether it's off or on it won't cause the keyboard to suddenly run unexpected and possibly dangerous commands. Also, its state is immediately obvious to the user when they start typing anything, regardless of whether they notice the indicator light on the keyboard. Making any other meta key a toggle key would be a really bad idea in most cases.
For the love of $deity, but the CTRL key back where it frakkin' belongs, next to the frakkin' A key!
Seriously. CTRL-key combo's are much easier to press, while touch typing, when the CTRL key is just to the left of the A key.
Cheers,
RM
You know that's never going to happen.
But do you know what's even easier? The Command key on Macs has always been right next to the space bar, like the Alt key on PC keyboards. Because of the ridiculous placement of the Control key on PC keyboards, almost the only keyboard shortcut I ever used in 20 years of using Windows was Alt+Tab and a couple other things like Alt+F,S and Alt+F,X. The Control key shortcuts were just too much of a pain to use, and I don't think moving the Control key back to the Caps Lock position really makes that much better. In comparison, I've got about 20 different keyboard shortcuts on the Mac that I use frequently, just because it's so easy to move my thumb over to the Command key. I almost never have any reason to more my hands away from the home keys. It's one of the main reasons I switched to Mac and gave up on both Windows and Linux.
Don't even get me started on how many completely non-standardized keyboard shortcut sets I ran into in the Linux world. Every Linux desktop environment and application toolkit had a different, and incompatible, set of shortcuts. I hope that's been improved during the last few years, but I kind of doubt it based on my years of using Linux. The thing that irritated me so much is that the Linux world has always had the capability to provide optional unified keyboard shortcut configurations that would mimic the beauty of the Mac setup, but (at least at the time) nobody had apparently bothered to even attempt to create the necessary configuration files to unify things in any way. So every other application I used, even in the most "user friendly" Linux distributions like Mandrake, had a completely different set of valid shortcuts. To top it off, very few primary (single key) shortcuts were based on the easily accessible Alt key rather than the Control key. Everywhere I looked things were designed to mimic the horribleness of Windows keyboard shortcuts rather than boldly striking out to create something better.
As far as I'm concerned, arguing about the loss of an ancient and pretty much vestigial key that 99.99% of the world hasn't had any use for in decades is the least of the problems with today's PC keyboards.
Last time I saw a LORAN-C device was on my family's sailboat that we used to motor-sail to Alaska from Washington through the Inside Passage. That was 1990. It wasn't much use even at the time. Radar and charts were much more helpful with navigation. I haven't even heard mention of the term LORAN-C for a very long time. I don't think most vessels have a LORAN-C receiver installed anymore. Maybe big ones, but not the hundreds of thousands of small to medium size vessels. Hard to justify keeping it running if nobody is using it. What's the benefit if almost nobody owns the necessary hardware anymore? Just playing Devil's Advocate. I'm sure it's still useful to somebody, somewhere.
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What a fine example of the failure of the medical profession to treat patients as human beings. I can tell you without question that if I had an infant that hadn't eaten or drunk anything for several DAYS, you better damn well believe that I would not just take the doctor's word that everything will be fine. I would raise hell until I found a doctor who would at least run some simple tests rather than just looking at the child and telling me to go away. Like maybe an x-ray in this case. I would go home only after someone took my parental terror seriously and treated me like they actually cared what might happen to my child.
Instead of realizing that these were just scared people trying to be responsible parents, you hold them up as an example of people being stupid. That's real nice. A perfect example of why people do not trust doctors. It's hard to trust someone who appears to have no empathy toward you and automatically assumes you are a moron the moment you walk in the door.
Oh, and I should have pointed out earlier that your supposition that some sort of feature is being, as you put it, "curtailed" is completely incorrect. The new procedures will still keep seven days of location data downloaded to your phone at all times when location services are turned on, which should be more than enough to let your phone find its relative position. So I honestly don't understand what you think you're raving about. No benefit is being lost whatsoever as far as I can tell. The more dangerous and invasive long term data is being deleted while some short term data is being kept. That is all. I suggest you find something else to be upset about. There is literally no reason I can see for you to be bothered by this issue.
A calendar is only going to show what you choose to put on it, and besides recurring appointments will not automatically show anyone where you have been throughout each day for the past several months or years. Most calendar apps delete expired events after at most 30 days, so any location history that might be derived is limited. Certainly there is still some abuse potential, especially for certain individuals. But calendar events don't even necessarily include any location information. In short, your comparison has almost zero relevance compared to the potentially minute-to-minute long term general location data that can be interpolated from the file in question. It is also quite insane to compare the caching of a few web pages to caching the physical wherebouts of a human being for a year or longer. You have to be mentally unbalanced to defend such a practice as acceptable.
