The reason China is able to compete is because of a handful factors:
* Enslavement/enticement of foreign countries to utilize their natural resources (see: Africa) * Cheap-as-fuck labor * Wanton IP theft * A docile populace * Totalitarian state able to push all this through to the populace * UN complicity towards Chinese abuse of standards which everyone else "has" to abide by. (See: pollution/global warming crap)
As someone who compulsively selects articles as i read them (repeatedly and randomly) let me just say I'm glad to see that my compulsive behavior is corrupting their 'service'.
Such caving is culturally expected in the West. We've been doing it, individually and as a culture, for almost 50 years now. This won't change a thing.
Even in the realm of sheer upper-body strength, I guarantee that (unless you happen to be a champion powerlifter) there are are women who can outbench you.
Yeah, but that's unimportant. Again, let's go back to:
1) averages exceptional 2) absolutes
That is, the averages are different for those who are exceptional. Smart men are smarter than smart women, on average. (Stupid men are also retards compared to stupid women due to a male intellectual bell curve with significantly more outliers). Women are much more normalized, intellectually.
Strong men are (with rare exception) stronger than strong women, on average.Pick a thousand fit men and women, and compare their body strength: men win. And chances are there are a lot more men in those categories to pick from at that.
Much easier said if you were employed mid-year 2008 and remained so throughout the 'downturn'.
That 'downturn' hurt, bad. Being out of work for 6 months would have been nice, but there were weeks at a time when there were no tech related positions, and nobody was interested in hiring someone with "professional" work experience for even tasks such as menial labor or food service. Good luck finding work out of your general area, too: my observation has been that there are so many IT types out of work, most places aren't even bothering to interview non-locals. There are just too many qualified applicants to pick from locally.
(I suspect concern that I would "up and leave" at the drop of a hat/promise of decent employment.) It's been 2 years, and at this point, I suspect there's not an end in sight due to the extended sabbatical.
The most extravegant thing I've bought since around March 08 was the occasional six pack of beer - maybe every other month. So yeah, that's not a terribly "good position".
I am the person I am, and my clothes are just bits of cloth. Fashion is for people who are willing to judge people on the superficial!
Yet, at least in IT, your email address is a bit more than that. It speaks of your technical preferences and can at least point to a person's technical ability (eg. aol.com doesn't allow IMAP or POP3).
Would I hire a Windows administrator with an @ilife.com (or whatever) Apple branded email address? Hell no. I'd probably not hire someone to work at an all-Mac design shop if the person had an @live.com address, either.
Really, what it comes down to is a social assessment of a persons' technical ability and/or competence.
I'm a sysadmin. If I were to deal with someone with an @aol.com or @hotmail.com, I'd think a combination of the following things:
1) They're older. 2) They're technologically and/or socially conservative. 3) They're incompetent (when it comes to computers).
There's no technical advantage to using either of those domains for email; that's why they've got the stigma, and why people have moved away to other web based mail.
These might not be 'correct' implications, but the stigma is there, just the same - even though someone with an @live.com address wouldn't likely have the same stigma.
If I were a writer, I'd not worry about it so much. For most people, an email address shows nothing more about them than their physical mailing address (even if it's something stupid, like discgolfbum@hotmail.com).
If I were an IT hiring manager or something like that, hiring for a Linux administrator, an @live.com or similar email address would dissuade me somewhat from interest in said candidate. In IT, there is a degree of technical savvy which needs to be demonstrated in a person's personal technology choices - preferably pertaining to their expertise.
Meanwhile, those of us who have had our own vanity domains and host our email through that will never face this problem.
And I'm not saying that because I dislike it. I like it very much, and it is one of those few shows with a special quality resulting from good writing (mostly) and a very realistic between the characters.
That interaction will not be the same with a 'reboot' unless the same actors are available. If those actors are not available - at least a couple of them to maintain the dynamic - it would make any relaunch a likely failure with existing fans.
