If you really want to be told specifically what speed you'll get, feel free to offer your ISP some $$$ to send out a technician and find out the combination of umpteen factors that will give you your result. It may take quite some $$$ but you'll be able to convince them - and you will get your precious accurate values.

Or just click on: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/

Wireless has rarely worked out of the box for Fedora and Mandrake, even though kernel support experiments started around early 2006. Even the latest Red Hat Centos (2009's v5.4) needed poking though half of the packages were silently waiting at the expected places... I think my downloaded wireless firmware is what fixed it.

Back when I got Nexenta, OpenSolaris, Slax and Knoppix, I first checked the tray for wireless networks, then ifconfig, and even whether iwspy was installed. Ubuntu is the only one rich&bold enough to launch "ready to connect" without needing ndiswrapper, ever since version 7.

Distros / Desktop environments have some welcome materials but are mum on why wireless support is ignored on mobile platforms. They assume nobody owns laptops and netbooks this day and edge, to be testing their distros out on it. I have a 3 year old Toshiba that had Fedora with varying degrees of "instant success" on wireless depending on versions. My second test is whether I any distro writes to NTFS partitions out of the box. I think that's been surmounted, but the past 4 years it was a headache to find why NTFS folders marked rwx would silently fail to write and not read.

Fedora was never a reasonable distro for me: too much pain on the bleeding edge. On the other hand, Centos gives me much pain because the edge is mostly 3 year old bluntness, and many tools do not appear to have been QA'd. I'll give the next release another try before tossing Red Hat out altogether.

If you must know, keychain access fails to remember or manage passwords and asks for them a million times with no off button... wireless connectivity (NetworkManager) is buggy and re-asks for passwords. Some Gnome applets are plainly broken: stocks ticker fails to update and the weather app does nothing until you refresh it. OpenOffice 2 databases have issues on some files created in 3, in a silent fail issue, and yum isn't tuned to let you download version 3 unless you go poking with rogue repos. Ubuntu seems to be fine. I am hating the man at the top, but at least it does feel like the most trouble-free home distro going back 4 years. I'm not upgrading from 9.04, though.

I don't see how the free market is the problem. Public schools just value money more than proper textbooks. Plus, even if Texas is such a huge market, they only account for 8% of total population of the country.

Esp. considering the massive amount of material that was written in the Federalist Papers(though not written by Jefferson, a large # of them were penned by his protege Madison) about the rights of minorities and how the Constitution was SPECIFICALLY written to enshrine the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. The writers of this law either seem to be ignoring that or ignorant of that fact, neither would surprise me considering it is Texas we are talking about.

FWIW, I consider myself to be at least fairly knowledgeable of basic American history AND I was educated north of the Mason-Dixon line, I don't consider those two things to be coincidental.

Being and Android user, and having only recently used an iphone and the app store for the first time, I was shocked by the amount of adult content that comes up in almost every app search.

With all the Steve Jobs has said regarding porn recently, I found it extremely hypocritical that all this stuff is so readily available on the iphone.

I'm sorry Mr Jobs, I wouldn't trust my children with any iPhone/iPad if that's the sort of thing you promote.

Right now Android is a far more children-friendly platform in my opinion.

This is history of man, not of nature. Political correctness was everywhere in my textbooks as well. I turned out to be a libertarian.

Evolution is evident, it is all around us.

Regardless, if parents want to teach their kids that an alien came to earth and made all of humanity, so be it. It isn't the government's right to deny the parents teachings to their children. This is why there is such a large debate about teaching evolution. All this would be easier if schools weren't publicly funding and parents paid for school DIRECTLY. Vote with your dollars.

Choosing which facts make it to print and which do not is necessarily a judgment call. Which of these facts are the most significant developments in American history? There's no "objective" way to answer this, since importance is itself a value judgment.

Yes that was my point. However deliberately airbrushing Comrade Jefferson out of the picture, for instance, is going a little further than simply making a "value judgment."

My solution is rather than teach the kids "facts," to teach them History. Selecting which viewpoints are represented to illustrate the variety of historiographical approaches towards particular events is of course itself a judgment call. It is, however, inherently less susceptible to propagandistic abuse and one more likely to illustrate that in matters of history (or politics), in contradistinction to the physical sciences or math, there is no such thing as the one correct position.

But the converse is not true.

With a manual, it depends a lot more on the skill of the driver at clutching.

I've got a friend who has a manual diesel with 980k miles on it. He doesn't use the clutch: he's able to 'feel' the vehicle well enough to not need it, and can shift seamlessly. It's quite the feat to watch.

The definition of rape depends on the country. According to wikipedia, for example, it's only rape if it's a man raping a woman.

Unless you consider the negative environmental impact of disposing/recycling all those used cars and the manufacture of newer ones. We would have done less damage to the planet by forcing everyone to drive the car they had an additional year before they could buy a new one.

And thats completely ignoring the fact that the fuel saved by cash for clunkers was only about 1/5th the cost of the program.

If I had traded in my 18mpg Oldsmobile for a 30mpg car, I would have only saved about 250gallons a year. At 3 per gallon, that only saved me $750 dollars. How much of my tax money did the government spend on it though? Oops.

I won't re-type this entire post, but you don't need to lecture me on the stresses of not having money. I've been there, both as a child and as an adult. And my point is, my kids did start learning to read when they were 5 or 6, and by now, they've caught up with most of the kids who could read earlier. On the other hand, I never went to pre-school, but I was reading quite comfortably by the time I started Kindergarten because I simply enjoyed it. My parents never had money for pre-school or special tutors, but (just for example), my older brother is a doctor, I'm a patent attorney, and my next younger brother is a Biochem Ph.D. who just started his own business. It wasn't money. Nobody lined our way with golden bricks. We just did it because we had parents who were emotionally engaged and taught us we could do it. It was parenting. And that's my whole point.

And, by the way, my wife taught at a low income elementary school. There were parents there who were dead broke, including single moms, who still managed to be engaged parents, and their kids did quite well. They did a lot better, in fact, than the kids whose parents came up with the money---whether they had it or not---to ensure that Little Johnny had a shiny new PlayStation to occupy him. Sure, money has some effect on a child's success, but it's not the only factor, and not even the most important one.

2. If you read the article, they had included software that collected traffic, like emails, etc.

Yes. As in, they collected /all/ wireless traffic with the intention of checking which hotspot it came from and measure its signal strength. I don't think there's any indication that they specifically tried to log emails or that they did any of this for purposes other than locating hotspots.

When somebody says 'truck' do you say "don't you mean car"?

I remember the good old days playing Couterstrike over my ISDN line. There were a couple of servers which I could hit single digit latency times. Now it's all gone to shit with consumer broadband.