"In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on schedule and almost ready for its October 2018 launch date."
This is not entirely accurate. JWST is primarily infrared- it won't cover the full visible spectrum. Hubble will still be required to see anything below yellow/green wavelengths, including blue down through ultraviolet, where JWST can't see at all. It will certainly let us see farther, and through the dust, but it's not the be all end all of space telescopes.
Speculation is that AT&T sanctioned tethering is coming in iPhone/iPhone OS 4. I see this as AT&T preparing for the inevitable onslaught of people who would use an "unlimited" data plan as their primary internet connection. The grandfathered unlimited plan will likely have tethering disabled, while the limited plans would allow it. I use my phone extensively, and I usually end up around 300-400mb/month, and the ability to tether would likely increase that substantially.
With the official announcement likely coming early next week at WWDC, it makes sense for AT&T to get this out there now before people rush out to purchase a new phone/plan.
Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program.
They more than likely have figured something out- listen to the fscking engineers that designed and built the vehicle. The only two shuttle failures to date were caused by management's unwillingness to listen to engineer feedback. With Challenger, the manufacturer of the O-ring in the solid rocket booster warned NASA the O-ring was NOT rated to launch under the cold conditions of that day. Managers effectively said "don't worry about it" and launched anyway. With Columbia, engineers saw the foam strike on launch video, and asked management for military/hubble satellite photography to check for damage to the leading edge of the wing. Managers effectively said "it was foam, what damage could it possibly have done, don't worry about it" without understanding that a block of foam traveling 400 miles per hour has some serious kinetic energy, especially when it hits the relatively delicate carbon-carbon tiles.
Bottom line is, both of those tragedies could have been avoided, if the managers actually considered the dangers engineers presented to them. If Richard Branson and Virgin figure out how to listen to the people working with the designs and hardware when there are potential problems, with a solid enough vehicle they likely could have a perfect launch record.
People like to spout off the "Health care in this country is about the best in the world" without really thinking it through. What it really means is "Doctors, hospitals, and treatments in this country are about the best in the world." The original statement makes no mention of how many people can afford the "best health care in the world." Sure, the care is available, but what good does it do when it is prohibitively expensive to so many people.
What people don't understand is while the US may have world class doctors/hospitals, they are largely inaccessible without the means to pay for it. With insurance in this country as screwed up as it is, it's no wonder the US ranks so low on life expectancy/infant mortality/maternal mortality.
If you're going to complain about the challenges in WoW, please tell me you've done all the hard modes in 25 man Ulduar, including Mimiron (Firefighter), Freya +3 Elders (Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood), Algalon, and Yogg-Saron with 0 keepers up.
Unless you are/were in a top 100 guild, you don't have Algalon or Yogg+0 down in 25 player mode, because they are exceptionally challenging, and dare I say, fun encounters that actually require a raid with some semblance of skill/attention/situational awareness.
And for Colosseum, they're only releasing one boss per week on the normal (easy) difficulty 25 man. Once all the bosses are out, and it's been cleared, the Heroic 25 man (hard mode) difficulty unlocks, and until you clear that, there is no room to complain about challenges.
I'm sure Icecrown will be the same- an easy 25 man mode so the casual players get to see content, and a heroic 25 man mode for those looking for a challenge and better loot.
I do find it funny when people complain about content being too hard (OMG NERF!), and when Blizzard releases easy modes for new encounters, those same people complain about things being too easy. Can't have your epic cake and eat it too.
So then the obvious solution is to take this to the people who do make the law- Congress. Write letters showing how blatantly contradictory the law is in this case. Ask them how it's possible to exercise fair use with a law preventing distribution of the tools allowing fair use, citing the RealDVD case. Ask for suggestions on how to legally time shift a DVD for watching on a netbook, or how to make a backup of a $30 DVD so you can still enjoy what you paid for when it gets dropped/scratched/eaten/rolled over by an office chair.
