I hate to say this, but if the virus is changing in that direction, it means it is more effective at infecting people that way. That's the way evolution works.
Yes, its more effective at surviving if it doesn't harm its hosts.
While it is good news that VIH is becoming less deadly, I wouldn't like it to become a chronic infection slowly debilitating and eventually killing its hosts. That would cause it not to be treated at all in poor countries.
The less harmful it becomes the better it survives. If it becomes harmless or a minor irritant, that would be a good thing.
or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
People will vote on principles once they don't need the free stuff. You can't eat principles. And they'll have more time to consider their principles if they aren't spending all their time looking for food too.
So give them education + welfare and suddenly they'll develop principles.
Unfortunately that's precisely the free stuff you don't want them to have.
Except that in normal systems the size of the money supply adjusts to the size of the economy.
As you yourself observed this "normal" system is only a very recent "innovation".
With Bitcoin, there is no correlation between the amount of Bitcoin and the size of the economy and so the system is inherently unstable, just as gold-based currencies were.
Which makes bitcoin more or a throw-back to the "old normal" rather than anything new.
Even though for most people the ROI on running their own Bitcoin mining hardware is in the past, it still fascinates me that I can make my own money and buy things with Bitcoin.
Dedicating capital and expending energy resulting in money. Is pretty much how we all make money.
There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.
Um no.
From an external point of view, the singularity is just the moment at which humanity switches from carbon based to silicon based brains.
There is no evidence that there will be "humanity" after the switch.
If all the frogs in a pond are wiped out by a new species of snake the frogs didn't "become" snakes.
From your "external point of view" there would be no difference between humainity switching from carbon to silicon and from humanity being wiped out by an alien silicon replacement. Does it make an iota of difference whether the alien replacement was invented by humans or merely showed up from somewhere else?
"GAFE" being google apps for education? Or for enterprises?
Being allowed to turn off the display of the ads on the gmail screen doesn't equate to turning off the "ad tracking stuff".
Are they still tracking and profiling your account to show you personalized google ads based on that profile on every OTHER page you visit with google ads?
Moreover, with kids, its the long game. They use gmail at school... simplest to setup a gmail at home, share files and contacts between the two accounts, hell even link them together so your logged into both. And from there your a googler for life.
I don't begrudge schools using commercial tools. But loading the kids into an advertising network, and then saying "its all good" because they turned the ads off when the kids check their gmail is a bit like covering them in blood, tossing them in the ocean and saying "no worries" we fed the sharks in advance so they aren't hungry.
Do you have some wacky old software that has a hard dependency on particular versions of some libraries? You can build a container with just the right libraries and get your software to work... and, after you do that work, the container is just another container.
On the flipside, the security of that container has to be managed separately. The operating system and libraries have to be managed separately. Yes, you get the advantages you state... but if the software isn't "wacky old software with wierd dependencies" then its a lot of overhead to setup and maintain.
A more lightweight approach to the common case makes sense, and you can always fall back to a full VM for the wacky ones.
Water is in fact, therefore, pretty scarce on Earth.
That's like arguing the material a balloon is made of is scarce on a balloon. Its true that there's not much of it in the total volume of a balloon. But it still makes up pretty much 100% of the surface area ON a balloon.
Similarly bridgmanite is pretty rare on the surface, even if it is the most common by far when you start looking further down.
video chat ? Where I send someone a web link? That's goofy.
And it doesn't work with Safari or Internet Explorer... so most people won't even be able to click on the link, and it doensn't work with iOS devices... because no firefox and doesn't work with safari... so... useless? Why is this a core feature?
This should be an addon... that almost nobody uses instead of a feature that almost nobody uses.
At least as an addon, any security issues inherent to a feature that lets the browser turn on your camera and microphone aren't part of the browser.
I love firefox.. I really do, and the alternatives are all far more awful, so I don't see myself switching, but I just don't see the point of this at all.
