It's this funny thing about being a parent... you see, you have other things to do than be your child's content censor all day long. I'm a single father of four, and I also have to do things like cook dinner, help my other children with their homework, clean, go to the bathroom, etc. etc. If I were to attempt to monitor my children's Internet usage like you demand, they would get to use the Internet... oh, around 15 minutes a week. Maybe.
Now, maybe in some elevated sense of the word I "ought" to be able to watch each of my four children like a hawk, all the time. But I can't, and a bit of content filtering allows my kids to get the benefits of Internet access without me having to be a content Nazi.
(And before you criticize me for having four children, originally my wife was a stay-at-home mother, but she died of cancer. So frankly if you want to blame me for having too many kids you can go to hell. There is something sick about a society that insists on a level of public depravity that makes it impossible for parents to have enough children to even maintain its population.)
My dad is a High School Physics/AP Math teacher who taught programming this year. I encouraged him NOT to use C++ (his original plan) and to use Python instead, and to use
Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science as the text. He has been absolutely delighted both with Python and with the choice of text. Now, it has to be said that this doesn't really address your case, since all of his students are pretty much AP materials (and it's a private school, etc.) However, I would encourage you to take a really close look at that text.
Not sure what sort of Biblical Scholar you might be if you seriously think that no theologian accepts the supernatural any more. I'd have to say you're probably the sort who picks up Crossan's latest book at Barnes' and Noble and thinks that that represents the sum of mainstream Biblical Scholarship. If you're really ambitious, maybe you read Funk or Elaine Pagels too. Off the top of my head, prominent Biblical Scholars and theologians who accept and defend the possibility of the supernatural:
Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican)
Tom Wright (Bishop of Durham, Anglican)
Richard Hays (United Methodist, Professor Emeritus at Duke Divinity School)
John Howard Yoder (Formerly of Notre Dame, deceased, Mennonite)
Millard Erickson (I think he's at Truett Seminary now, American (not Southern) Baptist)
Karl Barth (the most influential theologian of the 20th century, by far. Swiss Reformed.)
None of these would be considered "fundamentalist", although a couple might be evangelical if you squint. As for reading Dawkins' books, yes I have. But I'm reminded of the refrain of Louis l'Amor's Poem, "No, I haven't read Gone With the Wind":
For every book you think you've read, I've read forty-two.
Ok, whose house did he torch? What clinic did he bomb? How many blacks has he lynched? How many books has he burned? How many TV shows has he censored? Let's make this qualitative statement of yours quantitative, shall we?
Ooohm, quantitative. I LIKE quantitative. Let's see... a quick Google search shows roughy 80% of Americans claim to be Christians. That makes it about 240 million American Christians. How many of those have torched a house? Almost none. Last time I looked, the house-torchers were members of the KKK, not Christians. How many of those have bombed a clinic? By my count, four, although if you wanted to include arson under "bombing" you could stretch it to 10 or 12. How many books burned? That's sort of an interesting question... let's just say that if I advocated for Origin of Species what he advocates for Genesis, you'd call it book burning.
Now, while we're at it with quantitative analysis, let's see... how many atheists were actively involved in the abolitionist movement? Hmm... funny, I can't find any prominent ones (although I daresay you could dredge up one or two somewhere. Certainly there were none to compare with Wilberforce or Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Quakers were the core of the movement.) Who made up the core of the civil right movement? Hmm... Black and white ministers, from all across America (including far too few from the South, but there were a few.) Oddly enough, I don't seem to see much about Madeline Murray O'Hare or Americans United or even Richard Dawkins during the civil rights era... apparently they were too busy looking out for themselves and policing the schools up north for mentions of God to worry about the black folks down south. How many atheists stood up to Hitler? Can't find any, but I can name half a dozen people of faith who did.