Think of the last (couple) seasons of Stargate SG-1, after Richard Dean Anderson left. The show sucked because what little dynamic SG-1 had was lost by the removal of a pivotal character.
But implementing an easy view of the data is a small, auxiliary step from actually organizing things internally within Firefox so that things would work properly in a multiprocess fashion.
I recall seeing news articles about existing color readers long before the Kindle and Sony readers came out, as well.
I suspect it's a number of things:
1) You've got two products which beat everything in the market at paper-like utility; one is better than the other but still not awesome. Keep the one which is better in the back room and improve it (don't show all your cards at once) while the lesser one garners sales. 2) Cost. Realize that these are mainly being targeted at the paper-replacement market (ebook readers and web tablets). There was (is?) no market for color e-Ink yet, so they didn't send them to market. (Things are a little tight now for everyone, so they need to try and turn their research into money.) 3)Competition. Nobody has been able to come even close to the power/use utility of e-Ink yet, so they've not been quick to show their aces.
Only by Opera standards. Even then Firefox extensions are worth the bloat.
Except it's bloated compared to IE and Chrome, too. They scale much more gracefully than Firefox does.
"no internal resource (extensions, etc.) memory management"
Why would any user care about this?
Because its addition would provide a tool for extension developers to improve their extensions - decrease memory use and/or CPU use, find leaks, etc. Firefox has to do it all internally anyway; abstract it so the dev doesn't have to dig through arcane data to obtain the information.
It's also useful if you're trying to figure out why Firefox is suddenly leaking memory after an extension update, or to find out which extensions would be best gotten rid of if you're trying to work within a limited memory envelope. (You know, us geeks. Since when was "good software" ever initially targeted towards the technically stupid user?)
"No multiprocess ability"
Slashdot is the best place to post this. I'm pretty fed up with 50 Firefox tabs freezing for 10 seconds every time I click on a Slashdot link.
"Slow user interface"
Certainly not noticed this. I can quite easily have a dozen windows open with 50+ tabs total and it's still responsive (as long as I avoid Slashdot) on a netbook.
"Archaic code base"
Again why would a user care about this?
These are all associated, so naturally it's of central significance. Firefox feels slow because the UI is unresponsive when you click on that link, which takes 10s to load - on account of FF being a single process. Make sense?
No point comparing yourself to the lowest common denominator.
There is if the lowest common denominator is actually doing better in many regards. That doesn't speak well for you; that speaks of stagnation.
Sorry, no. Every extension writer needs it, as well as anyone who's experiencing an extension leaking memory. Anyone doing desktop support (with firefox as the browser being used) needs it.
And really, it'd be damn useful in general, making everyone's browsing experience better upon initial implementation. You'd no longer need to worry about a rogue script or Flash taking the whole browser out - just a specific tab or plugin, which could (should) then be dynamically reloaded.
Yes, Internet Explorer is even way ahead of the game in this department.
I'm thinking it's about time for a Firefox fork...
Or, if not a Firefox fork, then maybe picking up a browser based on the WebKit engine (pick one). Seriously, aside from Extensions, what does Firefox have over the other browsers right now? The only other thing I can think of is its standards compliance. It's got these things going against it:
Bloated, lots of memory use
no internal resource (extensions, etc.) memory management
No multiprocess ability
Slow user interface
Archaic code base
Hell, even Microsoft is rumored to be working on a replacement for Internet Explorer due to architectural issues. I'm not saying the gecko engine and/or Firefox can't be fixed, but from history, I think it's pretty safe to say that Mozilla won't be able to accompish what needs to be done. Just look how long it took them to get from 3.0 to 3.5, and how relatively marginal the improvements were (though they were improvements).
I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming.
I have been rallying for this functionality for years. It would improve the Firefox situation so, so much, and would likely provide a very useful tool for plugin/extension writers to troubleshoot/debug their work more thoroughly. Quality would go up across the line.
