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Education

Conservative Textbook Curriculum Passes Final Vote In Texas 895

suraj.sun sends in a followup to a story we've been following about the Texas Board of Education's efforts to put a more political spin on some of their state's textbooks. From the Dallas Morning News: "In a landmark move that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for US history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past. Split along party lines, the board delivered a pair of 9-5 votes to adopt the new standards, which will dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for future textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade. Texas standards often wind up being taught in other states because national publishers typically tailor their materials to Texas, one of the biggest textbook purchasers in the country. Approval came after the GOP-dominated board approved a new curriculum standard that would encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation — a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer."
Wine

Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced 165

An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set): many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
Mars

Submission + - Opportunity Rover breaks Viking 1 Record 1

necro81 writes: In the latest longevity milestone for the little-rovers-that-could, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has become the longest operating Mars lander ever, passing the mark set by the Viking 1 lander back in the 1970s. Considering that Viking was an immobile, nuclear-powered science station, the 2246-sols (six Earth years) that the solar-powered roving Opportunity has racked up is even more impressive. Opportunity does not seem to be slowing down, either, it is still driving its way slowly towards Endeavor crater, which it hopes to reach in another two years. Its twin, Spirit , has fared less well of late, but may yet be heard from again.

Comment Can you expect privacy on unprotected wifi? (Score 1) 418

Most of the collected data was from unprotected networks; they could only get the network name of anything protected. For example, public hotspots that don't use encryption. (Our city has one.)

Given that, a good question is how private should one consider their connection on such networks? Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy when not using any form of encryption, or when using encryption whose key is publicly distributed? I'd have to say no.

Comment My best guess (Score 1) 145

Macs are generally owned by people better off financially (PCs also have the better off folks in their market of course, but probably a much greater percentage of poorer folks than Macs), so that explains their position. Perhaps Windows and Linux both have a contingent of geeks who care, but Windows has far, far more non-geeks/non-gamers than Linux, and that's where the difference there comes in? (Or maybe it's from saving the hundreds of dollars on OS and other proprietary software, but a lot of that gets pirated anyway, so that still may only apply to the less geeky half of the populace.)

Comment Re:It's been said, but it's important (Score 1) 421

Just a point of correction, it's been made free (as in beer) until the end of 2015. I do agree that using a codec that will eventually cost money seems like a terrible idea however. Unfortunately it's a matter of convincing the majority of browser makers and sites like YouTube of that; otherwise without H.264 support FireFox will be irrelevant long before the cost of the codec becomes an issue.
Debian

Ubuntu Gets a New Visual Identity 683

buntcake writes "Canonical has launched a new visual identity for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ubuntu is shedding its previous brown look and adopting a more professional color scheme with purple and orange. The colors will be used in a new GNOME theme and boot splash for Ubuntu 10.04. According to updated design documents that were published in the Ubuntu wiki, 'light' is the underlying concept behind the new visual identity. It displaces the 'human' concept that has been part of Ubuntu's theming and brand vernacular for the past five years. Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon has posted a screenshot and additional information."
Image

Trade Your Bible For Porn Screenshot-sm 227

An anonymous reader writes "Atheist students at the University of Texas at San Antonio announced that any student over the age of 18 will receive pornographic materials if they trade in religious materials. From the article: 'Leaders of this atheist campaign allege that porn is no worse than what's written in religious texts. A university spokesman says that this controversial cause is completely legal, though he admits a majority of the students on campus do not agree with it.'"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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