Now, one more "quantitative analysis." In recent history (i.e. since we've had people who formally identified themselves as "atheists" ideologically), how many religious people have practiced genocide, and how many atheists? Let's see... Stalin, Pol Pot, Miloshevich, Mao... just off the top of my head. Hitler is the only Christian that occurs to me, but of course even Hitler seem to have been Christian only for the sake of its useful polemic against the Jew. For John S. Conway and many other historians it is beyond doubt that Hitler held a "fundamental antagonism" towards the Christian churches.' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler#Religious_beliefs).
I once heard an interview with Dawkins (I think it was on NPR's Fresh Air) in which he claimed that virtually no "Theologians" believe in the miraculous anymore. Speaking as someone with a Master's in Theology, I can say this is utter nonsense, and I lost all respect for Dawkins at that point. Dawkins is no longer a scientist, if he ever was, but a theologian and evangelist of atheism. And, from what I can tell from the couple of books of his I've read and miscellaneous interviews and articles, he's far more judgmental and intolerant than most Christians.
The senator who introduced the language into an omnibus appropriations bill wants feedback on the best way to make (e.g.) the Library of Congress's Thomas data more available -- an API or bulk downloads, or both.
This is a legitimate point... but if Javascript is going to be a sort of "bytecode for the Internet"... one wonders if it's really the right choice. Maybe what we need is a sort of "compiled web page" (ick... is this really just becoming flash?) standard or somesuch. I could see a pretty good case for this--if nothing else, browsers could become significantly faster as they wouldn't have to individually parse HTML pages. Also, compiled web pages would have the advantage of being run through a compiler on the server side, which could eliminate a lot of the malformed crud that browsers have to deal with currently.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but maybe it's time to really rethink the basic architecture of the web and of HTML? And maybe SGML/XML syntax (between http server and browser at least) is part of the problem?
It seems to me that the browser will not be able to replace the desktop... or even claim to be an "OS" in anything but the most attenuated sense... until we have the ability to use something other than javascript in a reasonably cross-platform way. Imagine for a second that Windows could only be programmed in Visual Basic, or Linux could only be programmed in C. We'd absolutely hate it, and we'd be right to hate it.
Now, granted, any given development platform generally displays a preference for a given programming language. If you're going to develop Gnome applications, you're probably going to use C, if Cocoa, then Objective C, etc. But right now the situation in the web space is one of total locking to Javascript, which isn't even all that good of a language.
What I really want to see is a reasonable degree of cross-platform support for the use of a reasonable variety of object-oriented scripting languages embedded in the browser, as plugins. So I can develop web pages in HTML + Ruby, or HTML + Python, or HTML + Javascript, as is best suited for my application. The hooks are there in the HTML specs to do this, but browser implementations don't seem to have caught up.
I'm going to buck the trend, and say "buy buy buy". Let me put it this way: on the one hand, Steve Jobs is seriously ill, and may be out of the picture. On the other hand:
Apple has got the best operating system available, stable, and for the moment feature complete.
The iPhone has a nice lead over the competition. The BB Storm seems to be in the process of failing to be an iPhone killer, and while its too soon to say on the Palm Pre, I do notice that they are now selling iPhone's at Walmart. That says something important about demand.
iTunes store just made a major step forward that gave them feature parity with their competition, at a time when they're still ahead in market share.
Apple's brand still has a lot of "shiny gloss to it
Jobs going might be a *good* thing, because it might open up the path for Apple to offer OSX to other manufacturers. In the short term, this is admittedly risky, since it could cannabilize hardware sales. But, if done right... software is awesome to sell, because the marginal cost approaches zero. And let's not forget that there are a number of other products (iLife, iWork, Final Cut, ProTools, etc.) that could benefit from OSX being more widely deployed.
I just don't see that Jobs going changes the fundamentals of the company all that much. I think Apple at the current price is a great buy, and if it tanks tomorrow, it is a great buy. Time to take some money out of bonds:)
No email system should ever "crash" under any reasonable load. Back in the late 90's, I was involved in designing and implementing email systems for some of the largest (at the times) ISP's as a consultant for a company that an NDA forbids me to mention. One of the things we did was limit the number of simultaneous connections, such that a "reply storm" (or, more often, a DOS attack) would hit a speed bump fairly quickly. Sendmail has done this for 25 years, by cutting off acceptance of new messages when load average goes above a certain (configurable) limit.
