Perhaps because the number of students admitted to various colleges has increased over the past decade? My alma mater is currently expanding its dorm capacity yet again, the third time in just 10 years. It is not that the quality of students graduating high school has decreased; it is that the number of students accepted to college has increased, which necessarily means the standards are lower (at least at moderately to highly competitive schools).
Why focus on Obama? I was in New York's public school system a long time before Obama was president, and I can tell you that what you are describing is almost an improvement. Back then, the subjects had been dumbed down to their lowest possible point (yes, we are seeing an improvement now), and high school graduates were having trouble with basic arithmetic. When we were not "learning" how to read and add, we were being taught about how crack dealers would try to sell drugs to us (even though we were 4th graders), how strangers with vans were plotting to abduct us, and were then shown world maps that still had the USSR on them (as late as 1999). And yes, we still had the publisher sweetheart deals that we have today -- but the editions were >= 4, rather than 7.
Before you whine about the current state of affairs, just consider how much of an improvement we have today.
Yes, because it is normal to expect third party kernel hacks to survive kernel updates. After all, if you apply a third party hack to the Windows or Mac OS kernels, it always survives updates.
He did not lose any configuration; all he had to do was reapply the hack (e.g. recompile ndiswrapper for the new kernel). Ndiswrapper is not just some configuration tweak that he was using, it is a kernel hack that allows the kernel to load Windows drivers. If he booted the older kernel, with the hack applied, then he would have continued to have his card work. Nothing was lost, he just has to apply the hack to each new kernel revision that he runs -- as anyone using any other OS, with any other kernel hacks, would have to do.
Distro maintainers have a habit of either not clearly stating where documentation is installed (/usr/share/doc?/usr/local/share/doc?/usr/doc? Maybe somewhere else entirely?) or not bothering to install documentation at all. Either way, they must be instructed to clean up their act, because even experienced users and developers need documentation.
This may be more of a legal issue; Microsoft and Apple both have multiple patents on font rendering. It may be the case that the OpenOffice.org developers actually wrote code to render fonts properly, but had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
Now, here is a dose of reality: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, does not work smoothly or reliably. This is true regardless of what OS or kernel you use, and Linux is no exception.
Ndiswrapper is a temporary solution that injects Windows drivers into the Linux kernel; would you expect a Linux driver to work smoothly under Windows? Why do people think that Linux is magically going to do things that they would never expect Windows or Mac OS to do?
For everyone who is complaining about hardware that does not have a Linux driver: I created a few pieces of hardware as an undergrad (engineering projects), and only write Linux drivers for them. Please, plug them into your Windows or Mac OS machine, and see how well they work. If it mysteriously "just works," I will personally write drivers for your wireless card.
Not really the same issue that we are seeing here.
If you want anonymity, STAY AWAY from blogging services, and more generally, stay away from the web. If you really have to use the web (i.e. because it is more popular than an anonymity-friendly system like Usenet), use a damned proxy server from a different jurisdiction.
To be fair, 300 is not a large number of people, at least not on the scale of Internet comments. Is it likely that all 300 have relevant, original information? No. Is it within the realm of possibility that 295 of the 300 got their information from the same 5 people, and that those 5 people have relevant information? Absolutely.
Perhaps, although to give the guy (or should I say, his lawyer) the benefit of the doubt, it is entirely possible that of those 300 people, 295 have information about actual witness. Rumors can spread pretty fast -- I would not be surprise if, within a 24 hour people, 300 people heard from "a friend of a friend" some detail about an emotionally sensitive subject like the murder of a child. IANAL so I cannot comment on whether or not this sort of investigation has a precedent or is even legal, but the guy does deserve a fair defense, and I can see this being part of a defense strategy.
All this time, I thought the iPhone was just an overhyped, overpriced smartphone that explodes. Now I see that, incredibly, it is doing some good: a major cell phone company is actually upgrading its network, after all these years of the US falling behind other parts of the world!
Lasers are used in war all the time, and always carry the risk of causing blindness. Any weapon carries that risk; even a.22, shot at a certain angle, could blind a target.
I believe the purpose of the Geneva conventions was to prohibit weapons that are intended to cause blindness, not simply weapons that could potentially blind a person.
"Semi-rational" is a stretch. Basically, this is affirming what people said would happen: if a takedown notice is received, the hosting company must assume that it is valid or face liability. If I want to take your website offline, I just claim that it is violating my copyright, and the hosting company must take it down before finding out whether or not there was an actual violation. How is that anything approaching rational?
Yes, some people are stupid. All the more reason to design phones -- which are commonly slipped into pockets -- to survive various sorts of non-ideal treatment.