The way things are going, browsers are becoming more OS like every couple months. Gazelle is supposed to be the furthest implementation of such things to date, but Chrome is already well within "useful and well designed" territory.
What we need is the ability granularly manage independent elements within our browsers, because they're running a huge variety of different code: extensions which perform separate tasks; javascript on many different pages, Flash, embedded video, Java, etc. Really, when it comes down to it, most peoples' browsers are running more independently developed instances of code than they are running actual applications. (For instance, I'm running Firefox with 14 extensions and 3 plugins right now; I'm only running 6 independent applications, in addition to firefox).
The way it stands, Firefox is on par with Windows 3.1, in terms of process management. The closest thing to managing processes we've got is "taking a long time" javascript detection. Flash crashes, and Firefox crashes (unless you're using a crap wrapper). Extensions lead to Firefox leaking, and there's no way to granularly manage any of the data.
I saw Chrome's "process manager" for the first time the other day and was quite impressed. The fact that Google collects information via Chrome, and its limited extension/plugin repository (which doesn't provide the functionality I want) has so far kept me from giving it much of a serious look, but now, I'm having second thoughts.
I was in my early teens when I started playing Duke3D. I'd played Duke Nukem 2 years prior (it was kid-safe).
Yeah, the boobies were awesome. But that was just the hook. Yes, the game engine was behind by quite a bit with its sprites. The sinker was the gameplay.
Weapons the weapons and levels combined really well with each other to form an absolutely incredible multiplayer experience. Trip mines, secret passages, crawl spaces, remote detonator grenades, being able to hear through walls to some degree (you know, like in real life), the jetpack, shrink gun, and so on... there were so many possibilities.
This reads a bit like the thread on the college sysadmins running the shop. Think: along the lines of over-education and not enough experience coloring one's view of the situation. See also: when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I'd say odds are that, with someone (anyone) who's highly educated in a specific field, they tend to try to apply that discipline to everything in their lives. The welder who has metal tables and chairs, the woodworker with an oak-everything house, and the mechanic with a V8 lawn mower/snow blower are all good examples of this. Managers who think something is a "morale problem" (and not a management one) or programmers/geeks who see a social problem as one that can be fixed with computing are also examples of this.
This doesn't necessarily mean these specialized-discipline people are necessarily wrong, but it does mean they're contentious and self-righteous assholes. Statistics might help. A wireless computer in your fridge might help. So might a V8 lawn mower (that'd be fucking cool!). But chances are such things are impractical, expensive, and/or coming from an over-extension of assumption.
And sometimes, a gut feeling is as good as (or better than) a well-reasoned and thoroughly informed opinion.
Life's a crap shoot. Sometimes you can't reduce everything to numbers.
Yes, something got fucked with the US implementation of government schools. That's because they're in America, and socialism has a bad habit of fucking things up really, really bad in America.
In America, social programs are run like a poorly operated corporation. There's a lot of top-end bloat, and not a whole lot gets done.
Just because that's the cause (provided it is) does not mean it's justified.
There should be no special ed. There's only so much that retarded people can do, and there is absolutely no reason why a child should be subjected to that. It's an unnecessary expense.
And no, public schools don't offer enough of an education to "round a person out" so that special ed could be justified in that fashion. There's only so much you should be teaching someone who's going to be physically and/or mentally unable to do much more than flip burgers or sweep a floor, when it's on the taxpayer dime. (Many of them will be on welfare their entire lives, anyway.)
So no, private schools don't have to deal with special ed. Instead, many focus on "special ed" in the sense of helping students who are actually able to excel. Government schools should not have special ed, either.
No Child Left Behind is, basically, Special Ed for Everyone People. That's a big fault.
I'm really getting tired of the "underfunded" argument as to why schools are failing in the US. Seriously?
Public funding has increased steadily, at a rate faster than inflation. This is not just nationally, but also at the local level through property taxes.