"Ken Stanborough, 47, from Liverpool, dropped his 11-year-old daughter Ellie's iPod Touch last month. "It made a hissing noise," he said. "I could feel it getting hotter in my hand, and I thought I could see vapour". Mr Stanborough said he threw the device out of his back door, where "within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10ft in the air"."
Emphasis mine. The article doesn't go on to elaborate how far of a drop it was, but I'd imagine it must have been significant for the impact to rupture the Li-poly cells. If it was a reasonable drop, say 3-4 feet, off a desk, or slipped out of his hands to the floor, they may have an argument against Apple for the design of the device, or a manufacturing defect. If it was dropped down some stairs, or if he was upset with his daughter, grabbed the ipod and threw it across the room, or something beyond a "normal" drop distance, Apple shouldn't have any liability at all.
True, but there are cases where the diagnostic isn't correct, or the tech's lie to either get more money out of you, or because they are that dumb. Like if you went to a mechanic saying your car was running rough, and the mechanic said you needed a whole new engine, when all you really needed was an oil change.
It's one thing when people say they're overcharged for paying a $50 diagnostic fee to figure something out that they couldn't.
It's another when a technician says you need a new motherboard, when really all that's wrong is the hard drive cable was unplugged.
I deal with that all the time at my shop, where people bring their machines to Best Buy or wherever, and come to us for a second opinion.
"If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they'd open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don't want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field."
It seems the community internet operating books will be transparent, so people can see what costs are, and where the money is going. It's a public service, not a for-profit business like Time Warner is.
While it's true a monopoly is generally anti-consumer, a publicly open/owned monopoly is far less likely to be in a position to price gouge for crap service, where the larger, established private monopolies already are.
This is true. In my school district, programs like FIRST (http://www.usfirst.org) are denounced, underfunded, and/or ignored. The district has no problem financing $20,000 trips for cheerleaders to attend national competitions, but can't spring $5,000 for team registration to inspire students into science, math, and technology fields. Many of the students in FIRST actually do go on to colleges and universities to become engineers or scientists, and most of them do so as a direct result of their involvement. How many cheerleaders graduate high school to become professional cheerleaders?
The author of TFA's assumption is that Linus is "The Big Cheese" (TM) of all things Linux, and as such has influence over everything carrying the name. The big thing the author doesn't get is that Linux isn't one entity- it's the sum of a bunch of smaller entities working together. The kernel is different from the boot loader (grub/lilo), which is different from the graphical server (X), which is different from the desktop manager (kde/gnome), which is different from all the other apps running on top. The people that package it all together into distributions make it a usable operating system- Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandriva, etc.
Linus doesn't really have any direct control over the distributions themselves, at least in terms of what features or programs they choose to bundle with the kernel to make usable. As such, there are distros specialized for just about every possible use- as a general desktop, server, embedded, small footprint, low power, etc. The versatility comes as a result of how the kernel was designed, even if it wasn't specifically designed for versatility.
It's time the Linux community finally wakes up and decides which way it will turn -- towards its roots or towards the features that the general public really wants. Until then, we'll have the old guard spewing their ideals, while the momentum of the operating system carries it away from its very foundation.
There are distributions going both ways- simple and complex. Look to something like Ubuntu/Kubuntu for a more windows-esque desktop experience out of the box. Look to something like Slackware to get "towards it's roots." The biggest strength of linux is that it isn't pinholed into one specific use or expectation, as the author asserts it is/was/should be. He doesn't "get it."
you have to call MS up and tell them you're changing the motherboard
Therein lies the problem. What's keeping Microsoft from arbitrarily deciding to drop XP activation? Say two years from now Microsoft's upper management sees XP is still the dominant OS, while Vista sales are still disappointing. Are there any contracts or legal issues forcing Microsoft into keeping the XP activation servers online? Or can they simply pull the plug and say "Sorry, XP is no longer available. Buy Vista or screw off."