If you are designing a system for a non-technical crowd, you need to give it relatively wide tolerances. Non-technical folks may very well believe that since a commercial shows a netbook being stuck in someone's back pocket, the netbook can survive being sat on. Warnings are insufficient: "Nobody ever reads the manual." If a device must be treated with the utmost care, it does not belong in the hands of the average consumer, who will undoubtedly mistreat it.
Again, it is a matter of engineering. Consumers mistreat their devices. The more portable the device is, the more people mistreat it. A cell phone is extremely portable, and if you designing a cell phone, you should design it to withstand the conditions that people subject other cell phones to: pockets, bags/briefcases/backpacks, dropping, hot environments, vibrations, dust, moisture, etc. No, it does not need ludicrous tolerances; it does not need to operate underwater or inside a volcano, but if it stops working because it was stored in a pocket on a 95 degree day, it is a poorly designed phone.
If people are sitting on their phones, it is not "common sense." Frankly, the fact that Apple is showing it in someone's pocket as part of the advertising would seem to indicate that they expect people to have the phone in their pocket; thus, they should design the phone to be sit-resistant. If Apple's engineers thought that the phone would be stored in a pristine environment, then they neglected to do research to find out how people actually carry their phones around -- not taking the time to find out how a system will be used is just bad engineering. Blaming your customers for your bad engineering is bad business.
The Branch Davidians' use of.50 caliber guns is a matter of controversy on the official record of the incident. The matter of them having stockpiled such weapons is not really disputed, and they had also stockpiled ammunition for those weapons.
I am as opposed to the Chinese government's crackdown on Falun Gong as I would be to a US government crackdown on Mormonism. The active members of Falun Gong may be weirdos, their beliefs may be weird, but there is no evidence that they are a threat to anyone (as opposed to, say, the Branch Davidians, who were preparing to go to war with the United States and had a stockpile of guns and ammunition, including several.50 caliber guns).
This next sentence is intended to be an insult: you sound like a shill for the Chinese government. The Chinese government is known to send such people abroad to keep up appearances.
Here in the United States, you are also free to do what you want, as long as you do not break the law. We just happen to have a different set of laws, which are less restrictive with regard to what information you are allowed to access, but more restrictive with regard to which information you are allowed to share with others.
My guess is that the laptops were purchased in some disorganized fashion -- maybe there were some interns in the governor's office who needed computers for their work, and the orders were processed twice.
One would think that China would be more interested in states like New York, Illinois, or California -- states with a lot of big banks and financial companies. Or, perhaps a state like Colorado, where there are major military bases. What is in West Virginia that would be of interest to the Chinese?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because the number of students admitted to various colleges has increased over the past decade? My alma mater is currently expanding its dorm capacity yet again, the third time in just 10 years. It is not that the quality of students graduating high school has decreased; it is that the number of students accepted to college has increased, which necessarily means the standards are lower (at least at moderately to highly competitive schools).
Why focus on Obama? I was in New York's public school system a long time before Obama was president, and I can tell you that what you are describing is almost an improvement. Back then, the subjects had been dumbed down to their lowest possible point (yes, we are seeing an improvement now), and high school graduates were having trouble with basic arithmetic. When we were not "learning" how to read and add, we were being taught about how crack dealers would try to sell drugs to us (even though we were 4th graders), how strangers with vans were plotting to abduct us, and were then shown world maps that still had the USSR on them (as late as 1999). And yes, we still had the publisher sweetheart deals that we have today -- but the editions were >= 4, rather than 7.
Before you whine about the current state of affairs, just consider how much of an improvement we have today.
Let the people run the country? Which country were you thinking of? It could not be the USA...
Yes, because it is normal to expect third party kernel hacks to survive kernel updates. After all, if you apply a third party hack to the Windows or Mac OS kernels, it always survives updates.
He did not lose any configuration; all he had to do was reapply the hack (e.g. recompile ndiswrapper for the new kernel). Ndiswrapper is not just some configuration tweak that he was using, it is a kernel hack that allows the kernel to load Windows drivers. If he booted the older kernel, with the hack applied, then he would have continued to have his card work. Nothing was lost, he just has to apply the hack to each new kernel revision that he runs -- as anyone using any other OS, with any other kernel hacks, would have to do.
Distro maintainers have a habit of either not clearly stating where documentation is installed (/usr/share/doc? /usr/local/share/doc? /usr/doc? Maybe somewhere else entirely?) or not bothering to install documentation at all. Either way, they must be instructed to clean up their act, because even experienced users and developers need documentation.
This may be more of a legal issue; Microsoft and Apple both have multiple patents on font rendering. It may be the case that the OpenOffice.org developers actually wrote code to render fonts properly, but had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
This is what you expected: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, to magically work.
Now, here is a dose of reality: Not-supported hardware, for which there is an experimental driver at best, does not work smoothly or reliably. This is true regardless of what OS or kernel you use, and Linux is no exception.