Also, the funding argument is easily dissuaded simply by pointing out counter-examples: there are many, many private schools which are able to educate students to superior levels in all of the basics. We're talking half as much funding and less.
The cause for government school failure in the US is not due to a lack of funding. That's an excuse, and pushes the blame from the cause. The cause is that they're government schools, with strict top-down models they must adhere to, and do not take the individual student in mind. Schools have to do well on standardized tests, yadda yadda. It's all a huge drain to actual education, and has been so, progressively for over 60 years now.
As someone who has approximately 5 years of experience, including 6 years of part-time and contractual small business network/system admin work and several years in small-medium hospital sysadmin work, let me just say that his attitude seems to be very, very prevalent.
Granted, I may be getting lied to, but I've been told that I don't have any "big shop experience" even though I was one of three admins handling 250 Linux servers and several thousand workstations. This just happened to be a number larger than they had: this organization was simply in a different sector.
My experience is that there are two lower level tiers of sysadmins: those which require 2 years of experience, for which anyone with over 3 years of experience is over-qualified for; and 5 years of experience, for which anyone with less than 6 or 7 years of experience is under qualified for. So if you want to do sysadmin work, you better reconsider your options, or hope to god you're able to hop jobs and/or avoid being laid off at the same place for a span of 4 years. Once you're unemployed, you're done.
If it's not something phone providers support and/or provide a warranty on, why do they sell locked-down, carrier-specific models of a specific phone?
Hate them all you want (and I do) but this is partially why companies (see: Verizon) get away with their ancient phones. They support what they sell, mostly.
When it comes to an 'unlocked' phone like the Nexus One, though, I completely understand the carrier telling people to PTFO. But if it's something the carrier sells...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, China
The reason China is able to compete is because of a handful factors:
* Enslavement/enticement of foreign countries to utilize their natural resources (see: Africa)
* Cheap-as-fuck labor
* Wanton IP theft
* A docile populace
* Totalitarian state able to push all this through to the populace
* UN complicity towards Chinese abuse of standards which everyone else "has" to abide by. (See: pollution/global warming crap)
Hilary Clinton threatening to write a stern letter.
OMG OMG no, anything but that! NooooOOO!
As someone who compulsively selects articles as i read them (repeatedly and randomly) let me just say I'm glad to see that my compulsive behavior is corrupting their 'service'.
Such caving is culturally expected in the West. We've been doing it, individually and as a culture, for almost 50 years now. This won't change a thing.
Even in the realm of sheer upper-body strength, I guarantee that (unless you happen to be a champion powerlifter) there are are women who can outbench you.
Yeah, but that's unimportant. Again, let's go back to:
1) averages exceptional
2) absolutes
That is, the averages are different for those who are exceptional. Smart men are smarter than smart women, on average. (Stupid men are also retards compared to stupid women due to a male intellectual bell curve with significantly more outliers). Women are much more normalized, intellectually.
Strong men are (with rare exception) stronger than strong women, on average.Pick a thousand fit men and women, and compare their body strength: men win. And chances are there are a lot more men in those categories to pick from at that.
Much easier said if you were employed mid-year 2008 and remained so throughout the 'downturn'.
That 'downturn' hurt, bad. Being out of work for 6 months would have been nice, but there were weeks at a time when there were no tech related positions, and nobody was interested in hiring someone with "professional" work experience for even tasks such as menial labor or food service. Good luck finding work out of your general area, too: my observation has been that there are so many IT types out of work, most places aren't even bothering to interview non-locals. There are just too many qualified applicants to pick from locally.
(I suspect concern that I would "up and leave" at the drop of a hat/promise of decent employment.) It's been 2 years, and at this point, I suspect there's not an end in sight due to the extended sabbatical.
The most extravegant thing I've bought since around March 08 was the occasional six pack of beer - maybe every other month. So yeah, that's not a terribly "good position".