When you have people on the board of directors that have actually seriously contemplated commiting Filicide-Suicide
I'd be more surprised if none of them had contemplated it. I've seen what severe forms of autism can do to a family. Is it really at all a stretch that having a child with special needs, and the pain, frustration, stress, pressure, and emotional drain that puts on everyone would result in people thinking along those lines.
Sure autism spectrum is often present in geniuses and eccentrics and other people who no doubt the world is richer for having. And it is such broad spectrum that arguably everyone is somewhere on it. But at the other end of the spectrum there is a lot of real misery, and people trapped in unbearable situations, that cannot lead normal lives, that require round the clock care, and assistance with even basic rudimentary functions, even that get violent, creating a financial and emotional drain on caregivers who rarely get adequate support.
I suppose, but I never write such copius notes with my math that cursive would have any real benefit over printing.
Really, I even did my 3hr university exams in English Lit, and other subjects where there was a lot of long form / essay type answers using printed letters instead of cursive and had no difficulty finishing within the time limits.
rather than going through the proper procedures to change the highest law of the land (constitutional amendments) is considered a good thing in "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
I agree with you. Amendments for the win.
But what practical difference would it make if they amended free speech in the constitution to disallow death threats and bomb threats? vs what has been done?
Don't complain next time the NSA, the TSA, etc. violates the constitution.
Why exactly not?
You are the problem. You want a government with unlimited power, whether you admit it or not.
Government has the power to amend the constitution. You want a government able to do that do you not? So then you too want a government with unlimited power, because it can amend the consitutition to give it any power it wants.
The government has whatever authority over us we collectively give it.
Checks and Balances are the mechanisms by which we decide how to define that authority, but at the end of the day all that matters is our collective will or lack thereof.
You are the problem. You want a government with unlimited power, whether you admit it or not.
The balance goes to the free speech rights 100%. No law can exist which can override someone's right to free speech.
Fortunately, only a few lunatics like yourself wish that were the case.
Turns out the rest of society thinks there are quite a few edge cases.
Phoning someone to make death threats is one. Calling in a fake bomb threat is another.
You may disagree. That's your right. But the rest of us are on board with these restrictions.
Now somewhere between phoning in a death threat, and free speech we have a writing a plausible death threat in the form of a rap lyric... so its quite right for the courts to look at it and decide if really is a death threat threat or not.
Lots of rap lyrics are full of threats. I don't think i've ever seen one that anyone would take seriously though... so far. That doesn't mean this case isn't real.
Exactly. They are "like a common carrier". And too often we think of them as common carriers. But they have fought tooth and nail to have their cake and eat it too... the providers want all the common carrier exemptions but none of the restrictions, and they are NOT common carriers.
As you say, anything that pushes them over the hump would be a good thing.
" MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later), MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later) "
They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.
Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.
Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.
I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".
Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.
People buying servers do not expect support to drop that quickly. Just because apple disco'd producing the line doesn't mean that support for the ones they did sell should end quicker.
Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract.
Nobody said they did. But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.
Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.
I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.
a) Longer HDMI and USB cables should not create a propagation delay, unless you are using repeaters. Get the unit at close enough that you can get away without repeaters.
Seriously, electricity propagates through copper at ~2/3rd the speed of light. You are NOT noticing the nanoseconds from an extra 10 feet of cable.
b) Water cooling. Don't fear it. If noise is the issue switch to water cooling. Its not hard at all for the CPU and graphics card. And good near silent power supplies aren't hard to fine.
If you aren't overclocking, or doing anything stupid overkill (and you really don't need to be running quad sli if you are just driving a 1080p hdtv) its not hard to make a virtually silent living room gaming PC.
Me personally, I have a near silent inexpensive mid-level gaming PC in the living room for games, mostly played with an xbox controller... but I still maintain a proper gaming pc in my office for FPS/RTS stuff. The parts from the downstairs pc filter into the upgrade pc as I upgrade. So the upstairs PC is always a year or so behind... no big deal. Hardware upgrade cycles have long since reached the point where you don't need a new video card every year.
