I'll keep my framerate as it is, thank you.

I'm not sure that I buy that 90% number. The percentage of our DNA that is composed of endogenous retroviral material is around 5-8%. ERVs are horizontal gene transfers that occur in germ-line cells, such as sperm, ova, and all of the cells in their ancestry back to the original zygote for that individual. Genetic changes to these cells (and only these cells) will be passed down to future generations.

Now, it's true that ERVs are not the only type of viral DNA that an individual may have in their cells. Any infection of a somatic (non-germ-line) cell by the appropriate type of virus since the individual's conception will lead to chimeric DNA in some part of the body. For example, well over 90% of American adults have had some form of herpes infection during their lives, such as chicken pox or herpes simplex. This becomes a permanent addition to the DNA in the infected portions of the body, but it is NOT passed down to offspring.

The reason that your 90% figure doesn't pass the sniff test is because it would mean that more than 80% of the DNA in an individual's body would be acquired AFTER birth. If this were true, then wouldn't we expect to see huge, obvious differences between individuals throughout the entire genome? This is definitely not what we see when we sequence DNA. After all, which diseases an individual contracts, when they contract them, and in what order is essentially never the same. Hell, the difference between a human and a chimpanzee's genome is only about 4%. The difference between individual humans is far smaller than that, so it seems likely that only a small (probably 1%) percentage of an individuals genome is made up of viral material obtained since birth. This passes the sniff test as well; you'd expect the genetic insertions that have accumulated over millions upon millions of years in germ-line cells to far outweigh the horizontal gene transfers that happen within a single individual's lifetime.

In other news, Homo sapiens is discovered to be a social animal which suffers from adverse psychological effects when their primary method of communicating with their peers is removed. News at 11.

There are plenty of people graduating with computer security degrees these days; I'm one of them. There are quite a few programs already offered by various colleges to attract more security students to their program. RIT, for example, offers what essentially amounts to a free ride for anyone who is willing to work for the NSA after they get out. I live in Texas, so I know from personal experience that Texas A&M, UTSA, and a plethora of smaller universities and community colleges are cranking out security graduates non-stop. The CCDC (Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) is a pretty big deal in this area.

The real problem is that very few 20-somethings in this field want to work for the government, let alone the DHS of all places. Anyone who is coming out with a security degree is obviously going to be active on the internet every day, and I shouldn't have to explain the general feeling towards government cyber-security practices among the internet crowd on Slashdot, of all places. Even here in south Texas, where you'd expect the most support for agencies such as the DHS, I've never met a security major that is at all interested in working for the government, despite what essentially amounts to begging and pleading to take a job there. I know that I probably couldn't look myself in the mirror every day if I worked for the DHS or NSA as a security expert. Protecting our nation's computer infrastructure is one thing, but there is no one in the field who believes that's actually all that our government does with its security staff.

No, I still get stuck in a crash loop on the login screen with both my 4870 and 5870 systems. There's little else that I can do in this situation to help with testing, since this occurs both on stock Desktop Ubuntu and the Server edition with xorg, fglrx, and fluxbox installed.

I find it hard to believe that the bug fixes and performance enhancements that x.org has implemented in the last 6 months (since 9.10) come even within an order of magnitude of the difference between the open-source and closed-source ATI drivers. Ubuntu has always been a distro for those who take a pragmatic approach to FOSS. We all know that the open-source drivers are currently far, far behind the closed-source drivers in terms of performance and functionality. This decision essentially removes HD video, gaming, compiz, etc. support from a huge percentage of the install base. I don't see how anyone could perceive this as an acceptable trade-off. Can you imagine the shit-storm that would occur if, say, Microsoft released a service pack that for its desktop or media center operating systems that "provided important bug fixes and performance enhancements", yet broke compatibility with ATI cards in the same way that this situation does?

These are the kind of issues that distros are supposed to insulate end-users from.

If the ATI driver issue has something to do with x.org updates, why would Ubuntu include a version of x.org in their release that doesn't work with ATI cards? Regardless of where the finger-pointing leads, there is no reason for an Ubuntu release to have this issue, if it didn't have the issue before. If the newer x.org is the issue, ship the old one. If the newer fglrx is the issue, ship the old one. If an underlying change in the OS is the issue, they fucked up.

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, and I mostly run Ubuntu Server or Debian machines for my personal desktop usage. However, their habit of catastrophically breaking important features in their releases is really getting on my nerves. Wi-fi support, for example, has been fixed and re-broken repeatedly over the past few years. I think that this release takes the cake when it comes to breaking existing functionality, though. The first two known issues listed for 10.04:

#Because of the new alternatives system used for nvidia driver packages, the nvidia installer from NVIDIA's website currently doesn't work.
#The fglrx binary driver for ATI video chipsets does not yet support the X server in Lucid. As a workaround, users should use the open source -ati driver instead.

Both of these are pretty much show-stoppers, especially the ATI issue. Is a month long enough to sort out a problem this serious?

Yeah, the only thing that I can imagine this possibly affecting would be the browser's phishing filters.

Google is a business, like any other. Do you think that they haven't run a CBA on this move? While the Chinese population is large, the viable market for Google's products is not. How many people in China have regular internet access? How many of those have disposable income to spend on things they see in advertisements? How many Chinese companies that market locally are going to have their profitability affected by search engine advertisements? On the other hand, how much does it cost Google to protect against cyber-attacks from the government? How much does it cost them to lose their trade secrets and IP? How much does it cost them in goodwill elsewhere to remain in business in China, following those draconian laws?

Google is coming out ahead in this move; that's why they made it in the first place. The Chinese government comes out ahead as well, since they gain even greater control over the flow of information within their borders. The only ones who lose are the Chinese people.