I don't necessarily disagree. The students that universities can accept or reject are, of course, the products of their parents, their school systems, and their communities in general. This probably doesn't position the university especially well to solve racial or other forms of socioeconomic inequality.

Then again, no single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood. If a university thinks it can make a small difference by trying to encourage a more diverse student body, that seems pretty reasonable.

Of course, this debate is just a spectacle to distract the riff-raff. If you really want to assure your spot at a university, you should get yourself some influential parents or friends...

Remember that most Slashdotters are younger, non-homeowning people with no children.

[Citation needed]. I, for one, wish I could still party like it was 1999...

We're not American's, God damn it.

Get off my lawn.

There needs to be a /whoosh option for moderators.

That problem is solved by providing paternity leave.

Solved is a pretty strong word to use to describe a benefit that lasts for, what, a few weeks? Maybe two months? Three?

Paternity leave is great and I'm all for it. But what happens afterward? Daycare, grandparents, or one of mom or dad stays home. And you can probably guess pretty well who it's going to be.

anyone flying one could have it seized, the organizers warned

But if someone is flying it, it's not a drone...

Wow! Well played, sir!

Like... uh... the ocean?

So we should trust what they say, but be careful signing up because they're going to try to trick us...?

To be fair, derision toward the likes of Microsoft has historically been pretty well warranted. Windows has, historically, obviously, been plagued by viruses, malware, crapware, etc., to a degree far surpassing any other operating system.

That's not to say this necessarily has anything to do with proprietary versus open-source. Obviously Windows has always been far more popular than any alternative, making it a much more tempting target for attackers. High profile bugs like shellshock have certainly pointed out that open source isn't a magical elixir that wards off security problems.

Nobody does security very well, yet. (Well, maybe excepting folks like the CompCert people and Sel4 people.) The underlying causes, I'm sure, is that it's not what your average (or even above average) consumer can evaluate and value, and it's not what your average programmer can deliver.

Web applications are portable, easy for users to install (they don't have to do anything), easy for users to update (they don't have to do anything), and accessible from just about anywhere on just about any device. HTML/CSS/JavaScript have matured a lot. It is very easy to prototype your application's UI, and easy to develop very slick looking applications with rich fonts, colors, fancy tables, etc. Unless there's some fundamental reason you absolutely must have a native UI, I would never choose a toolkit over the web.

Hah -- good one!

The FDIV bug was actually relatively limited in scope. Quoting Wikipedia, "Though rarely encountered by average users (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results),[3] both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors."

This seems pretty perverse. If a developer doesn't write documentation because he doesn't like to, how does that make him an asshole? You're the one who is asking him to do more work, for your benefit, for free.

Eeh. I agree that, as a user, it's frustrating when software doesn't have proper documentation.

On the other hand, if someone donates his time to develop a program and makes it free software, it seems hardly fair to fault him for not writing documentation to go along with it.

Someone who really cares could, of course, do it themselves, or offer to pay the developer to do it. If most people don't care enough to do that, then maybe that's the problem to focus on.

If someone comes along and gives you a free hamburger, you don't complain that they didn't bring fries and a drink.