Sadly, sedition would be vilified. Look at Mr Snowden. Enemy of the state, now exiled in Moscow. He's one of many, and as there are no controls, and the game of extortion is played at the highest level like a bad poker game, the chances of clarity, openness, and even "just the right thing" are nil.

Martyrdom doesn't work with 72 virgins, and it doesn't work when corporate America controls the press-- especially Murdoch. Who has the WSJ by the printing press short-hairs? None other. Most of us just duck low, shaking our heads.

Don't see what the hell #4 is supposed to do, to be honest.

But the rest is easier solved with "don't allow in-app purchases".

It's not racism to point out the fact that most H1B scab labor in IT is Indian. It's also not racist to point out that "lowering the bar" is bogus.

If Jesse wants to wage the next race war, he should start by getting more black kids interested in STEM and education in general. He can fight against the pervasive drug and gang culture that keeps black kids away from any means to better themselves.

Perhaps he could even get a bunch of athletes and rappers to just read to kids.

And so the article, and the quote in the summary, are just plain lying:

"The Silent Power PC is claimed to be the first high-end PC able to ditch noisy electric fans in favor of fully passive cooling."

Bought a no-moving-parts power supply back in... oh, I don't know, 2003 or something. Sold as "cooled by heatpipes", pretty much the same principle - silent, no moving parts, passively cooled, no fans, huge surface areas.

They also did kits for the processor itself but I've also bought P2-era motherboards that were designed to be passively cooled too (same thing, huge heatsink, no fan).

So this is certainly not "the first" in the PC world (unless we're talking about "the first" to use some particular technology that just about replicates what I bought over 10 years ago). Not even close. In fact, it's over a decade out. And going outside the PC world, passively cooled chips are pretty common - you have a tablet or smartphone without a huge stonking fan, no?

The PSU is still working 10 years on if you'd like me to dig it out. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to butcher it to do the same job to the processor, especially if you can safely have it clock itself down to prevent heat being generated in the first place.

> Who uses a flash drive anymore...it's all about the cloud...get with the times grandpa.

It's an automobile.

It goes where the cloud doesn't.

You don't even have to try that hard really.

> You bought a license to play that music

No. That is total corporate-felating bullshit.

There's 100 year old case law that contradicts this nonsense. Corporations already tried to pull this shit and got slapped down by the courts.

There is no "implicit license" on a copy of a creative work, just standard copyright law.

Agreed, in principle, but we're still allowed opinions based on experience.

When I've worked in primary and secondary education, state and private, deprived areas and the exact opposite, it's hard to see where the advantage is at all. The above is not a post from ignorance, it's a post from someone deep inside IT inside education, who has had phone calls in my professional position from parents of deprived children begging for technical support (and they got a lot more than they hoped for, and it didn't cost them a bean).

I'm not claiming to know everything, but what I've seen shows an inherent flaw in the "let's give kids computers" charities - they are starting from entirely the wrong premise - that access to even the cheapest of hardware is why the children are having problems. It's not.

A UK-based school IT guy asks:

Which company?

And do they collect?

I work in schools.

I work in IT in schools.

I've only ever worked in IT in schools (or colleges, or tuition centres...).

School computers do not make better students. Home computers do not make better students. Personal computers do not make better students.

If anything, the opposite unless they are regulated... by a teacher... in a classroom... and they have the will to learn. Guess which are the magic factors and which aren't?

Sure, there are disadvantaged children that don't have an Internet connection, a PC, time on it, and can't fill in their homework that the school provides on its website. The number of them is VANISHINGLY small. And, usually, because of much bigger problems that have nothing to do with technology - i.e. the kinds of families that you would find had sold the PC the next week for money to buy something else. They are dozens of charities, government schemes and even schools that do this. It's not taken up en-masse unless you are giving SILLY amounts of money to it, and then it's taken up to save them paying a bill that you could have just paid for them twice over.

And then, when I was a kid 15-20 years ago, I didn't have much access to a PC either. I came out near the top of my school. In IT. It wasn't a burden. In fact, my teachers fretted about my wasting so much time on the computers when they did come in.

Let's get this straight - giving an old recycled PC that someone was throwing out to a kid does not give them anything. I can't give this stuff away, when I throw out dozens of desktops a year, for a reason: you can run old stuff on it, if you're careful. So instead of "no PC", they have "slow PC full of junk that either can't run or is ancient". They're better off with no PC. Sticking it onto the Internet is, again, just a recipe for disaster. Now all that rich online content, tied into the school's cloud systems, requiring all kinds of plugins... they still can't view as intended.

Sticking them on Linux isn't going to help either. I speak as someone who HAS deployed Linux machines in schools, is never without a Linux server somewhere, and has Linux at home. And Windows. And (spit) Macs. And I was an early backer of the Raspberry Pi project. All it means is they won't be able to read their homework in a format that the teacher can send or send their homework in a format that the teacher can read. I *know* that you and *I* can do that, but this are disadvantaged kids with no PC skills stuck on an unfamiliar system that few people can help them with.

STOP GIVING THIS CRAP TO CHILDREN in the first world. Nothing is actually *better* - they then might have to come into school and do stuff like learn. And if the kid is that disadvantaged but able to learn, there are libraries, after-school clubs, lunchtime clubs, or they can negotiate after-hours access with their schools direct - which might just help those parents struggling to leave work in order to pick them up...

Sending this stuff to the third world doesn't help either. They have the same problems, and have to deal with too much junk.