The point is that the very fact that a simple "reply all" storm could take down a mail system is, itself, an indication that the mail system is poorly implemented. Anyone taking bets on the system in question?
I see 3 3.0+ quakes today after a couple of days off. From what I've been reading, it seems like quakes greater than 3 are somewhat unusual period. Granted, I know squat about geology, but it still seems a bit anomalous. (Unfortunately, the U. Utah page doesn't seem to go back more than a few days, so I can't really tell for sure how unusual 3.0 quakes are. I'd welcome being corrected with real data.)
Somebody from US News & World report blogged about it here. Not quite to the "run in circles scream and shout" stage, but I might go and spend $100 on rice and beans, just in case.
I'm sorry, but I think the dangers of Wikipedia accepting advertising are overstated, at least so long as it's kept fairly anonymous. A simple Google text ad creates almost no possibility of feedback between Wikipedia editors and contributors and the advertiser themselves. I suppose that it could, in theory, create some kind of tie to Google, but even that could be avoided by splitting business between various Internet advertising providers (and don't I recall that Wikipedia already takes money from Google in terms of sponsorship? Surely that's even more likely to influence?)
As far as paying contributors... I don't think that Wikipedia should ever go to paying all contributors. However, I do think it might make sense to pay bounties for articles on topics that are for some reason under-represented or particularly difficult to get quality articles on. I would suggest that there be some sort of community nominating scheme to nominate an article for a bounty, to keep the community involved.
I don't think anyone wants to keep dumping crap in the air. I'm not the OP, but I am more than a bit skeptical about global warming. However, I would consider myself a conservationist, especially since I suffer from serious asthma that gets triggered whenever I have to spend a night in an urban shith^H^H^H^H^H area. Believe me, waking up in the morning completely unable to breathe after one night in a Washington hotel will make you a believer in emissions controls.
However, "cleaning up the environment" and "limiting CO2 emissions" are not the same thing. For example, if the goal is to cleanup the environment, clean coal is a wizard idea. If the goal is to limit CO2, then not so much.
My problem with the environmental movement (as opposed to conservationism, which is the label I choose for myself) is that environmentalism seems to elevate the environment to an almost religious position. Taking care of the planet is seen as a religious obligation, which must be undertaken irrespective of the merits, irrespective of the cost, no matter whether it makes sense, no matter who gets hurt. So, we end up with insane situations where badly needed development--development that will give people jobs, save lives, help keep the US out of foreign wars, etc.--is blocked because the environment is elevated above everything else.
An excellent example would be a controversy in the are where I live, where environmentalists are trying to block the construction of two more reactors at Lake Anna Nuclear Power Station since said reactors will raise the lake temperature and change the ecology of the lake. Never mind that the lake was BUILT for cooling those reactors, and is in fact owned by Virginia Power (literally), and was originally designed for four reactors! As far as environmentalists are concerned, the status quo is sacred, and must be preserved at all costs.
Examples could be multiplied... from ANWR to off-shore drilling, the environmental movement always regards the environment to be more important than people.
Global warming is the worst example, because rich nations can afford to retool to avoid emitting carbon dioxide, but the third world cannot. Now, if global warming were really the threat that it is made out to be, then everybody needs to retool. However, if its not, then forcing the 3rd world to retool is just plain cruel.
But you don't seem to care. All you seem to care about is "The Environment." Try thinking about "The People" first, and you may come up with a different answer.
I just picked up 10 10/100 Mbps dual-speed 24port 3com hubs for $10 off ebay, as well as a 12 port 3com 100mbps hub for another $5. Shipping cost another $10, and I used them to network my friends computers shop by putting one on each desk. Granted, switches would have been nicer, but I would rather have a quality hub than a questionable (read "consumer grade") switch. In any case, a consumer grade switch would have cost me several times as much, and likely not performed as well.