That brings up an interesting question. When you, I, or anyone purchases music, the purchaser becomes the licensee of said content, right? Generally speaking, only the licensee is authorized to listen to the music. What if a corporation/non-profit/non-singular entity or group purchases the music? If the group itself is licensee, do all members share the license?
How large of a music library are you working with? I've got ~54,000 songs (around 350gb), and Amarok is a pain in the ass. Every time I exit Amarok or restart my computer, every time I load it back up it needs to rebuild it's playlist, which takes 7-8 minutes with a library that big (and this is a 500gb SATA drive on an Athlon 64 3200 with 1.5gb RAM). While it's playing, every few minutes the computer will slow to a crawl for about 10 seconds, presumably while Amarok finds and caches the next song to play, which is kind of irritating after a while.
When it works, it works well, and I love the features of Amarok, but for large quantities of music, it seems there's either some work to be done to improve performance/stability, or I've just got too much music for it's database to handle.
For now, I'm just using XMMS. It takes around a minute to load the full library into it's playlist, and I get no slowdown at all while playing.
What sort of parents are so out of touch with their children (especially underage), that they allow this sort of thing to happen? Parents should always be aware of where their kids are and take some friggin responsibility, rather than let TV and the internet raise them. "I left my kid in front of the computer while I went out shopping with some friends, assuming my kid was responsible enough to make mature decisions at a young age... now my kid is in danger because the interweb is evil so I'm suing."
Computer != parent. Take an interest in your kids and their activities, and they won't have to resort to meeting up with "online friends" for attention.
Where I voted this morning, we had paper ballots that were fed into an optical scan machine (by Diebold). The ballot was handed to me after I checked in, and each polling station had a hidden desktop with a felt-tip pen. All I had to do was fill in the circles corresponding to whatever candidate I wished to cast my vote for (much like a standardized test). When I was done filling in the circles, I took it over to the big machine, where a poll worker watched me insert it, and made sure the machine processed it correctly.
Seemed simple enough. The ballot itself has no personally identifiable information on it, and if there's a dispute or need for a manual recount, the paper ballots are presumably easy enough to get out of the machine. So these machines do have a paper trail, no potential for miscalibrated LCD screens, and have a ballot that's generally hard to screw up (fill in the circle).
The only way to really screw up a system like that is in the optical recognition software, which I'd hope is tested by poll workers before the polls actually open. And even then, with the paper ballots being retained inside, it's easy enough to do a manual recount.
Before this year we had mechanical voting machines, where you'd have to walk in, close the curtain by pulling a big lever, push all the levers down for the candidates you'd like to vote for, then pull the big lever back again to open the curtain and cast the votes. That was also easy enough, but mechanical machines like that are prone to more common failures, which was the primary reason for going with the electronic machines.
I understand what you're saying. I know the way civilization functions- each person has a specialty, and does their own job. Communities are made up of multiple specialists who exchange goods and services for the common good of everyone. You're missing my point. I'm not saying everyone who uses a computer needs to learn assembly, or C, or basic, or java. You don't need that to run a computer. Just like you don't need to know how to grow food to eat.
Here's a more proper analogy:
I'm not a programmer. I don't write code for a living. I'm not a farmer. I don't grow food for a living (but I do have a small vegetable garden).
I know how to work on computers, and have learned enough of how they operate to work with linux. I do work with food, and have learned enough to pick up ingredients to cook myself a decent meal.
Just like you can learn to cook food by reading a recipe, you can learn to use linux/windows/OS of choice by reading the documentation that comes with it.
Think about a plumber. Earning $50/hour. If that plumber has to spend 20 hours learning "how his computer works (ie: getting Linux working)", that's $1000. That plumber would have to be a total idiot to waste his time dicking with his computer.
