Can I point out that Enterprise occurred before the point in time when the timeline changed in the Abrams film, and never interacted with events from the other series outside of a self-contained Mirror Universe story, IIRC.

It's the only one of the series that could possibly exist in the new timeline.

The thing I love about this industry is that with every new platform, every generation of programmers manages to make errors that were made - and fixed - by a previous generation or on a previous platform. And it's an industry that aggressively weeds out experience - which is uniquely dysfunctional.

Credit card issuers and processors need to come down on this like a ton of bricks. Losing your access to a card network or losing your merchant agreement would probably be a powerful incentive.

Actually, I get 59 down routinely with Cablevision/Optimum. Then again, I got a two-year, no-contract deal that gives me phone, cable, and their upgraded internet service for $85 a month. That includes a cablecard. When that deal is up, I'll either get them to extend the price, or switch to Verizon FIOS for a couple of years with no contract. Having real competition makes a HUGE difference. Looks like Verizon has given up on extending FIOS to any new areas, though. Look at Boston - no FIOS, and Verizon is not only not going to build it out, they're going to start requiring residential DSL customers to also pay for POTS.

I've heard that Verizon's percentage market penetration rate per mile of cable in the greater NYC area isn't good. Makes me wonder how long it'll be before they go to being an entirely wireless company, and they offload their physical network to other companies. If you're only grabbing 25% of the possible customers (for example), and the local cable company is at 60% or more, and you're having to maintain just as much cable, you've got an issue.

Yup. Competition from essentially unaccountable charter schools or private schools getting public money with little or no oversight, and under a variety of guises able to reject students with physical, mental or behavioral issues. There have been studies showing that the "new school effect" is what may account for any short-term gains in charters, and that renovating and relaunching public schools could have the same effect. Charter and private schools aren't expected to act like social service agencies, dealing with all sorts of damaged kids. The regular public schools are. And recent studies about the effects of stress on neurological development pretty much shows that these kids are being wired to fail by their environments. Poverty, home problems, crime, etc. are the actual problems.

The motivated parents who move their kids to a new school? Those kids probably have less stress than the kids who have parents who are having more problems and aren't focusing on them. Charter/private with vouchers will lead to tons of kids being left behind.

Please understand - the for-profits, consulting companies, etc. have NO interest in actually fixing education. Education is one of the few places where there's a lot of public money, it's staying public, and it's largely going to middle-class employees. The entire point of the reform - from the standpoint of these companies - is to siphon off a ton of that money. Their profit margin will be built by lowering wages - leading to lower-quality teachers over time - and eventually making the whole thing even worse.

I halfway expect to see some of these for-profit companies running juvenile detention facilities soon as well. They make money either way if they do.

Absolutely right. This is an attempt to take billions of dollars and shift it to private industry. Romney referred to us as "Company" and not a "Country" the other day. We're at the point where I'm nostalgic for Bush II calling us "Consumers" instead of "Citizens". The middle class was created when wealth was redistributed down. Those at the top have spent the last 60 years working to reverse that, and they've nearly succeeded. Four years of Romney with a Republican congress will seal the deal.

Yes, it is. First off, you're not just dealing with the students, you're dealing with (sometimes) batshit-crazy parents, in addition to your own supervisory chain. You're dealing with 25 students in a room, 12 of which have IEPs or 504 documentation, and you may or may not have any in-room support for those kids, depending on the subject area and district. And you're having to deal with students who just won't do the work or are disruptive, you're likely to get little support from the school in terms of disciplining the kid, and often less from the kid's parents.

Most programmers - most professionals - don't have to deal with that many individual people - and aren't expected to both cater to them and produce results - to the same degree as teachers. It's exhausting. And when you look at what charter schools are attempting to get teachers to do (and mind you, the charters often do a crap job of actually supporting their teachers), it's little wonder that a high proportion of charter school teachers quit after one or two years. BTW, the least effective teaching years for a teacher? The first two or three years. If your school has a high percentage of teachers with less than four years of experience, it's not going to be as good. I'm sure some of the /. readers will object to that, but there are a significant number of studies that have shown it over the years.

In addition, there's the pressure that if you can't get through to a kid, they're behind next year, and maybe more the year after that. And trust me, that bothers them. You're constantly battling to get kids to recognize that something is in their long-term benefit. Most goddamn adults can't figure that out.

Yeah, but Ryan isn't a baby boomer. He was born in 1970, so that either puts him on the tail end of Gen X if you've extended past the "original" timeframe used for that term, or else early GenY. As a slightly-older GenX, I couldn't stand this kind of jackass 25 years ago, and I can't stand them now. He's clearly in love with himself, and how clever he thinks he is, and he somehow doesn't think he's relied on other people to get there. And let's not forget that he's only managed to get a couple of pieces of meaningless legislation (naming a post office and lowering excise tax on arrow shafts) through Congress in 14 years..

Hell, he even thinks he's brilliant enough to reconcile Catholicism and Objectivism. That's a level of mental contradiction that's only possible if you're shallow or delusional - or you're just a power-hungry, cynical political hack who doesn't have any real principles.

Arguably, Hawaii could as well, The original annexation wasn't legally voted on by congress (the treaty was never ratified), so the statehood vote may or may not count.

No, it can't. The only tablet I'm aware of that can do any sort of enterprise auth out of the box (against Active Directory) is the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet (Android). You can use your AD password to lock/unlock the device. They also preload a Citrix client into the tablets.

Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.

Does anyone think that a serious candidate who would threaten the surveillance agencies' plans would ever get to the presidency, or even to a major party nomination? Any dirt on candidates or their families would appear from "anonymous sources" well before that happens.

I seriously doubt the the NSA - even if ordered by a court or by whoever the current administration is at the time - would actually stop collecting the data or to delete the data in question

Weirdly - they're shipping really nice cameras. The Alpha A77 and A65, as well as the compact system NEX-7, are really good by any measure, and fantastic for the money. Of course, the A77 and A65 have a Minolta lineage, and some parts of the NEX-7 do as well. But the new OLED electronic viewfinder in those cameras is industry-leading, and the new sensor is terrific. And their top-end lenses are as good as anyone's. Sony's actually putting more thought into their digital imaging products than a lot of other camera makers at this point.

Does anyone think any candidate unacceptable to the intelligence/national security apparatus in this country would even get past the primary, if even the smallest bit of dirt could be found on them and passed to the media? Because I sure have my doubts.

Older shows were sometimes altered for DVD release - music removed or changed, etc. - due to royalty issues.

And I can think of good movies that you can't really get on DVD today. Like the Stephen Frears film "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid".

It's worse than that - they're actually pushing costs off onto wifi providers. Any crowded place with unmetered wifi - Coffee shops, college networks, hotels, etc. are getting hammered by crap like this, and in some cases aren't budgeted for it. And it's not "just get another access point" - it's the amount of traffic - 802.11 and otherwise - in that spectrum. There's a point where there's just too much traffic, and adding additional equipment won't fix the problem. We can't turn every room into a Faraday Cage. Even crowded apartment buildings are starting to see problems with interference between apartments.

And, yes, I am making a value judgement on the feature. If you've got working fingers, you can type and not bother the rest of us with your voice. This is on par with Nextel users who used to use the "push to talk" feature back in the day, would hold the phone a foot away from their face, and yell into it while the phone blasted the other party out on a speaker. This using this thing around other people is the aural equivalent of someone going out of their way to fart in a crowded room.