OTOH - Long division is the only manual method I use. I have a CS/Maths degree but it's so long since I did short division I would have to look up the algorithm.
I couldn't remember what short division was either... so I looked it up... and I honestly can't tell it apart from how I do long division....
And equally honestly, I'm not entirely sure we should be teaching kids in gradeschool to do long division anymore either.
It seems to me that it should be simplified to estimation techniques, and actual calculations if necessary done by calculator.
Long division would then be a high school or university technique - where studying "how it works" is the emphasis rather than rote-learning the algorithm to actually use it to evaluate divisions.
Much like square roots. They used to teach kids this algorithm to find square roots. (I have an old textbook that covers it...)
They don't teach this anymore. If you need a root today, you use a calculator, until you reach high school where you start looking at quadratic roots, or the intro calculus stuff might look at newtons method.
I think we're pretty close to the long division algorithm being taught the same way. The long division algorithm is difficult to use... requires guessing each round, and really provides no real insight into division or number theory to a gradeschool kid. So its only value is they need it to do division.
Unless they have a calculator. Which at this point they all do. And only people like you or me with CS and math degrees ever even willingly attempt manually calculating 15443 / 225 nevermind 4,535,422,456 / 3,235,442 manually.
Hell, I pull out a calculator to figure out if $17.99 / 750g or $2.49 / 100 g is a better price. Practically nobody does even fairly grocery shopping calculations manually.
So maybe the long division technique should be moved as a crucial rote-technique taught in grade 3-4-5 to a number theory interest topic taught in high school or beyond.
That's quite interesting, but to me instead of it being a defense of cursive... it raises the point that if we are going to teach 'writing' as a computer input mechanism, perhaps we should be teaching kids shorthand instead, and/or developing shorthand techniques that are designed to lend them selves well to recognition software. (e.g. maybe not Pitman or Gregg 'as they are' but developed specifically with computer recognition in mind.
That would be a much more useful skill to have then cursive.
Written communication is the only thing that will keep working throughout history and they want to stop teaching it.
They aren't going to stop teaching printing. They are going to stop teaching cursive.
In highschool my cursive was illegible enough that I switched back to printing for notes, assignments, and exams.
I would be with you 100% if if they were going to stop teaching printing, and if all note taking and draft writing, math homehork, spelling tests, and everything else was going to be done on a keyboard. But they aren't doing that. Nobody is suggesting that.
They're getting rid of cursive. It's not a big deal.
I don't know if that might be true of some iOS mobile devices or where that FUD comes from, but my six year old Mac from 2008
Well, I guess if Yosemite runs on YOUR six year old Mac you must be right, and anything anyone else says must be FUD.
Then again, OSX March was released in 2013, and dropped support for early-2009 13-inch Mac Book Pros.
So, just to make it perfectly clear to you, they've ALREADY dropped support for a laptop that's a year NEWER than your computer, being dropped by OS that's already a year and a half old.
Mavericks (and Yosemite) also dropped support for any Xserve's older than 2009 (so server class hardware got dropped after just 4 years of support), and any mac mini's older than 2009 got dropped as well.
Millions of Macs from 2008s stopped being supported over a year and half a go. You got lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say this, but if the virus is changing in that direction, it means it is more effective at infecting people that way. That's the way evolution works.
Yes, its more effective at surviving if it doesn't harm its hosts.
While it is good news that VIH is becoming less deadly, I wouldn't like it to become a chronic infection slowly debilitating and eventually killing its hosts. That would cause it not to be treated at all in poor countries.
The less harmful it becomes the better it survives. If it becomes harmless or a minor irritant, that would be a good thing.
or through voting for free stuff rather than principles.