Ndiswrapper is a temporary solution that injects Windows drivers into the Linux kernel; would you expect a Linux driver to work smoothly under Windows? Why do people think that Linux is magically going to do things that they would never expect Windows or Mac OS to do?
For everyone who is complaining about hardware that does not have a Linux driver: I created a few pieces of hardware as an undergrad (engineering projects), and only write Linux drivers for them. Please, plug them into your Windows or Mac OS machine, and see how well they work. If it mysteriously "just works," I will personally write drivers for your wireless card.
But...but...I thought that we were paying for quality when we bought Apple products...uh...ugh...[head explodes]...
To be fair, 300 is not a large number of people, at least not on the scale of Internet comments. Is it likely that all 300 have relevant, original information? No. Is it within the realm of possibility that 295 of the 300 got their information from the same 5 people, and that those 5 people have relevant information? Absolutely.
Perhaps, although to give the guy (or should I say, his lawyer) the benefit of the doubt, it is entirely possible that of those 300 people, 295 have information about actual witness. Rumors can spread pretty fast -- I would not be surprise if, within a 24 hour people, 300 people heard from "a friend of a friend" some detail about an emotionally sensitive subject like the murder of a child. IANAL so I cannot comment on whether or not this sort of investigation has a precedent or is even legal, but the guy does deserve a fair defense, and I can see this being part of a defense strategy.
Which, of course, explains how C++ was standardized, and why very few programs are written in Ada...
If I write a book, I want to be able to sell it and get paid for it. I cannot patent the contents of a book. What makes software any different?
All this time, I thought the iPhone was just an overhyped, overpriced smartphone that explodes. Now I see that, incredibly, it is doing some good: a major cell phone company is actually upgrading its network, after all these years of the US falling behind other parts of the world!
Lasers are used in war all the time, and always carry the risk of causing blindness. Any weapon carries that risk; even a .22, shot at a certain angle, could blind a target.
I believe the purpose of the Geneva conventions was to prohibit weapons that are intended to cause blindness, not simply weapons that could potentially blind a person.
"Semi-rational" is a stretch. Basically, this is affirming what people said would happen: if a takedown notice is received, the hosting company must assume that it is valid or face liability. If I want to take your website offline, I just claim that it is violating my copyright, and the hosting company must take it down before finding out whether or not there was an actual violation. How is that anything approaching rational?
Except that instead of affecting one organization, this outage is affecting hundreds at a time.
Again, it is a matter of engineering. Consumers mistreat their devices. The more portable the device is, the more people mistreat it. A cell phone is extremely portable, and if you designing a cell phone, you should design it to withstand the conditions that people subject other cell phones to: pockets, bags/briefcases/backpacks, dropping, hot environments, vibrations, dust, moisture, etc. No, it does not need ludicrous tolerances; it does not need to operate underwater or inside a volcano, but if it stops working because it was stored in a pocket on a 95 degree day, it is a poorly designed phone.
If people are sitting on their phones, it is not "common sense." Frankly, the fact that Apple is showing it in someone's pocket as part of the advertising would seem to indicate that they expect people to have the phone in their pocket; thus, they should design the phone to be sit-resistant. If Apple's engineers thought that the phone would be stored in a pristine environment, then they neglected to do research to find out how people actually carry their phones around -- not taking the time to find out how a system will be used is just bad engineering. Blaming your customers for your bad engineering is bad business.
The Branch Davidians' use of .50 caliber guns is a matter of controversy on the official record of the incident. The matter of them having stockpiled such weapons is not really disputed, and they had also stockpiled ammunition for those weapons.
I am as opposed to the Chinese government's crackdown on Falun Gong as I would be to a US government crackdown on Mormonism. The active members of Falun Gong may be weirdos, their beliefs may be weird, but there is no evidence that they are a threat to anyone (as opposed to, say, the Branch Davidians, who were preparing to go to war with the United States and had a stockpile of guns and ammunition, including several .50 caliber guns).
This next sentence is intended to be an insult: you sound like a shill for the Chinese government. The Chinese government is known to send such people abroad to keep up appearances.
Here in the United States, you are also free to do what you want, as long as you do not break the law. We just happen to have a different set of laws, which are less restrictive with regard to what information you are allowed to access, but more restrictive with regard to which information you are allowed to share with others.
My guess is that the laptops were purchased in some disorganized fashion -- maybe there were some interns in the governor's office who needed computers for their work, and the orders were processed twice.
One would think that China would be more interested in states like New York, Illinois, or California -- states with a lot of big banks and financial companies. Or, perhaps a state like Colorado, where there are major military bases. What is in West Virginia that would be of interest to the Chinese?
Actually, there are still cases of complex documents in proprietary formats that OOo does not open properly...