If storing this information long term were a sane and safe thing to do, Apple would not be taking the steps to change their procedure so significantly in response to the well-deserved outrage they have encountered. They will no longer be backing up the file to your computer, they will be erasing the file completely if location services are turned off, the file will be limited to one week of data even when in use, and the next major version of iOS will encrypt the file. They obviously believe that the user's privacy is the most important part of the equation. If this were not a big deal, they wouldn't bother with such drastic changes.
You may have no issue with exposing such private information to any person or agency who feels like taking 30 seconds out of their day to copy it from your phone while you aren't looking, but not everyone has the luxury of forgetting that there are some very bad people in the world who spend their entire lives looking for ways to exploit others. This kind of data is like candy to them. Apple is doing the right thing by doing what they can to mitigate the abuse potential of the data. The only way the feature becomes "sane" is by limiting the data to a few days worth of information, which is all that is necessary to make the location feature work anyway. They have come straight out and admitted that this is the way the feature should have worked all along.
As I tried to point out less than 24 hours ago here, this "feature" is not sane at all. It never was and never will be. Funny how closely Apple came to completely agreeing with my statements less than a day later, especially when saying that they also believe that the phone should not keep this kind of information for more than a maximum of one week.
You and far too many other people fail to realize that it was never "Big Brother" or Apple that made the presence of this information dangerous. Rather, it was and is the potential murderers, stalkers, rapists, thieves, kidnappers and assassins who could use the information for nefarious purposes that make it dangerous. Everyone with a smart phone that keeps this kind of location history is at risk if that information can ever be accessed by a malicious third party (and I'm not talking about advertisers). Keeping the cache limited to 7 days worth of data will help limit the abuse potential while still maintaining the point of keeping the information in the first place, which is to help the phone locate its own position quickly even with faulty or non-existent GPS data.
I, for one, am mildly impressed by the way that Apple is responding to and fixing this issue, although they should have already taken these exact steps a year ago when this type of "tracking" was initially revealed.
Events like this make me feel like I might be the only sane, rational, non-retarded person left on the face of the Earth. I see far too many people blowing this off like it's really no big deal at all for your phone to keep your location history for years at a time. The stupidity of this is beyond belief. People are acting like this information isn't dangerous to you because it isn't being stored anywhere except on your own phone.
What very few people seem to realize is that the biggest threat is not Apple or even the government. The danger comes from criminal elements who can far too easily use this information to make it far easier and safer for them to stalk, rob, murder or kidnap any individual who owns a smart phone. This data can be copied off your phone without your knowledge in a matter of seconds, so you may not even know the information has been stolen from you at any given time.
The fact that this is only "relative" position information is another idiotic defense. Any fool should be able to take one look at the video posted by the recent researchers and see that a real time interpolation of the data points gives a remarkably accurate rendering of your activities over time. It is certainly more than accurate enough to tell any potential home invader when you are likely to be home, and just as important, when you are likely to NOT be within several miles of your home. Anyone who does not believe that this information is dangerous even to those who are not "high profile" targets is truly naive.
When I allow apps on my smart phone to track me, I am doing it for a specific purpose and I fully expect that tracking to stop immediately when I quit the app. Allowing tracking in real time is completely different from letting any person or app have access to information about where I was two flipping YEARS ago and every day in between. It is truly insane to have hundreds of millions of individuals carrying around an easily accessible long term cache of their whereabouts for years at a time. It could be beneficial to the user to keep a cache for a week at the most. Three days would be safer. Anything longer than that is simply crazy, and endangers the user.
Wow. For the first time I'm actually a little bit freaked out by a science story. They're disassembling an atom and making it behave like a different kind of atom? That's spooky. Here's why this spooks me: This strongly reminds me of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which was just a slightly "modified" form of water that was solid at room temperature. It had the unfortunate attribute that it would change any normal water into ice-nine on contact, thus causing a worldwide cataclysm when released into the wild. Until this moment I was unable to really picture how one could "modify" a simple molecule like H2O and wind up with something that was still H2O and thus still be able to call it "water". This technique would make that possible.
