One small note: age discrimination is only illegal in the US when you are descriminating against people for being too old. You are allowed to disciminate against. Untill you are 40, you are not protected by those laws at all. A simple reference on this would be the first sentance of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's page on this subject:
http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/age.html
I am in no way aruing that this is right, mearly that it is law.
It did not download and execute, it downloaded and opend the installer. Your wife would have had to go clicking through a an installer, and provided her admin credentials, in order to have installed/run something.
While this is bad behavior, and will probably finally convince Apple that.pkg should not be on the list of auto-launched items, this is also not the "sky is falling" situation that your post makes it out to be.
Actually, thus far every design type of theoretical fusion plant would necessarily create radioactive waste, although not as much of it as fission plants. The reason is the same one that the waste-water in the original article is a problem: nuclear reactions work by massive cascades of nutrons randomly hitting atoms in the core. When those nutrons hit the nucleus of an atom (in a way that causes them to be absorbed in the right way), then you get your nuclear reaction, and that in turn produces more neutrons as ersatz-billiard-balls to continue your reaction, plus energy (in the form of heat) that you harvest off (usually with water) to convert into your power-transmission method of choice (usually electricity).
The problem in all of this is that you can't just limit it to your fuel and your energy harvester (water), you wind up with lots of other elements in the reaction chamber that also get bombarded with neutrons. And some percentage of those elements are going to wind up transmuting into radioactive waste.
In the case of a fusion reactor that is probably going to be whatever serves as the reaction chamber wall. Remember, neutrons are magnetically/electrically neutral particles, so you can't contain them using magnets, so you just have to let your reactor wall take the hits, and slowly degrade into radioactive waste. No one has a solution to this problem, and it is unlikely that one exists.
So, there really is no pedantic to call out here. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, the only question is how much (vs. the extracted energy), and how bad the byproducts will be.
Most science labs have people whose job it is to take care of the study animals, and only go and check their animals out when they have actual procedures/oservations to make. For the rest of the time the only people who are near the study animals are the caretakers.
I should note that this is not just about keeping PHDs doing PDH-level work, but is also because of the enormous burdon of all of the regulations around the care of research animals. The specialists who do the care and feeding get a lot of training (and regulatory oversight) in order to keep within the rules. I wrote a database solution once to help the group that oversaw the regulatory inspections at a research university. Just the people who did the inspections was a small department, and they really did need a database to keep track of all of the facilities that they were inspecting.
As a side note: I met a person at another research university whose sole job was to kill research mice correctly. Most of the scientits that I know killed their own mice, but at this large facility there was enough thoroput that they needed a full-time position just for that.
It seems you are nearly a week out-of-date. On the 22nd Apple released iOS for iPad. Among its banner features are printing and multitasking. While your point about Apple benifiting from moving its customers around in its product line is probably correct, it does help to have your facts straight.
While not a Republican myself, I do think you have their argument wrong. When I debate with my Republican friends their argument is not centered around "no-one is having a problem" so much as "the people who are having problems deserve it". Mostly the arguments come down to "those people are lazy".
There is some truth in it, however it mises out completly on understanding the system around it. To whit: the differnece between the people having the problems and the people doing realy well is rarely ability or drive. Much more often the difference is initial situations.
As a case-in-point: the housing cricis. Much of the problem was caused by the enormous amounts of debit that were allowed to pile into the housing market. A lot of money appeared from nowhere and needed to find an outlet in order to earn the banks money on it. In the rush to get that money out-the-door loans were made to all sorts of people who had no real ability to ever pay it back... and those people had no background in finance (and tragically little in even simpler math) to understand why this was so.
In this case the (very simplified) Republican mindset would blame the individuals as having taken out a loan that they could not repay. The (very simplified) Democratic view would blame the banks more for making loand they had the experence to know would never work out. Both sides have some of reality on their sides, but in this particular case I think that the banks are more to blame. They used a loophole in the law (that they had made sure was in place) to make short-term profits that they should have known would wreck the system. Depending on someone else (the government... and thus the people) would pick up the tab in the end.
Timothy McVey and Terry Nicols (Oklahoma City bombing) were not Arab, and killed 168 Americans with a bomb. They were clearly terrorists (fit all the definitions). So your implicit assumption that terrorists are going to be young Arab men fails there.
