That's unfair. He obviously wants to be controlled by the unelected bureaucracy, since it takes experience to learn where the real levers of power are. I mean, it works for the EU, after all (at least as described by my EU associates).

Or you have too few offices to vote upon that you can find someone of the opposite party that you like and are in your district. Both parties have gerrymandered, and people often gerrymander themselves with their feet (eg, I cannot stand that A county is totally controlled by the X party, so I will move to neighboring W county where there are more of the Y party, and vice versa). Also, I had only four (4) offices with opposition parties, and no US Senate race, this time; not even any ballot questions to worry about.

All that this lack indicates is that Linux has too small a market share among probable targets to be worth setting up a cookie-cutter process to hack it. Neither Al Quaida (sp? and whose?) nor the German Chancellor's office are likely to have dedicated SAs determined to keep out others by security through obscurity, regardless of it preventing easy usability of popular software that their principals demand.

Use any distribution out of the box, without doing something that makes things interesting (like Sun used to have the /bin directory tree in a separate partition which was mounted as read-only) and you are just as vulnerable to script kiddies (even if law enforcement agents) as anyone, although the variability between different distributions might help a bit.

Mod Parent Insightful

The child can be running away from the car, thus the speed of approach would be lower.

Everyone within half a mile with a non-trivial bank account or liquid assets. Just ask any personal injury lawyer when he is being honest (usually only when a guest lecturer in Law School, or drunk).

To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

OTOH, expecting one unique and universally acceptable moral or ethical decision in almost anything is the sign of someone who hasn't studied Ethics. Or Tort Law.

OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.

Yes, well I will not pay attention to you unless you can state your argument in proper Latin, as you would when degrees really meant something, in the early 19th Century. Seriously, you write of standards dropping to accommodate job seekers, in English?

exit SARC mode

Anyway, when people were still studying the trivium and the quad-whatever-it-was. they were still doing it to get a job, when not going just to make contacts like the nobility and upper commoners' sons (like the son of the Franklin from the Canterbury Tales).

William Shakespeare would probably agree. Once, he spelled his name three different ways on the same sheet of paper. Likewise, so would The Honorable David S. Crockett. So, for that matter, would a German co-worker of mine who moved to the US at about 12 years old, and never really learned the spelling rules although he had not a trace of accent when I knew him (Stanford Math department didn't care much, either, since they gave him a PhD after he left the company).

No, but the trees saved will surely reverse Global Climate Change.

I assumed that the Kemal Attaturk reforms were *designed* to make Ottoman and Seljuk literature unreadable, so that the new Turkish nation could modernize without the dead weight of history, just as the "first" Chinese Emperor tried to have all the works written before him, especially Confucius, destroyed for that purpose.

And knowing Stalin, the readers of the Latin-alphabet books were equally pulped.

First, I doubt that Finnish spelling is as complex as English.

Second, I was exposed to letters in kindergarten, then started reading words in the middle of 1st grade, just like everyone else in my 1st grade class (the ones who could not were held back [OK, the one person flunked]). Before that (reading from "Tip", our school's equivalent of the more famous "Dick and Jane" books), the closest that we got to reading in the Fall half of 1st grade was the teacher trying to tell me that a bucket started with the letter "p" and was pronounced "pail" even though there was no champagne bottle in it (she didn't like it when I used that very point, for some reason).

(For the non-US, kindergarten was a half-day grade zero that exposed children to letters, digits, minimal socialization, and most importantly naps when we were not sleepy. Nowadays, most children have a grade -1 called "pre-school" as well, ignoring the question of whether they have had day care from infancy because their complete set of parental units had to work)

Third, why are we discussing methods of teaching English in the US when the article is whether Germany is raising a generation of illiterates? Is there a slashdot.org.de to which this should have been limited? Or should we also discuss here whether Chairman Mao's decision to drastically simplify Chinese orthography from historical Chinese is designed to produce a nation of illiterates, or is it just NewSpeak (from 1984), since modern PRC Chinese will be unable to read anything from before the change or anything written by Chinese writers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Chinese Diaspora?

Correction: Algorithms will be carried out by computers, but the computers will be groups of women with adding machines, as they were up to the middle of WWII.

CompSci will be useful to the extent that it relates to handling large numbers, or if they can build robots using what is left. Losing Heathkit may well have doomed us to be recreated after the last living computer person has died.

The Apollo CSM never pulled along side another space based object and latched on because it didn't need to on any of the missions except 13, and that mission wouldn't have needed to do so if the service module hadn't had a one-in-a-program explosion. The DID do that during at least two Gemini missions that I watched growing up.

The original design version of the shuttle would have been far more useful, but it was Proxmired away.

Which Earth2, though? There have been several, and ALL had at least one hot chick and one guy who looks like Major West from Lost In Space (either of them).