In any case, this network is easily capable of keeping up with my friend's (limited) needs, and unlike the old network (a mix of antique 10mbps hubs) it doesn't get collisions all the time. So, even though everything involved is at least 10 years old, it seems to be a pretty good deal for $30.
I'm probably betraying my ignorance here, but the ability to implement filesystems in userspace was supposed to be one of the advantages of microkernel based operating systems. Given that Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel, could this be better done as a Mach server (i.e. at the Mach layer) than in user space under the FreeBSD layer? I recognize that Darwin doesn't really take advantage of Mach as a microkernel in the way that it should, but surely there's *some* advantage to being built on Mach, right?
You seem to be suffering from a common sort of fallacious thinking--confusing correlation with causation. I have yet to see anything to convince me that more money to public education will necessary result in better educated students. Instead, what I see again and again is that enhanced funding for public education is often funneled into "luxury items" that do nothing to enhance the performance of students in basic areas like Reading, Math, Science, etc.
As a concrete example, the schools in my (rural) area gets large amounts of money from state, rural, and private foundations every year. One would hope that this money would be spent on things like smaller class sizes, better remedial education for low-performing students, better advanced education for high-performing students, or replacement/refurbishment of antiquated schools (some of which are literally unsafe.)
Instead, what do we have?
An elementary school that's literally falling apart, with back-flowing sewage, and a DS3 internet connection.
Same elementary school, with brand-new phone system based on Cisco IP Phones.
Somebody decided they needed an auto-dialer. Now I get 3-4 calls a night telling me about everything from football games to PTA meetings.
Brand new computers in the computer lab this year. And last year. And the year before. (Running Windows, of course. (Note that they don't actually teach computer science. They teach students how to use Microsoft Office and play video games.
In the meantime...
My autistic Daughter's special ed teacher is trying to help a 3-year-old child (who appears to have Down's Syndrome) whose only language is Spanish. The school has dealt with this by buying her a copy of Rosetta Stone. There's no funding for a translator, nor is there a translator available anywhere in the school system, even for IEP meetings. (This violates Federal special education laws, in my opinion.
My son is bored out of his gourd in his math classes. At home, he is studying Algebra. At school, they're adding fractions. The TAG teacher tried to get him a tutor, but was told there was no funding. He's now tuning out the classroom and his grades are dropping.
My other daughter is in a kindergarten classroom with 24 students. There is one teacher, and a teacher's aid shared with 2 other kindergarten classrooms.
Oh yeah... the PTA is constantly doing fund-raisers. They want to build a butterfly garden.
The problem with American education isn't a lack of funding. We spend more on education than any other major industrial nation. The problem is cultural. The problem is that we don't value academics. The problem is that we resent smart kids. The problem is that administrators would rather have toys than teachers. The problem is that the NEA would rather whine about not having funding than actually take responsibility for fixing the problems.
And I'm *SICK* to death of hearing the apologists for the failure of American education whine that they need more funding. You don't need more funding. You need to DO YOUR JOB. We need to fire the administrators who are more worried with empire building than knowledge building, promote the teachers that actually teach, tell the parents who want to build butterfly gardens and soothe the little angels egos to stuff a sock in it, and start focusing on one thing and one thing only: STUDENTS WHO CAN THINK.
Perhaps (although I could argue the point.) But I doubt there are many SF authors who were more consistent in advocating civilian space exploration, and of those who did none were nearly so popular or influential. (Ben Bova, for example, reads like "Gosh I wanna be Heinlein when I grow up" in his novels that touch on this sort of space exploration.)
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It's this funny thing about being a parent... you see, you have other things to do than be your child's content censor all day long. I'm a single father of four, and I also have to do things like cook dinner, help my other children with their homework, clean, go to the bathroom, etc. etc. If I were to attempt to monitor my children's Internet usage like you demand, they would get to use the Internet... oh, around 15 minutes a week. Maybe.
