Personally I am fine with some basic traffic shaping, as long as:
a) It is spelled out *clearly* and *specifically* in the contract and cannot change without agreeing to a new contract. b) It is limited enough that reasonable use still exists - it is one thing to cap torrent downloads at 50KB/s or 100KB/s on a normal cable modem. It is entirely another thing to cap them at 9KB/s. The former means that I can still download an ISO in a reasonable amount of time, the latter makes the download essentially pointless. c) Rates limits are removed during off hours - honest, 99% of the time when I am downloading something on a torrent, I am perfectly fine with them *requesting* that I limit myself to off hours, because I don't care if I leave it overnight. However, there are many times when I do need something uploaded during the day, and having a capped internet at 9KB/s is essentially the same as having no internet at all.
It would be nice if ISP's would try to work with their big P2P users instead of hating on them. If the people using all of your bandwidth are only a small percentage of your total user base, there's probably few enough of them that you can send them an email asking them to please do most downloading at night. I know a lot of old ISP's back in the modem days did stuff like that all the time.
I spent the last month on a shaped and capped service (it was run over a wireless link through a small ISP's single T1 line) and thought that they were actually completely reasonable about it. You had your basic service at full speed up to a certain transfer limit, then you dropped down to a speed that while *significantly* slower, was still plenty fast for VoIP, general browsing, and youtube. More importantly, it was spelled out completely in the contract and advertising, so you knew what you got.
Most of the consumer outrage about this is the level of bait and switch the ISP's keep trying to pull, which is bullshit.
Maybe they've improved them a bit. Honestly with a proper desk arrangement I haven't had the cord get in the way of my work in years. Last time I used one if you hadn't touched it in five minute you had to wiggle it around a bit to get it to wake up first, and it wasn't a cheap model.
I do love a nice wireless trackball for my home entertainment system, though. And I can definitely see the point of the little micro wireless mice for notebooks, as cords are much more of a problem when you're picking up and moving the computer around all the time.
I never want to have to worry about replacing batteries, recharging, or waiting for the mouse to make up from sleep on anything as core to my workflow as a mouse.
Personally I think that any good gaming mouse works well for coding. You've got your extra buttons (which mostly just give you an extra forward/back in your browser) and good accuracy. I'm a fan of my Razer Diamondback, although by this point the grippy paint they put on it is coming off so it looks a bit shabby.
I would say with 100 certainty that your keyboard is ten times more important than your mouse for programming. The mouse just has to not get in your way.
I think the answer has something to do with the extra weight of the hybrid system.
I'm all for the idea though. I just wish they'd do something more useful with all this wonderful tech than making poor driving, pretentious, over-priced sedans and "eco-friendly" bullshit SUV's.
Yes, I'm completely sure that all of the scientists doing this research would much rather be called baby-killers just to spite a bunch of conservatives than go with the easier and more effective route of not using embryonic stem cells.
Oh wait, except for that doesn't make any sense at all. Other methods of harvesting stem cells have been researched and developed because of these bans at great cost and effort. That doesn't mean they are easier, or even as effective. It also means that doctors were busy just developing those techniques instead of actually finding new ways to use stem cells to treat actual illnesses affecting people who are actually, as opposed to just theoretically, alive.
Believe me, if doctors could be doing this research as effectively without causing all this controversy and testing of their own morals, they'd be doing it in a heartbeat.
The embryos they are working on will never live. They will never grow into a person. They have already been kept for other purposes and if not used for stem cell research will be destroyed. To me this has the same level of moral complication as organ transplants - yes, there could be nightmarish scenarios where people are grown to be harvested, but we have laws and morals preventing that, and they work pretty well.
I used to think hybrids were pretty neat tech. Now I pretty much despise them.
Notice that no one in Europe is so excited about them. Why? because they've had cars that get 40-50 mpg for years. They're call small diesels. And somehow they've made them actually fun to drive in the process as well.
Until I can get a hybrid that handles well and still does 0-60 in less than 7 seconds while also getting well over 40 mpg, I'm not interested. I still get 34 mpg out of my Toyota Celica and its actually fun to drive.
Exactly. It is common courtesy for someone who is slowing up traffic for *any* reason - be it a bike, a tractor, a broken car, hell, a freaking lawn mower (yes, I've seen quite a few of those around here) to pull over to the shoulder to make it easier for blocked up traffic behind them to pass. That was one of the first things I was taught when I was learning to ride a bike on country roads. And honestly, most bikers I see out in the country (apparently I live on a common bike road) follow those rules pretty well.