In Russia many of the most recent suicide bombings have been women, mostly mothers who had lost children and/or husbands in the conflicts there. How many such mothers do you think have lost their children and/or husbands in Afganistan and Iraq to American guns or bombs? So you advocate skipping them?
You have let prejudice blind you to the actual threats. While I don't think that the security theater that we are paying a lot of tax money for is making us any safer... your propsal is just ignorant of even simple experince.
"As for ZFS, it's not the tech that's keeping it from Linux but the restrictive licensing."
Just to be clear: between CDDL (ZFS) and GPL (BTRFS), GPL is clearly the more restrictive license. BTRFS can probably never be shipped with any other major OS other than linux (at least not in kernel mode), while ZFS has already shipped with a few.
The license restriction is one of linuxes making, not ZFS's. There are arguments for that restricion, but calling the problem one of CDDL being restrictive is a completly distorted view.
Apple does not offer MacBooks with i5s or i7s, those are MacBook Pros. And the reason they don't offer the i3 on the MacBook is that the i3 processor will only work with Intel shared graphics and Apple has decided that the very slight increase in processor power between the Core 2 Duo they have in the MacBook is not worth the very large performance and battery life hit it would take for using the Intel integrated graphics rather than the integrated solution that they worked out with NVIDIA.
In case you have not heard, Intel has been in court for some time now trying to prevent NVIDIA from providing chipsets that can work with the i3/i5/i7 processors, saying that the previous agreement (hammered out by the courts) that allowed it to work with previous Intel processors does not apply since the i3/i5/i7 processors use a new pinout.
And in case you are going to try to say you don't need the graphics acceleration, there is enough in the MacOS X GUI that can be accelerated using the GPU that unless you turn off the display there is a solid overall perfomance win in the better graphics chip.
So despite your denigrating UVa students as not knowing their tech, it seems that you are the one that is a bit behind on your knowledge of the reality of the situation. By sticking with the Core 2 Duo on their low end (where a discrete video card is not within the pricing/heat envelope) Apple is providing a better overall value to their customers than if they went with an i3.
Your attitude does not stand up to even moderate scrutiny, and seems to be based on the assumption that a large percentage of the Federal budget goes to stuff that benefits only a small portion of the US. I would invite you to go look at the "Death and Taxes 2011" poster:
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
Looking at the poster you can't help but realize that the vast majority of the expenditures (either discretionary like most of the poster, or the including the non-discretionary as in the small inset) are not things that could be paid for out of use-fees (as you seem to be advocating). After all, how do you decide how much of the military you are using? Or how do you decide how much of a safety net you need? Both of these things are things that a society (so a collective of people) need to work at together, and the government is exactly the body that we have erected to do things like this for us.
Politicians love to point at government waste and blame their opponents for it, but in reality that accounts for a trivial amount of the budget.
Short of radically cutting back on social services (and thus bringing back the worst of our capitalistic days where Civil War widows were living on the streets in great numbers), this is just not going to happen.
Since the iPad/AT&T users actually gave their email addresses directly to AT&T through the sign-up web form, your analogy is a bit off. A better one is of a restaraunt that contracts with a specific vallet parking company. You give your keys to the valet company and they ding your car. The restaraunt is certainly in some way involved (having chosen the valet company), but at no time were they directly responcible.
Microsoft decided to only support UEFI 2.0, Apple has implemented EFI 1.x on their computers. So you need to use the "legacy" boot option on Apple hardware to support Windows. What this does is loads the BIOS-compatibility module in EFI to give Windows an environment that it is familiar with.
FOG is nice, but it does not have all of the features of Ghost Solution Suite (the enterprise product under the Symantec brand, not the consumer one under the Norton name). I really wanted to use it, but it was missing two major features that I could not live without:
1) It will only run under PXE boot, so it requires that you have control over DHCP wherever you are. With GSS I can use a "virtual partition" to boot from, so it will download the boot system from the server, then boot without ever requiring me to get special information from a DHCP server. Since my clients need to be able to roam to many network segments (that I have no control over, and may have their own network boot servers), including home networks, I can't use FOG.
I should note that this is one thing I hope will change under UEFI. Apple's implementation (while being a bit off the standard) is a great example of the flexibility that having a more intelligent boot system can do.