I hope and pray (to the mythical God that I don't even believe in) that these people messing with the basic structure of atoms know what they're doing. I've never put any stock in silly ideas like the LHC creating black holes or any of that other nonsense people come up with, but this particular story gives me the willies. Helium is one step away from hydrogen. What if they did something similar to a hydrogen atom and it turned out to be able to create new copies of itself just by somehow interacting with normal hydrogen molecules? To those who would immediately say "pish tosh" without thinking about the implications, I'd have to respond by asking how do we know such a thing can't happen when we go around mucking with the very nature of an atom's structure? It's one thing to go around breaking down molecules into their component atoms, or atoms into their component sub-atomic particles, but I think it may be a whole different ball game to go around creating hybrid atoms (and thus hybrid elements) with possibly unknown or unknowable interactions with other atoms/elements.
Or maybe I'm being silly and the scientists know exactly what they're doing. Riiiiiight...
I'll be even more spooked if I find out this sort of thing can't happen in nature. If they're managing to artificially create something that has never been able to exist in the entire history of the universe, it may be time to pull a Peter Griffin, i.e., "WHOA, WHOA, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whooaaa... Are you sure your math is right and you're not gonna destroy the universe?"
Scientists: "Yes."
Peter: "OK. Nevermind."
Scientists: "Whoops!"
Universe: "BOOOOM!!!"
P.S. The new Slashdot is broken. Good job guys. I tried to post this comment once already and it never showed up, but it's listed in the sidebar of my comment page and it wouldn't let me repost the same comment. Even though the link doesn't exist.
Wow. For the first time I'm actually a little bit freaked out by a science story. They're disassembling an atom and making it behave like a different kind of atom? That's spooky. Here's why this spooks me: This strongly reminds me of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which was just a slightly "modified" form of water that was solid at room temperature. It had the unfortunate attribute that it would change any normal water into ice-nine on contact, thus causing a worldwide cataclysm when released into the wild. Until this moment I was unable to really picture how one could "modify" a simple molecule like H2O and wind up with something that was still H2O and thus still be able to call it "water". This technique would make that possible.
I hope and pray (to the mythical God that I don't even believe in) that these people messing with the basic structure of atoms know what they're doing. I've never put any stock in silly ideas like the LHC creating black holes or any of that other nonsense people come up with, but this particular story gives me the willies. Helium is one step away from hydrogen. What if they did something similar to a hydrogen atom and it turned out to be able to create new copies of itself just by somehow interacting with normal hydrogen molecules? To those who would immediately say "pish tosh" without thinking about the implications, I'd have to respond by asking how do we know such a thing can't happen when we go around mucking with the very nature of an atom's structure? It's one thing to go around breaking down molecules into their component atoms, or atoms into their component sub-atomic particles, but I think it may be a whole different ball game to go around creating hybrid atoms (and thus hybrid elements) with possibly unknown or unknowable interactions with other atoms/elements.
Or maybe I'm being silly and the scientists know exactly what they're doing. Riiiiiight...
I'll be even more spooked if I find out this sort of thing can't happen in nature. If they're managing to artificially create something that has never been able to exist in the entire history of the universe, it may be time to pull a Peter Griffin, i.e., "WHOA, WHOA, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whooaaa... Are you sure your math is right and you're not gonna destroy the universe?"
Scientists: "Yes."
Peter: "OK. Nevermind."
Scientists: "Whoops!"
Universe: "BOOOOM!!!"
No kidding. If some of her supporters were armed, instead of there being 12 injured people, there'd be just one: the gunman himself.
Yes, sure, because their reactions would be so fast that they'd see the attacker drawing, identify the situation, draw their own weapons and shoot the attacher before the attacker gets a round off. Or maybe this isn't the movies, and the stoormtrooper effect doesn't work in the real world.
I know this may be difficult for non-gun owners to understand, but yes, many of those who choose to get certified and licensed to legally carry concealed weapons actually spend time mentally preparing and training for precisely that type of situation. So there would be a good chance that someone could react quickly enough to maybe cut the death toll in half in a situation like that. Six or more people could be alive today if there were more competent gun owners in the crowd.
You're also implying that without guns, people wouldn't find some other ways to kill each other. That's another fundamentally unsound assumption: guns make killing easier in some ways, but that's all.
I hear this bullshit all the time from Americans trying to justify widespread gun ownership and it's real crap. Guns don't make killing easier 'in some ways' - guns make killing easier period. It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them, and it's accurate
If someone wants you dead, he doesn't need a gun.
That's the wrong logic. If someone would like you dead and they don't have a gun then the obstacles are nearly always insurmountable and the feeling passes. With a gun you can do it any time you want, and that increases the temptation.
You're the one spouting crap. If I want you dead there are a thousand ways I could make it happen, ranging from cars to knitting needles to bare hands or kitchen knives. As the original poster said, guns just make homicide somewhat easier. They don't magically create the desire to commit homicide. That's a separate societal issue that is not created by the mere fact that it is legal to own firearms. Your own argument is not logical in the slightest.
