What makes you think you would know? I know many people who I'm pretty sure have guns, but I have never seen them. I have guns myself, but there are people who do not know that. Unless they see me leaving/coming home from a hunting trip, how would they know?
Most people with children (which is a large part of your neighbors) keep their guns locked away so the kids don't kill someone with them. Even those who have them tend not to show them off except to collectors. Guns are fairly valuable, so you want them hidden so a to not tempt thieves.
As the other poster noted, there are guns in about half the homes in the US. Even if you are in an area where few people own guns, there are still a lot of them in your neighborhood.
Least effective, except for everything else
on
Modding and the Law
·
· Score: 1
True a gun isn't a great tool in an attack. However it is the only one you can give someone within 30 minutes of an attack and have confidence that their odds have increased.
This is even more true when the subject is a small women against a large man. Men, particularly stockers, typically have been in fights before, and thus have some experience about what to do. Hormones means that men are also bigger and stronger. These factors mean that the average women has no chance against the average man in a fight. Now you can train people, but any training you give a woman is easily countered if the man chooses to get the same amount of training.
The gun is not perfect, but it is a great equalizer. A women can kill someone with a gun just as easily as a man can. (maybe better, women seem to have a steadier hand at the range) It takes very little training with a gun to get to that point.
If people were regularly breaking into my car I would demand things like bullet proof glass so that they would not succeed. If every car in the world was getting broken into that much, I would demand that the makers build it to withstand bricks. Sure I'm mad that the thief breaking in, but I'm also mad at the manufacturer who didn't make the car harder to break into.
If I regularly put my car in neutral and floored it I would demand a rev-limiter. I don't do that often. My PWC (jetski) has a rev limiter because it is common to have the engine wide open with no load - when wave jumping. They could have teach me to let off the throttle when I am in the air, but the problem is common enough that it is worth a real fix.
If I regularly drove my car into walls I would demand a car that doesn't' allow that. In fact because accidents happen fairly often car makers build crumple zones, and other such things so that I'm safe in the event of an accident. Microsoft should not have waiting for sp2 to make the firewall default - by the time of win98 second edition it was clear this was needed.
Actually this is in an investor relations page. Bill Gates can go to jail if there is any worst case scenario they know of that they don't tell investors, and that happens.
Reports like this are often filled with doom and gloom about the future. These things rarely happen, but they could.
South Korea should not be a major consideration. Just good business practice is for IT managers to always have a finger on the technology in place in relation to the alternatives, the business, and the business' future plans. Of course many IT managers have decided that nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft, and they are not following though.
Though I would argue that your San Francisco business might care if South Korea drops Microsoft for several reasons. If they do business with South Korea they may need something other than Microsoft so they can interoperate with their customers. (for instance if they are getting OOo documents and Word doesn't open them) Or because other businesses in the above situation have switch, so Microsoft no longer has a monopoly, and thus that barrier to switching no longer applies. Most likely neither will apply.
I upgraded my computer over time, and one day I noticed that I was only lacking a case to have two computers. Since I only had one license to OS/2, and I needed ip masquerading anyway, I download slackware 3.0 (and then upgraded to the latest 1.3.x kernel), and linux was ready to go on a 386.
A few years latter I finally admitted that IBM was going to kill OS/2, so my failing 486 (motherboard problems) was replaced by the most powerful machine mere mortals could buy at the time (I was now out of college and had real money but no bills) - a dual Ppro-200. I installed FreeBSD on that, and it is still running to this day, though I mostly use more powerful machines now.
I formally retired that old 386 just over a year ago. Over time everything was moved away from it. It ended up running 2.0.29+patches, and often spent hours on end with a load of over 8. booting and swapping to the original 80Mb harddrive. (though user data was on a 1.6Gig drive)
I'm doing something about high gas prices: ethanol and biodiesel.
My car won't run right (as if the piece of junk runs right anyway) on pure ethanol, but a 50/50 mix of E85 and gas works just fine, and puts money into the pockets of those who have a chance of solving the high price problem. Competition would be great if there was some.