2) The system tray item does not allow my clients to initiate a re-image when they want. For my purposes they have to be able to trigger a re-image of a computer in front of them in a easy-GUI way. We get a lot of people flowing through and while I may have my pain-points on the GSS version of the system tray icon, it is drop-dead simple to implement and only requires a "see, here is the tool you use" level of training.
So no, FOG is not better in all ways than Ghost (at least not GSS).
The mechanism you describe is only used when imaging a computer, not durring the netboot phase that is often used to deliver the new image. It is really nice if you can run broadcast ASR, but like most multicast has some real limiations when crossing subnets. It is also a bit of a bear to set all the variables so that you get good speed without taking down a network. But once you get the combination for your network it really works out well.
No, it wasn't. It was a large re-architecting of a lot of subsystems. This does not mean a lot for most users, thus they only announced a couple of user-visiable feautres. Not the same thing at all.
For developers Snow Leopard was a rather feature-rich update.
Ya, immagine that, they acted like it actually took work and thinking to completely go through a 15+ year-old architecture and make sure that every layer is 64-bit clean. And they actually though that some of their developer time should go to improving areas of their OS's that actually matter for 95%+ of their audiences first...
With the excepton of Intel's x86 instruction set hobbling their processors, and Windows only recognizing 3GiB of RAM (then subtract the address space for your video memory), or most Intel Macs only recogising 4 GiB (also subtracting video memory, but this is a hardware limitation), 64bit OSs have been a non-event for most consumers.
People are not going to revert, but we have just come to the point now that most computers ship with enough memory that 64bit addressing even makes any difference system-wide.
Yes there is hardware assist for H.264 on MacOS X, specifically (and unfortunately at this point only) on NVIDIA 9400M cards. This has been widely reported. Nicly the lower-end macs consitanlty have this, so the computers most in need have this acceleration avalible.
Hopefully this hardware assist will be widened out a bit later.
I thing that the Washington DC schools also have a major handicap that should be tossed into that discussion: they are one of the most hightly politisized school districts in the nation. The folks in Congress get a hand in many of the decisions made for that program, so they are constanly blown by the winds of politics.
Politics and the courts play a hugely negative roll in the performance of schools everywhere. My mother was a Special Ed. teacher in Wisconsin and the parrents in her program were constantly suing the school district or the state to get more special treatment for their children, who were already getting funding many times the average. My mother was fortunate to never have had to spend her time in court testifying in those cases, but only because she has a couple of administrators above her who took care of spending all that time in court for her. None of the mony spent there did anything to help a single child learn anything more.
Just imagine what it must be like in a city full of government lawyers and lobyists.
The problem with this argument is that Germany was not a child, and was not really any more "at fault" for World War 1 than anyone else. It started just like any of the other land-grab wars before it, but because of the interwoven politics (and a lot of personal ambitions by a lot of people), kept spiraling upward untill we got so much bigger than anything that had come before it.
And Germany was/is not some child, and the US was not some adult. They are, and were, full countries. Full of adults capable of feeling wounded pride. The only reason you can cast them in the role of a naughty child is because they lost the armed conflict. If they had won then the US/France/England led aliance would assume the role of the child. Neither idea holds any water, nor are they useful in preventing the same sort fo problem in the future (one of the most practical reasons to study history).
The de-industrialization of Germany was an atrocious idea, and was the biggest cause of World War 2. Without the horrendus finantial oppresion caused by it Hitler and the Brown-Shirts would never have had the fertile grounds to grow their movement in, and would never have been elected to power in Germany. Eventually there probably would have been a war, but that is only because human nature seems to push us to that eventually.
The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content
No, this would be "figuratively on the front-lines". Being "litterally on the front-lines" requires actual lines of battle on a phisical battlefield. Would it really kill the editors to do even some minor editing?
Student printing largely pays for itself through the printing fees charged to the students. I am sure the UWGB is advocating to their students to make the font change, but that is largely a secondary issue. What they are probably talking about here is printing done by faculty and staff, where the local IT department picks up the cost of ink/toner.
And I think your measurement of the cost for lasers is a couple of orders of magnitude off. It is still much cheaper than ink-jet, but not that much cheaper.
This is probably very close to the truth. The people in question are probably professors, and the way internal politics works in most Universities (I have worked for 3) the professors have most of the power. Since they all want a personal printer, they all get one, but they are the ones in charge of the budget and there is no way they are going to buy a laser printer when they could buy a cheaper inkjet (since "it is almost free"). Since the ink often comes out of a budget that is not theirs (at least not directly), they don't care about on-going costs (nor were they really going to think about them in the first place).
