I don't see a lack of documentation anywhere in the FOSS world, it's actually a lot better than most closed source software. I don't know whether you're complaining about your lack of Google-fu or the fact that software is reliant on other things. Off course, very obscure things are not well documented but that is regardless of software you use, that's when you experiment and find out what you need, write a blog post or improve the documentation yourself. But for a regular user and regular sysadmin and developer tasks, there is plenty of help available.

Feel free to move to Mars, I doubt they would know or care much about your hijinks. The world has become a small town due to the Internet. Small towns have their advantages but also their disadvantages.

There is technology out there that could detect humans/animals even in the darkest portions (in tunnels etc) well in advance, outside human drivers' visual range. However whether or not that would make a difference is a big question, you can't stop a chunk of steel weighing in at 10T in a matter of seconds - well, you could (rocket boosters and whatnot) but then the meat bags inside the train would be omelets.

Speech recognition has been in computers since OS/2 Warp and MacOS9. It's a 'solved' problem. However we speak much slower than we either think or type/move mouses so it's a bit of a solution looking for a problem (and with mobile there are some practical uses eg. driving a car but it's still weird to talk to a device in public as if it were your butler; heck it's weird to talk to a human butler). What isn't solved very well is understanding natural language and having a 'conversation' with a computer.

If I don't know any further details, I'll take it as if it were the best case scenario and someone found some irregularities and is fixing it. Irregularities doesn't mean something illegal happened, there are plenty of ways to siphon money out of a fund that don't break the law, that's what accountants are supposed to know and fix.

If something is blatantly illegal, follow the corporate policy and report as necessary to superiors and if that fails or is not feasible, authorities. Remain as anonymous as possible, do an anonymous report to HR or at least ask them to keep your identity concealed etc etc. And trust me, authorities don't give a shit about what is and isn't legal within a corporation, you file a report and nothing ever happens unless millions of dollars are going in the wrong (read: not in their) pockets. Even the corporation won't care if an accountant syphoned 100k to their personal bank account; they'll fire the dude/dudette and carry on because the bad press will hurt their stock/client base more than the 100k. For the 'regular' guy, $100k or even $1M is a LOT of money, within the billion dollar corporation this is chump change and well within their calculated losses.

Architecture is an important art with plenty of math worked into it, the human body in art is also a great case for both biology and math; art is important and should be a core academic subject supporting the rest however it should not be "arts and crafts" which is not art but a way of keeping kids busy.

It should be the reasons behind art, what makes a thing aesthetically pleasing, what harmonics are and how colors and light mix but how do you convince a populace that doesn't even understand half of the words in this sentence that that is what art is and why it's important?

Math has been in the boring rote memorization exercise for decades in schools. The reason is that most people simply do not grasp the 'mechanics' behind mathematics and teachers have neither the will nor the skill to teach a subject like math. I didn't like math in school simply because they went so slow and required rote memorization of multiplication tables, axioms and rules. I even remember doing tests that were simply asking to write down axioms in text form.

Some people do grasp math and those will be the nerds that eventually become STEM students. However 75% of the population will never enter this field because they're simply not wired to understand it.

That is basically breaking even especially given the backers and what they're investing in. I'm surprised the losses weren't larger.

vi just works regardless of whether you're local or remote or whether or not you have a windowing environment. It doesn't even need a correctly defined terminal. Also, it has all the features like spell check, indentation, code highlighting, colors and everything you ever need. It also a little over 1MB (smaller for some other platforms) and thus will fit anywhere.

It's not necessarily the FUD that worked. Read the presentation - the proposals were killed by a State senator that was bribed to make a law that said "no office in this state can sell high speed Internet"

Look at the T-Mobile fine print for the BYOD plans:
"If you switch plans you may be bound by existing term (including early termination provisions) and/or charged an up to $200 fee."
AT&T (same "no-contract plan" page:
Early termination fee up to $325 may apply.

The pricing for a no-contract is actually similar or more expensive than my current 2 year contracts AND you have to pay for the phone.

They're not ditching the two year contracts. They're just locking you into a contract for 1 or 2 years without giving you a free phone. Big difference.

Any sysadmin worth their salt is going to cost a pretty penny. If you cheap out on the workers, you'll get what you pay for including multi-million dollar license fees. The license fees for MS products in EDU is currently at ~$1000/year/FTE or full-time student. You only need to have ~50-150 people total (depending on your area) to pay for a good sysadmin.

If you make such claims, please back them up with statements. The latest iOS upgrade has been a great improvement to both speed and usability for my iPhone 4 and my iPad 1 is no slower today through all the upgrades than when I started using it 3 years ago, it still runs all the games and whatnots.

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

The problem is that the whole computer eco-system is built on the premise that whoever is buying doesn't have a clue what the fuck they are doing. Most of the niche and custom software (think PeopleSoft which comes as a set of basic HTML blocks and a database) is something that can be built much better for a company in less than 6 months by a team of dedicated and decent programmers.

Yet, the person buying doesn't have a clue what they are doing so they throw a few million at it and 2-3 years of H1B's and overpaid (for their qualifications) contractors to come up with a system that is more broken in the end than when it started. The same happens everywhere and at every level. Desktop software: Throw a few millions at Microsoft and Dell so everyone can browse the web and receive the occasional e-mail on a system that could run Crysis 5 when it comes out in 2020 even though a Raspberry Pi would be good enough for most of the fleet. Web software: throw a few millions in the directions of Oracle and IBM in order to serve out 99% static pages.