Ya know, you could just deny Firefox from writing to its own installation directory. That would be the ideal way to prevent such a thing, yes?
I am the person I am, and my clothes are just bits of cloth. Fashion is for people who are willing to judge people on the superficial!
Yet, at least in IT, your email address is a bit more than that. It speaks of your technical preferences and can at least point to a person's technical ability (eg. aol.com doesn't allow IMAP or POP3).
Would I hire a Windows administrator with an @ilife.com (or whatever) Apple branded email address? Hell no. I'd probably not hire someone to work at an all-Mac design shop if the person had an @live.com address, either.
Really, what it comes down to is a social assessment of a persons' technical ability and/or competence.
I'm a sysadmin. If I were to deal with someone with an @aol.com or @hotmail.com, I'd think a combination of the following things:
1) They're older.
2) They're technologically and/or socially conservative.
3) They're incompetent (when it comes to computers).
There's no technical advantage to using either of those domains for email; that's why they've got the stigma, and why people have moved away to other web based mail.
These might not be 'correct' implications, but the stigma is there, just the same - even though someone with an @live.com address wouldn't likely have the same stigma.
If I were a writer, I'd not worry about it so much. For most people, an email address shows nothing more about them than their physical mailing address (even if it's something stupid, like discgolfbum@hotmail.com).
If I were an IT hiring manager or something like that, hiring for a Linux administrator, an @live.com or similar email address would dissuade me somewhat from interest in said candidate. In IT, there is a degree of technical savvy which needs to be demonstrated in a person's personal technology choices - preferably pertaining to their expertise.
Meanwhile, those of us who have had our own vanity domains and host our email through that will never face this problem.
Please do not 'reboot' Firefly!
And I'm not saying that because I dislike it. I like it very much, and it is one of those few shows with a special quality resulting from good writing (mostly) and a very realistic between the characters.
That interaction will not be the same with a 'reboot' unless the same actors are available. If those actors are not available - at least a couple of them to maintain the dynamic - it would make any relaunch a likely failure with existing fans.
Think of the last (couple) seasons of Stargate SG-1, after Richard Dean Anderson left. The show sucked because what little dynamic SG-1 had was lost by the removal of a pivotal character.
But implementing an easy view of the data is a small, auxiliary step from actually organizing things internally within Firefox so that things would work properly in a multiprocess fashion.
I recall seeing news articles about existing color readers long before the Kindle and Sony readers came out, as well.
I suspect it's a number of things:
1) You've got two products which beat everything in the market at paper-like utility; one is better than the other but still not awesome. Keep the one which is better in the back room and improve it (don't show all your cards at once) while the lesser one garners sales.
2) Cost. Realize that these are mainly being targeted at the paper-replacement market (ebook readers and web tablets). There was (is?) no market for color e-Ink yet, so they didn't send them to market. (Things are a little tight now for everyone, so they need to try and turn their research into money.)
3)Competition. Nobody has been able to come even close to the power/use utility of e-Ink yet, so they've not been quick to show their aces.
Only by Opera standards. Even then Firefox extensions are worth the bloat.
Except it's bloated compared to IE and Chrome, too. They scale much more gracefully than Firefox does.
"no internal resource (extensions, etc.) memory management"
Why would any user care about this?
Because its addition would provide a tool for extension developers to improve their extensions - decrease memory use and/or CPU use, find leaks, etc. Firefox has to do it all internally anyway; abstract it so the dev doesn't have to dig through arcane data to obtain the information.
It's also useful if you're trying to figure out why Firefox is suddenly leaking memory after an extension update, or to find out which extensions would be best gotten rid of if you're trying to work within a limited memory envelope. (You know, us geeks. Since when was "good software" ever initially targeted towards the technically stupid user?)
"No multiprocess ability"
Slashdot is the best place to post this. I'm pretty fed up with 50 Firefox tabs freezing for 10 seconds every time I click on a Slashdot link.