And the professors in question are often older (this affects both eyesight, and comfort with technology), and they are often getting email that needs to be marked up (notes on scientific papers, reviews of their post-doc's work, etc...), and you find that they get in the habit of printing out everything. There are some who are moving to a mostly-digital workflow, but the tools for this are still specialized or not well known in the community (they are just learning about how to use editing notes in Word).
In most Universities the local IT has no power to change any of these, and has to walk a lot of very fine lines politically (while being underpaid for even the normal job). Central IT often can put out edicts, since people there have the ear of the dean, but localized IT has both the responsibility to enforce these edicts, and none of the power to do so.
Tests are great for finding bug/problems you have already thought about. They are great for making sure that you don't make the same mistake again. However they don't reliably cover things you have not yet thought about. It is also really hard to write tests that cover complicated network interaction... and that is percicely what Bind must do.
I note that you have not commented on the merits of the idea that multitasking might not be a good thing, but rather resort to an Ad hominem attack (name-calling) on anyone who might disagree with you. Do we really need to resort to third-grade level arguments... and how in the world did this get moderated "insightful"?
Android does not actually run the other applications that are in the background. The only things allowed to run in the background are "services" that some of those apps rely on for things that need to continue. This gets confusing to users as in some apps (take Pandora as an example) the service is 90% of what you want the app doing, and the actual app is only a thin skin over the top.
If Apple does go the route of "background apps", then I hope they adopt a similar model, but are even more aggressive on resource-limiting the background services running. I saw all of the warts and problems of not doing this with my old PalmOS phone (not WebOS, but the one before). If I left my email application running the background it could well (and often did) crash the phone and I could not receive phone calls. And anything running the background and my battery life dropped to less than a working day.
I have an iPhone now, and appreciate that I never have these problems. It might be nice if my RSS reader could have things ready for me when I switch to it, but it is not that big a deal. And I am not silly enough to think that something like Pandora or an IM client that holds open a TCP/IP connection is not going to kill my battery life.
Slashdot Mirror
One small note: age discrimination is only illegal in the US when you are descriminating against people for being too old. You are allowed to disciminate against. Untill you are 40, you are not protected by those laws at all. A simple reference on this would be the first sentance of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's page on this subject:
http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/age.html
I am in no way aruing that this is right, mearly that it is law.
It did not download and execute, it downloaded and opend the installer. Your wife would have had to go clicking through a an installer, and provided her admin credentials, in order to have installed/run something.
While this is bad behavior, and will probably finally convince Apple that .pkg should not be on the list of auto-launched items, this is also not the "sky is falling" situation that your post makes it out to be.
Actually, thus far every design type of theoretical fusion plant would necessarily create radioactive waste, although not as much of it as fission plants. The reason is the same one that the waste-water in the original article is a problem: nuclear reactions work by massive cascades of nutrons randomly hitting atoms in the core. When those nutrons hit the nucleus of an atom (in a way that causes them to be absorbed in the right way), then you get your nuclear reaction, and that in turn produces more neutrons as ersatz-billiard-balls to continue your reaction, plus energy (in the form of heat) that you harvest off (usually with water) to convert into your power-transmission method of choice (usually electricity).
The problem in all of this is that you can't just limit it to your fuel and your energy harvester (water), you wind up with lots of other elements in the reaction chamber that also get bombarded with neutrons. And some percentage of those elements are going to wind up transmuting into radioactive waste.
In the case of a fusion reactor that is probably going to be whatever serves as the reaction chamber wall. Remember, neutrons are magnetically/electrically neutral particles, so you can't contain them using magnets, so you just have to let your reactor wall take the hits, and slowly degrade into radioactive waste. No one has a solution to this problem, and it is unlikely that one exists.
So, there really is no pedantic to call out here. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, the only question is how much (vs. the extracted energy), and how bad the byproducts will be.
Most science labs have people whose job it is to take care of the study animals, and only go and check their animals out when they have actual procedures/oservations to make. For the rest of the time the only people who are near the study animals are the caretakers.
