Stupid M.2 is why it's harder for me to get good toys for may mSATA. My 256GB boot drive will have to suffice.

I would be less worried about Secureboot if it was absolutely mandated to allow a user key and allow disabling. Alas, it hasn't been all that long and the one mandate out there (from MS) is now gone. It's interesting that it is supposed to be for the owner's benefit but typically doesn't offer a simple way for the user to bless a bootloader or OS nor does it offer a boot anyway option. Almost as if the benefit is meant for someone else.

Perhaps the best approach would have been for the firmware to be just a simple bootstrap with a well-defined handoff to stage two which would reside in a seperately re-writable segment of the flash rom.

That, in turn could do the rest of EFI or could be a more conventional bios or be replaced with SeaBIOS, bits of Coreboot, or whatever the user wants. I would expect the factory installed default to be a simple boot menu that can read MBR and GPT in order to load the disk based boot loader.

That would both improve reliability where needed and make sure that you could always replace the offending EFI if it wanted to insist on SecureBoot or other potentially harmful scheme.

Failing that, just go with the simplest possible bootstrap and let the OS or bootloader deal with the rest.

It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.

It's an odd blend of no chores and yet no actual free time. Even when unsupervised, they're locked up in the house (but no running!). Then people wonder why they don't exercise more.

I once read an essay about how 'the novel' would be the downfall of civilization.

The top two stories on Slashdot right now are a working Tricorder at SXSW and Boeing patenting "Star Wars Style Force Field Technology".

I get that it's "News for Nerds" but can we please try to appeal to a readership that doesn't think the holocaust is the name of the new VR headset from Samsung?

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

So it only protects from shock waves? I was thinking of something that would help replace the expensive, heavy, and error prone reactive armor on tanks.

It completely misses the aspect of positive freedoms. The conditions that maximise the negative freedoms (that is, rights to have others NOT do something) are often dismal for the positive freedoms. For example, Crusoe had it made as far as people not telling him he could not shout obscenities at 3 A.M. But reading whatever he wants? A bit hard when nobody is writing anything he can get to.

That argument only works when replying to an extremist. For example someone who never met a regulation he liked. Someone who wants to move the 'slider' a bit one way or the other, not so much.

In cases like this where the 'safety' is far from established but the cost to freedom is shown (even if a few steps out), it's even less appropriate.

Eskimo is a tribe. It'd be like calling Tahoe, Taos, and all the others you can think of based in the Southwest US "Pueblo". It's wrong, and indicates that you don't know or care what the correct label is.

In the United States and Canada the term "Eskimo" was commonly used to describe the Inuit, and Alaska's Yupik and Iñupiat. "Inuit" is not accepted as a term for the Yupik, and "Eskimo" is the only term that includes Yupik, Iñupiat and Inuit. However, Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Greenland view "Eskimo" as pejorative, and "Inuit" has become more common. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Though, being around the Alaskan natives, I've found that the Wikipedia article is incomplete. Canada, Greenland, and Alaska would be more accurate. Eskimo was one tribe, but it was one of the first, so all the other arctic tribes were (wrongly) called Eskimo.

A race-baiting A/C is assumed willfully ignorant.

Then everything is sexual harassment because everyone has a gender.

You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.

So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.

So if I blow on your hand, I've used "physical force" and thus committed an assault? Does it matter of the "blowing" of air was from speaking? I can measure the "physical force" speech causes. Microphones are designed to measure and record that physical force.

But you have an inarticulable line between speech and "force" where the force has no force.

For the water balloon, what if it misses the car, and the driver still panicked and crashed?

So water hitting your car causes risk. I guess you never drive when rain is predicted.

In reality, a water balloon thrown at your car holds a near-zero risk. Yet people go ape-shit over it. Is the problem the person that causes offense, or the person that over-reacts? You assert that if it's assault with water, then it's the fault of the thrower (do you sue God every time it rains?), but if it's words, the fault is with the people that hear.

I think your logic is flawed.

I'm taking a real incident of speech that was prosecuted. You speak in platitudes and generalities, but nothing concrete and definable. So I'm trying to identify the edges, if any. Inciting someone to do something through speech should be illegal, according to you. Unless that "something" done is be offended. I don't see your logic. Offense is real, and measurable. It can be measured with medical tools, like you can see a bruise on someone's nose when you hit them. Yet the nose is sacred to you, and the ears aren't.