You're a 20-something, aren't you? Come back and say that in another half a century. Life isn't all that "must-have" after a bunch of decades, even if you're in perfect health. The main problem is that after numerous years of life-experience, you start realizing what unbelievable sacks of shit most people truly are. If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
In a world of immortals such a sad state of affairs couldn't last very long. Inevitably, the nasty people in the world will be eliminated one way or another. Either they will learn over time to not be nasty people anymore, or someone will most assuredly get tired of them and kill each and every one of them. There are only so many times you can step on any person's toes before they will snap. If everyone were capable of living long healthy lives for many decades on end, everyone would eventually come to realize that putting up with nasty people is not worth it in the grand scheme of things. Gradually, the world of immortals will end up containing only two types of people: Those who are nice by nature and those who may not be nice by nature but who have learned to at least be polite at all times to avoid making enemies.
Those who don't have the gumption to stand up to the nasty people of the world and either force them to change or eliminate them will most assuredly die out rapidly. The rest of us, no matter how pacifistic we may start out, will eventually become the type of people who will not put up with allowing other people to make our lives unnecessarily miserable. Eventually every single individual, after they've lived long enough and seen enough pointless bullshit behavior, will come to the conclusion that failing to behave nicely toward others in any way is completely unacceptable, and nastiness from others will simply cease to be tolerated. After that, life should be pretty nice.
The much, MUCH bigger problem than what to do with another century or two of healthy life is what to do to stop everyone from having so many babies. If true immortality were actually found, most of the breeding population of the world would immediately have to be sterilized or we would end up depleting the resources of the Earth within a generation or two. Instead of the current growth rate of half a billion or so per year, the world's population would double, then triple and quadruple in rapid succession. If you think we have population problems today, just wait until most people live to be 250 years old.
The only solution is, of course, expansion into space. Immortality, or even a moderate lengthening of human life, will make the emigration of the human race from the Earth an absolute necessity. Heinlein's Diaspora, here we come!
I lost a lot of my passion and motivation for teaching the course that day. It was very disheartening to discover that 95% of my students didn't care if I spent an extra 6 hours a week to make the course interesting -- why should I spend that extra time and effort myself if it wouldn't make any difference for more than maybe 2 or 3 of my students? In the end, I still made an effort to keep things interesting, and I'd like to think my section was more interesting than the day sections which had 300+ student lectures, but I didn't put nearly as much of myself into it as I could have.
You spend the extra time for the few students who do actually get excited about learning. Because those few students are usually the ones who end up taking the knowledge you gave them and changing the world. The rest of them don't matter. It's sad that you lost your own passion for teaching a subject you enjoyed just because you were faced with a bunch of idiots who were forced to be part of a class they didn't care about. A good teacher ignores the students who don't care and just focuses on the ones who do.
Isn't it awesome when a new version of your OS performs *better* than the last one on the same hardware?
Yeah, like how Windows 7 is better than Vista on the same hardware? Or how most versions of OS X since 10.0 have ended up being slightly faster than the previous version on the same hardware?
Oh wait, were you and your "Insightful" moderators trying to say that Linux is the only operating system that has the ability to improve over time? Sorry. Don't mind me. Back to your regularly scheduled zealotry.
Seriously. Steve Jobs apparently does not have a monopoly on the Reality Distortion Field. Be supportive of Linux by all means, but please do so with with valid reasoning.
What blows my mind is that there is a supposed "animation studio" in North-frickin-Korea. I thought they barely even had electricity up there, much less any sort of higher technology trade going on with the rest of the world. Interesting. Shows what I know.
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Prediction: Even if, ten years from now, the Mac platform is still just as open and general purpose as it was prior to the invention of the Mac App Store concept, people like you will continue to make factually baseless comments like this and continue to be modded "Insightful" on a daily basis during the entire intervening ten years.
If Apple is actually stupid enough to try and lock down a general purpose computing platform that is competing with other general purpose computing platforms, I will be happy to eat my words. In the meantime, every idiot who thinks the entire Mac platform is going to suddenly turn into some sort of locked-down extension of the iPhone next summer is _severely_ deluded. The Mac App Store is just going to be a bonus to the platform, not a restriction, and will make a ton of developers very, very rich in the next few years.
Oh, and totally on topic, Oracle will put out their own JVM for Mac and by a year from now nobody will even be questioning Apple's decision to stop making their own JVM which Java developers were always complaining about anyway because it was constantly one version behind.