I'll agree spending 20 hours dicking with anything would be a waste of time if there's something more important to be done. But consider this- and it does happe all the time in my line of work. Say the plumber has to print some invoices to mail out to his customers to bill for work done. The printer spits out nothing but blank paper. Rather than read the troubleshooting section of the printer manual where it says "if printouts are very light or blank, change print cartridges," he brings it to my store (wasting an hour of his time to label all the cables so he knows where they all go, unplug it, and bring it down)and says "the printer doesn't work.. I don't know anything about computers so I'm hoping you can help me." A print cartridge and 1 minute later, the printer's working fine. The plumber pays the bill and spends another hour hauling it back to his office and plugging all the cables back in so he can get back to work.
Would it not have been worth it for him to make an effort to do some self-troubleshooting? Would spending even half an hour reading the manual to find out he only needed new cartridges been worth the 2 hours of time he wasted bringing it down?
I enjoy eating at restaraunts whenever I can, but I can also cook up a nice meal when I need to. Working with a computer without any fundamental knowledge can be just as dangerous as not knowing the difference between cooking oil and bleach. While it may not be deadly, it can be devastating, especially if you any sort of financial transactions with a spyware infested computer.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
Clean a man's spyware riddled computer, he's good until he visits his favorite porn site again. Teach a man how and why he gets infected, and show him alternatives and methods to stay clean, then I don't have to deal with the "wtf i just got this cleaned up a month ago how come i got popups again."
Like I said, it's the desire to learn people are lacking. That's the real problem. It's not "relearning to check your email." It's learning how to not screw it up.
Then again, if you're like most of the people around the area my repair shop is, I'm sure you don't mind dropping $100 every time there's a relatively minor problem with a computer you paid $500 for.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't be the only one who read the title, went to Google, and searched for "France Being Raided For Unpaid Taxes".
"In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on schedule and almost ready for its October 2018 launch date."
This is not entirely accurate. JWST is primarily infrared- it won't cover the full visible spectrum. Hubble will still be required to see anything below yellow/green wavelengths, including blue down through ultraviolet, where JWST can't see at all. It will certainly let us see farther, and through the dust, but it's not the be all end all of space telescopes.
I'd be disappointed in Slashdot if I were the only one. Glad to see others thinking the same.
"It's an inanimate carbon rod!!" http://i.imgur.com/ijjIh.png
There were a few bones thrown our way
The concession of the Public Option was a fairly large bone. It was one of the few things I looked forward to in health care reform.
Speculation is that AT&T sanctioned tethering is coming in iPhone/iPhone OS 4. I see this as AT&T preparing for the inevitable onslaught of people who would use an "unlimited" data plan as their primary internet connection. The grandfathered unlimited plan will likely have tethering disabled, while the limited plans would allow it. I use my phone extensively, and I usually end up around 300-400mb/month, and the ability to tether would likely increase that substantially. With the official announcement likely coming early next week at WWDC, it makes sense for AT&T to get this out there now before people rush out to purchase a new phone/plan.
Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program.
They more than likely have figured something out- listen to the fscking engineers that designed and built the vehicle. The only two shuttle failures to date were caused by management's unwillingness to listen to engineer feedback. With Challenger, the manufacturer of the O-ring in the solid rocket booster warned NASA the O-ring was NOT rated to launch under the cold conditions of that day. Managers effectively said "don't worry about it" and launched anyway. With Columbia, engineers saw the foam strike on launch video, and asked management for military/hubble satellite photography to check for damage to the leading edge of the wing. Managers effectively said "it was foam, what damage could it possibly have done, don't worry about it" without understanding that a block of foam traveling 400 miles per hour has some serious kinetic energy, especially when it hits the relatively delicate carbon-carbon tiles.
Bottom line is, both of those tragedies could have been avoided, if the managers actually considered the dangers engineers presented to them. If Richard Branson and Virgin figure out how to listen to the people working with the designs and hardware when there are potential problems, with a solid enough vehicle they likely could have a perfect launch record.
