Probably you can do pre-7th grade math in one year, but you do not have much more time. With the beginning of puberty, many things suddenly become more interesting than learning new math.

I am working with selected -- so called gifted -- students of different age on math problems. I have given the same problem to 3rd grade and 7th grade students with the 7th grade students achieving not much more within 90 minutes than the 3rd grade students -- the problem did use knowledge from schools. The schools have failed in my opinion. Working on a different problem that involved some more rigorous proves (existence of Euler path'), the 7th grade students achieved more than the 3rd grade students on average (some exceptional 3rd grade student got most of it).

Either the article is right and the first six years of math education are more or less wasted even on the most skilled students -- or it is simply not the right approach that is used in school. As long as we do not teach "math" in school up to the high school level but only "computation", there are just cooking recipes, which tend to get boring, especially if the applications are flawed, too.

I have seen 4th grade students formulating proves by contradiction. Abstract thinking is possible in elementary school. I have seen many adults with university degree that fail on negating "C follows from (A or B)".

3rd grade students tend to be more open than 7th grade students, if you tell them that math without proves is no math at all -- because they have seen less so-called math.

The problems is that we do not teach math in elementary school at all!

Remote updates via the wlan are probably not very common. And I guess I could have put a brave "freebsd-update install && reboot" somewhere in the startup scripts that would have been replaced if that really succeeded. (Probably something a little more intelligent would be better.)

It appeared on the main ftp server on Monday and only an hour later on some of the mirrors. Now most of them got the bits. This is really not the time to stress the main ftp server more than necessary. The checksum files from the main server might be worse getting -- or better yet, wait for the official announcement that will contain them, too.

I did not read your blog using freebsd-update this time, but as far as I see, it would not have saved me needing hands on assistance for the system that I tried to update remotely with the last connection being a wlan. I added the appropriate lines to rc.conf before the update, but after the first reboot with the new kernel and old userland, the wlan did not come up. Thinking about it, nothing else could be expected...

On Sep-10, most debugging was disabled: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2009-September/013399.html

On Sep-17, there was the last commit before 8.0-RC1: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2009-September/013645.html

Anyone familiar with the FreeBSD development and release process would know that there are no fixed rules rules when certain stuff happens and there are no sweeping changes like turning off debugging between a late RC and the actual release. (Other debugging stuff like kernel and module symbols are kept for the release.)

According to some story circulating the net ( http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/wo-kaufe-ich-ein-notebook-mit-linux-13-herste/2/ ), the Lenovo hotline in Germany denies that it is possible, but if you talk to a certain person at Lenovo, you will get a refund of 30 Euros for your Windows license.

I have not tried myself, maybe for my next laptop...

> I'm not sure how practical it is for any "programmer on the streets" to pay attention to this sort of thing.

These "any programmer on the street" guys hopefully never implement anything in the vicinity of crypto code.

You do not need to read the papers. Reading something like http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-right-answers.html -- if you happen to trust Colin Percival -- should be enough, if you do not try to be creative in what you use.

What is so bad about considering MD5 broken and make design choices because of that? Better than the other way around, if you are not in the field. How much more expensive is it to verify an MD5 and an SHA256 hash instead of MD5 only -- for many practical application, it is irrelevant. So why not do it?

/usr/local is for ports and packages. If you really need something outside ports to be available to all users, it might go there, too. Hopefully, you have a good idea of how to deal with updates. (Is there any reason not to make it a port?) /usr/bin is for the base -- the nonessential stuff that is not in /bin. No package should touch that since packages are much more likely to be broken than the base and should not interfere with it.

Sorry, your operation system has different ideas about hier(7) -- layout of file systems? Maybe that makes sense, too, but why do you think you know it better than the packages manager of another operating system / distribution?

Do these media for example include aljazeera? It is rather a selected media-driver viewpoint.

No, they cannot. Your statement does not get any more valid with this disclaimer.

The Islam accepts Judaism and Christianity as valid religions. There are many (fundamental) Christians that do not accept the Islam.

I do not think that the Islam is more tolerant than Christianity, which many Muslim claim. In most countries with an Islamic majority you should rather not even think about converting away from Islam. Anyhow, your claim that the Islam is "uncompromisingly intolerant" is rather close-minded (and very _certain_ media-driven).

You have not tested too much. Have a look at the FreeBSD mailing lists. ZFS is not stable (and that is not only for the BSD interpretation of "stable"). It needs major tweaking to work on any RELEASE or STABLE. CURRENT has got a newer version that supposedly does much better, but recommending anyone new to the BSD world to go straight to CURRENT is insane. PC-BSD is not based on CURRENT. Moreover, you should be on amd64 or maybe sparc64 and have lots of RAM.

FreeBSD 8.0 is scheduled for summer, which means that it is likely to come out this year...

I already wondered about the heise.de title blaming the file system. Now Slashdot repeats it.

I have seen the same on FreeBSD using UFS (with soft updates).

KDE4 is supposed to be portable enough to run on file systems that have no data journaling or a guarantee for operations on different files to be written in a certain order without issuing a sync.

If you are so scientific minded, you should have realized that there are more dimensions than one to describe your political view. If you just go one dimension up than "left" and "liberal" are two different directions (at least if "left"/"right" is your economical opinion). Moreover, this has nothing to do with "liberal".

Is it difficult to make your argument without relying on general support for your political point of view?

Now you lost all your credibility. What does "anti nuke environmentalists" have to do with it? How are they the same as "autism/vaccine linkers"?

Anti science? I know the Physics behind nuclear energy pretty well (some years of university helped, but were not necessary) and I understand that modern reactors may be pretty save, maybe better if compared with some alternatives like climate change due to CO2 pollution.

Anyhow, being skeptical about our capability to deal with the nuclear waste for the time it poses a thread to the environment is anti scientific where? Here in Germany, there is no place for final storage of waste, yet, because many experiments failed. There are waste amounts of money being spend cleaning a salt dome because it eventually leaked. Money that is never added to the price of nuclear energy.

Being skeptical about the ability of companies maximizing profit to use the full security potential of modern reactors is anti scientific in which way? There have been so many reports of nuclear accidents that were swept under the rug -- or could-have-been accidents because of safety procedures not followed due to profit reasons. Being skeptical about our Governments to act in a way to change that is anti scientific? I guess there is much more evidence to back up these fears than evidence that we have working regulations.

I can understand why people see nuclear power saving us, but being of another opinion has nothing to do with "don't mess with mother nature".

From the source: 'Solomon also points out that these dissenting scientists - over 9,000 of whom hold Ph.Ds -- [...] far exceed the count of UN IPCC "scientists"'. As dubious as some of the results of the IPCC might have been put together, counting the number of scientists from random professions opposing it and comparing that to an expert panel seems a really qualified approach.

Last month, the source cited had an article starting with 'I admire President Bush. I think he is a good man and I have said so before.' Other articles go in the same direction.

Coming from Europe, I see that they are very _American_ "thinkers" as we saw the USA during the last years.

That is not interesting. Most people outside the US consider this an narrow minded, selfish, unscientific view endangering the world.

By many political scientist, Israel is not considered democratic, since it lacks many aspects of a modern democracy. (Israel is an important military ally of the USA and thus considered democratic.)