Some claim that ethanol is energy positive, but they have to use absurd numbers to come to that conclusion. Eitherway, biodiesel is energy positive.
I don't own a diesel car, but I'm looking for a good biodiesel and ethanol producers to invest in. Maybe someone with new enzymes. I haven't found anything yet, but I'm sure it is a matter of more investigation. I'm in no hurry.
Short term it probably does cost more. However word gets out, I wouldn't be surprised if less illegals showed up in that town in a few years because they know they will be fined.
I'm not sure if this is a good plan, but I could see how it could work.
If you want two threads which are totally independent you can have it.
In theory you are correct. However in practice you are wrong. In the real world memory 'scribblers' tend to corrupt data for the other thread, so you start looking in the wrong place for them. Worse, they are intermittent, so they are harder to catch in the first place. All you know is your customers (because these bugs often don't show up in test) are complaining that your program randomly doesn't work.
In practice processes separate your memory access, which makes the bugs much easier to find and fix. (Note that I said easier, not trivial. These bugs are still very hard to single threaded programs)
Otherwise intelligent people seem to consider it (a) amazingly hard (b) brand new and cutting edge (c) only any use if you have multiple cores and (d) not really very useful at all to be honest. All four are false.
I have personally done threading. It is amazingly hard. I've spent as much time debugging thread related problems as everything else. In a single threaded design these problems wouldn't exist.
Thread is not brand new anymore.
If you have just one core you can do everything faster in a single thread. Of course this can make for ugly code, and has a large number of problems in many cases. It is still faster because you don't have to deal with locks. It might or might not be easier depending on what other tasks you have to do. (the obvious example is it is much easier to have one thread handle GUI events while the other does long processing)
Threads are useful for those cases where you have very separated tasks. However in most cases you can save all the hassle of threads by just using a different process and thus ensure you never have locking problems. Obviously this cannot work if you have a GUI controlling a long process though. (I'm sure there are other examples.)
Yes you can make threads work. However in many threaded programs there are 1 time in a billion bugs that are really hard to fix. Thus good programmers recommend that you avoid threads if you can.
With current games that is true. However there is no reason new game engines cannot be made that do not have this limitation.
Unfortunately for the programmers, getting multi-threaded programs right is hard. I've done it, but I spent more time killing the thread related bugs than all the other bugs. (at least I think I've got all the bugs worked out now) This despite designing the project in advance to be threaded. Getting the locks right is hard (unless you can live with far to many locks, not the case for a fast video game)
While it is true that methanol contains about half as much energy as gasoline by volume, that does not mean you need twice as much to go the same distance. Methanol burns much better in a standard engine (high octane), and in an engine designed for it can get nearly the same range per volume of fuel even though there is less energy in that fuel.
SAAB has a car that gets the same gas milage on ethanol (not methanol which is the subject of this message, but ethanol is similar to methanol so this example is instructive) as gasoline, but it gets 50 more horsepower on ethanol because the fuel is better.
Given a choice, no one would want to be born knowing they'll need eye correction at some point in their life.
Given that most 'nerds' need eye correction, while less intelligent people do not, I hypothesize that there is a relation between intelligence and needing eye correction. If this is the case, then I will choose wearing glasses all my life to being less intelligent. (but that is just me who can't see the floor without glasses)
I of course am not sure how you would test this hypothesis, but that is beside the point.
You should have quit after the first warning. Seriously. First of all, as you discovered your past cannot be left behind so long as you don't leave. Second, so long as you let them get by with snuffing your humor out, they will, and your only resource is at the exit interview to tell them you can't stand things. (This works better if you tell your boss why he is loosing a good employee, because now he is mad at HR) Third, you never know for sure that they won't put you on the next lay-off list (when you firesomeone they can sue if the cause isn't good enough, but when you lay them off it is impersonal budget cutting nothing against you, and you can't win a lawsuit for that).
So find a new job now. You should have long ago. A first warning is a good sign that you have been there long enough. Find the job now, while you are still paid. It make take a year or two, but that is life. Much better than to loose your job in a downturn (when you are more likely to be laid off), and still not have found one after unemployment runs out.