People will vote on principles once they don't need the free stuff. You can't eat principles. And they'll have more time to consider their principles if they aren't spending all their time looking for food too.
So give them education + welfare and suddenly they'll develop principles.
Unfortunately that's precisely the free stuff you don't want them to have.
Except that in normal systems the size of the money supply adjusts to the size of the economy.
As you yourself observed this "normal" system is only a very recent "innovation".
With Bitcoin, there is no correlation between the amount of Bitcoin and the size of the economy and so the system is inherently unstable, just as gold-based currencies were.
Which makes bitcoin more or a throw-back to the "old normal" rather than anything new.
Even though for most people the ROI on running their own Bitcoin mining hardware is in the past, it still fascinates me that I can make my own money and buy things with Bitcoin.
Dedicating capital and expending energy resulting in money. Is pretty much how we all make money.
There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.
Um no.
From an external point of view, the singularity is just the moment at which humanity switches from carbon based to silicon based brains.
There is no evidence that there will be "humanity" after the switch.
If all the frogs in a pond are wiped out by a new species of snake the frogs didn't "become" snakes.
From your "external point of view" there would be no difference between humainity switching from carbon to silicon and from humanity being wiped out by an alien silicon replacement. Does it make an iota of difference whether the alien replacement was invented by humans or merely showed up from somewhere else?
Not to humans it won't.
"GAFE" being google apps for education? Or for enterprises?
Being allowed to turn off the display of the ads on the gmail screen doesn't equate to turning off the "ad tracking stuff".
Are they still tracking and profiling your account to show you personalized google ads based on that profile on every OTHER page you visit with google ads?
Moreover, with kids, its the long game. They use gmail at school... simplest to setup a gmail at home, share files and contacts between the two accounts, hell even link them together so your logged into both. And from there your a googler for life.
I don't begrudge schools using commercial tools. But loading the kids into an advertising network, and then saying "its all good" because they turned the ads off when the kids check their gmail is a bit like covering them in blood, tossing them in the ocean and saying "no worries" we fed the sharks in advance so they aren't hungry.
Do you have some wacky old software that has a hard dependency on particular versions of some libraries? You can build a container with just the right libraries and get your software to work... and, after you do that work, the container is just another container.
On the flipside, the security of that container has to be managed separately. The operating system and libraries have to be managed separately. Yes, you get the advantages you state... but if the software isn't "wacky old software with wierd dependencies" then its a lot of overhead to setup and maintain.
A more lightweight approach to the common case makes sense, and you can always fall back to a full VM for the wacky ones.
Wikipedia says Firefox has had it since 22... so its on 34 now... so what's that? 4 weeks already? What's new in 34? :p
Water is in fact, therefore, pretty scarce on Earth.
That's like arguing the material a balloon is made of is scarce on a balloon. Its true that there's not much of it in the total volume of a balloon. But it still makes up pretty much 100% of the surface area ON a balloon.
Similarly bridgmanite is pretty rare on the surface, even if it is the most common by far when you start looking further down.
video chat ? Where I send someone a web link? That's goofy.
And it doesn't work with Safari or Internet Explorer ... so most people won't even be able to click on the link, and it doensn't work with iOS devices... because no firefox and doesn't work with safari... so... useless? Why is this a core feature?
This should be an addon... that almost nobody uses instead of a feature that almost nobody uses.
At least as an addon, any security issues inherent to a feature that lets the browser turn on your camera and microphone aren't part of the browser.
I love firefox.. I really do, and the alternatives are all far more awful, so I don't see myself switching, but I just don't see the point of this at all.
When you have people on the board of directors that have actually seriously contemplated commiting Filicide-Suicide
I'd be more surprised if none of them had contemplated it. I've seen what severe forms of autism can do to a family. Is it really at all a stretch that having a child with special needs, and the pain, frustration, stress, pressure, and emotional drain that puts on everyone would result in people thinking along those lines.