Now, maybe in some elevated sense of the word I "ought" to be able to watch each of my four children like a hawk, all the time. But I can't, and a bit of content filtering allows my kids to get the benefits of Internet access without me having to be a content Nazi.
(And before you criticize me for having four children, originally my wife was a stay-at-home mother, but she died of cancer. So frankly if you want to blame me for having too many kids you can go to hell. There is something sick about a society that insists on a level of public depravity that makes it impossible for parents to have enough children to even maintain its population.)
My dad is a High School Physics/AP Math teacher who taught programming this year. I encouraged him NOT to use C++ (his original plan) and to use Python instead, and to use Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science as the text. He has been absolutely delighted both with Python and with the choice of text. Now, it has to be said that this doesn't really address your case, since all of his students are pretty much AP materials (and it's a private school, etc.) However, I would encourage you to take a really close look at that text.
Not sure what sort of Biblical Scholar you might be if you seriously think that no theologian accepts the supernatural any more. I'd have to say you're probably the sort who picks up Crossan's latest book at Barnes' and Noble and thinks that that represents the sum of mainstream Biblical Scholarship. If you're really ambitious, maybe you read Funk or Elaine Pagels too. Off the top of my head, prominent Biblical Scholars and theologians who accept and defend the possibility of the supernatural:
None of these would be considered "fundamentalist", although a couple might be evangelical if you squint. As for reading Dawkins' books, yes I have. But I'm reminded of the refrain of Louis l'Amor's Poem, "No, I haven't read Gone With the Wind":
Cheers
Ooohm, quantitative. I LIKE quantitative. Let's see... a quick Google search shows roughy 80% of Americans claim to be Christians. That makes it about 240 million American Christians. How many of those have torched a house? Almost none. Last time I looked, the house-torchers were members of the KKK, not Christians. How many of those have bombed a clinic? By my count, four, although if you wanted to include arson under "bombing" you could stretch it to 10 or 12. How many books burned? That's sort of an interesting question... let's just say that if I advocated for Origin of Species what he advocates for Genesis, you'd call it book burning.
Now, while we're at it with quantitative analysis, let's see... how many atheists were actively involved in the abolitionist movement? Hmm... funny, I can't find any prominent ones (although I daresay you could dredge up one or two somewhere. Certainly there were none to compare with Wilberforce or Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Quakers were the core of the movement.) Who made up the core of the civil right movement? Hmm... Black and white ministers, from all across America (including far too few from the South, but there were a few.) Oddly enough, I don't seem to see much about Madeline Murray O'Hare or Americans United or even Richard Dawkins during the civil rights era... apparently they were too busy looking out for themselves and policing the schools up north for mentions of God to worry about the black folks down south. How many atheists stood up to Hitler? Can't find any, but I can name half a dozen people of faith who did.
Now, one more "quantitative analysis." In recent history (i.e. since we've had people who formally identified themselves as "atheists" ideologically), how many religious people have practiced genocide, and how many atheists? Let's see... Stalin, Pol Pot, Miloshevich, Mao... just off the top of my head. Hitler is the only Christian that occurs to me, but of course even Hitler seem to have been Christian only for the sake of its useful polemic against the Jew. For John S. Conway and many other historians it is beyond doubt that Hitler held a "fundamental antagonism" towards the Christian churches.' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler#Religious_beliefs).
Gosh, I love quantitative analysis.
I once heard an interview with Dawkins (I think it was on NPR's Fresh Air) in which he claimed that virtually no "Theologians" believe in the miraculous anymore. Speaking as someone with a Master's in Theology, I can say this is utter nonsense, and I lost all respect for Dawkins at that point. Dawkins is no longer a scientist, if he ever was, but a theologian and evangelist of atheism. And, from what I can tell from the couple of books of his I've read and miscellaneous interviews and articles, he's far more judgmental and intolerant than most Christians.
Both. Duh.