I should note that this is not just about keeping PHDs doing PDH-level work, but is also because of the enormous burdon of all of the regulations around the care of research animals. The specialists who do the care and feeding get a lot of training (and regulatory oversight) in order to keep within the rules. I wrote a database solution once to help the group that oversaw the regulatory inspections at a research university. Just the people who did the inspections was a small department, and they really did need a database to keep track of all of the facilities that they were inspecting.
As a side note: I met a person at another research university whose sole job was to kill research mice correctly. Most of the scientits that I know killed their own mice, but at this large facility there was enough thoroput that they needed a full-time position just for that.
It seems you are nearly a week out-of-date. On the 22nd Apple released iOS for iPad. Among its banner features are printing and multitasking. While your point about Apple benifiting from moving its customers around in its product line is probably correct, it does help to have your facts straight.
While not a Republican myself, I do think you have their argument wrong. When I debate with my Republican friends their argument is not centered around "no-one is having a problem" so much as "the people who are having problems deserve it". Mostly the arguments come down to "those people are lazy".
There is some truth in it, however it mises out completly on understanding the system around it. To whit: the differnece between the people having the problems and the people doing realy well is rarely ability or drive. Much more often the difference is initial situations.
As a case-in-point: the housing cricis. Much of the problem was caused by the enormous amounts of debit that were allowed to pile into the housing market. A lot of money appeared from nowhere and needed to find an outlet in order to earn the banks money on it. In the rush to get that money out-the-door loans were made to all sorts of people who had no real ability to ever pay it back... and those people had no background in finance (and tragically little in even simpler math) to understand why this was so.
In this case the (very simplified) Republican mindset would blame the individuals as having taken out a loan that they could not repay. The (very simplified) Democratic view would blame the banks more for making loand they had the experence to know would never work out. Both sides have some of reality on their sides, but in this particular case I think that the banks are more to blame. They used a loophole in the law (that they had made sure was in place) to make short-term profits that they should have known would wreck the system. Depending on someone else (the government... and thus the people) would pick up the tab in the end.
Timothy McVey and Terry Nicols (Oklahoma City bombing) were not Arab, and killed 168 Americans with a bomb. They were clearly terrorists (fit all the definitions). So your implicit assumption that terrorists are going to be young Arab men fails there.
In Russia many of the most recent suicide bombings have been women, mostly mothers who had lost children and/or husbands in the conflicts there. How many such mothers do you think have lost their children and/or husbands in Afganistan and Iraq to American guns or bombs? So you advocate skipping them?
You have let prejudice blind you to the actual threats. While I don't think that the security theater that we are paying a lot of tax money for is making us any safer... your propsal is just ignorant of even simple experince.
"As for ZFS, it's not the tech that's keeping it from Linux but the restrictive licensing."
Just to be clear: between CDDL (ZFS) and GPL (BTRFS), GPL is clearly the more restrictive license. BTRFS can probably never be shipped with any other major OS other than linux (at least not in kernel mode), while ZFS has already shipped with a few.
The license restriction is one of linuxes making, not ZFS's. There are arguments for that restricion, but calling the problem one of CDDL being restrictive is a completly distorted view.
Apple does not offer MacBooks with i5s or i7s, those are MacBook Pros. And the reason they don't offer the i3 on the MacBook is that the i3 processor will only work with Intel shared graphics and Apple has decided that the very slight increase in processor power between the Core 2 Duo they have in the MacBook is not worth the very large performance and battery life hit it would take for using the Intel integrated graphics rather than the integrated solution that they worked out with NVIDIA.
In case you have not heard, Intel has been in court for some time now trying to prevent NVIDIA from providing chipsets that can work with the i3/i5/i7 processors, saying that the previous agreement (hammered out by the courts) that allowed it to work with previous Intel processors does not apply since the i3/i5/i7 processors use a new pinout.
And in case you are going to try to say you don't need the graphics acceleration, there is enough in the MacOS X GUI that can be accelerated using the GPU that unless you turn off the display there is a solid overall perfomance win in the better graphics chip.
So despite your denigrating UVa students as not knowing their tech, it seems that you are the one that is a bit behind on your knowledge of the reality of the situation. By sticking with the Core 2 Duo on their low end (where a discrete video card is not within the pricing/heat envelope) Apple is providing a better overall value to their customers than if they went with an i3.