So? There are people like that everywhere. Go outsometime and you will soon meet them. Some are worse than others. There are abusive people everywhere looking for a fight. Just human nature. Like most geeks, I have not figured out how to deal with them.
Windows is the EASIEST environment out there to set up a variety of hardware on. Mac supports less and linux is still a nightmare for certain relatively easy devices. You'd be hard pressed, for example, to find a network card or modem that isn't auto-detected by windows these days. Your comment was barely true around 1995.
Where have you been since 1995? Back in 1995 this was true, but in the meantime things have moved on. I have never install Windows 2000 or XP on a system and had all the hardware recognized. I always have to find a different machine with a network connection so I can download drivers. Almost always the drivers I need are the network adapter, and the graphics card (despite this lack of video drivers, Microsoft appears not to test in VGA mode because some screen cannot be operaterated at 640x480)
These are Windows 2000 and XP machines, installing on various hardware in our lab (we have a MSDN subscription)
By contrast when I have problems with hardware on linux I got a message that said "The vendor of this device will not supply us with information on writing a driver, we did our best, but if you can we recommend you return it for a better model". (For some wireless network card, which I promptly returned).
Even though I've used Unix (linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) more than Microsoft windows, I've seen more blue screen of death's than I have the equivalent in the Unix world (kernel panic). When I have seen them in the Unix world, the entire machine was no longer functional afterwords, no matter what I did.
So while I'll agree that Microsoft solved that problem, it took them a lot longer than it should have.
He did speak on subject. Knowing how windows came to be is helpful if you want to program. If he had spoke on something like the blood lines of the quarterhorse he would not have been on topic. However he spoke about windows, so he was on topic.
That isn't to say this was the best speech he could have given.
That is because you are used to the cout << foo; syntax, so you don't think of it as abuse. Though it can be argued that there is no better way, I don't know if I buy that.
Will the use of overloading operators...
*) reduce development time?
*) reduce the number of bugs?
*) improve maintainability?
If the answer is yes to the above (This is an all or nothing test), then use them, if not don't use them.
There is a good reason that most examples of operator overloading are complex numbers - using overloaded operators for complex numbers reduces development time, reduces the number of bugs, and improves maintainability.
There is a good reason examples of operator overloading never use shapes. While I can design an shape interface where
circle + square
is legal, and gives some useful result. However this will increase development time, increase the number of bugs, and reduce maintainability. Therefore anyone use overloads operators for shape classes is a fool.
Operator overloading is often abused. I rarely find it useful to overload operators, but in those few cases where I overload an operator I make my code better.
You are making two assumptions: the national decisions are wrong, and the local decisions will be right.
No, I am not. I am assuming that at least some of the time the national decisions will be wrong. I am assuming that when there are hundreds of local schools, there will always be some that make the right decision, and others that make the wrong decisions.
So poorly educated voters will get to design the education system. Forget Intelligent Design, some place will have astrology in their science classes.
The minority who object to such things can (will) move away from areas where they teach astrology. What if it was decided on a national level to teach astrology? What can you do? You cannot as a small minority who thinks this is a bad idea move to where astrology is not a part of science, because there is no such area.
As for 'new approaches': none of these new approaches is a tremendous improvement over our 1940's educational system. We would be better to use a good system than try for a great system, and get a lousy system. Slowing down the change (decline) in our schools would probably be a good thing.
Some of those changes were forced by federal government, thus this is actually an argument against your point. Sure some local schools will fall for some fad that isn't a good idea, but others will not.
the burden of brining these students up to a uniform level on a uniform body of knowledge will fall on our Universities.
If you look close you will notice we have much less restrictions on what universities can do. Somehow schools like MIT have earned a good reputation, while other schools have earned a bad one. I would expect that universities will not admit any students from bad schools - which in fact they do, if you ACT/SAT scores are not strong enough you cannot get into the best universities.
You are assuming that the national decisions are right.