No one says you need to sit on the shoulder all the time, just pull over to around the white line when you get to a place that is good for people to pass you and let them pass.
Like I said, most of the riders I see in the country do a pretty good job of this. I think it's because they're doing it for entertainment as opposed to transportation. Nearly every biker I have seen in the city is a rolling disaster waiting to happen. They ignore traffic lights, ride in and out of stopped traffic, don't signal, switch lanes at random... I'm spending the entire time I'm driving next to them *terrified* that they're going to suddenly pop out of my blind spot and get themselves killed. I think I have seen all of two bikers in an urban setting who were actually riding legally and courteously.
So.. to all the bikers who are bitching about cars not sharing the road - convince your friends who bike to not be asses as well. I understand where the cyclist frustration comes from - I have a friend who has been hit *twice* while road biking. But there are a lot of motorists who aren't trying to be jerks, but just feel like most of the cyclists aren't making it easy on them either.
Also, drop the "save the planet" bullshit. I drive a car because I enjoy living in the country and driving my damn car, not because I'm fat, lazy, or hate the planet. You'll win a few more battles that.
And people need to realize that 30m isn't really all that exciting aside from it being available for the whole world. There are already free datasets for specific countries that are higher resolution than that, and pay datasets that are significantly higher.
The problem you tend to run into with this sort of data is how big of a mess trees and/or buildings can make of it. Usually it's pretty accurate vertically, but if you're sampling horizontally at 30 and that one data point happens to hit the top of a tree, you can end up with some odd effects when you try to start rendering terrain from it and mapping your satellite imagery to it.
Yeah, my favorite classes were the ones where they *intentionally* gave you an assignment that was nearly impossible to fully complete in the time allotted, and made you do the best you could with it. Open-ended competitions work well for that. We had one competition where only two or three entrants out of over fifty got close to a perfect score. The whole project as about solving problems with less budget than you needed, less weight than you want, and way less time than you need to be able to do it perfectly every time.
I actually had several courses exactly like that. I had a ton that were a waste of time, but several of my engineering courses and software engineering courses were very much about balancing time and costs (in terms of equipment available and man hours) versus requirements. I got even more of that in club projects like FIRST robotics.
Ohio State University CSE class of 2006, in case you were interested.
In a very real sense, every one of our ancestors from the first bacterial life to the first proto-fish to crawl out of the sea to our tree-swinging simian forebears has struggled and fought and killed so that they and their species will survive. Who are we to suddenly decide "oh, well, guess it doesn't matter any more, might as well we all die."
I think the core problem there is the government dictating what units you have to sell your beer in. Is it so damn hard to have a conversion table on a sign in the bar?
If you don't mind the liberal guilt over contributing to modern sprawl, Columbus isn't bad. The industries available are somewhat limited though (a few interesting startups, but a *lot* of medical and insurance as well.
But Columbus works fairly well because some of the tech centers have arisen in the upper class suburbs in addition to the old downtown. That means that if you pick one of the major freeways out and drive 5-10 minutes, you're far enough into the middle of nowhere to have cows for neighbors. Unfortunately it means you're also a fair drive from any of the traditionally interesting things to do in town, but it's working fairly well for me in general.
But I get the impression you can find that sort of situation in most mid-major cities (Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh) in the "flyover" states.
Another option you might consider is military contracting. There's a fair amount of IT work that goes into keeping the different military bases and training centers running, and most of those are (for obvious reasons) out in the middle of nowhere. Huntsville, AL, Fairborn, OH, those sorts of places. Might not be as much dev work on site but there is plenty of IT stuff.
Dude, have you ever actually *had* sex with a condom?
There is no way I would ever, ever prefer that. The only reason I'm stuck with it is that birth control turns my wife into a crazy person.
They make the room smell like latex instead of sex. They significantly reduce direct feeling - sure, you still get the nice feeling of being squeezed, but there's no specific tactile feedback of touching someone's skin. They make her *taste* like latex if you want to continue the encounter after you've orgasmed. They mean instead of looking longingly into her eyes and entering her, you have to say "ok, excuse me," and go rummage in a drawer, open a wrapper, and apply it to yourself. *or* you have to put one next to everywhere you might ever want to ever sex ahead of time, so it's readily available.
Oh, and just to add insult to injury, they're sized, and if you aren't the "standard" size, you may have to go to five different stores to find the one remaining pack of "Trojan Magnum XL" in stock (Yes, this has actually happened to me. You try wandering around at 6 am on an Ohio winter morning because you're out of condoms but your girlfriend is horny). I've heard of people studying abroad who had to have their mothers MAIL THEM CONDOMS because they couldn't find any of the local variety that would fit.