Only fitting after he knighted Robin Hood. "Kneel, Robin of Loxley. And arise, Sir Robin of Loxley."
People like to spout off the "Health care in this country is about the best in the world" without really thinking it through. What it really means is "Doctors, hospitals, and treatments in this country are about the best in the world." The original statement makes no mention of how many people can afford the "best health care in the world." Sure, the care is available, but what good does it do when it is prohibitively expensive to so many people.
What people don't understand is while the US may have world class doctors/hospitals, they are largely inaccessible without the means to pay for it. With insurance in this country as screwed up as it is, it's no wonder the US ranks so low on life expectancy/infant mortality/maternal mortality.
If you're going to complain about the challenges in WoW, please tell me you've done all the hard modes in 25 man Ulduar, including Mimiron (Firefighter), Freya +3 Elders (Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood), Algalon, and Yogg-Saron with 0 keepers up.
Unless you are/were in a top 100 guild, you don't have Algalon or Yogg+0 down in 25 player mode, because they are exceptionally challenging, and dare I say, fun encounters that actually require a raid with some semblance of skill/attention/situational awareness.
And for Colosseum, they're only releasing one boss per week on the normal (easy) difficulty 25 man. Once all the bosses are out, and it's been cleared, the Heroic 25 man (hard mode) difficulty unlocks, and until you clear that, there is no room to complain about challenges.
I'm sure Icecrown will be the same- an easy 25 man mode so the casual players get to see content, and a heroic 25 man mode for those looking for a challenge and better loot.
I do find it funny when people complain about content being too hard (OMG NERF!), and when Blizzard releases easy modes for new encounters, those same people complain about things being too easy. Can't have your epic cake and eat it too.
So then the obvious solution is to take this to the people who do make the law- Congress. Write letters showing how blatantly contradictory the law is in this case. Ask them how it's possible to exercise fair use with a law preventing distribution of the tools allowing fair use, citing the RealDVD case. Ask for suggestions on how to legally time shift a DVD for watching on a netbook, or how to make a backup of a $30 DVD so you can still enjoy what you paid for when it gets dropped/scratched/eaten/rolled over by an office chair.
From the article-
"Ken Stanborough, 47, from Liverpool, dropped his 11-year-old daughter Ellie's iPod Touch last month. "It made a hissing noise," he said. "I could feel it getting hotter in my hand, and I thought I could see vapour". Mr Stanborough said he threw the device out of his back door, where "within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10ft in the air"."
Emphasis mine. The article doesn't go on to elaborate how far of a drop it was, but I'd imagine it must have been significant for the impact to rupture the Li-poly cells. If it was a reasonable drop, say 3-4 feet, off a desk, or slipped out of his hands to the floor, they may have an argument against Apple for the design of the device, or a manufacturing defect. If it was dropped down some stairs, or if he was upset with his daughter, grabbed the ipod and threw it across the room, or something beyond a "normal" drop distance, Apple shouldn't have any liability at all.
True, but there are cases where the diagnostic isn't correct, or the tech's lie to either get more money out of you, or because they are that dumb. Like if you went to a mechanic saying your car was running rough, and the mechanic said you needed a whole new engine, when all you really needed was an oil change.
It's one thing when people say they're overcharged for paying a $50 diagnostic fee to figure something out that they couldn't.
It's another when a technician says you need a new motherboard, when really all that's wrong is the hard drive cable was unplugged.
I deal with that all the time at my shop, where people bring their machines to Best Buy or wherever, and come to us for a second opinion.
From the techjournalsouth article-
"If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they'd open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don't want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field."
It seems the community internet operating books will be transparent, so people can see what costs are, and where the money is going. It's a public service, not a for-profit business like Time Warner is.
While it's true a monopoly is generally anti-consumer, a publicly open/owned monopoly is far less likely to be in a position to price gouge for crap service, where the larger, established private monopolies already are.