This is a legitimate point... but if Javascript is going to be a sort of "bytecode for the Internet"... one wonders if it's really the right choice. Maybe what we need is a sort of "compiled web page" (ick... is this really just becoming flash?) standard or somesuch. I could see a pretty good case for this--if nothing else, browsers could become significantly faster as they wouldn't have to individually parse HTML pages. Also, compiled web pages would have the advantage of being run through a compiler on the server side, which could eliminate a lot of the malformed crud that browsers have to deal with currently.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but maybe it's time to really rethink the basic architecture of the web and of HTML? And maybe SGML/XML syntax (between http server and browser at least) is part of the problem?
It seems to me that the browser will not be able to replace the desktop ... or even claim to be an "OS" in anything but the most attenuated sense... until we have the ability to use something other than javascript in a reasonably cross-platform way. Imagine for a second that Windows could only be programmed in Visual Basic, or Linux could only be programmed in C. We'd absolutely hate it, and we'd be right to hate it.
Now, granted, any given development platform generally displays a preference for a given programming language. If you're going to develop Gnome applications, you're probably going to use C, if Cocoa, then Objective C, etc. But right now the situation in the web space is one of total locking to Javascript, which isn't even all that good of a language.
What I really want to see is a reasonable degree of cross-platform support for the use of a reasonable variety of object-oriented scripting languages embedded in the browser, as plugins. So I can develop web pages in HTML + Ruby, or HTML + Python, or HTML + Javascript, as is best suited for my application. The hooks are there in the HTML specs to do this, but browser implementations don't seem to have caught up.
Man, and I just NOW hear about this!
Of course, that would only be suitable for students with at least some calc.
Also, how about A Beautiful Mind (the book, not the movie.)
I never do this, but "Mod Parent Up", +4 Insightful/Informative
I just don't see that Jobs going changes the fundamentals of the company all that much. I think Apple at the current price is a great buy, and if it tanks tomorrow, it is a great buy. Time to take some money out of bonds :)
Only left the company in 2005.
No email system should ever "crash" under any reasonable load. Back in the late 90's, I was involved in designing and implementing email systems for some of the largest (at the times) ISP's as a consultant for a company that an NDA forbids me to mention. One of the things we did was limit the number of simultaneous connections, such that a "reply storm" (or, more often, a DOS attack) would hit a speed bump fairly quickly. Sendmail has done this for 25 years, by cutting off acceptance of new messages when load average goes above a certain (configurable) limit.
The point is that the very fact that a simple "reply all" storm could take down a mail system is, itself, an indication that the mail system is poorly implemented. Anyone taking bets on the system in question?
Some scientific perspective... from 2005. Granted, I'm not ready to go paranoid yet, but surely a bunch of earthquakes sort of changes the odds?
I see 3 3.0+ quakes today after a couple of days off. From what I've been reading, it seems like quakes greater than 3 are somewhat unusual period. Granted, I know squat about geology, but it still seems a bit anomalous. (Unfortunately, the U. Utah page doesn't seem to go back more than a few days, so I can't really tell for sure how unusual 3.0 quakes are. I'd welcome being corrected with real data.)
Somebody from US News & World report blogged about it here. Not quite to the "run in circles scream and shout" stage, but I might go and spend $100 on rice and beans, just in case.
This really sounds like a virus to me. Which is kind of pathetic... even Microsoft's iPod's get viruses.
As far as paying contributors... I don't think that Wikipedia should ever go to paying all contributors. However, I do think it might make sense to pay bounties for articles on topics that are for some reason under-represented or particularly difficult to get quality articles on. I would suggest that there be some sort of community nominating scheme to nominate an article for a bounty, to keep the community involved.
I don't think anyone wants to keep dumping crap in the air. I'm not the OP, but I am more than a bit skeptical about global warming. However, I would consider myself a conservationist, especially since I suffer from serious asthma that gets triggered whenever I have to spend a night in an urban shith^H^H^H^H^H area. Believe me, waking up in the morning completely unable to breathe after one night in a Washington hotel will make you a believer in emissions controls.