Maybe it's just me, but lately the Slashdot community really seems to be in the practice of making mountains out of molehills, even more so than usual. Perspective seems to be all but lost around here anymore.
The very sad thing about this article is this: I was desperately chasing after better desktop Linux performance at least twelve years ago, and twelve years later there are still comments like yours (the same ones I saw constantly so long ago) alluding to the fact that there should be some patches in (wonder of wonders!) THE VERY NEXT VERSION of the kernel that will damn near solve the problem. Oh, and the next version of the Ext filesystem (which is still in development) will help a lot too!
With Linux, unfortunately, it's always about "we'll fix that next week, don't worry". Which is why I finally gave up and became one of the millions who switched to Mac. It still bums me out to this day how little _apparent_ progress the Linux world seems to be making in many of these essential areas that are crucial to competing with other platforms. I continue to try out the supposedly "best" desktop Linux distros every year or so and continue to be exceedingly unimpressed despite all the invisible technical triumphs that I know have been achieved by Linux over the intervening years. It just never seems to add up to much in the big scheme of things.
The fact that people in this community are still telling Linux users to apply kernel patches to get better desktop performance just pretty much sums up the whole Linux world and the reason it is still making very few inroads into the general computing market. In the end, even the best Linux "desktop oriented" distros are made by developers and geeks FOR developers and geeks. And yet, making a simple true statement like this is met with derision and idiotic comments about how Linux is actually perfect or somehow much better than everything else. And you guys think the Mac world has some sort of reality distortion field. Join the club.
Good Lord, people, get hold of yourselves...
Only one problem with this complete nonsense about the platform becoming "locked down" with the creation of the Mac App Store. It's a complete load of crap. The "Mac" and Mac OS X is and will continue to be a general purpose computer system, where you will _always_ be able to install software from any site on the web or install from any boxed CD or DVD or USB stick. The Mac App Store is a brilliant piece of marketing strategy that the Mac users will absolutely adore from day one. When it is in place Apple will have finally succeeded in getting the general public to use something that the Unix/Linux world has been madly barking about for decades: a nearly system-wide package management system. Only Apple will have managed to create a package management system that commercial entities will actually "buy into", so to speak, which has been the major flaw in the package management systems in the Unix/Linux world for so very long. Once again, without even breaking a sweat, Apple is about to something we wish we'd been able to do for the last couple of decades.
Mac OS X has had a sort of package management system (which works very well, BTW) for system updates for... well pretty much forever. Since its inception, I believe. But now, with a Mac App Store, users will have a single source to browse for and download both free and commercial software, have it _automatically_ install itself in the proper location with a single click*, and then keep dozens upon dozens of large and small apps completely up to date with a system-wide single-click update mechanism. Users will know that software from the Mac App Store has been vetted as being safe, having a certain quality level and not being completely pointless. Currently, most Mac applications are pretty smart about telling you there is an update available, and many of them will do a single-click download and update without much fuss. But this normally only happens when you run the app. Unfortunately, when you're starting an app it's usually because you want to use it, so it's kind of a pain to be constantly having one individual app after another telling you there is an update available. With the Mac App Store the users will have a central place to look for and receive notices of application updates, and a single button that will download and apply all relevant updates.
The moment the Mac App Store was revealed I immediately saw that it would change the way the typical Mac user will manage software on their computer, and everyone else will once again be stuck trying to cobble something together and catch up. Microsoft will desperately attempt to have something similar in place in the next version of Windows. Of course they will fail horribly, as usual. What will happen is that the Mac platform will continue to accelerate and gain more and more users on into the foreseeable future, because Apple is completely boxing in all market demographics. Between the iPhone, the iPad and now a new mind-bogglingly simple to use Mac platform, the PC world is going to be in serious trouble. Mark my words. Remember, the paying market could not care less about the kinds of "openness" we're always worrying about here on /. They want stuff that's as easy to use as their TV, and Apple is the only one giving them what they want.
Trust me folks, this is going to be _big_. The few developers who complain that the Mac App Store is too tightly controlled and refuse to use it will unfortunately be completely drowned out by the thundering horde who will be rushing to use it and showering praise on it for the next decade. Those of us "in the know" will continue to download apps from the general internet and use our general purpose computers as general purpose computers. That simply won't change. If it does change somewhere down the line, there's always Linux. Ten years from now I'm sure Linux will be kicking some major ass and still be just as open as ever. And even if the Mac platform keeps growing phenomenally the way it h
Ever since Ubuntu came out, I've never had to recompile a kernel or find device drivers myself. I can still view any media I want, have a bash shell, and have a unix-like OS. I was amazed at how the Ubuntu installation found all drivers (even wireless!) for my wife's HP laptop with a Broadcom wireless chip (and that was 3 years ago on a fairly new laptop).