"Slow user interface"
Certainly not noticed this. I can quite easily have a dozen windows open with 50+ tabs total and it's still responsive (as long as I avoid Slashdot) on a netbook.
"Archaic code base"
Again why would a user care about this?
These are all associated, so naturally it's of central significance. Firefox feels slow because the UI is unresponsive when you click on that link, which takes 10s to load - on account of FF being a single process. Make sense?
No point comparing yourself to the lowest common denominator.
There is if the lowest common denominator is actually doing better in many regards. That doesn't speak well for you; that speaks of stagnation.
Five people?
Sorry, no. Every extension writer needs it, as well as anyone who's experiencing an extension leaking memory. Anyone doing desktop support (with firefox as the browser being used) needs it.
And really, it'd be damn useful in general, making everyone's browsing experience better upon initial implementation. You'd no longer need to worry about a rogue script or Flash taking the whole browser out - just a specific tab or plugin, which could (should) then be dynamically reloaded.
Yes, Internet Explorer is even way ahead of the game in this department.
I'm thinking it's about time for a Firefox fork...
Or, if not a Firefox fork, then maybe picking up a browser based on the WebKit engine (pick one). Seriously, aside from Extensions, what does Firefox have over the other browsers right now? The only other thing I can think of is its standards compliance. It's got these things going against it:
Bloated, lots of memory use
no internal resource (extensions, etc.) memory management
No multiprocess ability
Slow user interface
Archaic code base
Hell, even Microsoft is rumored to be working on a replacement for Internet Explorer due to architectural issues. I'm not saying the gecko engine and/or Firefox can't be fixed, but from history, I think it's pretty safe to say that Mozilla won't be able to accompish what needs to be done. Just look how long it took them to get from 3.0 to 3.5, and how relatively marginal the improvements were (though they were improvements).
I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming.
I have been rallying for this functionality for years. It would improve the Firefox situation so, so much, and would likely provide a very useful tool for plugin/extension writers to troubleshoot/debug their work more thoroughly. Quality would go up across the line.
The way things are going, browsers are becoming more OS like every couple months. Gazelle is supposed to be the furthest implementation of such things to date, but Chrome is already well within "useful and well designed" territory.
What we need is the ability granularly manage independent elements within our browsers, because they're running a huge variety of different code: extensions which perform separate tasks; javascript on many different pages, Flash, embedded video, Java, etc. Really, when it comes down to it, most peoples' browsers are running more independently developed instances of code than they are running actual applications. (For instance, I'm running Firefox with 14 extensions and 3 plugins right now; I'm only running 6 independent applications, in addition to firefox).
The way it stands, Firefox is on par with Windows 3.1, in terms of process management. The closest thing to managing processes we've got is "taking a long time" javascript detection. Flash crashes, and Firefox crashes (unless you're using a crap wrapper). Extensions lead to Firefox leaking, and there's no way to granularly manage any of the data.
I saw Chrome's "process manager" for the first time the other day and was quite impressed. The fact that Google collects information via Chrome, and its limited extension/plugin repository (which doesn't provide the functionality I want) has so far kept me from giving it much of a serious look, but now, I'm having second thoughts.
Are you serious?
I was in my early teens when I started playing Duke3D. I'd played Duke Nukem 2 years prior (it was kid-safe).
Yeah, the boobies were awesome. But that was just the hook. Yes, the game engine was behind by quite a bit with its sprites. The sinker was the gameplay.
Weapons the weapons and levels combined really well with each other to form an absolutely incredible multiplayer experience. Trip mines, secret passages, crawl spaces, remote detonator grenades, being able to hear through walls to some degree (you know, like in real life), the jetpack, shrink gun, and so on... there were so many possibilities.
Or do what the Islamists do: get your enemies to pay for your crusade.
