The problem here is the primary education system, if you defend primary education(or let the anti-science crowd run the show) your not able to run a sensible university system for the general masses to the point where you need to be able to import skilled workers while the unemployment lines grow,

With a effective primary and secondary education system pretty much everyone who apply will be ready for university levels, and you can generally depend on primary and secondary grades to Scandinavia works this way for instance, and most of Europe tries to adopt to that model. And were talking about countries where universities are far more subsidized then the US here.

The problem here is either that the primary education system was teaching different facts then the university exams expected, or that someone screwed up on the auto-grading multiple choice system(multiple choice exams are notorious for being either easy to game or rigged toward memorization of very specific phases).

The problem with the TPM is not the TPM it's that win8 equipment is using something that should really be called UEFI lite ie a TPM with a reduced set of key management features mostly binding the end user to always trust what was shipped with the chip and everything trusted by those, ie should Microsoft loose control over one of their keys you as a user have a system that will run viruses and spyware as trusted OS component and there's nothing short of removing the TPM chip, you can do to fix it as antivirus is not allowed to mess with trusted code(ie antivirus would only be effective against signed malware in unsecure mode). Ohh and the NSA have full access to MS's signing keys. With the non TPM systems antivirus can prevent any binary library/driver it identifies from running(it's the identifying that the hard part.)

Had UEFI/TPM been implemented as Intel/IBM intended it the system owner would have full edit access to the keystore using hw overide, Ie the system owner would have full control over what software that gets trusted, and the user can even add their own keys, this is not how secure mode on win8 systems work.

And LaTeX does online text now.

The real reason why LaTeX is now hopelessly outdated is that it's even more of a paper simulator then the "WordPerfect" clones ie it's centered around creating a beautiful readable output nobody will ever see in a modern document workflow, where things never really gets printed or published to readers but circulated in it's "write enabled form". LaTeX is based around a dying way of thinking about document.

With LyX you get a system that solves a problem that only existed with an now obsolete way of using computers to create documents.

What is flexisheet and are you even able to solve the problems with it people solve with excel/calc remember again that the way people use spreadsheets today might have very little to do with how academia thought spreadsheets were supposed to be used back in the early days of pc usage.

And yet we have indies being forced to get publishers on the XBox platform, something dont add up.

This is basically the walled garden problem, in order for the walled garden to give the security benefits the curator promises the walled garden need gatekeepers, as MS cant afford to actually vet everything they need to limit the amount of companies/people who can publish content into the walled garden, hence cutting out small scale independent who don't want to give some established insider what is basically an bribe for entry into the walled garden.

MS probably want the indie's and do probably do have some measures to help indies get past the bribe seeking gatekeepers but unlike their competitors MS have a system that is dependent on a small number of gatekeepers in order for it to be viable.

The BSA will have a field day slamming companies that migrate off site licensing windows and MS Office for using limited licenses or even worse pirated software on the BYOD equipment used to conduct the company's business. if you don't actually provide employee's with a licensing budget or depend s

To get around it means getting in t equally big trouble with labor laws banning the nonfree-freelancer loophole some companies have used to pretend they to not have obligations as an employer in the past.

The main problem with BYOD is the fact that you cant legally demand that your employee's bring the device you want them to without compensation, at least not in the civilized part of the wold. ie no matter what the company is going to wind up paying most of the HW bill, and all of the licensing bills. And you still need to support the equipment.

The problem here is not as much that you cant manage the security aspects but that you cant just slash your IT budget without breaking contract and employment law. And without the option of cutting IT budgets most BYOD business cases just fall a part.

202 comments on VOIP and nobody mentioning teamspeak, mumble or Ventrillo?

If your looking for something that's going to set your apart from your lynq/exhange/avaya using competitors that a direction you might want to look at.

The whole groupware thing is in a lot of way corporations trying to achieve what the various geek subcultures have done for decades and allow teams to function independently of geography, without loosing the mid 90ies serious business office vibe.

Poking further outside of the "made exclusively for business" box you find IRC servers, conventional web forums etc,

I know this is not what the OP mentions but it's worth noting that there is different approaches to doing in team communication then the tools that is directly derived from the stuff that got adopted by the old school office in the mid 90ies.

