Not going to happen? I did some BOE calculations. In the past 14 years the price of gas has risen at an annual rate of 7%, roughly. Google tells me the average price of gas in Detroit is $3.36/gallon today. At 7% inflation, $7/gallon is 2022, just over a decade from now.

Well, I suppose it is possible that we could run out of oil before then.

I'll take this opportunity to point out that, if this had been a piece of commercial software where the corporation behind it was gone, your options would be:

1.

2.

This is the power of OSS. You still have options when things don't go the way you'd hoped.

You can't. Because they didn't like the look of the big, floor-to-ceiling look of the old XP system, they shrunk it all down so that it only shows 5-6 items at a time and has a scrollbar.

In short, they made it harder to use and less functional than the XP Start Menu

ClassicShell to the rescue.

Also, 7 Taskbar Tweaker.

<pedant>50 points.</pedant>

True, but in some parts of rural Ontario, you get Fibre to the Home.

Viva la Wightman! (And please bring FTTH to KW.)

The naivety of this is amazing. When the mafia send a message to OTHER shop owners, there are a limited number of them, they're all nearby, and can't easily relocate.

There are a lot of hackers & crackers

(emphasis mine), they're distributed across the globe, and servers/data can be easily be moved.

...Stu

Students graduating from the University of Waterloo's Math Faculty are invited to make one or more graduating pledges to support U(W). One of those pledges is the Dean's Prime Number Club, which confers upon you your very own Prime Number.

As others have noted, the binary sequence is a palindrome prime number in base 2. David Johnston is U(W)'s out-going President. It's likely that the Math Dean's Office has awarded him his very own Prime Number as an honorific (or for completing the pledge!) and he has chosen to incorporate it into his personal Coat of Arms.

I am unable to find the Prime Number registry online or in fact any mention of it at all, U(W) web pages about pledges aside. Digging out my old papers I see that the letter awarding one's Prime Number merely says "Here it is in the box at the bottom. Congratulations!" Perhaps the Dean's Office will confirm tomorrow.

...Stu, hopefully not the only member of the Dean's Prime Number Club reading Slashdot...

However, having had many protracted discussions with friends of mine who are teachers, I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them. The "sampling" of sorts is most likely very unrandom and biased.

I'm certain this isn't captured in these test scores or being adjusted for. This would be difficult if not impossible to tease out but might be by looking for the expected patterns, i.e. a student's poor performance is less than it was with a previous teacher.

If you had RTFA you would have known that this is accounted for. The metric looks at a student's relative performance. A bad student, given an average teacher, will do just as poorly at the end of the year as at the start. Ditto for a good student, an average student, a corpse, a bird, a principal.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/warning.asp?page=internetEng.htm&lang=E

...is a companion-like device (360 degree recording out to a distance of tens of feet), and the backing alibi archive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_Parallax#Government_and_justice

...Stu

Well, Chrome OS doesn't let you install or run any programs at all. It might be sufficient, but you never know.

If you want a screen you can draw on, those have been available for years. Hopefully you have not been waiting for one. But a 12-inch Cintiq costs 2x what the iPad costs, and considering that many people who are currently using Wacom tablets don't use the pressure (they're just making Photoshop selections) it would be a waste to prioritize pressure on an iPad at this time.

There are ideas out there about how to make pressure work on devices like iPad but it is not happening yet.

Also, keep in mind that the Mac will get touch in the near future. That is when we may see Wacom being made obsolete by stock Macs.

I knew someone would reply with this. Yes, we can all cheer personally that the bad guy is off the street and they're not going to tie anyone else up. But from a legal point of view, once the immediate threat has ended, you can't use force in self defense.

My point was that this is not an example of "Britain locking up people for defending their families", especially with the implied contrast to the United States. Legally, they locked this guy (and his brother) up for chasing, beating, and permanently injuring a guy in the street. Had the same beating happened while they were still in immediate danger, the legal situation would've been entirely different.

Ignorance is bliss

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5712573/UK-is-violent-crime-capital-of-Europe.html

http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/news/Ex-soldier-faces-jail-handing-gun/article-1509082-detail/article.html

That is the original article, but it looks like there has been a happy ending since I read it last. Looks like he has been released. I'm a bit surprised, but gratified. There was a lot of publicity at the time and it looks like it had an effect.
I read crime reports from all over and occasionally see similar stuff from across the pond. I dont have any others off the top of my head though.