Don't be an idiot. "Liberal bias" is a term used by American conservatives when they don't agree with the way they're represented. You may notice that the rest of the world doesn't try to apply a conspiratorial overtone to what is essentially a chaotic medium.

It's not even getting as far as gdm. just outputs garbage to the screen...

You assume that "serious commercial software developers like Adobe" are required.

Linux appears to be getting on just fine without them.

I've now done the upgrade from Intrepid on three machines and here are the results:

1. Work Machine - Uses an Intel 965 Graphics cards, support of which is broken until kernel 2.6.29 / 30 according to the forums, and won't be properly supported until karmic. Fucking annoying, since by 'broken' I mean "utterly non performant".

2. Home Laptop. Ran just fine, but apt decided that I didn't want the restricted packages installing on the upgrade, so my atheros wifi card was out of action until I could get the .deb from somewhere else. Annoyingly, the madwifi drivers seem to kill whatever ubuntu do to NetworkManager so I'm stuck using the propietary, even though they've been in the kernel since 2.6.25.

3. Home Desktop. This has killed X. Killed it good. At the moment I've no idea how it was managed, but it was...

I love ubuntu, but this upgrade has gone horribly wrong for me on two out of three installs, and 'smoothly' on none of them.

No, my friend. You are the arrogant one, for assuming that I was expanding my argument to all mac buyers. I don't I accept that for certain tasks they are the standard, and I don't have a problem with it. I never said I knew more than all Mac users.

I was actually referring to the Starbucks slurping, Khaki wearing, self appointed kings of techno-cool. You don't want to run Ubuntu on everything. Fine. That's your prerogative

I missed off the major thing that gets my goat about Macs. And that's that Mac users take everything that isn't fawning appreciation as an attack. Which you helpfully revealed at the end of your post.

So forget growing up, why don't you fuck off?

One of my major issues with Apple is that they force users to spend through the nose for standard hardware so they can run an OS.

I mean, my other problem is that Macs make people with more money than tech sense tell me that I don't know how to do my job, and that they "just work" - A claim I can almost instantly prove wrong by crashing the bloody things.

Nope. These kids come from rough homes, and no teacher is going to able to countermand 16 hours a day of "no rules". Not by the time they're older than nine or so.

Whether you choose to believe it or not, some kids, barring intensive socialisation programs, are write offs. If you've got a mixed ability class, the best you can do is to stop them wrecking everyone else's chances. By paying for school, you're just removing everyone who hasn't already had their problems 'fixed' with dubious kiddy psychiatry.

It's the teachers that make the difference. Go back fifty / sixty years and there's no difference between the technology, since it wasn't there. Technology is more or less irrelevant in schools (Unless you are specifically learning about the technology).

Money would be irrelevant if America wasn't so broken that all the decent teachers can think is "100k a year" instead of teaching some people who could _really_ use their skills.

Cool. I'll do that. Send me a plane ticket and my 2.4 and I are there...

The solution is simple. Stop the PTA managing the school boards, and just have them as a kind of "Viewers group". It's how it works in most European countries. Stops people who don't know anything about Education fucking it all up...

Of course, I don't actually know how it works in the states, as to whether the PTA has some kind of managerial right.

You don't *need* money, you need good teachers. Paying more for a bad ones who can slither their way through interview, know buzzwords and can use a digital whiteboard won't fix it.

I went to a State school in the UK. Half of the kids were rough as anything, and the other half weren't. There were blackboards ('chalkboards' in the colonial parlance) and textbooks.
This is about ten years ago.

Not a rich school.
The teachers were good, so those who wanted to learn ended up going to a University of their choice, and those who couldn't be arsed weren't allowed to disrupt the teaching. If you'd put shiny e-tech and new age / business school teaching methods in there it would have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

That money is required for success in everything is a curious Americanism. India has more programmers and techs than anywhere else, and their schools run on a budget that couldn't run a US schoolbus.

...you can't fix education by throwing money at it.

Perhaps you have to know what you're doing.

In my case, this is because I am revolted by the IE7 interface, and am pissed off that it can't be turned back to IE6 mode.

The law, as I understand it was proposed, would have made ISPs responsible for monitoring their networks and enforcing the law, which ain't their job.

All this does is open the way for a properly appointed government body to do it.

Bugger.

I wouldn't scream too loudly, Jacquie Smith is still trying to run the country like her own personal penal system...

Nope. Only if has the power to legally declare war on behalf of his country. He's done nothing wrong under New Zealand law, excepting any crazy treaties. If the US wants to do something to him then they have to prove he violated their law within their sovereign territory, then try to get him extradited.

I'm kinda hoping the current president isn't the kind of guy to declare war over a second hand iPod...