the next generation won't even ever have the guns we have

The youngest generation of Americans simply do not own guns at anywhere near the rates of prior generations. Grouping people in the NORC's General Social Survey by date of birth shows that gun ownership rates have fallen by an absolute 10% for each generation after what Pew Research calls the "Silents," people who became adults between 1946 and 1963. For the "Millennial" generation of people born after 1980, only about 20% report the presence of a gun in the household, down from 50% among the "Silents."

Personally I favor strict licensing provisions for gun ownership with background checks, testing, and liability insurance. It should be at least as difficult to own and use a gun as it is to own and drive a car.

As far as I can tell, the primary motivation for Windows 8 was to try and regain some traction in the mobile device market along with Microsoft's new best friend Nokia. This announcement reinforces my belief that Microsoft doesn't see the desktop as a profitable investment, nor thay they care as much about the enterprise as they did either. Then there is the Surface which could compete quite effectively in the tablet market and, with the detachable keyboard, in the netbook/laptop segment. In these markets direct sales to consumers are the driving force.

That leaves the question of where the enterprise will be heading over the next decade. Cloud services do not have much appeal; corporate data needs to be on internal servers. Most companies will stick with Windows, of course, but the opportunity for new entrants is opening up. I wouldn't be surprised to see Oracle start competing for desktops with an end-to-end solution based on its Sun servers, the Oracle database, and Oracle Linux on the desktop. Canonical is also focused on consumers, RedHat doesn't have the clout that Oracle does, and Novell is so 90's.

As someone else who witnessed the NY Times attack, I will just reiterate my stance that no advertiser should ever permit advertising that includes scripts of any kind. Pictures and, though annoying, animated gifs are fine, but scripts should be banned.

I'm going to guess it's the latter. Most people just don't care that much or don't know how easy it is to block ads. None of my less-than-technology-savvy friends install ABP or its equivalent unless I'm helping them set up their browsers.

Bryn Mawr have been very generous with us. It's worth a shot.

My daughter wants to go to med school and maybe transition to public health later in her career. I'm not worried about her employment prospects. Bryn Mawr also does very well with students who intend to go for a Ph.D in the sciences. A few months back the Washington Monthly published a set of college ratings that use different criteria than USA Today does. Bryn Mawr turns out to be their top-ranked liberal arts college because of things like the generosity of its aid packages, the percentage of students going on for doctorates, and other measures like community service. I thought it might have scored in the top twenty or thirty schools, but I never expected to find it at the top of the list. Washington Monthly reported an average "net price" for Bryn Mawr of $19,316 after financial aid is factored in.

I also have a niece at McGill. Tuition for foreigners is a lot more than that $2,200 figure, but much less than tuition at an American private institution. The drawback is that foreign students don't receive financial aid. So it could be more expensive than an American school with an aid package, or less depending on what is offered.

My daughter is majoring in biology at Bryn Mawr, and the College has been quite generous to us. That seems true for many private institutions with reasonably-sized endowments. I'm surprised that [big expensive school] wasn't more generous. Is it all women? Single-sex womens' colleges are always on the lookout for talented young ladies.

Nearly half of American adults believe humans were created out of whole cloth by God within the past 10,000 years, a figure that has hardly changed at all in over three decades. Belief in evolution without any guidance from God has risen from 9% in 1982 to a whopping 15% in 2012. When pastors and parents say one thing, and teachers say another, apparently what the teachers say falls on deaf ears.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

Last I saw it had to be 'user'@'hostname'. Maybe that's no longer true, but if it still requires the quotes, then many new users will be puzzled why the command you gave doesn't work. It certainly looks like it should work.

PostgreSQL provides a simple command-line program "createuser".

I post frequently on Ubuntu Forums, and regardless of how hard or easy you (or I) may think using the GRANT command in the mysql command-line client might be, it doesn't seem that easy to naive users just starting out. Most of them have no idea that a command-line client even exists, much less how to use it to manage users. If they can't find what they need immediately in phpmyadmin, or something goes awry while installing Wordpress, they are lost.