Is there anything I'm missing? I can't think of a single possible reason that using a condom is physically preferable to unprotected sex. I mean, sex is still good with on, and it's better than no sex, and it's definitely better than dying or paying child support, but I just can't imagine anyone *wanting* to wear a condom.
Just to be informative, the average curb weight of US cars is 3,239 lbs, or 1,469 kilograms. So not quite two short tons (although you might make it with four average mid-westerners and their groceries on board), and definitely nowhere near two metric tons.
Some of the problem is that developers like shiny things.
Which is more motivating - the idea of spending a ton of development time to produce something that pushes the boundaries of what an XBox 360 game can be, or putting that same amount of effort into a Wii game that will look decent on the Wii, but be far behind what you could be doing on a PS3.
Combine this with market numbers I'm sure are saying that much of the Wii's market share are people who think that Wii sports looks amazing, and there is low motivation for producing games that stretch the limits of what the console can do.
Slower consoles *can* be made to run beautiful games - look at GTA:: San Andreas, God of War II, or Shadow of the Colossus on PS2, or some of the first-party titles on the Wii. But there has to be a very strong motivation to do so (it's the fastest thing out, it's your company's flagship console so you have to develop for it) when you have the option as a studio of developing for something that lets you do more for the same amount of effort, especially when you're making a cross platform game. The steps you would take and engine tradeoffs you would make to try to make a truly modern Wii game would be very different than those would do for a 360 game, and would practically make it a completely different game.
Although the real problem is that even Bill Gates would have a hard time funding enough private jet fighters (and the research and development to produce them) to stave off a foreign invasion.
You learned about about dark matter, optical discs, mobile telephony, eye surgeries in your high school and elementary *textbooks*? Really? All I ever got were mitosis, the periodic table, and kinematics.
Neat tech advances are already taught as side projects - as "go learn for yourself and write a report" or "here's an interesting article" sort of things. All the examples you mention are not in most textbooks, and if they are, they are one small subheading next to a chart.
I'm not saying kids don't need to know these things - I'm saying they aren't part of the core education that a textbook provides. Having them do a book report one of Stephen Hawking's books will do a much better job of teaching about Dark Matter than buying everyone in the classroom a new textbook that *might* mention it for a paragraph.
You act as though the students are teaching themselves out of the textbook. Textbooks are to supplement a teacher, not to replace one. They exist so that a teacher can say "go read this chapter" and expect the student to come to class with a good grasp of the basics.
Who 'discovered America has not changed, only our current spin on it. I'm sure any competent teacher is perfectly able to tell students about the different trips to America, or to skip the whole "discovered" bit entirely. The details like that are not the important part of the story - the following explorers and their impact on American culture (both native and current) are the important part of the story.
As for math, I know that I am perfectly capable of doing long division. My mother works as a teacher, and she has seen very little actual benefit to the newer methods of teaching maths. They have generally been adopted for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
I would say that nothing in literature should displace a classic work until at least 20-30 years after its publication - few works are probably judged without the perspective of history.
Whether or not pluto is a planet was a political decision and a random fact, not science - it's an arbitrary distinction. And when did you learn about computers in a science class? High school science is about basic biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and the scientific method. These fields have not changed at the introductory level. I'm not saying the schools shouldn't buy a new computer and lab instructions to use it, I'm saying they don't need a new textbook for everyone to run that lab.
I see it that any minor changes such as you mention are better addressed by the teacher than updated materials. Who cares if the kids read that Columbus discovered America if the teacher clarifies that this was a Euro-centric view held at one point.
As for books not lasting very long... you must have gone to very different schools. I remember less than one book a year being damaged in my classes, from elementary school on up. We were still using fifteen year old books in some cases that were still in good shape - I remember the teacher admonishing us to be careful with them, because they were out of print and she liked them better than the newer literature books she'd seen.
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Personally I am fine with some basic traffic shaping, as long as:
a) It is spelled out *clearly* and *specifically* in the contract and cannot change without agreeing to a new contract.
b) It is limited enough that reasonable use still exists - it is one thing to cap torrent downloads at 50KB/s or 100KB/s on a normal cable modem. It is entirely another thing to cap them at 9KB/s. The former means that I can still download an ISO in a reasonable amount of time, the latter makes the download essentially pointless.
c) Rates limits are removed during off hours - honest, 99% of the time when I am downloading something on a torrent, I am perfectly fine with them *requesting* that I limit myself to off hours, because I don't care if I leave it overnight. However, there are many times when I do need something uploaded during the day, and having a capped internet at 9KB/s is essentially the same as having no internet at all.
