They should just tell the students who don't pay attention not to even bother showing up, and save the students a walk or a drive and save the teacher a half classroom full of teaching-energy suckers.

Whoosh

Name three countries please that the US has attacked that have oil, that don't have nukes, and that refuse to play ball.

This is a very common misconception. It is not true. Until about the beginning of the 20th century (1900 ad) Jews lived in the Middle East and in other Muslim countries in the area in relative peace.

Animosity between Arab and Muslim countries (Iran is a Muslim country but IS NOT an Arab country) increased greatly in the last century for a variety of reasons. The creation of the state of Israel and the handling of some of the non-Jews living in that reason prior is one of the issues. Israel has done what it thinks is best* to ensure the continued existence of the state of Israel, and as they still exist 60 years later, they have been successful so far. Israel puts its own interests above the interests of the region. Why should they do anything else? Why should any nation state do anything else?

*This includes maintaining a very strong military, which they have used to defend themselves from foreign aggression as well as to be aggressors in preemptive wars and doing preemptive military strikes that they felt were in the interests of Israel. Includes using assassination as one of their options. Includes developing strong alliances with countries that can help them (most notably the USA). Includes expanding their borders into areas that are strategically significant.

Which browser was? I say this honestly, which was the first widely available and useful browser to have tabs or something like it? From my dim memory, I was using FF as my default browser and sometime in 2005 or 2006 (I could be wrong with my years here) I downloaded Opera and it had tabs and ran better and was more useful to *me* (which is all I ever care about when it comes to software). I switched to Opera as my default browser with FF as the backup. Since my latest OS wipe and reinstall, I've been getting along fine with Opera as the default and Chrome as the backup browser, no FF on my system yet.

I continue to maintain that I like Opera more than any other web browser I have tried. Everyone else's opinions are free to differ.

Whoah, it does! For a browser known for its lack of features compared to other browsers (which is partly true and partly false) it hasn't ceased to surprise me with the features it does have and that I have continued to discover since I started using it back in 2006.

To be completely honest, taking you to slashdot when you type /. in the link bar isn't really a feature as much as a Whoah! Thats pretty nifty! type of a thing.

I take it back, this is new but related stuff. The old stuff was a hack to gain control of a NIC and then the host computer over the network (only affected 1 model of NIC that they knew of). There new stuff is firmware that would require them to first have root level access on the target system so that they could flash the attached network card. The upside to this is that they could remove all tools on the system itself and traces that they had been there, and be very very stealthy.

But still completely and utterly fascinating and relevant, especially since no one seemed to pay to much attention back at CANSECWEST (yet another computer security/tool/hacker/exploit research convention) this year in March when the same group shared their research and did a live demonstration of getting root (or system level, I forget if they hacked a windows or linux box) over the network by taking over the NIC, and not doing anything at all through the host OS.

See their writeup here www.ssi.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/csw-trustnetworkcard.pdf or go to their company's website http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/site_article185.html

I believe that it is an absolute requirement to have port forwarding on your landlord's NAT to your NATing router, as well as port forwarding on your own router to the box you are trying to access.

You do realize that when the term "settlers" is used in conjunction with the west bank and gaza, and the term "settlements" as well, its not in reference to Palestinians. It is in reference to Israelis moving in an establishing new settlements there. In places that Palestinians have been living in for a long time. So if you were to move out settlers, you would be removing the Israelis that are moving there.

Have you been playing SC2? I don't want to go online to get the full mutiplayer experience. I don't want it to be difficult to download a custom map outside of Battlenet, and for Blizzard to keep track of what maps I have. When I switch races I want to be in a league (There are 5 levels) that has players close to my skill level, so *I* don't get stomped. If I make a new account to "pick on people" it won't be good for long, because the matchmaking system promotes you very quickly if it notices that you are significantly better than the people in the league you are in.

I agree with your sentiments. Its also possibly the best game in the mmo genre, which is designed to force players to pay the mmo owner monthly to continue playing. I don't really play lots of mmo's, and didn't play wow for very long (in comparison to others), but thought it was the funnest and most well polished mmo I have tried (there might be better, I dont know). So they did good for themselves in the mmo genre. That it is a shitty genre that consumes the lives of those that really get into it is not blizz's fault.

You might call me a Blizzard fanboy. I don't consider myself a fanboy of anything, but I think Blizzard has produced nothing but excellent PC games. Not a single bad one. All 7 of the games they released have been fun, well polished, well supported, and ran decently on older hardware. SC2 is really good. I uninstalled it yesterday because the network-centricity of it is pissing me off. I have a fast computer. I should not have to sit and wait for things to load when I hit the custom maps folder icon (on single player), as the custom maps I have already paid and I assume downloaded, should be on my local machine. Instead I wait for it to do whatever network activity it does to monitor me playing a single player custom map. And then beyond that it just gets worse. This is the first time I personally think I agree with the argument that I would be getting a better product if I find a hacked/cracked version of the game that doesn't do all this network garbage when I just want to start the game from my OS, load a map, and play single player.

It would also be nice to be able to change my account name when on multiplayer. Or even better to just let me make up new account names and start with a 0-0 record, so that I can learn other races in the game without lowering my rating with my main race (as I would lose lots of games and get stomped playing zerg for the first time when I am say at the gold or platinum level with protoss.)

Well....FreeBSD is not Linux. So what does your comment have to do with anything?

Your analogy is not completely isomorphic. If a food or drug manufacturer makes a product, they can directly sell it to any drug store, supermarket or fast food chain. Because the process of eating is the same for all people. You put food in one end, some hours later poop comes out the other end, the details are hidden by the black box of the digestive system.

Computer software is different. Unless there is a 100% agreed upon and followed standard in a hardware/software ecosystem, then different versions of the software will have to exist to account for the various hardware/software configurations. Apple's phone ecosystem is a completely closed and controlled system. A developer has to decide which is the minimum hardware configuration he wants to support (the 1, 2, 3, 3gs or whatever, or the 4) and code from there, knowing it will work on ALL phones that use that version of the OS or higher. Or they can code a reduced feature/functionality/blingbling branch to hit the early version(s) of IOS that don't support all the stuff they want. That is the extent of it.

The situation with Android is a little different. There are many different hardware configurations to support, and many different modifications or branches or forks or implemented features or extensions of the base OS. Having multiple stores will be good for a consumer. I can go to APP store X which I know verifies that all apps work with my version of Android (hopefully). As a developer I know have to ensure that my app meets the quality/interoperability standards of APP store X. But...... I have to QA again and possibly change code to meet the requirements of APP store Y. And again for APP store Z. And so on. Its not good for me as a developer unless I only want to target APP store X, which cuts the market for my apps way down. Or I can use some sort of multiplatform development kit/framework which will do the work of making cross platform/hardware binaries of whatever I am developing, which has its own limitations and trade offs.

So in summary, Steve Jobs does have a point about this and is not spouting straight bullshit. This time.

Anybody with actual apple phone and android phone development under their belt have anything to chime in with, one way or another? Not geek fan-boys of either system, but nerds with useful knowledge and experience to share?