This is true. In my school district, programs like FIRST (http://www.usfirst.org) are denounced, underfunded, and/or ignored. The district has no problem financing $20,000 trips for cheerleaders to attend national competitions, but can't spring $5,000 for team registration to inspire students into science, math, and technology fields. Many of the students in FIRST actually do go on to colleges and universities to become engineers or scientists, and most of them do so as a direct result of their involvement. How many cheerleaders graduate high school to become professional cheerleaders?
http://www.hulu.com/watch/25857/the-simpsons-home-security-system
Dr. Frink would be proud.
The author of TFA's assumption is that Linus is "The Big Cheese" (TM) of all things Linux, and as such has influence over everything carrying the name. The big thing the author doesn't get is that Linux isn't one entity- it's the sum of a bunch of smaller entities working together. The kernel is different from the boot loader (grub/lilo), which is different from the graphical server (X), which is different from the desktop manager (kde/gnome), which is different from all the other apps running on top. The people that package it all together into distributions make it a usable operating system- Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandriva, etc.
Linus doesn't really have any direct control over the distributions themselves, at least in terms of what features or programs they choose to bundle with the kernel to make usable. As such, there are distros specialized for just about every possible use- as a general desktop, server, embedded, small footprint, low power, etc. The versatility comes as a result of how the kernel was designed, even if it wasn't specifically designed for versatility.
It's time the Linux community finally wakes up and decides which way it will turn -- towards its roots or towards the features that the general public really wants. Until then, we'll have the old guard spewing their ideals, while the momentum of the operating system carries it away from its very foundation.
There are distributions going both ways- simple and complex. Look to something like Ubuntu/Kubuntu for a more windows-esque desktop experience out of the box. Look to something like Slackware to get "towards it's roots." The biggest strength of linux is that it isn't pinholed into one specific use or expectation, as the author asserts it is/was/should be. He doesn't "get it."
you have to call MS up and tell them you're changing the motherboard
Therein lies the problem. What's keeping Microsoft from arbitrarily deciding to drop XP activation? Say two years from now Microsoft's upper management sees XP is still the dominant OS, while Vista sales are still disappointing. Are there any contracts or legal issues forcing Microsoft into keeping the XP activation servers online? Or can they simply pull the plug and say "Sorry, XP is no longer available. Buy Vista or screw off."
That brings up an interesting question. When you, I, or anyone purchases music, the purchaser becomes the licensee of said content, right? Generally speaking, only the licensee is authorized to listen to the music. What if a corporation/non-profit/non-singular entity or group purchases the music? If the group itself is licensee, do all members share the license?
After making them buy lunch.
How large of a music library are you working with? I've got ~54,000 songs (around 350gb), and Amarok is a pain in the ass. Every time I exit Amarok or restart my computer, every time I load it back up it needs to rebuild it's playlist, which takes 7-8 minutes with a library that big (and this is a 500gb SATA drive on an Athlon 64 3200 with 1.5gb RAM). While it's playing, every few minutes the computer will slow to a crawl for about 10 seconds, presumably while Amarok finds and caches the next song to play, which is kind of irritating after a while.
When it works, it works well, and I love the features of Amarok, but for large quantities of music, it seems there's either some work to be done to improve performance/stability, or I've just got too much music for it's database to handle.
For now, I'm just using XMMS. It takes around a minute to load the full library into it's playlist, and I get no slowdown at all while playing.
What sort of parents are so out of touch with their children (especially underage), that they allow this sort of thing to happen? Parents should always be aware of where their kids are and take some friggin responsibility, rather than let TV and the internet raise them. "I left my kid in front of the computer while I went out shopping with some friends, assuming my kid was responsible enough to make mature decisions at a young age... now my kid is in danger because the interweb is evil so I'm suing."
Computer != parent. Take an interest in your kids and their activities, and they won't have to resort to meeting up with "online friends" for attention.