This reads a bit like the thread on the college sysadmins running the shop. Think: along the lines of over-education and not enough experience coloring one's view of the situation. See also: when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I'd say odds are that, with someone (anyone) who's highly educated in a specific field, they tend to try to apply that discipline to everything in their lives. The welder who has metal tables and chairs, the woodworker with an oak-everything house, and the mechanic with a V8 lawn mower/snow blower are all good examples of this. Managers who think something is a "morale problem" (and not a management one) or programmers/geeks who see a social problem as one that can be fixed with computing are also examples of this.
This doesn't necessarily mean these specialized-discipline people are necessarily wrong, but it does mean they're contentious and self-righteous assholes. Statistics might help. A wireless computer in your fridge might help. So might a V8 lawn mower (that'd be fucking cool!). But chances are such things are impractical, expensive, and/or coming from an over-extension of assumption.
And sometimes, a gut feeling is as good as (or better than) a well-reasoned and thoroughly informed opinion.
Life's a crap shoot. Sometimes you can't reduce everything to numbers.
Yes, something got fucked with the US implementation of government schools. That's because they're in America, and socialism has a bad habit of fucking things up really, really bad in America.
In America, social programs are run like a poorly operated corporation. There's a lot of top-end bloat, and not a whole lot gets done.
Just because that's the cause (provided it is) does not mean it's justified.
There should be no special ed. There's only so much that retarded people can do, and there is absolutely no reason why a child should be subjected to that. It's an unnecessary expense.
And no, public schools don't offer enough of an education to "round a person out" so that special ed could be justified in that fashion. There's only so much you should be teaching someone who's going to be physically and/or mentally unable to do much more than flip burgers or sweep a floor, when it's on the taxpayer dime. (Many of them will be on welfare their entire lives, anyway.)
So no, private schools don't have to deal with special ed. Instead, many focus on "special ed" in the sense of helping students who are actually able to excel. Government schools should not have special ed, either.
No Child Left Behind is, basically, Special Ed for Everyone People. That's a big fault.
I'm really getting tired of the "underfunded" argument as to why schools are failing in the US. Seriously?
Public funding has increased steadily, at a rate faster than inflation. This is not just nationally, but also at the local level through property taxes.
Also, the funding argument is easily dissuaded simply by pointing out counter-examples: there are many, many private schools which are able to educate students to superior levels in all of the basics. We're talking half as much funding and less.
The cause for government school failure in the US is not due to a lack of funding. That's an excuse, and pushes the blame from the cause. The cause is that they're government schools, with strict top-down models they must adhere to, and do not take the individual student in mind. Schools have to do well on standardized tests, yadda yadda. It's all a huge drain to actual education, and has been so, progressively for over 60 years now.
Lesson 2 is that it doesn't matter what your actions are, if someone doesn't like you and they've got power over your position, you're fucked.
As someone who has approximately 5 years of experience, including 6 years of part-time and contractual small business network/system admin work and several years in small-medium hospital sysadmin work, let me just say that his attitude seems to be very, very prevalent.
Granted, I may be getting lied to, but I've been told that I don't have any "big shop experience" even though I was one of three admins handling 250 Linux servers and several thousand workstations. This just happened to be a number larger than they had: this organization was simply in a different sector.
My experience is that there are two lower level tiers of sysadmins: those which require 2 years of experience, for which anyone with over 3 years of experience is over-qualified for; and 5 years of experience, for which anyone with less than 6 or 7 years of experience is under qualified for. So if you want to do sysadmin work, you better reconsider your options, or hope to god you're able to hop jobs and/or avoid being laid off at the same place for a span of 4 years. Once you're unemployed, you're done.
If it's not something phone providers support and/or provide a warranty on, why do they sell locked-down, carrier-specific models of a specific phone?
Hate them all you want (and I do) but this is partially why companies (see: Verizon) get away with their ancient phones. They support what they sell, mostly.
When it comes to an 'unlocked' phone like the Nexus One, though, I completely understand the carrier telling people to PTFO. But if it's something the carrier sells...