Other than importing data, why do you need a GUI tool at all? I've used PostgreSQL for fifteen years and managed everything I needed to do by entering SQL commands with the psql client. It forced me to learn about the intricacies of SQL syntax and become a more competent database administrator as a result.

When I started using PostgreSQL, MySQL was not available under a license that permitted free redistribution. As somone who was building servers for clients, that was a major obstacle. I started using PostgreSQL and never looked back. While MySQL was shuffled around among a variety of corporate owners, I just continued to use the one database I knew would always be well-supported and unencumbered, PostgreSQL. I've never regretted this decision.

Every time I have to deal with MySQL, I wonder why it is so popular. Even the simple task of creating and managing users is much more difficult with MySQL.

If you really must use a GUI tool, I prefer Microsoft Access with the PostgreSQL ODBC connector. I've tried OO Base a couple of times, but it still seems rather clunky.

MS has not been able to beat linux in the server room. There's a lot of big bucks in corporate software.

You mean that server room running Linux Active Directory and Linux Exchange? There is a lot of big bucks in corporate software, and most of it still goes to Microsoft and its third-party developers. Companies might have their websites on Linux servers, but the desktop ecosystem at most organizations is still pretty much an MS preserve.

Do your parents use Photoshop? Their friends and relatives? When was the last time they bought a PC game for themselves at GameStop?

I see reasoning by anecdote way too often on this site. What percentage of people with home computers own a (legal or illegal) copy of Photoshop? I don't know the answer to that question, do you? A search of Google sure doesn't provide any insights.

Mozilla is an obvious anti-MS, Firefox was started in part to restore open standards on the web, IOW, to loosen IE's iron grip on the web.

Firefox is the direct descendant of Netscape which itself was built on the original NCSA Mosaic browser. Both Mosaic and Netscape pre-dated Internet Explorer by a year or more. They weren't created to "restore open standards on the web." Rather Internet Explorer was created to undermine open standards on the web and to extend Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop to the Internet. Thank goodness the early versions of IE were so pathetic in comparison to Netscape. Otherwise things might have evolved very differently.

My experience as a FiOS customer that uses both Amazon Instant and Hulu does not fit your description. I've not seen slow performance from either site. I don't find this surprising given that we're generally talking about 480p streams which aren't that bandwidth-intensive to begin with.
 

I'm assuming when you talk about "running a movie from a network drive" you're using SMB filesharing. Try running mplayer from the command prompt with an SMB-shared video, and you'll see the same result.

The solution? Use NFS. Videos shared with NFS to mplayer-based players like SMPlayer just play when opened. If you have to share with both Windows and Linux users, build a Linux file server with support for both NFS and SMB.

I don't think this is a KDE issue at all.

I don't trust executive summaries of polling data; I want to see the entire questionnaire so I can understand the context in which the questions were asked. I'd bet that if people were asked an open-ended question about the "problems facing our country today" cyberterrorism would be lucky to get a 1% response. Here are the top items from the most recent New York Times/CBS poll released yesterday:

Economy and jobs 62%
Federal budget deficit 11
Health care 9
Same-sex marriage 7
Foreign policy 4
Immigration 2
Other/DK 4

I don't see terrorism of any sort on that list.

Even if we accept the findings of the survey, what is most striking in the results is the substantial increase in respondents who say they are "not concerned" about the threats asked about compared to a year ago.

Moreover at least one question has nothing to do with IT, the one about respondents' ability to "meet essential financial obligations." For more relevant questions, solid majorities report being only "somewhat" or "not concerned" about the security of online shopping and banking, computer viruses and spam email, and their own personal security.

The IT media has a habit of touting these self-serving studies by organizations like, in this case, Unisys as somehow providing an "objective" view of public opinion. Puh-leeze.