Your attitude does not stand up to even moderate scrutiny, and seems to be based on the assumption that a large percentage of the Federal budget goes to stuff that benefits only a small portion of the US. I would invite you to go look at the "Death and Taxes 2011" poster:
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
Looking at the poster you can't help but realize that the vast majority of the expenditures (either discretionary like most of the poster, or the including the non-discretionary as in the small inset) are not things that could be paid for out of use-fees (as you seem to be advocating). After all, how do you decide how much of the military you are using? Or how do you decide how much of a safety net you need? Both of these things are things that a society (so a collective of people) need to work at together, and the government is exactly the body that we have erected to do things like this for us.
Politicians love to point at government waste and blame their opponents for it, but in reality that accounts for a trivial amount of the budget.
Short of radically cutting back on social services (and thus bringing back the worst of our capitalistic days where Civil War widows were living on the streets in great numbers), this is just not going to happen.
Since the iPad/AT&T users actually gave their email addresses directly to AT&T through the sign-up web form, your analogy is a bit off. A better one is of a restaraunt that contracts with a specific vallet parking company. You give your keys to the valet company and they ding your car. The restaraunt is certainly in some way involved (having chosen the valet company), but at no time were they directly responcible.
Microsoft decided to only support UEFI 2.0, Apple has implemented EFI 1.x on their computers. So you need to use the "legacy" boot option on Apple hardware to support Windows. What this does is loads the BIOS-compatibility module in EFI to give Windows an environment that it is familiar with.
FOG is nice, but it does not have all of the features of Ghost Solution Suite (the enterprise product under the Symantec brand, not the consumer one under the Norton name). I really wanted to use it, but it was missing two major features that I could not live without:
1) It will only run under PXE boot, so it requires that you have control over DHCP wherever you are. With GSS I can use a "virtual partition" to boot from, so it will download the boot system from the server, then boot without ever requiring me to get special information from a DHCP server. Since my clients need to be able to roam to many network segments (that I have no control over, and may have their own network boot servers), including home networks, I can't use FOG.
I should note that this is one thing I hope will change under UEFI. Apple's implementation (while being a bit off the standard) is a great example of the flexibility that having a more intelligent boot system can do.
2) The system tray item does not allow my clients to initiate a re-image when they want. For my purposes they have to be able to trigger a re-image of a computer in front of them in a easy-GUI way. We get a lot of people flowing through and while I may have my pain-points on the GSS version of the system tray icon, it is drop-dead simple to implement and only requires a "see, here is the tool you use" level of training.
So no, FOG is not better in all ways than Ghost (at least not GSS).
The mechanism you describe is only used when imaging a computer, not durring the netboot phase that is often used to deliver the new image. It is really nice if you can run broadcast ASR, but like most multicast has some real limiations when crossing subnets. It is also a bit of a bear to set all the variables so that you get good speed without taking down a network. But once you get the combination for your network it really works out well.
No, it wasn't. It was a large re-architecting of a lot of subsystems. This does not mean a lot for most users, thus they only announced a couple of user-visiable feautres. Not the same thing at all.
For developers Snow Leopard was a rather feature-rich update.
Ya, immagine that, they acted like it actually took work and thinking to completely go through a 15+ year-old architecture and make sure that every layer is 64-bit clean. And they actually though that some of their developer time should go to improving areas of their OS's that actually matter for 95%+ of their audiences first...
With the excepton of Intel's x86 instruction set hobbling their processors, and Windows only recognizing 3GiB of RAM (then subtract the address space for your video memory), or most Intel Macs only recogising 4 GiB (also subtracting video memory, but this is a hardware limitation), 64bit OSs have been a non-event for most consumers.
People are not going to revert, but we have just come to the point now that most computers ship with enough memory that 64bit addressing even makes any difference system-wide.
Yes there is hardware assist for H.264 on MacOS X, specifically (and unfortunately at this point only) on NVIDIA 9400M cards. This has been widely reported. Nicly the lower-end macs consitanlty have this, so the computers most in need have this acceleration avalible.
Hopefully this hardware assist will be widened out a bit later.
I thing that the Washington DC schools also have a major handicap that should be tossed into that discussion: they are one of the most hightly politisized school districts in the nation. The folks in Congress get a hand in many of the decisions made for that program, so they are constanly blown by the winds of politics.
