Except of course being able to generate a million spoofed tcp syn packets that overload different servers w/o taking client resources (beyond bandwidth), or any other similar kind of attack you can think of when you forge packets. Its just not for authenticating streams you know ...

The real reason why is that the Linux kernel has no stable API or ABI, thus any driver compiled for one release will not work at all every on a different release. Read Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt in any recent kernel's folder for the reasons.

It seems the same for me too. I know they've taken out many concepts from the curriculum that sounded really interesting (imaginary numbers as a prime example). I find that we try to equalize the playing field too much. Instead of equalizing the field, we should make sure that everyone has a chance. Not everyone can write a book, and not everyone can comprehend quantum mechanics. That doesn't mean writing a 3 page novel or understanding quantum mechanics as 20th physics should mean a 90% in school. Instead what people are good at they should excel at, and everything else has support structures they can use (tutoring, extra help from teachers, etc.) Dumbing everything done just means that once you need all the skills and don't have them, you won't be able to preform.

I guess my real point is that while we shouldn't discriminate against any single group, we should make sure anti-discriminative behaviour doesn't negatively affect people trying to be better too.