I really wish that people like you (the lucky folks who just happen to have computer hardware that is fully supported by some random Linux distro) would wake up to the fact that you will never be able to compare the hardware support of any Linux distro to Apple products until your hardware support approaches 99.9%. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely fabulous that Linux hardware support continues to improve incrementally every year, but even Ubuntu is still not even in the same ballpark as any Apple product. I've tried it myself every year or so for the last few years and never been particularly impressed with the hardware support.
You got lucky. It's as simple as that. Congratulations. Whether you are part of a 33% minority or a 95% majority of users of "Random Linux Distro X" who managed to have all hardware working automatically makes very little difference when you are comparing your operating system to a company that has - for all intents and purposes - 100% hardware support for their own hardware. We're talking millions of Mac people who have never even given a single thought to finding a hardware driver for anything besides possibly a printer. If you started talking about how you had to track down and install a driver for your wireless card, they would just give you a blank stare.
When you spend the premium to buy a Mac, you are virtually guaranteed not to have the sorts of hardware issues that would require hours of browsing internet support forums to solve. Geeks in particular have often spent countless hours getting some obscure piece of hardware working with some otherwise nearly perfect Linux distro, and we simply get tired of wasting so much time out of our lives when we could be doing other things. All the "fiddling" just plain gets old. That is why both geeks and regular folks are buying Macs in droves.
I really cannot fathom why it is so difficult for otherwise intelligent people to understand the draw of Apple's devices, and the vast gulf between the concepts of "usually works pretty well" to "almost always works flawlessly". Apple's products are not perfect, but they really do "just work" for the vast majority of users and purposes, and let us get on with doing other things. As far as we are concerned, the cost is well worth what we get in return. The fact that your Linux distro of choice continues to improve general hardware support will make absolutely no difference to most general Mac users or even many geeks who use Macs, until the level of Linux hardware support gets extremely close to 100%. Only then will Linux even begin to rival the experience most of us in the Apple world have become accustomed to.
Here is what they should have done, to wake up all the system administrators who didn't happen to notice the announcements: Gradually wean people off the old version by shutting down the ClamAV server for an hour, then six hours, then a day, then three days, and finally shut it down permanently. At the end of that process I guarantee you there would be almost zero affected systems left to break after the permanent shutdown deadline. The better admins and bigger systems will notice the problem immediately during the short shutdowns and have plenty of time to upgrade. The systems that are still vulnerable after the entire weaning process need to be broken anyway so that someone will finally pay attention and fix them.
Shutting it down permanently, even after making "announcements" for a few months will never allow every single user of any product sufficient time to notice that something is about to happen. It's a simple fact of life, not every system admin is a computer expert, not every admin knows what the last admin did or is subscribed to the same mailing lists or visits the same technical websites. Stopping an external service like that on a temporary and gradually increasing basis would allow almost 100% of the end users to finally figure out or do the research to realize what was happening and upgrade their systems in time for the final permanent shutdown.
Things like this always remind me of the Hitchhiker's Guide where they posted the "announcement" that the Earth would be destroyed, giving everyone on Earth plenty of time to leave. Unfortunately the announcement was posted in an office on the home planet of the aliens who came through and destroyed the Earth, so no one on Earth ever saw it, and it was only posted for like 30 days anyway. People always have this weird idea that just because something is "announced" to a specific community that is paying attention it means that everyone else will magically know you made an announcement, but that isn't how the real world works. People also have this weird idea that not knowing everything about everything in the technical universe is somehow the same as being incompetent. The world is not perfect. Upgrade procedures and policies for any external software service must acknowledge this or suffer the wrath of the 90% of the system admin community who are NOT God-like in their omniscience.
No, that's not the answer.
Beating up all the bullies you ever encounter should be a last resort. Unfortunately, a simple school scuffle is now attributed virtually the same importance as murder, which is why so many individuals now give up on the system and figure, "Hey, if I'm going to have my life basically ruined for the foreseeable future by being expelled for punching a bully in the mouth, I might as well just go all the way and get some real satisfaction by wiping out everyone who ever made fun of me or stood by and ignored me while I was being bullied." This is how you end up with students bringing bags of weapons to school for a killing spree where they kill students and teachers alike. They obviously don't see any other usable option for their lives besides violence, which has been declared universally evil even if it's just punching someone who deserves it in the mouth. This is the idiocy of "zero tolerance" policies. There is no longer any middle ground where a simple tussle between aggressor and victim can defuse an issue before it takes on epic proportions in the mind of the victim.