Congress passed the patriot act, something that most on slashdot consider a bad law. There is not much you can do about it though. (In theory you can move to a different country, but few countries allow anyone to enter, and most that do are not places where you want to live)
If education is a local issue, you can move just a few miles (20 at the most) down the road and get to a difference school that may not have made such a decision.
If education is a local issue, there are less voters involved. It is possible for someone running for my local schoolboard to talk to everyone in town about the issues within a month of the election. So you can actually change things in your local district, much easier than a change on the national level.
I have personally seen 4 different theories of education in my short lifetime, and I have evidence that this is typical. (that is every 5-10 years someone has a new idea to revolutionize education). Some were good, some bad. On a national level all they can do is force all schools to try the new system, or prevent all schools from trying it. On a local level you can decide if you like the ideas, and if you are progressive enough to be a first adopter, or conservative enough to watch others try it first.
Education is too important to take chances with a uniform national system.
No, but at least with open source you have options. If nothing else you can hire coders who can handle kernel level C hacking. If your vendor says "We do not think it is worth our while to fix that bug", you are stuck. With open source you just put an ad on dice.com or something like that looking for developers.
I am not a kernel developer, but I have found and fixed bugs in kernel code before. I already know C, which is a big help. It wasn't the easiest coding I've done, but it was by no means the hardest either. Maybe most of your staff can't handle the work, but if you have several developers there is a good chance one can.
While I wouldn't call maintenance coding simple, you seem to think it is much harder than it really is.
Assuming someone corrects all your mistakes (which the other guy mostly did, I think there are other mistakes that have not been corrected), I agree. Which is why I drive a Geo Metro. A car that most people consider underpowered, even though it is perfectly capable of maintaining freeway speed (70mph) so long as the headwind isn't too strong (this is an issue about once a year where I live).
Most people though want to burn their tires up when the light turns green, at least once in a while. I can't do that. A hybrid allows them to use a small engine like my car has, yes still get way too much acceleration when they feel like driving like an idiot.
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What makes you think you would know? I know many people who I'm pretty sure have guns, but I have never seen them. I have guns myself, but there are people who do not know that. Unless they see me leaving/coming home from a hunting trip, how would they know?
Most people with children (which is a large part of your neighbors) keep their guns locked away so the kids don't kill someone with them. Even those who have them tend not to show them off except to collectors. Guns are fairly valuable, so you want them hidden so a to not tempt thieves.
As the other poster noted, there are guns in about half the homes in the US. Even if you are in an area where few people own guns, there are still a lot of them in your neighborhood.
True a gun isn't a great tool in an attack. However it is the only one you can give someone within 30 minutes of an attack and have confidence that their odds have increased.
This is even more true when the subject is a small women against a large man. Men, particularly stockers, typically have been in fights before, and thus have some experience about what to do. Hormones means that men are also bigger and stronger. These factors mean that the average women has no chance against the average man in a fight. Now you can train people, but any training you give a woman is easily countered if the man chooses to get the same amount of training.
The gun is not perfect, but it is a great equalizer. A women can kill someone with a gun just as easily as a man can. (maybe better, women seem to have a steadier hand at the range) It takes very little training with a gun to get to that point.
If people were regularly breaking into my car I would demand things like bullet proof glass so that they would not succeed. If every car in the world was getting broken into that much, I would demand that the makers build it to withstand bricks. Sure I'm mad that the thief breaking in, but I'm also mad at the manufacturer who didn't make the car harder to break into.
If I regularly put my car in neutral and floored it I would demand a rev-limiter. I don't do that often. My PWC (jetski) has a rev limiter because it is common to have the engine wide open with no load - when wave jumping. They could have teach me to let off the throttle when I am in the air, but the problem is common enough that it is worth a real fix.
If I regularly drove my car into walls I would demand a car that doesn't' allow that. In fact because accidents happen fairly often car makers build crumple zones, and other such things so that I'm safe in the event of an accident. Microsoft should not have waiting for sp2 to make the firewall default - by the time of win98 second edition it was clear this was needed.