Politics and the courts play a hugely negative roll in the performance of schools everywhere. My mother was a Special Ed. teacher in Wisconsin and the parrents in her program were constantly suing the school district or the state to get more special treatment for their children, who were already getting funding many times the average. My mother was fortunate to never have had to spend her time in court testifying in those cases, but only because she has a couple of administrators above her who took care of spending all that time in court for her. None of the mony spent there did anything to help a single child learn anything more.
Just imagine what it must be like in a city full of government lawyers and lobyists.
The problem with this argument is that Germany was not a child, and was not really any more "at fault" for World War 1 than anyone else. It started just like any of the other land-grab wars before it, but because of the interwoven politics (and a lot of personal ambitions by a lot of people), kept spiraling upward untill we got so much bigger than anything that had come before it.
And Germany was/is not some child, and the US was not some adult. They are, and were, full countries. Full of adults capable of feeling wounded pride. The only reason you can cast them in the role of a naughty child is because they lost the armed conflict. If they had won then the US/France/England led aliance would assume the role of the child. Neither idea holds any water, nor are they useful in preventing the same sort fo problem in the future (one of the most practical reasons to study history).
The de-industrialization of Germany was an atrocious idea, and was the biggest cause of World War 2. Without the horrendus finantial oppresion caused by it Hitler and the Brown-Shirts would never have had the fertile grounds to grow their movement in, and would never have been elected to power in Germany. Eventually there probably would have been a war, but that is only because human nature seems to push us to that eventually.
The intern will literally be on the front-lines of the epic battle against pirated content
No, this would be "figuratively on the front-lines". Being "litterally on the front-lines" requires actual lines of battle on a phisical battlefield. Would it really kill the editors to do even some minor editing?
Student printing largely pays for itself through the printing fees charged to the students. I am sure the UWGB is advocating to their students to make the font change, but that is largely a secondary issue. What they are probably talking about here is printing done by faculty and staff, where the local IT department picks up the cost of ink/toner.
And I think your measurement of the cost for lasers is a couple of orders of magnitude off. It is still much cheaper than ink-jet, but not that much cheaper.
This is probably very close to the truth. The people in question are probably professors, and the way internal politics works in most Universities (I have worked for 3) the professors have most of the power. Since they all want a personal printer, they all get one, but they are the ones in charge of the budget and there is no way they are going to buy a laser printer when they could buy a cheaper inkjet (since "it is almost free"). Since the ink often comes out of a budget that is not theirs (at least not directly), they don't care about on-going costs (nor were they really going to think about them in the first place).
And the professors in question are often older (this affects both eyesight, and comfort with technology), and they are often getting email that needs to be marked up (notes on scientific papers, reviews of their post-doc's work, etc...), and you find that they get in the habit of printing out everything. There are some who are moving to a mostly-digital workflow, but the tools for this are still specialized or not well known in the community (they are just learning about how to use editing notes in Word).
In most Universities the local IT has no power to change any of these, and has to walk a lot of very fine lines politically (while being underpaid for even the normal job). Central IT often can put out edicts, since people there have the ear of the dean, but localized IT has both the responsibility to enforce these edicts, and none of the power to do so.
Tests are great for finding bug/problems you have already thought about. They are great for making sure that you don't make the same mistake again. However they don't reliably cover things you have not yet thought about. It is also really hard to write tests that cover complicated network interaction... and that is percicely what Bind must do.
I note that you have not commented on the merits of the idea that multitasking might not be a good thing, but rather resort to an Ad hominem attack (name-calling) on anyone who might disagree with you. Do we really need to resort to third-grade level arguments... and how in the world did this get moderated "insightful"?
Android does not actually run the other applications that are in the background. The only things allowed to run in the background are "services" that some of those apps rely on for things that need to continue. This gets confusing to users as in some apps (take Pandora as an example) the service is 90% of what you want the app doing, and the actual app is only a thin skin over the top.
If Apple does go the route of "background apps", then I hope they adopt a similar model, but are even more aggressive on resource-limiting the background services running. I saw all of the warts and problems of not doing this with my old PalmOS phone (not WebOS, but the one before). If I left my email application running the background it could well (and often did) crash the phone and I could not receive phone calls. And anything running the background and my battery life dropped to less than a working day.
I have an iPhone now, and appreciate that I never have these problems. It might be nice if my RSS reader could have things ready for me when I switch to it, but it is not that big a deal. And I am not silly enough to think that something like Pandora or an IM client that holds open a TCP/IP connection is not going to kill my battery life.