However, "cleaning up the environment" and "limiting CO2 emissions" are not the same thing. For example, if the goal is to cleanup the environment, clean coal is a wizard idea. If the goal is to limit CO2, then not so much.
My problem with the environmental movement (as opposed to conservationism, which is the label I choose for myself) is that environmentalism seems to elevate the environment to an almost religious position. Taking care of the planet is seen as a religious obligation, which must be undertaken irrespective of the merits, irrespective of the cost, no matter whether it makes sense, no matter who gets hurt. So, we end up with insane situations where badly needed development--development that will give people jobs, save lives, help keep the US out of foreign wars, etc.--is blocked because the environment is elevated above everything else.
An excellent example would be a controversy in the are where I live, where environmentalists are trying to block the construction of two more reactors at Lake Anna Nuclear Power Station since said reactors will raise the lake temperature and change the ecology of the lake. Never mind that the lake was BUILT for cooling those reactors, and is in fact owned by Virginia Power (literally), and was originally designed for four reactors! As far as environmentalists are concerned, the status quo is sacred, and must be preserved at all costs.
Examples could be multiplied... from ANWR to off-shore drilling, the environmental movement always regards the environment to be more important than people.
Global warming is the worst example, because rich nations can afford to retool to avoid emitting carbon dioxide, but the third world cannot. Now, if global warming were really the threat that it is made out to be, then everybody needs to retool. However, if its not, then forcing the 3rd world to retool is just plain cruel.
But you don't seem to care. All you seem to care about is "The Environment." Try thinking about "The People" first, and you may come up with a different answer.
In any case, this network is easily capable of keeping up with my friend's (limited) needs, and unlike the old network (a mix of antique 10mbps hubs) it doesn't get collisions all the time. So, even though everything involved is at least 10 years old, it seems to be a pretty good deal for $30.
I'm probably betraying my ignorance here, but the ability to implement filesystems in userspace was supposed to be one of the advantages of microkernel based operating systems. Given that Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel, could this be better done as a Mach server (i.e. at the Mach layer) than in user space under the FreeBSD layer? I recognize that Darwin doesn't really take advantage of Mach as a microkernel in the way that it should, but surely there's *some* advantage to being built on Mach, right?
You seem to be suffering from a common sort of fallacious thinking--confusing correlation with causation. I have yet to see anything to convince me that more money to public education will necessary result in better educated students. Instead, what I see again and again is that enhanced funding for public education is often funneled into "luxury items" that do nothing to enhance the performance of students in basic areas like Reading, Math, Science, etc.
As a concrete example, the schools in my (rural) area gets large amounts of money from state, rural, and private foundations every year. One would hope that this money would be spent on things like smaller class sizes, better remedial education for low-performing students, better advanced education for high-performing students, or replacement/refurbishment of antiquated schools (some of which are literally unsafe.)
Instead, what do we have?
In the meantime...
The problem with American education isn't a lack of funding. We spend more on education than any other major industrial nation. The problem is cultural. The problem is that we don't value academics. The problem is that we resent smart kids. The problem is that administrators would rather have toys than teachers. The problem is that the NEA would rather whine about not having funding than actually take responsibility for fixing the problems.
And I'm *SICK* to death of hearing the apologists for the failure of American education whine that they need more funding. You don't need more funding. You need to DO YOUR JOB. We need to fire the administrators who are more worried with empire building than knowledge building, promote the teachers that actually teach, tell the parents who want to build butterfly gardens and soothe the little angels egos to stuff a sock in it, and start focusing on one thing and one thing only: STUDENTS WHO CAN THINK.
Perhaps (although I could argue the point.) But I doubt there are many SF authors who were more consistent in advocating civilian space exploration, and of those who did none were nearly so popular or influential. (Ben Bova, for example, reads like "Gosh I wanna be Heinlein when I grow up" in his novels that touch on this sort of space exploration.)
Operating Systems on the other hand are. My "other" religion is a Macintosh.