Sure autism spectrum is often present in geniuses and eccentrics and other people who no doubt the world is richer for having. And it is such broad spectrum that arguably everyone is somewhere on it. But at the other end of the spectrum there is a lot of real misery, and people trapped in unbearable situations, that cannot lead normal lives, that require round the clock care, and assistance with even basic rudimentary functions, even that get violent, creating a financial and emotional drain on caregivers who rarely get adequate support.
I'd probably contemplate it too.
I suppose, but I never write such copius notes with my math that cursive would have any real benefit over printing.
Really, I even did my 3hr university exams in English Lit, and other subjects where there was a lot of long form / essay type answers using printed letters instead of cursive and had no difficulty finishing within the time limits.
rather than going through the proper procedures to change the highest law of the land (constitutional amendments) is considered a good thing in "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
I agree with you. Amendments for the win.
But what practical difference would it make if they amended free speech in the constitution to disallow death threats and bomb threats? vs what has been done?
Don't complain next time the NSA, the TSA, etc. violates the constitution.
Why exactly not?
You are the problem. You want a government with unlimited power, whether you admit it or not.
Government has the power to amend the constitution. You want a government able to do that do you not? So then you too want a government with unlimited power, because it can amend the consitutition to give it any power it wants.
The government has whatever authority over us we collectively give it.
Checks and Balances are the mechanisms by which we decide how to define that authority, but at the end of the day all that matters is our collective will or lack thereof.
You are the problem. You want a government with unlimited power, whether you admit it or not.
Typing is faster except if you're writing a mathematical text
or anything that is NOT simple plain text
True. But if your writing equations down your not using cursive.
The balance goes to the free speech rights 100%. No law can exist which can override someone's right to free speech.
Fortunately, only a few lunatics like yourself wish that were the case.
Turns out the rest of society thinks there are quite a few edge cases.
Phoning someone to make death threats is one.
Calling in a fake bomb threat is another.
You may disagree. That's your right. But the rest of us are on board with these restrictions.
Now somewhere between phoning in a death threat, and free speech we have a writing a plausible death threat in the form of a rap lyric... so its quite right for the courts to look at it and decide if really is a death threat threat or not.
Lots of rap lyrics are full of threats. I don't think i've ever seen one that anyone would take seriously though... so far. That doesn't mean this case isn't real.
she will indeed sleep in a separate bed
Yes, In a separate bed. In a separate house. With a new boyfriend.
That's an interesting point too... but the disadvantage to swype is they can't fall back to pen and paper if they don't have a tablet.
Exactly. They are "like a common carrier". And too often we think of them as common carriers. But they have fought tooth and nail to have their cake and eat it too... the providers want all the common carrier exemptions but none of the restrictions, and they are NOT common carriers.
As you say, anything that pushes them over the hump would be a good thing.
I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March?
Yes, Mavericks. Not sure what freudian slip caused that.
Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on.
http://support.apple.com/en-us...
Ok, that's interesting.
Now Check:
http://support.apple.com/en-us...
"
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
"
They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.
Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.
Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.
I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".
Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.
People buying servers do not expect support to drop that quickly. Just because apple disco'd producing the line doesn't mean that support for the ones they did sell should end quicker.
Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract.
Nobody said they did. But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.
Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.
I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.
a) Longer HDMI and USB cables should not create a propagation delay, unless you are using repeaters. Get the unit at close enough that you can get away without repeaters.
Seriously, electricity propagates through copper at ~2/3rd the speed of light. You are NOT noticing the nanoseconds from an extra 10 feet of cable.
b) Water cooling. Don't fear it. If noise is the issue switch to water cooling. Its not hard at all for the CPU and graphics card. And good near silent power supplies aren't hard to fine.
If you aren't overclocking, or doing anything stupid overkill (and you really don't need to be running quad sli if you are just driving a 1080p hdtv) its not hard to make a virtually silent living room gaming PC.
