spot on. The parent to your post is improperly using the boogeyman-of-the-week to help make the case for a specious argument. But at least we got another hilarious "FTFY" out of it!

I'll just grab the headlines from google news and skip the commentary.

Then your opinions will be just as knee-jerk and uninformed as those of the people you're berating. The only difference is that you're keeping them to yourself instead of inflicting them on everyone else.

It takes work to keep yourself informed, and since the news media is more interested in advertising revenue than informing the public, that work now has to be done by you (and me, and anyone else who wants to know more than the superficialities of an issue). Sure it's hard and sometimes depressing to wade through the all crap from @bootycakes and friends, but you will almost always find a point or two that you hadn't considered before, or a link to an analysis piece on another site, or maybe a post from an expert in the field that backs up or refutes a claim from the original piece. These are the things that help you understand the nuances of a story, which is what you need before you can claim that you're actually informed.

Similarly unrealistic is what happens when I get killed. Quick trip to the hospital and everything's back to normal. Will this turn anybody into a criminal? Somehow I doubt it.

[...]

What kind of media violence turns people violent? [...] the kind that makes violence innocuous. The hero gets knocked out and wakes up 15 minutes later with nothing worse than a splitting headache -- no concussion symptoms such as extreme nausea and neurological impairment.

How can you argue both of these things at the same time?

There's a reason the military is starting to get mighty interested in nerdy types, although most programs designed to leverage these skills are in their infancy. We need to get serious about this fast; other nations certainly are.

I hope we do; maybe it'll help fix the sorry state of math and science education in this country. For better or for worse, as goes the military so goes our money.

um, no. What do you think happens to productivity when this superstar asshole developer leaves for whatever (or no) reason, and everyone at his old job has to scramble to make sense of his poorly-documented code instead of getting their own work done?

Sure the article probably isn't 100% unbiased, but it seems like the author did more or less the right thing. The developer was a dick, and his manager was either too short-sighted or too focused on making herself look good to actually, y'know, manage her developers.

Is there even a story here? What's your point?

thank you.

[...] Ubuntu users are more likely to be newbies than Debian users. The numbers reveal, for instance, that 86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines do.

How does that classify a user as a newbie instead of just someone interested in playing games through WINE, or someone interested in graphics performance?

I'm not saying there are no differences between the two administrations, but I wonder how many people who are casually dismissing this report would be howling with outrage if the article was about, say, Bush's choice for assistant director of the FCC instead of about someone on Obama's transition team.

I went to Georgia Tech for my BS in computer science, and spent a semester studying abroad in Barcelona. Tech has some sort of exchange program with UPC (Universidad Politecnica de Catalonia) where UPC students come to Atlanta and Tech professors and students go to Barcelona. The CS courses offered all focused on UI, HCI, and i18n-type stuff; there were also courses offered in architecture and Spanish.

It was a hell of a lot of fun, I got to do a lot of traveling around Europe by myself and with friends, and being an out-of-state student it was actually cheaper than taking courses on campus.

You don't mention where you go to school now, but check with your CS department's advisors and see if they offer any similar programs, or get in touch with UPC and see if they can help you.