I've got a degree. It didn't teach me a damned thing about IT, but I've got the degree. The degree helps get your resume through the HR drones, though, but not much else.

... here in Canada, we just buy up the UK's old junk and they don't float either.

Riiiight.... so university's just kick people out randomly when they do nothing wrong. Uh huh.

All that happened was some young hotshot did something the dept forbids. He paid for that, end of story. How you go from there to "CS depts out of touch with today's world" is beyond me, but then again I'm not some CTO either.

You're missing the point... "works better over dialup" means it works better over any faster connection too. It's not a meaningless title when it shows how fast the stuff works on a slow connection. Just because you may have fibre optic, I certainly don't. And RDP works better over my LAN as well. Get it now? It works better EVERYWHERE. I really love your third paragraph... yeah no shit, the cloud requires bandwidth and there are latency issues, so it actually in fact becomes very important to discuss these arguments; as in, solution X performs better than solution Y. Holy crap man did you even think about that for more than 2 seconds? Yippee for you, you are allowed to decide for yourself when you prefer local or remote; many of us don't have the luxury (think business). Attitudes like your are part of the problem... you just can't believe that a windows / msft solution would be better than the equivalent in linux, so you wave your hands in there, spout a lot of bs, and nothing gets fixed. I'd pay good money for a linux solution that works just as good as RDP.

No it doesn't, that's the problem. RDP is unbeatable, and you'd finally clue in if you actually tried it. I have, I've tried them all... X, ssh -X, freenx, vnc, and RDP; RDP takes the crown son, sorry... Perhaps we could finally get some real thin client solutions working on linux if linux users would admit that RDP absolutely smashes anything that linux has to offer in the "works over dialup" area.

What is it and North Americans claiming RIM is dead? What a bunch of blind people... RIM is only hurting in North America, in many other markets they are on the top or close enough. They still make money every quarter and are a in transition phase. Nobody is claiming RIM doesn't have an issue or two to work out, but to close your eyes to the rest of the world and blabber like you have any clue what is going on just shows how little you know...

Hinting is totally separate from aliasing. I run kde / gnome / xfce with anti-aliasing off, but full hinting. Last time I checked (within past 6 months) there was no option to turn off the eye-seering anti-aliasing. The fact that the head developer doesn't see the need to provide this feature (because they do it right!) tells me everything I need to know about the state of this project.

Can I turn off the antialiasing feature? Last time I looked into this, Mr Rasterman basically said "it looks perfect the way we do because we do it right". Yeah, until I can turn it off I'm not touching it with a 10 foot barge pole...

It turns out that you can be great. You can be great at anything you want. You don't have to be born with talent. This totally inspired me to try new things. I only wish I'd read it as a teenager!

> retired it due to not having any PS2 machines any more.

That isn't a reason to part with a Model M. Get a USB converter (you may have to try a couple) and keep on trucking. I have an original Logitech three button mouse on the same adapter with my Model M. I use the middle click a heck of a lot more than the wheel so prefer an actual button that won't end up sending scroll up/down every time I middle click on a link to throw it into a tab for later reading. Have to clean the mouse out every month or so but other than it is still good to go.

Can I get an AMEN!

I have a pair of em. Thinkpads also tend to have darned good keyboards even after the Lenovo takeover.

If ya spring for the good stuff it lasts. And face it, keyboards aren't something that you need to change out every year or two when you buy a faster machine. Keyboards endure. Old keyboards even have a full size spacebar instead of those almost useless Microsoft mandated keys.

> Its a good idea to have scientists advising politicians on science.

Agreed. But when debating the policy implications of AGW a climatoligist is useless. What insight can they offer into whether cap and trade is a good idea? They aren't economists. If the conversation turns to carbon sequestration they aren't the person to ask whether that is feasable. If we want to talk alternative energy they can't provide any insight on that either. You need different scientists and experts to answer those questions. Climatology is a pretty narrow specialty.

> notwithstanding Mann's dubious practices

But that is just it. Mann is the elephant in the room, you simply can not ignore him. He was so obviously a fraud, and stone cold busted, and not a single voice was raised against him by the warmers. That is called a clue. What more do you want, the hand of God to reach down to you with a graven stone tablet saying "AGW IS A FRAUD!" or something? They didn't care if the science was fake because they aren't interested in the least in science. They have a policy solution in mind and the science will be tortured until it confesses.

AGW may indeed be real. But it is literally impossible to say at this point. The raw data was destroyed and the 'adjusted' data we have left is unreliable. Not only that we would need a lot more data for a lot longer than reliable records have been kept to say with the reliability normally expected from science. We do know the Earth has been both a lot warmer and a lot colder than at any point in the last hundred years. We are making predictions on time horizons as long as our reliable data set of past history and covering that lack with a lot of proxy data of dubious reliability. Doesn't sound very scientific if ya ask me, but I'm just a lay person. But somehow I doubt anyone would build a multibillion dollar chip fab on a theory of such reliability yet we are supposed to entirely reorder our economy on this theory's predictions. And anyone who expresses a doubt is called an idiot, anti-science and worse.

Exactly. I am exactly as qualified to discuss the policy implications of AGW as Mann. Both of us are interested lay people who have studied the issue and can debate it as ordinary citizens as part of the political process. Except of course that isn't how it works, he is held up as an expert. He isn't. Al Gore on the other hand, IS a politician and is actually qualified to debate (I can disagree and experts on my team can take him on, it is politics) the policy side. Where he fails is in trying to go the other way and argue the science. He isn't a scientist any more than I am and it is silly when the media hold him up as an expert on the science, scientists were embarrassed by much of the science in _An Inconvenient Truth_ but because they agreed with his politics they kept their yap shut.