No, the real solution is education. Parents and teachers must be educated to understand how detrimental it becomes to allow any form of bullying behavior without at least trying to do something about it. Bullies must be identified as early as possible (if teachers had their f*ing eyes and ears open this really wouldn't be a problem) and educated about the damage their behavior is doing to themselves and others.
As another poster has already pointed out, bullies are not cowards. And last time I checked they have a tendency to travel in packs. Without an excessive level of aggression, fighting skill, or deadly weapons of some sort, it is very difficult to make a dent in the mental state of a unified gang of any size just by resisting their actions. The school and social systems need to be smart enough to nip bullying behavior in the bud, long before the victims are pushed into feeling like they have no recourse but extreme violence. Advocating fighting just perpetuates the cycle of learned aggression rather than solving the root of the problem. I think it comes down to awareness of self and awareness of the affect we have on others.
Oh, and making the decision to not be expelled (or even arrested) for punching a bully isn't cowardice either. It is usually a very difficult decision to make, and it has to be made virtually every day due to the fact that the current school system is completely broken. Violence is the simple but socially (and legally) unacceptable solution. It takes a lot of courage to take the harder path of just putting up with it until graduation (after which most of these problems simply evaporate, blown away by the winds of real life).
Homeschooling is in no way a human right.
Pardon? As long as the schooling meets minimum state testing requirements, it is and should always be the right of the parents to choose whether to put their child in public school, private school, or homeschool. Depending on where you go, the public or private school education available in your area may involve significant amounts of religious and philosophical propaganda which you won't necessarily want your young child subjected to, even here in the US where that isn't supposed to happen. What's important is that the child ends up getting a testably equivalent (or better) education to what public schooling provides, not that they be forced into attending a state-approved facility.
There are many people, particularly in the US, who would argue that you are utterly wrong on this point, and the law is behind them. Quite a lot of the folks who support homeschooling are NOT right-wing religious nuts, as you seem to imply with your subject line.
You know, Slashdot should really have a method where we could give truly informative posters a "tip" in the form of micro-payments. Every post like yours helps clarify the issue involved, focus the discussion, and probably saves thousands of readers a lot of wasted time reading comments that end up having nothing to do with the actual issue. Thank you.
Now, from a more informed viewpoint, I can say that I can't believe the US granted asylum to people who were completely unwilling to simply have their homeschooled children take the standard tests that allow the state to recognize that a child/citizen has been given a suitable education. This isn't about the homeschooling at all. I also can't believe that the rules here in the US will allow these homeschooled children to actually graduate without taking the standardized American tests which allow the US to recognize that a child/citizen has been given a suitable education.
These are the kind of people that create dangerously ignorant or brainwashed offspring and end up damaging the fabric of our society. They give a bad name to both homeschooling and freedom of religion.
Just to throw a small voice of reason into the mix for those who equate homeschooling with religious nuttery, I myself was homeschooled for a few years in grade school for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. In fact, my family isn't religious in any particular way. I was homeschooled because my ADD (which remained undiagnosed for another 20 years or so) made it virtually impossible for me to pay attention and learn anything in public school classrooms full of children and other distractions. I would literally go to school every day in first grade and come home knowing no more than I did in the morning. My brain was much more interested in the stuff outside the window and the antics of the other children than in paying attention to the rote instruction from the teacher. At the time, ADD was relatively unknown. All my mother knew was that I was going to school and failing to learn, despite being apparently intelligent enough to do so quite easily. So she pulled me out and homeschooled me for a few years.
Oddly, to this day I often feel like I learned more in those three years of homeschooling about basic grammar, history, word origins and several other areas than I did in the remaining several years of public education. The stuff I learned in homeschool, I remember. Public school was mostly a blur where we got slowly coached on the minimum information to pass the tests and progress to the next grade. I got placed in advanced math and English programs when I went back to public school, simply based on the fact that I had been homeschooled for a few years. That suggests that school admins recognize that homeschooling is often superior to public schooling. Which doesn't speak highly of the public school system in general.
So, just remember that homeschooling, while often used by ultra-religious parents as a platform for brainwashing their children, is not inherently a bad thing. Especially in the early years where a good solid foundation is needed for a child to do well later on in school, and life.
No wireless chipset, of course. Because after 15 years of WiFi being in common usage worldwide, there still isn't a single chipset available with full support for 100% free software. That's just sad.