It would be nice if ISP's would try to work with their big P2P users instead of hating on them. If the people using all of your bandwidth are only a small percentage of your total user base, there's probably few enough of them that you can send them an email asking them to please do most downloading at night. I know a lot of old ISP's back in the modem days did stuff like that all the time.
I spent the last month on a shaped and capped service (it was run over a wireless link through a small ISP's single T1 line) and thought that they were actually completely reasonable about it. You had your basic service at full speed up to a certain transfer limit, then you dropped down to a speed that while *significantly* slower, was still plenty fast for VoIP, general browsing, and youtube. More importantly, it was spelled out completely in the contract and advertising, so you knew what you got.
Most of the consumer outrage about this is the level of bait and switch the ISP's keep trying to pull, which is bullshit.
Maybe they've improved them a bit. Honestly with a proper desk arrangement I haven't had the cord get in the way of my work in years. Last time I used one if you hadn't touched it in five minute you had to wiggle it around a bit to get it to wake up first, and it wasn't a cheap model.
I do love a nice wireless trackball for my home entertainment system, though. And I can definitely see the point of the little micro wireless mice for notebooks, as cords are much more of a problem when you're picking up and moving the computer around all the time.
I never want to have to worry about replacing batteries, recharging, or waiting for the mouse to make up from sleep on anything as core to my workflow as a mouse.
Personally I think that any good gaming mouse works well for coding. You've got your extra buttons (which mostly just give you an extra forward/back in your browser) and good accuracy. I'm a fan of my Razer Diamondback, although by this point the grippy paint they put on it is coming off so it looks a bit shabby.
I would say with 100 certainty that your keyboard is ten times more important than your mouse for programming. The mouse just has to not get in your way.
I think the answer has something to do with the extra weight of the hybrid system.
I'm all for the idea though. I just wish they'd do something more useful with all this wonderful tech than making poor driving, pretentious, over-priced sedans and "eco-friendly" bullshit SUV's.
Yes, I'm completely sure that all of the scientists doing this research would much rather be called baby-killers just to spite a bunch of conservatives than go with the easier and more effective route of not using embryonic stem cells.
Oh wait, except for that doesn't make any sense at all. Other methods of harvesting stem cells have been researched and developed because of these bans at great cost and effort. That doesn't mean they are easier, or even as effective. It also means that doctors were busy just developing those techniques instead of actually finding new ways to use stem cells to treat actual illnesses affecting people who are actually, as opposed to just theoretically, alive.
Believe me, if doctors could be doing this research as effectively without causing all this controversy and testing of their own morals, they'd be doing it in a heartbeat.
The embryos they are working on will never live. They will never grow into a person. They have already been kept for other purposes and if not used for stem cell research will be destroyed. To me this has the same level of moral complication as organ transplants - yes, there could be nightmarish scenarios where people are grown to be harvested, but we have laws and morals preventing that, and they work pretty well.
I used to think hybrids were pretty neat tech. Now I pretty much despise them.
Notice that no one in Europe is so excited about them. Why? because they've had cars that get 40-50 mpg for years. They're call small diesels. And somehow they've made them actually fun to drive in the process as well.
Until I can get a hybrid that handles well and still does 0-60 in less than 7 seconds while also getting well over 40 mpg, I'm not interested. I still get 34 mpg out of my Toyota Celica and its actually fun to drive.
But grandma will say "why do my blu-ray movies look all jumpy on my system when they run fine on yours?"
Well, grandma might not, but quite a few people with enough tech level to want to watch movies but not enough to compile something will.
Exactly. It is common courtesy for someone who is slowing up traffic for *any* reason - be it a bike, a tractor, a broken car, hell, a freaking lawn mower (yes, I've seen quite a few of those around here) to pull over to the shoulder to make it easier for blocked up traffic behind them to pass. That was one of the first things I was taught when I was learning to ride a bike on country roads. And honestly, most bikers I see out in the country (apparently I live on a common bike road) follow those rules pretty well.
No one says you need to sit on the shoulder all the time, just pull over to around the white line when you get to a place that is good for people to pass you and let them pass.