On top of all that, unless you're online it's pointless. The Linux educational software is NOT educational software. It's some geek's idea of educational, conforms to no curriculum whatsoever and, if you're lucky, can be crowbarred to fulfill two or three curriculum requirements over the course of a year. And if you have to put these kids online to do what they need, THAT is the cost and the expense and the problem, not what device they happen to access it from (by the time you are then, any kind of thin-client would work, backed by their school).

Really, we need to find other ways to solve this problem, not just throw old computers at kids. It's not even as useful as throwing old library books at kids.

"You can buy our products individually"
"You can subscribe to all our products for one fee"
"You can buy our special title by subscribing and paying a premium for that one title"
"You can buy our products individually"

Sorry. I don't "subscribe". The value of it rarely lasts long enough to be of any value at all to me.

Magazines? They tend to repeat themselves after a year, then you realise that all the "new" stuff, you now know where to find out. (Did this for PC magazines, Linux magazines, Astronomy magazines, even New Scientist is ludicrously expensive for what it is).

Movies? You get all of the crap, nothing that you actually want. I did the test subscription to Amazon Prime Instant Video. 30 days of "free" movies. We watched 4. Stopped one within ten minutes. Spent HOURS looking through what they had. All the interesting ones were "not included" so you had to buy them anyway. The subscription didn't make it out of the trial period. Was the same back when video rental was the thing - the good movie that you'd been waiting for was unavailable or more expensive, all you could book out was the dross you'd seen a hundred times.

Games? I have Steam. But I don't have a single subscription game. There are even Steam games that I regularly plug money into for DLC and extras, and I have my own personal "monthly Steam allowance". To be honest, not one of the subscription games (or software) have I even looked at past the word "subscription". Nope, never played WoW either. Sorry, but I invest enough back into games I play (by running servers, helping out on the forums, bug-fixing, or buying DLC / extra copies for friends), I'm not paying every month "just because".

I tried OnLive, mostly to prove that it wasn't a sustainable business model to be honest. I played a full-price game on there for free, then went and bought it cheaper elsewhere. The technology worked but was nowhere near the claims they made. And the "lifetime" (3 years only) pass to the game cost more than my buying it outright on Steam.

I don't see any subscription as worthwhile. Once they have your first month of money, they can destroy the value of what you have overnight and you'll feel obliged to keep paying until renewal. It's just not worth it.

If you want to subscribe to EA games, stick some money in a tin every month. Then when EA only have the same crap as usual, you can go elsewhere, and when you have a month without playing, you're under no obligation, still have your money and can play twice as much next month.

So what's new?

If you don't need credit, they'll give it to you. If you do, they won't. It's the general rule of banking.

How else can you explain that NO credit history is seen as worse than a mediocre one? For years, banks ignored me precisely because I'd never taken out a loan, credit card, etc. It was only once I'd got one that they desperately tried to push more loans down my throat. Up until then, apparently, I'd been too much of an unknown to risk it.

Credit scoring, the entire premise, is flawed. It's based on the reputation of your previous credit, and bears little resemblance to reality - as you point out. And try taking out a credit card and then RELIGIOUSLY paying back the full amount every month for many years. They hate you for it. Your credit score is still basically zero.

Credit score is not a reputation or history-based score. It's purely arbitrary. There's even "traps" like "use this high-interest credit card that we will give to people with no credit history just so you can 'improve' your score". WTF?

Hence why, as much as humanly possible, I don't use credit. Pretty much, for the last five years, I have no credit "history" as such (no credit cards, no loans, no judgements etc.), earn twice what I used to, and have never had anything "bad" on my history.

Was still refused for a joint mortgage with my girlfriend, though. Weird, because I'd had a mortgage previously for 3/4's of the same amount, earning half as much, self-employed, never missed a payment, sold the house for profit and paid off the full loan + interest early.

Ironically, my girlfriend (who's Italian, hadn't worked in the UK, had never owned a house, was refused a credit card for lack of history, and earns less than me) was approved for the entire mortgage on her own, so I just pay her half the mortgage and she's the one on their records. Oh, they offered to "put me on the paperwork" in a couple of years. This is despite the fact that in the UK, credit records (apart from bankruptcies and county-court judgements) are supposed to expire after 4 years.

Hell, they will CHARGE YOU to view your credit history, and in the UK you have to get your history from several large credit-history suppliers in order to make sure you have the full picture - some banks use one supplier, some use another, and their information can differ even though they are supposed to share it.

It's a scam. It's got nothing to do with risk, it's everything to do with maximum profit - and that means that you get a better "score" if you get into debt but don't quite go bankrupt.

The ability of a DVD to be compressed using a different format seems largely to be a function of the quality of the "original". A decent original can compress quite nicely. A crap original will be crap transcoded.

It won't be as impressive as a BluRay but the original isn't either.

Again. MPEG2 is a really outdated format. It doesn't take much to do better (or much better).

Er... is there a UK tax on blank CD's and media?

I'm not sure there is.

1) You've confused American "schools" with British schools, where the pupils are children. I specifically mention primary and secondary - primary is up to age 10/11.

2) We still have tracing of what was accessed, it's still against school rules to allow someone access to your account. Their actions aren't your responsibility but may have been your fault.

3) Any "school" that expels a kid for losing their key and another kid doing stuff on their account, won't be a school over here for long.

4) No school will charge for a crime in such circumstances, unless a crime was committed, and then you have the "reasonable doubt" defence and legal requirements of proof.

If you think for a second that a teenager losing their access card is any different to them leaving the machine logged on for the microsecond it takes one of their "mates" to reach over and do something on their account, you're an idiot.

P.S. Been running IT in UK schools - state and private - for fifteen years, no complaints yet, and massive shortage of time to work for all the school who want me.