Anybody who buys this instead of a Mac mini, which does include 802.11b/g/n, gigabit Ethernet, DVD burner and better graphics for virtually the same price, is a fool.
And why stop there? Lenovo has also asked itself how often users press the F Function keys. On the new laptops, the F Function buttons are reduced to secondary controls, in place of laptop controls like screen brightness. Now, you'll need to hold the Fn button to use keys like F11 (while screen brightness can be pressed without holding Fn).
Now that is a dumb decision. I use function keys all the time, and having to hold some other key for them to work would definitely be a dealbreaker. My Microsoft keyboard has an "F Lock" key which is like the Fn key but toggleable (think Caps Lock instead of Shift). That's a much better design.
No, the better design is the one that allows the vast majority of the market buying the product to use the product more easily. For most people that means it is useful to have dedicated hardware control functions attached to the function keys, whereas someone who grew up using WordStar can go into the keyboard preferences and switch things back so that they can use the function keys normally again. At least, on the Mac it is possible to do this with a single click, I don't know about any particular PC keyboard. If it isn't possible to change the default mode of the F keys on the Lenovo keyboard, that would definitely be bad design.
A Fn lock key doesn't seem like a good idea to me at all. It would only be necessary if you're constantly switching back and forth between using the dedicated functions and the regular F keys. Normally you'd just keep the keyboard in the mode you use most often and learn to press the Fn key for temporary access to the other mode. Most people would just get massively confused when their dedicated keys stopped working every time they accidentally toggled the Fn lock key. No other meta key on the keyboard except Caps Lock is a toggle key for good reason. Operating the keyboard without realizing that a meta key is toggled can wind up with some very bad results. Caps Lock is the exception because whether it's off or on it won't cause the keyboard to suddenly run unexpected and possibly dangerous commands. Also, its state is immediately obvious to the user when they start typing anything, regardless of whether they notice the indicator light on the keyboard. Making any other meta key a toggle key would be a really bad idea in most cases.
For the love of $deity, but the CTRL key back where it frakkin' belongs, next to the frakkin' A key!
Seriously. CTRL-key combo's are much easier to press, while touch typing, when the CTRL key is just to the left of the A key.
Cheers,
RM
You know that's never going to happen.
But do you know what's even easier? The Command key on Macs has always been right next to the space bar, like the Alt key on PC keyboards. Because of the ridiculous placement of the Control key on PC keyboards, almost the only keyboard shortcut I ever used in 20 years of using Windows was Alt+Tab and a couple other things like Alt+F,S and Alt+F,X. The Control key shortcuts were just too much of a pain to use, and I don't think moving the Control key back to the Caps Lock position really makes that much better. In comparison, I've got about 20 different keyboard shortcuts on the Mac that I use frequently, just because it's so easy to move my thumb over to the Command key. I almost never have any reason to more my hands away from the home keys. It's one of the main reasons I switched to Mac and gave up on both Windows and Linux.
Don't even get me started on how many completely non-standardized keyboard shortcut sets I ran into in the Linux world. Every Linux desktop environment and application toolkit had a different, and incompatible, set of shortcuts. I hope that's been improved during the last few years, but I kind of doubt it based on my years of using Linux. The thing that irritated me so much is that the Linux world has always had the capability to provide optional unified keyboard shortcut configurations that would mimic the beauty of the Mac setup, but (at least at the time) nobody had apparently bothered to even attempt to create the necessary configuration files to unify things in any way. So every other application I used, even in the most "user friendly" Linux distributions like Mandrake, had a completely different set of valid shortcuts. To top it off, very few primary (single key) shortcuts were based on the easily accessible Alt key rather than the Control key. Everywhere I looked things were designed to mimic the horribleness of Windows keyboard shortcuts rather than boldly striking out to create something better.
As far as I'm concerned, arguing about the loss of an ancient and pretty much vestigial key that 99.99% of the world hasn't had any use for in decades is the least of the problems with today's PC keyboards.
Last time I saw a LORAN-C device was on my family's sailboat that we used to motor-sail to Alaska from Washington through the Inside Passage. That was 1990. It wasn't much use even at the time. Radar and charts were much more helpful with navigation. I haven't even heard mention of the term LORAN-C for a very long time. I don't think most vessels have a LORAN-C receiver installed anymore. Maybe big ones, but not the hundreds of thousands of small to medium size vessels. Hard to justify keeping it running if nobody is using it. What's the benefit if almost nobody owns the necessary hardware anymore? Just playing Devil's Advocate. I'm sure it's still useful to somebody, somewhere.