Actually this is in an investor relations page. Bill Gates can go to jail if there is any worst case scenario they know of that they don't tell investors, and that happens.
Reports like this are often filled with doom and gloom about the future. These things rarely happen, but they could.
South Korea should not be a major consideration. Just good business practice is for IT managers to always have a finger on the technology in place in relation to the alternatives, the business, and the business' future plans. Of course many IT managers have decided that nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft, and they are not following though.
Though I would argue that your San Francisco business might care if South Korea drops Microsoft for several reasons. If they do business with South Korea they may need something other than Microsoft so they can interoperate with their customers. (for instance if they are getting OOo documents and Word doesn't open them) Or because other businesses in the above situation have switch, so Microsoft no longer has a monopoly, and thus that barrier to switching no longer applies. Most likely neither will apply.
I upgraded my computer over time, and one day I noticed that I was only lacking a case to have two computers. Since I only had one license to OS/2, and I needed ip masquerading anyway, I download slackware 3.0 (and then upgraded to the latest 1.3.x kernel), and linux was ready to go on a 386.
A few years latter I finally admitted that IBM was going to kill OS/2, so my failing 486 (motherboard problems) was replaced by the most powerful machine mere mortals could buy at the time (I was now out of college and had real money but no bills) - a dual Ppro-200. I installed FreeBSD on that, and it is still running to this day, though I mostly use more powerful machines now.
I formally retired that old 386 just over a year ago. Over time everything was moved away from it. It ended up running 2.0.29+patches, and often spent hours on end with a load of over 8. booting and swapping to the original 80Mb harddrive. (though user data was on a 1.6Gig drive)
Good memories.
I'm doing something about high gas prices: ethanol and biodiesel.
My car won't run right (as if the piece of junk runs right anyway) on pure ethanol, but a 50/50 mix of E85 and gas works just fine, and puts money into the pockets of those who have a chance of solving the high price problem. Competition would be great if there was some.
Some claim that ethanol is energy positive, but they have to use absurd numbers to come to that conclusion. Eitherway, biodiesel is energy positive.
I don't own a diesel car, but I'm looking for a good biodiesel and ethanol producers to invest in. Maybe someone with new enzymes. I haven't found anything yet, but I'm sure it is a matter of more investigation. I'm in no hurry.
Short term it probably does cost more. However word gets out, I wouldn't be surprised if less illegals showed up in that town in a few years because they know they will be fined.
I'm not sure if this is a good plan, but I could see how it could work.
If you want two threads which are totally independent you can have it.
In theory you are correct. However in practice you are wrong. In the real world memory 'scribblers' tend to corrupt data for the other thread, so you start looking in the wrong place for them. Worse, they are intermittent, so they are harder to catch in the first place. All you know is your customers (because these bugs often don't show up in test) are complaining that your program randomly doesn't work.
In practice processes separate your memory access, which makes the bugs much easier to find and fix. (Note that I said easier, not trivial. These bugs are still very hard to single threaded programs)
Otherwise intelligent people seem to consider it (a) amazingly hard (b) brand new and cutting edge (c) only any use if you have multiple cores and (d) not really very useful at all to be honest. All four are false.
I have personally done threading. It is amazingly hard. I've spent as much time debugging thread related problems as everything else. In a single threaded design these problems wouldn't exist.
Thread is not brand new anymore.
If you have just one core you can do everything faster in a single thread. Of course this can make for ugly code, and has a large number of problems in many cases. It is still faster because you don't have to deal with locks. It might or might not be easier depending on what other tasks you have to do. (the obvious example is it is much easier to have one thread handle GUI events while the other does long processing)
Threads are useful for those cases where you have very separated tasks. However in most cases you can save all the hassle of threads by just using a different process and thus ensure you never have locking problems. Obviously this cannot work if you have a GUI controlling a long process though. (I'm sure there are other examples.)
Yes you can make threads work. However in many threaded programs there are 1 time in a billion bugs that are really hard to fix. Thus good programmers recommend that you avoid threads if you can.