Where I voted this morning, we had paper ballots that were fed into an optical scan machine (by Diebold). The ballot was handed to me after I checked in, and each polling station had a hidden desktop with a felt-tip pen. All I had to do was fill in the circles corresponding to whatever candidate I wished to cast my vote for (much like a standardized test). When I was done filling in the circles, I took it over to the big machine, where a poll worker watched me insert it, and made sure the machine processed it correctly.
Seemed simple enough. The ballot itself has no personally identifiable information on it, and if there's a dispute or need for a manual recount, the paper ballots are presumably easy enough to get out of the machine. So these machines do have a paper trail, no potential for miscalibrated LCD screens, and have a ballot that's generally hard to screw up (fill in the circle).
The only way to really screw up a system like that is in the optical recognition software, which I'd hope is tested by poll workers before the polls actually open. And even then, with the paper ballots being retained inside, it's easy enough to do a manual recount.
Before this year we had mechanical voting machines, where you'd have to walk in, close the curtain by pulling a big lever, push all the levers down for the candidates you'd like to vote for, then pull the big lever back again to open the curtain and cast the votes. That was also easy enough, but mechanical machines like that are prone to more common failures, which was the primary reason for going with the electronic machines.
I understand what you're saying. I know the way civilization functions- each person has a specialty, and does their own job. Communities are made up of multiple specialists who exchange goods and services for the common good of everyone. You're missing my point. I'm not saying everyone who uses a computer needs to learn assembly, or C, or basic, or java. You don't need that to run a computer. Just like you don't need to know how to grow food to eat.
Here's a more proper analogy:
I'm not a programmer. I don't write code for a living.
I'm not a farmer. I don't grow food for a living (but I do have a small vegetable garden).
I know how to work on computers, and have learned enough of how they operate to work with linux.
I do work with food, and have learned enough to pick up ingredients to cook myself a decent meal.
Just like you can learn to cook food by reading a recipe, you can learn to use linux/windows/OS of choice by reading the documentation that comes with it.
Think about a plumber. Earning $50/hour. If that plumber has to spend 20 hours learning "how his computer works (ie: getting Linux working)", that's $1000. That plumber would have to be a total idiot to waste his time dicking with his computer.
I'll agree spending 20 hours dicking with anything would be a waste of time if there's something more important to be done. But consider this- and it does happe all the time in my line of work. Say the plumber has to print some invoices to mail out to his customers to bill for work done. The printer spits out nothing but blank paper. Rather than read the troubleshooting section of the printer manual where it says "if printouts are very light or blank, change print cartridges," he brings it to my store (wasting an hour of his time to label all the cables so he knows where they all go, unplug it, and bring it down)and says "the printer doesn't work.. I don't know anything about computers so I'm hoping you can help me." A print cartridge and 1 minute later, the printer's working fine. The plumber pays the bill and spends another hour hauling it back to his office and plugging all the cables back in so he can get back to work.
Would it not have been worth it for him to make an effort to do some self-troubleshooting? Would spending even half an hour reading the manual to find out he only needed new cartridges been worth the 2 hours of time he wasted bringing it down?
I enjoy eating at restaraunts whenever I can, but I can also cook up a nice meal when I need to. Working with a computer without any fundamental knowledge can be just as dangerous as not knowing the difference between cooking oil and bleach. While it may not be deadly, it can be devastating, especially if you any sort of financial transactions with a spyware infested computer.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
Clean a man's spyware riddled computer, he's good until he visits his favorite porn site again. Teach a man how and why he gets infected, and show him alternatives and methods to stay clean, then I don't have to deal with the "wtf i just got this cleaned up a month ago how come i got popups again."
Like I said, it's the desire to learn people are lacking. That's the real problem. It's not "relearning to check your email." It's learning how to not screw it up.
Then again, if you're like most of the people around the area my repair shop is, I'm sure you don't mind dropping $100 every time there's a relatively minor problem with a computer you paid $500 for.