Like I said, most of the riders I see in the country do a pretty good job of this. I think it's because they're doing it for entertainment as opposed to transportation. Nearly every biker I have seen in the city is a rolling disaster waiting to happen. They ignore traffic lights, ride in and out of stopped traffic, don't signal, switch lanes at random... I'm spending the entire time I'm driving next to them *terrified* that they're going to suddenly pop out of my blind spot and get themselves killed. I think I have seen all of two bikers in an urban setting who were actually riding legally and courteously.
So.. to all the bikers who are bitching about cars not sharing the road - convince your friends who bike to not be asses as well. I understand where the cyclist frustration comes from - I have a friend who has been hit *twice* while road biking. But there are a lot of motorists who aren't trying to be jerks, but just feel like most of the cyclists aren't making it easy on them either.
Also, drop the "save the planet" bullshit. I drive a car because I enjoy living in the country and driving my damn car, not because I'm fat, lazy, or hate the planet. You'll win a few more battles that.
And people need to realize that 30m isn't really all that exciting aside from it being available for the whole world. There are already free datasets for specific countries that are higher resolution than that, and pay datasets that are significantly higher.
The problem you tend to run into with this sort of data is how big of a mess trees and/or buildings can make of it. Usually it's pretty accurate vertically, but if you're sampling horizontally at 30 and that one data point happens to hit the top of a tree, you can end up with some odd effects when you try to start rendering terrain from it and mapping your satellite imagery to it.
Yeah, my favorite classes were the ones where they *intentionally* gave you an assignment that was nearly impossible to fully complete in the time allotted, and made you do the best you could with it. Open-ended competitions work well for that. We had one competition where only two or three entrants out of over fifty got close to a perfect score. The whole project as about solving problems with less budget than you needed, less weight than you want, and way less time than you need to be able to do it perfectly every time.
I actually had several courses exactly like that. I had a ton that were a waste of time, but several of my engineering courses and software engineering courses were very much about balancing time and costs (in terms of equipment available and man hours) versus requirements. I got even more of that in club projects like FIRST robotics.
Ohio State University CSE class of 2006, in case you were interested.
Except for do have easy to measure heuristics that are significantly more reasonable.
Even taking BMI and correcting it for waist size goes a long way into taking muscle mass into account.
You disgrace your ancestors.
In a very real sense, every one of our ancestors from the first bacterial life to the first proto-fish to crawl out of the sea to our tree-swinging simian forebears has struggled and fought and killed so that they and their species will survive. Who are we to suddenly decide "oh, well, guess it doesn't matter any more, might as well we all die."
I'm not even sure if I'm joking...
Exactly. Imagine the reception about how amazing of a victory "Pearl Harbor" was for Japan and you'll get a bit of the idea.
Is there any reason there should be ANY old parts used in the new shuttles?
Umm, because it's *really* expensive to design and entirely near launch system and support infrastructure for it?
I think the core problem there is the government dictating what units you have to sell your beer in. Is it so damn hard to have a conversion table on a sign in the bar?
If you don't mind the liberal guilt over contributing to modern sprawl, Columbus isn't bad. The industries available are somewhat limited though (a few interesting startups, but a *lot* of medical and insurance as well.
But Columbus works fairly well because some of the tech centers have arisen in the upper class suburbs in addition to the old downtown. That means that if you pick one of the major freeways out and drive 5-10 minutes, you're far enough into the middle of nowhere to have cows for neighbors. Unfortunately it means you're also a fair drive from any of the traditionally interesting things to do in town, but it's working fairly well for me in general.
But I get the impression you can find that sort of situation in most mid-major cities (Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh) in the "flyover" states.
Another option you might consider is military contracting. There's a fair amount of IT work that goes into keeping the different military bases and training centers running, and most of those are (for obvious reasons) out in the middle of nowhere. Huntsville, AL, Fairborn, OH, those sorts of places. Might not be as much dev work on site but there is plenty of IT stuff.
Dude, have you ever actually *had* sex with a condom?
There is no way I would ever, ever prefer that. The only reason I'm stuck with it is that birth control turns my wife into a crazy person.
They make the room smell like latex instead of sex. They significantly reduce direct feeling - sure, you still get the nice feeling of being squeezed, but there's no specific tactile feedback of touching someone's skin. They make her *taste* like latex if you want to continue the encounter after you've orgasmed. They mean instead of looking longingly into her eyes and entering her, you have to say "ok, excuse me," and go rummage in a drawer, open a wrapper, and apply it to yourself. *or* you have to put one next to everywhere you might ever want to ever sex ahead of time, so it's readily available.
