DrSprout

>this was 50 years ago when such schools were widely funded by local sources

This is really the only significant part of the equation. The system is basically designed to fail. You pass a tax levy for X mills, which brings in X amount of money for the school system, and never a dollar more. Property values go up, but property taxes do not. The budget therefore shrinks every year due to inflation, and every 10-15 years the situation gets so dire that the district has to put a ballot issue up for a tax "increase" to get funding back up to the levels of 10-15 years ago.

In most areas of the Midwest, this poor voter understanding of how schools are funded has resulted in a steady decline in school expenditures, even as actual costs of education have outpaced inflation.

It might be better just to put the damn money in a trust to pay off the national debt. God knows everyone with the money to be trading on Wall St. is responsible for that debt.

Quickly checking that you have the latest release in the absence of a good network connection.

Also, you can use mirrors without worrying about the mirrors being tampered with. Obviously if someone does a MITM on you against gmane you're in trouble.

It is in fact very hard to find these bugs. Most of the time when a person sees something about you, that person has no idea if that's in line with your preferences, so can't even know if Facebook is working as it's supposed to.

Was it really needed? Most of the stuff I've seen on Scribd was basically pdfs in an iFrame, except replace iFrame with Flash.

>Those tons of aresoles

I initially read that as "those tons of arse-holes." Sort of half a Freudian slip?

So sort of a logical view of Wikipedia with RSS?

Comparing sliced bread to a breadmaker is like comparing a television to an iPad. Sliced bread is really nothing special. Let me rip off a chunk of bread fresh out of my oven any day of the week.

This is the Internet. If you're looking for a job, and something impressive with your name on it gets to the top of HN, Reddit, Slashdot, or even Digg, you'll have ample opportunities.

Heck, the only reason I haven't quit my job yet is I'm working on something potentially impressive right now that isn't done yet.

>If humans bred only with other humans, all these markers would create a neat phylogenetic tree, showing that human genetic diversity can be traced to a single population that existed in Africa in the last 100,000 years.

I'm not a statistician, but from what I've studied of genetics, that seems like an unwarranted leap. Phylogenetic trees, at the end of the day, are guesswork (though they probably reflect reality pretty closely.) If you have a neat phylogenetic tree, you've probably been massaging your data.

Only if the user's email account is hosted on a service with a similar TOS.

Why do all of the Android websites look like crap on an Android phone? If there were a website you would think would have a good mobile layout, it would be one ostensibly dedicated to a mobile platform.

I have not bought a game in years. I have pirated several, but I have never pirated a game I didn't already own a license for. (And actually, by 'pirate' I mean downloaded a keygen to get around inserting a disc into the drive.) I now exclusively use Linux at home, which compounds the issue.

I suspect I'm not alone, and there's a large market of gamers who were more hardcore in high school and college who don't want to deal with the shit they're shoveling, and are quite content with the games we bought years ago.

Flash hasn't crashed on me in over a year.

Firefox frequently refuses to run Flash, but I've pretty much given up on that, and when I want Flash, I copy the url into Chromium. It's actually a nice separation, since I've got one locked-down noscripted browser I go where I want on,and one that I use when I'm looking for rich media.

If its kept minimalistic, along the lines of Craigslist, they will be just fine.

I guess I lump .NET together with Silverlight, and the software I have to use for work is currently unusable on Moonlight.

Except Microsoft doesn't provide fully functional implementations of the CLR for a reasonable set of platforms. Microsoft intentionally crippled the CLR on non-Windows OSes, and continues to do so.

You're missing the bigger, and much more legitimate omission: Windows Mobile 7 is running with IE7. Which effectively means these things won't work their way into WinMo for at least a year after the release of IE9.

It's not a standard if your tests are designed to match what your browser currently does.

The real tests of compatibility are those like Acid3 that are designed to fail all browsers equally. This one is clearly designed to fail all non-IE browsers.

American industry is failing primarily because safety standards are higher than abroad.

GM failed because they designed shoddy cars. The Unions had nothing to do with that (especially given that most of the union workers were rank-and-file factory workers who built exactly the shitty cars they were told to.)

The biggest sticking point is going to be the web of trust. Facebook's walled garden is excellent at managing identity, and this would be very difficult if any random 419 scammer can set up a Diaspora server and plug into the network.

Really, it seems like turn-key services are the primary solution, though the important thing is to get a competitive marketplace where some are ad-supported, some aren't, but all of them are reasonably trusted.

>By making an admittedly weak effort to return the iPhone to Apple, Hogan – in the eyes of the law – committed theft.

That's the thing though. Gizmodo did in fact return the iPhone to Apple without complaint, in a timely manner. Posting the information to the Internet is an unorthodox way of asking Apple if they want their property returned, but it ultimately has the same result.

If any crime was committed by Gizmodo, it is theft of trade secrets, not theft of the device.

Competition is a good thing. It's only a problem for Ubuntu.

And it's not even that much of a problem for Ubuntu's end users, since Ubuntu's biggest problem is making meaningful contributions upstream.

Hopefully users will steer a different course.

It wasn't. It was a US soldier attacking a US military base. Treason in time of war. Entirely different problem.

I recently went in to update some minor thing on my profile, and I had to delete all my interests, activities, etc. because Facebook wanted to make them into connections, and would not let me leave them as they were.

The marginal costs are pretty small. It could easily be handled by a site with an emphasis on simplicity like Craigslist.

Personally, I would prefer a non-profit. I can't stand a private company like Facebook being the primary gateway to my social life. I would like to see multiple companies involved, but it would be a lot more difficult to get the network benefits of Facebook with multiple sites.

You could start by making a rational argument instead of appealing to a cynical belief that everyone is irrational and intent on restricting freedom. The essence of the irrationality that pervades American political discourse is exactly that sort of "everyone is crazy" mentality. There are plenty of people advancing rationality and freedom. You aren't one of them.

those things are easy to obtain, but they are well-on near impossible to smuggle into the US without someone noticing.

What you're missing is that nothing occurs in a vacuum. People don't like being associated with terrorists, especially not people helping immigrants across the border. If you go to Latin America, they're often even more bigoted than Americans are - and I'm not talking about gringos. The level of hatred for blacks is positively revolting from a North American perspective.

So Mexico really isn't a great entry point for a dark-skinned Arab, unless he speaks Spanish with a flawless accent (though given the variety of Spanish accents, that's not necessarily that hard.)

>I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school.

If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack.