The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.

The study doesn't actually say that, at least not according to the chart on page 4. It says that 18.8% of the students in college who had scores of 0-699 got merit aid. Not that 18.8% of all the students in college received aid with such low scores.

It's because it's harder to tell when there are new comments in a thread, so conversations fragment.

Nothing at all like pretending to start a topic here, just to try to get us to click on your link to continue, right? :)

I don't have a problem with this ruling. If you publish such a declaration on your page for your friends, enemies, and/or other family members to see, I think you've intended and made a real threat, and as such, should be subject to the consequences.

Clam666, please explain why you disagree. Am I wrong to think people should be held accountable for this?
Also, what sorts of other rulings are you worried might follow from this?

Well, I'm convinced: it's our civet doodie not to support this animal cruelty.

I tried several different ones on my notebook: 14 KDE, 14 Xfce, and MATE & Cinnamon from either 13 or 14. Turned out Xubuntu was actually faster for me.
Also, the latest (well, 12.10) Ubuntu lines have "full" disk encryption available during default install, and that's handy. Could be useful if your grandmother stores her bank information on that netbook, but even more useful if, say, you're setting up a(nother) laptop up for an executive who is always getting drunk and losing his at bars.

Beyond that, though, it's mostly a matter of which programs are set up by default and whether you need to (un)install a bunch of stuff in one distro compared to another, to get the programs you want. If I were you (actually, I do this anyway), I'd stick with my current distro for a while but start reading the weekly reviews over at Distrowatch to see what novel things other people are doing.

You're just encouraging them. But you have to know this. So, apparently you like it?

You're forgetting satellite phones. While they are often mobile, they're technically not cell phones.

Try a search for "gay people in Kenya," for example.

I don't know if these people all made the mistake of thinking the "interested in" sections of their profiles would not be publicly visible by default, or whether they set them public but were relying on the obscurity of only friends looking them up. Perhaps some made their accounts years ago, and haven't kept up with the ever-eroding privacy on this site that requires you to go back and re-specify as private some things that used to be private by default. The point is, it hasn't been this easy before to just search for masses of people based on one common trait.

Whether it's being gay [an orientation (not just a set of activities) still actively punishable by death or jail time in many countries], atheist or minority religion in a fundamentalist country, or some other minority that can be profiled ("people who like red hair in London" -- only partly joking, "gingers" do get bullied), a lot of people are about to find out what Facebook Feature Creep really means.