DjVu is a format intended specifically for document distribution which uses lossy compression to obtain small files. It's not nearly as flexible as FITS, so you can't use it to represent hyperspectral images, metadata, etc.

Since the Vatican wants a format for data archival, they probably want to preserve as much information as possible for a wide variety of documents, so they can keep the originals in a vault and not touch them for the next 100 years.

Back in the day, Slashdot's readership was much nerdier than it is today. Rob Malda and Jeff Bates were undergrads, as were a lot of the visitors. I was in high school when Slashdot started. Linus Torvalds wasn't even 30 years old at the time, Linux was by no means mainstream, but everyone on Slashdot knew about it and was quite knowledgeable about operating systems and computer languages. These technology enthusiasts had 10 years to finish college, improve their skills and on average should now be working in IT, science or engineering.

Slashdot's readership is much more diverse now. When I'm not moderating, I threshold comments at +3 and hide everything with a Funny mod, because very often you find threads about science and technology that have nothing but offtopic rants and stupid jokes. For example, today's story about NASA's call for proposals was filled with garbage. This would not have happened 10 years ago.

The average reader's spelling skills is significantly better, though.

People with low UIDs are typically IT professionals, engineers or scientists with at least 10 years of experience in their respective fields. Back then, Slashdot was much geekier and the Internet was much smaller.

On average you're much better off getting a technical consult from people with low UIDs.

This is exactly the same as when cases are sealed here in the U.S.! They aren't burying these cases, or dismissing them, or hiding the names of the accused, or the results of the case, just sealing the proceedings themselves. Someone took a look at the Latin (which, btw, is available on line at the Vatican's website), mis-translated and mis-understood it, and came up with this wild and inflammatory explanation.

Contrary to your statement, the Vatican did withhold names of the accused and refused to prosecute priests involved in child abuse cases. It only makes sense to seal a case to protect the victim or the innocent accused if you have complete confidence in the judicial process, otherwise sealing a case effectively buries it. And since the Vatican's judicial process is biased in favour of the priests (being, of course, presided by priests behind closed doors), sealing a record as a "pontifical secret" is as dirty as it sounds.

On a related note, I find it ridiculous that the Vatican publishes material in Latin hundreds of years after the language died, and then people like you complain about improper translations. It's bullshit like this that brought forth the protestant reform, more than 400 years ago.

Source.

To see the term "pontifical secret", read the English translation.

Back in 2001, when Ratzinger was head of the Holy Office, he implemented a policy that classified child abuse cases as pontifical secrets.

And Ratzinger is not an exception. This is business as usual for the Catholic church.

If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.

On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.

Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.

So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.

Why is western society obsessed with mathematics, deluded into thinking it's useful in general, and why are people so stressed over learning this useless and dryly-presented subject?

Essentially because:

1) Everyone should learn logic and disciplined thought. Otherwise you'll end up with adults who can't read instruction manuals, have an attention span of 5 year olds and can't see their own mistakes and contradictions due to disorganized thought processes and hubris. Math can have a humbling effect on people.

2) Proper mathematics is used constantly by good electrical engineers, physicists and mathematicians. If you want a good engineer, you have to teach him math from childhood. And since you can't have a grade school for scientists and another one for everyone else, everyone has to learn math.

3) Math greatly contributes to keep idiots out of the sciences, med school and other important professions.

It surprises me that you even discussed the option of having confidential documents stored on a system that makes little guarantees about security or privacy, and that by design distributes your data around the world.

Really? Honestly I haven't ever had any real issues with Flash since I've been running the 64bit release of about a year ago.

I also haven't had any issues with the 64-bit prerelease under Fedora 11 and 12. That said, the lack of hardware acceleration is very annoying and several years overdue.

Adobe Reader is fine as long as I don't install the plugin. Every time I click on a PDF, it completely downloads the file and launches the Adobe Reader binary. When I used the plugin, it tried to load the file incrementally (even when I explicitly configured it not to), which very often locked the browser.

Apple can't have Android inside Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.

But instead, Google went off into a corner, created their own solution behind closed doors that nobody in the kernel community likes and now it can't go upstream.

No one in their right mind is going to start a lengthy debate with kernel developers when they have a deadline to meet and a product to ship.

In the industry, getting things done on time is priority #1. Google's implementation may not have been ideal, but it was delivered.

Personally, I find it interesting that you specifically name electricians and plumbers as examples of "people with little or no formal training". It might be different in Brazil, but in the USA there is an appreciable amount of training, and sometimes certification, expected before you can name yourself as a practitioner of either of those disciplines. Of course this isn't consider "higher education", but it still is regarded as "technical training" that requires either study and/or on-the-job training beyond what you learn in school. So in the USA reading and mathematics skills correlate somewhat more to the ability to get a job as an electrician or plumber than they would a manual laborer. However, it doesn't really the change applicability of your main points.

Electrician wasn't a good example, because nowadays in Brazil a person that calls himself an electrician is expected to have a certificate from a technical school (even though many don't in poor areas). But plumbers and bricklayers typically aren't certified, and even when they are certified, they can't be compared to a contractor in the US.

I don't know what a teacher educator is, but I can tell you what my experience was in Brazilian public schools.

While getting my bachelor's in math, I used the opportunity to get a teaching license. To fulfill my internship hours I worked as an unpaid substitute teacher in public schools. It's completely obvious to me that most parents transfer the full responsibility of educating their children to the school. Every student in the top 5% of my class had at least one parent who was interested in his child's education, and held him (and not the teacher) accountable for studying and getting good grades.

Many (although not all) of these parents were electricians, plumbers, brick layers -- people with little or no formal training, but who would do their best to assist their child, while deferring to the teacher when it came to academic instruction. Without exception, these children were well mannered (in sharp contrast to the criminal behavior of the kids in the other end of the curve).

My favorite is that many in education believe there to be a causal link between parental involvement and student performance.

That's because there is a causal link, although I wouldn't call the determining factor "parental involvement". I don't care if the parent shows up at PTA meetings or at school events. I want the parent teach his child the basic concepts of accountability, honesty, politeness and discipline, and to lead by example. But that's too much to ask, because most people -- parents or not -- are lazy assholes with a sense of entitlement.

What's that graph supposed to represent without an y axis?

This is marketing disguised as an objective quality metric. Without showing the numbers, they've admitted to nothing, and promised nothing.