With current games that is true. However there is no reason new game engines cannot be made that do not have this limitation.
Unfortunately for the programmers, getting multi-threaded programs right is hard. I've done it, but I spent more time killing the thread related bugs than all the other bugs. (at least I think I've got all the bugs worked out now) This despite designing the project in advance to be threaded. Getting the locks right is hard (unless you can live with far to many locks, not the case for a fast video game)
While it is true that methanol contains about half as much energy as gasoline by volume, that does not mean you need twice as much to go the same distance. Methanol burns much better in a standard engine (high octane), and in an engine designed for it can get nearly the same range per volume of fuel even though there is less energy in that fuel.
SAAB has a car that gets the same gas milage on ethanol (not methanol which is the subject of this message, but ethanol is similar to methanol so this example is instructive) as gasoline, but it gets 50 more horsepower on ethanol because the fuel is better.
Given a choice, no one would want to be born knowing they'll need eye correction at some point in their life.
Given that most 'nerds' need eye correction, while less intelligent people do not, I hypothesize that there is a relation between intelligence and needing eye correction. If this is the case, then I will choose wearing glasses all my life to being less intelligent. (but that is just me who can't see the floor without glasses)
I of course am not sure how you would test this hypothesis, but that is beside the point.
You should have quit after the first warning. Seriously. First of all, as you discovered your past cannot be left behind so long as you don't leave. Second, so long as you let them get by with snuffing your humor out, they will, and your only resource is at the exit interview to tell them you can't stand things. (This works better if you tell your boss why he is loosing a good employee, because now he is mad at HR) Third, you never know for sure that they won't put you on the next lay-off list (when you firesomeone they can sue if the cause isn't good enough, but when you lay them off it is impersonal budget cutting nothing against you, and you can't win a lawsuit for that).
So find a new job now. You should have long ago. A first warning is a good sign that you have been there long enough. Find the job now, while you are still paid. It make take a year or two, but that is life. Much better than to loose your job in a downturn (when you are more likely to be laid off), and still not have found one after unemployment runs out.
So? There are people like that everywhere. Go outsometime and you will soon meet them. Some are worse than others. There are abusive people everywhere looking for a fight. Just human nature. Like most geeks, I have not figured out how to deal with them.
Windows is the EASIEST environment out there to set up a variety of hardware on. Mac supports less and linux is still a nightmare for certain relatively easy devices. You'd be hard pressed, for example, to find a network card or modem that isn't auto-detected by windows these days. Your comment was barely true around 1995.
Where have you been since 1995? Back in 1995 this was true, but in the meantime things have moved on. I have never install Windows 2000 or XP on a system and had all the hardware recognized. I always have to find a different machine with a network connection so I can download drivers. Almost always the drivers I need are the network adapter, and the graphics card (despite this lack of video drivers, Microsoft appears not to test in VGA mode because some screen cannot be operaterated at 640x480)
These are Windows 2000 and XP machines, installing on various hardware in our lab (we have a MSDN subscription)
By contrast when I have problems with hardware on linux I got a message that said "The vendor of this device will not supply us with information on writing a driver, we did our best, but if you can we recommend you return it for a better model". (For some wireless network card, which I promptly returned).
Even though I've used Unix (linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) more than Microsoft windows, I've seen more blue screen of death's than I have the equivalent in the Unix world (kernel panic). When I have seen them in the Unix world, the entire machine was no longer functional afterwords, no matter what I did.
So while I'll agree that Microsoft solved that problem, it took them a lot longer than it should have.
He did speak on subject. Knowing how windows came to be is helpful if you want to program. If he had spoke on something like the blood lines of the quarterhorse he would not have been on topic. However he spoke about windows, so he was on topic.
That isn't to say this was the best speech he could have given.
What does it do? What can it do?
Well for starters you can win the IOCCC with just a little more effort, and that had to be worth something.
Don't do that in code I need to maintain though.
That is because you are used to the cout << foo; syntax, so you don't think of it as abuse. Though it can be argued that there is no better way, I don't know if I buy that.
