>>If it wasn't 99% memorization no one would cheat

Actually, I think you may be completely factually wrong here.

Nobody "cybercheats" on rote memorization tests (listing the state capitals or whatever) because the only time those things are tested are in closely monitored classroom situations. No teacher is going to give out a closed-book take-home exam.

  The kinds of assignments that people actually use the internet to cheat on are *intended* to test the "application of information."

The problem here is that the internet is FULL of analysis and applied information on a huge variety of subjects, so it's easy for students to pawn off someone else's analysis as their own.

The further problem is that teachers are expected to have the ability to apply some kind of retarded Turing Test to determine whether the paper they're reading is the mediocre ramblings a freshman typed up at 2am before the assignment was due, or the mediocre ramblings said freshman copied from the internet. And if teachers fall short in that psychic capacity, it's taken by you as evidence that they're only teaching rote memorization.

The problem is that a great deal of the people using Glide are gold farmers using stolen accounts and/or accounts opened with stolen credit card numbers. So while Blizzard can and does ban accounts caught botting, all that really does is provide farmers more incentive to come up with creative trojans and scams to hack people's accounts.

Not defending Blizzard's legal tactics here, but this is the issue they're dealing with.

I get a little furious every time I hear from Michelle Obama about childhood obesity, given that her husband is in charge of a government that gives billions of dollars in subsidies to corn farmers so that they can produce more high-fructose corn syrup to ensure that Twinkies remain cheaper than carrots.

Want to end childhood obesity? Fix farm subsidies so that healthy foods like fruits and vegetables become more affordable. But I guess that's a political impossibility, like 95% of the other change our government desperately needs.

>>you could lose weight eating only bacon, cholesterol notwithstanding

And you could program Call of Duty in QuickBASIC, performance notwithstanding.

Ahh, so THAT'S why no major corporations use Flash on their websites or Microsoft Office documents internally.

I'm guessing this is less an unintentional "loophole" than a very intentional concession to the lobbyists who are writing this bill.

The only reason Congress cares about "Net Neutrality" is that some big tech companies like Google are lobbying hard for it, while big service providers like Comcast are lobbying against it. But since neither group actually cares about your right to use BitTorrent, the RIAA lobbyists are free to stick in some extra restrictions like this.

I'm ever so glad the Supreme Court thinks these corporate groups should have even MORE influence over our elections.

>>Not knowing much about this history of web browsers, coupled with a near-religious fanaticism for Firefox, leads to absolutely fucking stupid comments like we see in the summary.

Well, maybe they know just enough history to remember back to 2005 when Opera was neither free-as-in-Braveheart nor free-as-in-beer, and Firefox was both.

I'd say this comment misses the point of phone apps pretty terribly. At least the ones I use tend to rely almost entirely on the phone's hardware features. Not just accelerated graphics and GPS and camera, but tie-ins to the address book and calendar, etc.

>>Odd we don't see many stories about the global shortage in female garbage collectors. Or janitors... Women aren't in computers because they tend not to be interested in it.

Is the implication that men love being janitors and garbage collectors? ;-)

>If there's money to be made, the big players will each have a Cloud. They'll each support some set of software; why would you assume that it would all be the same, or even interoperable?

For the same reason I can plug any brand battery into my remote control or use any brand light bulb in my chandelier: because interoperability is a core selling point for these products. The very first essential question I'm going to ask when choosing a "cloud" is this: will it work with my existing documents and those my peers use?

So I've used various drawing programs for years to make crappy little graphical schematics to post online. MS Paint is all I really need, although I've used Photoshop and similar programs as well.

I heard a lot about how powerful GIMP was, and my Mac didn't come with even a basic drawing tool, so I downloaded it. Lasted... oh, maybe 2 minutes.

The issue came when I wanted to draw a line. Now, every other graphics program I've used has a "line" tool, somewhere in plain sight. Observe:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Using-Paint
http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/photoshop/line_tool.html ...and so on. Such was not the case for GIMP. In GIMP, you use the Shift key with other tools to draw lines. Not an inherently bad way of doing things, I guess. But here's how you have to find out about it:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/ (That's from the official GIMP site, mind you.)

Hey, GIMP guys. Screw you and your sarcastic screenshot telling me what the "Shift" button is. Your interface is the WEIRD one. People who use MS Paint or Photoshop or friggin' ClarisWorks - your potential customers - expect "line" to be a tool, not a key. And it's not like the key is entitled "Shift Or Draw Straight Lines In Some Linux Programs." It is NON-OBVIOUS that this would be the manner you draw lines. I don't care that I had to look up how to use a new interface, but don't act like I'm supposed to psychically fucking know ahead of time how your arbitrary interface works.

Note how both MS Paint and Photoshop are way MORE straightforward in this operation, and yet avoid sarcasm in their tutorials.