Oh, and just to add insult to injury, they're sized, and if you aren't the "standard" size, you may have to go to five different stores to find the one remaining pack of "Trojan Magnum XL" in stock (Yes, this has actually happened to me. You try wandering around at 6 am on an Ohio winter morning because you're out of condoms but your girlfriend is horny). I've heard of people studying abroad who had to have their mothers MAIL THEM CONDOMS because they couldn't find any of the local variety that would fit.
Is there anything I'm missing? I can't think of a single possible reason that using a condom is physically preferable to unprotected sex. I mean, sex is still good with on, and it's better than no sex, and it's definitely better than dying or paying child support, but I just can't imagine anyone *wanting* to wear a condom.
Armed? You must be kidding, Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country!
See I was going to blame that on outsourcing some of the code when obviously we should have handled it all ourselves :)
It honestly is a shame it would cost so damn much to switch the US to metric.
Just to be informative, the average curb weight of US cars is 3,239 lbs, or 1,469 kilograms. So not quite two short tons (although you might make it with four average mid-westerners and their groceries on board), and definitely nowhere near two metric tons.
Some of the problem is that developers like shiny things.
Which is more motivating - the idea of spending a ton of development time to produce something that pushes the boundaries of what an XBox 360 game can be, or putting that same amount of effort into a Wii game that will look decent on the Wii, but be far behind what you could be doing on a PS3.
Combine this with market numbers I'm sure are saying that much of the Wii's market share are people who think that Wii sports looks amazing, and there is low motivation for producing games that stretch the limits of what the console can do.
Slower consoles *can* be made to run beautiful games - look at GTA:: San Andreas, God of War II, or Shadow of the Colossus on PS2, or some of the first-party titles on the Wii. But there has to be a very strong motivation to do so (it's the fastest thing out, it's your company's flagship console so you have to develop for it) when you have the option as a studio of developing for something that lets you do more for the same amount of effort, especially when you're making a cross platform game. The steps you would take and engine tradeoffs you would make to try to make a truly modern Wii game would be very different than those would do for a 360 game, and would practically make it a completely different game.
When the other guy has a gun, generally yes.
Although the real problem is that even Bill Gates would have a hard time funding enough private jet fighters (and the research and development to produce them) to stave off a foreign invasion.
You learned about about dark matter, optical discs, mobile telephony, eye surgeries in your high school and elementary *textbooks*? Really? All I ever got were mitosis, the periodic table, and kinematics.
Neat tech advances are already taught as side projects - as "go learn for yourself and write a report" or "here's an interesting article" sort of things. All the examples you mention are not in most textbooks, and if they are, they are one small subheading next to a chart.
I'm not saying kids don't need to know these things - I'm saying they aren't part of the core education that a textbook provides. Having them do a book report one of Stephen Hawking's books will do a much better job of teaching about Dark Matter than buying everyone in the classroom a new textbook that *might* mention it for a paragraph.
You act as though the students are teaching themselves out of the textbook. Textbooks are to supplement a teacher, not to replace one. They exist so that a teacher can say "go read this chapter" and expect the student to come to class with a good grasp of the basics.
Who 'discovered America has not changed, only our current spin on it. I'm sure any competent teacher is perfectly able to tell students about the different trips to America, or to skip the whole "discovered" bit entirely. The details like that are not the important part of the story - the following explorers and their impact on American culture (both native and current) are the important part of the story.
As for math, I know that I am perfectly capable of doing long division. My mother works as a teacher, and she has seen very little actual benefit to the newer methods of teaching maths. They have generally been adopted for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
I would say that nothing in literature should displace a classic work until at least 20-30 years after its publication - few works are probably judged without the perspective of history.
Whether or not pluto is a planet was a political decision and a random fact, not science - it's an arbitrary distinction. And when did you learn about computers in a science class? High school science is about basic biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and the scientific method. These fields have not changed at the introductory level. I'm not saying the schools shouldn't buy a new computer and lab instructions to use it, I'm saying they don't need a new textbook for everyone to run that lab.
I see it that any minor changes such as you mention are better addressed by the teacher than updated materials. Who cares if the kids read that Columbus discovered America if the teacher clarifies that this was a Euro-centric view held at one point.
As for books not lasting very long... you must have gone to very different schools. I remember less than one book a year being damaged in my classes, from elementary school on up. We were still using fifteen year old books in some cases that were still in good shape - I remember the teacher admonishing us to be careful with them, because they were out of print and she liked them better than the newer literature books she'd seen.