Will the use of overloading operators... *) reduce development time? *) reduce the number of bugs? *) improve maintainability?
If the answer is yes to the above (This is an all or nothing test), then use them, if not don't use them.
There is a good reason that most examples of operator overloading are complex numbers - using overloaded operators for complex numbers reduces development time, reduces the number of bugs, and improves maintainability.
There is a good reason examples of operator overloading never use shapes. While I can design an shape interface where
circle + square
is legal, and gives some useful result. However this will increase development time, increase the number of bugs, and reduce maintainability. Therefore anyone use overloads operators for shape classes is a fool.
Operator overloading is often abused. I rarely find it useful to overload operators, but in those few cases where I overload an operator I make my code better.
You are making two assumptions: the national decisions are wrong, and the local decisions will be right.
No, I am not. I am assuming that at least some of the time the national decisions will be wrong. I am assuming that when there are hundreds of local schools, there will always be some that make the right decision, and others that make the wrong decisions.
So poorly educated voters will get to design the education system. Forget Intelligent Design, some place will have astrology in their science classes.
The minority who object to such things can (will) move away from areas where they teach astrology. What if it was decided on a national level to teach astrology? What can you do? You cannot as a small minority who thinks this is a bad idea move to where astrology is not a part of science, because there is no such area.
As for 'new approaches': none of these new approaches is a tremendous improvement over our 1940's educational system. We would be better to use a good system than try for a great system, and get a lousy system. Slowing down the change (decline) in our schools would probably be a good thing.
Some of those changes were forced by federal government, thus this is actually an argument against your point. Sure some local schools will fall for some fad that isn't a good idea, but others will not.
the burden of brining these students up to a uniform level on a uniform body of knowledge will fall on our Universities.
If you look close you will notice we have much less restrictions on what universities can do. Somehow schools like MIT have earned a good reputation, while other schools have earned a bad one. I would expect that universities will not admit any students from bad schools - which in fact they do, if you ACT/SAT scores are not strong enough you cannot get into the best universities.
You are assuming that the national decisions are right.
Congress passed the patriot act, something that most on slashdot consider a bad law. There is not much you can do about it though. (In theory you can move to a different country, but few countries allow anyone to enter, and most that do are not places where you want to live)
If education is a local issue, you can move just a few miles (20 at the most) down the road and get to a difference school that may not have made such a decision.
If education is a local issue, there are less voters involved. It is possible for someone running for my local schoolboard to talk to everyone in town about the issues within a month of the election. So you can actually change things in your local district, much easier than a change on the national level.
I have personally seen 4 different theories of education in my short lifetime, and I have evidence that this is typical. (that is every 5-10 years someone has a new idea to revolutionize education). Some were good, some bad. On a national level all they can do is force all schools to try the new system, or prevent all schools from trying it. On a local level you can decide if you like the ideas, and if you are progressive enough to be a first adopter, or conservative enough to watch others try it first.
Education is too important to take chances with a uniform national system.
Maintenance coding is NOT simple.
No, but at least with open source you have options. If nothing else you can hire coders who can handle kernel level C hacking. If your vendor says "We do not think it is worth our while to fix that bug", you are stuck. With open source you just put an ad on dice.com or something like that looking for developers.
I am not a kernel developer, but I have found and fixed bugs in kernel code before. I already know C, which is a big help. It wasn't the easiest coding I've done, but it was by no means the hardest either. Maybe most of your staff can't handle the work, but if you have several developers there is a good chance one can.
While I wouldn't call maintenance coding simple, you seem to think it is much harder than it really is.
Assuming someone corrects all your mistakes (which the other guy mostly did, I think there are other mistakes that have not been corrected), I agree. Which is why I drive a Geo Metro. A car that most people consider underpowered, even though it is perfectly capable of maintaining freeway speed (70mph) so long as the headwind isn't too strong (this is an issue about once a year where I live).
Most people though want to burn their tires up when the light turns green, at least once in a while. I can't do that. A hybrid allows them to use a small engine like my car has, yes still get way too much acceleration when they feel like driving like an idiot.