No probably the http://europa.eu/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice/index_en.htm which is supposed to upheld the "federal EU legislation" against the local governments and in generally gets involved in almost every principal case as a standard practice by the local supreme courts, the fact that few cases actually make it all the way is due to a process of advisory where the national court ask the EU court for advice, on cases where EU law may be relevant.

The interesting thing is that the main tactics in the war on "fair use" seams to be outsourcing the regulation to private parties who does not get a realistic choice to refuse a takedown request as it will always be both more expansive and more risky to defend their customers rights then not.

This allow some interesting legal doublethink in the context of the US supreme court where you can protect the "freedom" of the "oppressor"(telco) instead of the "oppressed"("uploader"), by granting corporation a privileged personhood status,something that is a bit harder with the general EU legislation because corporation and consumer tend to be more clearly defined.

The basic tactic is to avoid involving the courts, as it spread the risk of financial loss move evenly between the accuser and accused in favor of a "private" pseudo system where it's almost free to accuse and expansive to defend, when things go to court the content industry almost always get's less then they ask for, if anything at all.

At least the high frequency trading mess is leaving some usable wreckage behind that's a lot more then you can say about most of the financial institutions innovations.

Problem is, that windmills are noisy neighbors and cannot cover every square mile, take a place like Denmark with around 20% of energy coming from wind where the eco-activists is now chaining themselves to construction machinery to protest the construction of bigger and hence more noisy windmills in what they consider a Nature reserve.

Above a certain level you simply run out of space, where you can put em without "ruining" someone neighborhood for the windmills and the figures of cost rises significanly when you move the location out into the oceans, hydro reached that point decades ago.

Traditional solar panels are extremely expansive in both energy and material cost to make when you measure pr megawatt, and just not viable on a large scale 10% might be a realistic upper limit. Bio cant provide anything like double digit percentages either, This leaves us with something like 60-70% of our energy need we can only fill with, fosil, nuclear or tech we dont have yet.

If you want to move from gas/diesel cars to hydrogen/battery power you add to this problem by increasing the drain you need to put on the grid by 30-100%.

The problem is that none of the alternative energy forms will generate the same amount of energy we get from fossil without us actually making sacrifices, beyond spending a few billions.

In some parts of Europe we are beginning to see data protection agencies(yes normally an oxymoron) banning the use of clouds, where parts of the infrastructure is outside of their jurisdiction, for anyone licensed to store sensitive information. because they assume that the authorities of that place will always have access to back doors in the platform. Something that have caused the usual cloudvangalists to accuse them of being anti progress and all the lot.

This is causing some ruckus as school districts want to use google docs and hospitals want to move their IT into the cloud where the unicorns roam and IT is free and easy.

the BP oil spill.

One of the biggest issues in the whole nuclear accident meme thing is that well somehow nuclear accidents are only ever compared to other nuclear accidents. But on a wider scale how dangerous is this compared to similar events hitting conventional energy sources? like oil well or refinery fires.

Chrome like safari is based on the rather old khtml engine(of konqueror fame) that always was fast but tended to do pretty bad when rendering non standard html the way the author intended(and nobody especially google writes standard html) that issue slowly got fixed, and when apple got involved(and it got renamed to webkit), it took off for mainstream use.

Chromes javascript performance along with firefox latest 6x improvement is achived by going from parsed code to compile on load or JIT compilation.

Version numbers are often marketing tools firefox is at triple digit version numbers if you convert it to the scheme chrome uses, it makes little sense to use them as indication of progress.

600 SMS'es on the same cell to the same recipient could cause some interesting effects, especially if multiple carriers are involved. You might see random votes get delayed for longish period of time and you might not get the result within seconds. Email is also set up to allow for delays. It might not be a real problem but dont expect a SMS system to be 110% reliable.

Wireless Ethernet fails a lot more transparent i.e. the voters will get a feedback from the system if their transaction fail, SMS/Email will fail silently i.e. it will not be obvius to the voter if transaction went through.

Wasn't this the MS get the fact showcase as to how much better ms.net and sql server were compared to linux? Before the system came crashing down and latency became an issue?