Me personally, I have a near silent inexpensive mid-level gaming PC in the living room for games, mostly played with an xbox controller... but I still maintain a proper gaming pc in my office for FPS/RTS stuff. The parts from the downstairs pc filter into the upgrade pc as I upgrade. So the upstairs PC is always a year or so behind... no big deal. Hardware upgrade cycles have long since reached the point where you don't need a new video card every year.
OTOH - Long division is the only manual method I use. I have a CS/Maths degree but it's so long since I did short division I would have to look up the algorithm.
I couldn't remember what short division was either... so I looked it up... and I honestly can't tell it apart from how I do long division....
http://www.wikihow.com/Do-Shor...
And equally honestly, I'm not entirely sure we should be teaching kids in gradeschool to do long division anymore either.
It seems to me that it should be simplified to estimation techniques, and actual calculations if necessary done by calculator.
Long division would then be a high school or university technique - where studying "how it works" is the emphasis rather than rote-learning the algorithm to actually use it to evaluate divisions.
Much like square roots. They used to teach kids this algorithm to find square roots. (I have an old textbook that covers it...)
http://www.homeschoolmath.net/...
They don't teach this anymore. If you need a root today, you use a calculator, until you reach high school where you start looking at quadratic roots, or the intro calculus stuff might look at newtons method.
I think we're pretty close to the long division algorithm being taught the same way. The long division algorithm is difficult to use... requires guessing each round, and really provides no real insight into division or number theory to a gradeschool kid. So its only value is they need it to do division.
Unless they have a calculator. Which at this point they all do. And only people like you or me with CS and math degrees ever even willingly attempt manually calculating 15443 / 225 nevermind 4,535,422,456 / 3,235,442 manually.
Hell, I pull out a calculator to figure out if $17.99 / 750g or $2.49 / 100 g is a better price. Practically nobody does even fairly grocery shopping calculations manually.
So maybe the long division technique should be moved as a crucial rote-technique taught in grade 3-4-5 to a number theory interest topic taught in high school or beyond.
That's quite interesting, but to me instead of it being a defense of cursive ... it raises the point that if we are going to teach 'writing' as a computer input mechanism, perhaps we should be teaching kids shorthand instead, and/or developing shorthand techniques that are designed to lend them selves well to recognition software. (e.g. maybe not Pitman or Gregg 'as they are' but developed specifically with computer recognition in mind.
That would be a much more useful skill to have then cursive.
Written communication is the only thing that will keep working throughout history and they want to stop teaching it.
They aren't going to stop teaching printing. They are going to stop teaching cursive.
In highschool my cursive was illegible enough that I switched back to printing for notes, assignments, and exams.
I would be with you 100% if if they were going to stop teaching printing, and if all note taking and draft writing, math homehork, spelling tests, and everything else was going to be done on a keyboard. But they aren't doing that. Nobody is suggesting that.
They're getting rid of cursive. It's not a big deal.
I don't know if that might be true of some iOS mobile devices or where that FUD comes from, but my six year old Mac from 2008
Well, I guess if Yosemite runs on YOUR six year old Mac you must be right, and anything anyone else says must be FUD.
Then again, OSX March was released in 2013, and dropped support for early-2009 13-inch Mac Book Pros.
So, just to make it perfectly clear to you, they've ALREADY dropped support for a laptop that's a year NEWER than your computer, being dropped by OS that's already a year and a half old.
Mavericks (and Yosemite) also dropped support for any Xserve's older than 2009 (so server class hardware got dropped after just 4 years of support), and any mac mini's older than 2009 got dropped as well.
Millions of Macs from 2008s stopped being supported over a year and half a go. You got lucky.
No censoring is happening. By doing this they have ensured that every student in that class will go find the missing page and read it.
You seriously overestimate how badly teenagers want to read text books.
Even telling them they "can't" read it, isn't likely to motivate most of them.