Similar experience here. I got very good grades on my college papers. Later on I had a sociology class and got a bad grade on my first paper. I knew it was a much better paper than that. I talked to the TA and she tactfully went over some things I could improve that sounded mostly like BS she was trying to make up because she didn't know what she could tell me. After a pause I said "it is my concern that I can not get a good grade in this class without agreeing with the professor's opinions," and she replied:
"That would be my concern also."

On the first paper we were allowed to re-write it and resubmit it, and rather than picking a new topic, I simply re-wrote the same paper from the opposite stance, parroting back the professor's (in my view entirely wrong) opinions. I even included some egregious BS about how I'd learned so much and realized how right he was. I worried it might be over-the-top with the sarcasm, but I couldn't help myself. Anyone without an ego problem would have seen through it, that a college student isn't likely to have a total change of heart and (in this instance) change from being basically a libertarian to being a socialist overnight because their professor was so brilliant that they showed them the error of their ways. I was a little scared he was going to notice and call me into his office for submitting a sarcastic paper.

I got an A. The rest of the class was a disgusting piece of cake. There was no reason to bother with hard work, insightful points, and original analysis. It wasn't even necessary to read the material (although I generally did for my own benefit.) I just typed whatever opinions the professor espoused in class, with fidelity that was borderline plagiarism, and it was an easy A every time.

You're missing the potential of merging the two.

They will merge. It will not be a problem for interface, because the OS will determine what hardware it is on and automatically present an appropriate interface. Likewise for resource usage, it will load different modules and run appropriately for the hardware.

They didn't do this to begin with, because the original iPhone didn't have near the memory nor horsepower to do anything useful with a full copy of OSX anyway, it would be a waste. All it needed was the small, optimized iOS.

Soon it will need both. Because Apple's new Thunderbolt display isn't just aimed at their new laptops. It's aimed at the yet-to-come Thunderbolt iPhones. The ones with no dock connector.

Because the average user won't have a PC. The average user that ChromeOS is aimed at. The person with the $500 appliance-like budget box who only uses the web, who doesn't know the difference between webmail and a client email application using IMAP. All they'll need is an iPhone. And a really nice monitor. A monitor with a nice line of ports, for their printer and maybe ethernet and whatever. And one Thunderbolt cable, a cable that can, all at once, run a 4-megapixel display, a USB hub, firewire, ethernet, a display webcam, and charge the iPhone. Maybe a thunderbolt dock. Maybe a thunderbolt iPhone dock built into the display in future iterations.

It's the future. As every year more and more users find that all their storage and processing needs can be met with hardware that can fit in an iPhone, it's inevitable. Will it cannibalize Mac sales? Yes, but so did the iPad. Apple can see the future and intends to own it. Even if Moore's Law promises a smaller pie for PC's as cheaper and cheaper machines meet the average user's needs, Apple intends to own a bigger and bigger slice of that pie. -- Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?

"XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all."

I bought a Dell Mini 10v new from Dell on 5/28/2010 that came with Windows XP.

So at most, one year.

And I don't think the gist of the story here is "wow, they're abandoning their users so soon," the point is more "wholly *$@!, Microsoft went so long between successful OS releases that they need to support users for three more years on a system that came out when Apple was still on Mac OS 9 and Ubuntu was still on... oh wait, Ubuntu didn't even come out for three more years. I should say Red Hat Eneterprise Linux was on... holy cow, that wasn't out yet either. Red Hat Linux was on 7.2

When did Apple stop supporting OS 9? I'm guessing the vast majority of Mac users would respond "OS-what?"

The Tetris Movie

The Angry Birds movie.

What if I don't care if it's brewed in an astrodome sized vat by Anheuser Busch or a 1-gallon bottle by a monk living in the Alps using an 800 year old recipe and natural yeast blown in on the winds, what if I just care how it tastes?

I always point this out when I see ads for Bell+Howell cameras, which used to run on the back of Science News. Bell+Howell always advertises some high resolution for their cameras, usually advertised prominently in huge letters and in multiple places in the ad. Then somewhere at the bottom in fine print it says "image resolution achieved through interpolation."

I always thought I should come out with an 800 megapixel tie-clip sized $10 digital camera that's just a photodiode interpolated up to fill some flash memory with a giant JPEG that's a uniform shade of grey every time you push the shutter button. (image resolution achieved through interpolation).

Not literally on the "new thing," but stop making competing ports. Start and then end the next generation port format war as quickly as possible, and everybody get on board with either USB3, Firewire 3200, or Thunderbolt as quickly as possible. Computers should have one row of identical ports that work with everything. We need to get over the idea that certain 1's and 0's need a different shaped plug than others.

I agree. And it has to be easy, or most people won't do it. Anything that requires manual input is likely to fail. And I think most people radically underestimate the probability and consequences of losing all their data if they don't back up.

I have a script nightly mirror my entire drive to a bootable copy, and then I ALSO have Mozy for all my files, because my mirror won't do me much good in case of fire / flood / break-in where they steal the computer and backup drive.

And doing those two things is not at all difficult or expensive, and combined I believe they provide me with a high level of protection.

Hard drives are so cheap these days I may also tack on a huge Time Machine volume to add a versioned backup solution.

Or geothermal.

Solar, wind, wave, coal, oil, natural gas, garbage burning, that's all indirectly solar.

Tidal is an exception too. If it weren't for the sun, the oceans would be frozen solid and there wouldn't be tides, but the tides themselves are driven from the kinetic energy from the moon, not from the sun.

Human and animal powered generators are all driven by calories coming from the sun directly or indirectly.

Is there anything being used at all aside from nuclear, tidal, and geothermal that isn't at least indirectly solar?

While "solar" means "of sol" which is our sun, all the heavier elements comprising the earth and moon were created in stars and ejected in supernova, so to that extent all the nuclear fission power plants are still using energy that was built up by stars- the easily fissionable elements were created in the nuclear furnace of a star. And the momentum of the moon and earth are some combination of momentum from the Bog Bang and supernova explosions, the extent to which it's the later is still star energy driving the tides. Is Geothermal truly separate from star energy? The matter that formed the earth wasn't so hot, it heated up due to friction from gravitational crushing as it coalesced. Of course, if we hadn't had the heavy elements formed by stars, we wouldn't have had that heavy matter with enough gravity to make all that heat... everything seems to rely on a star if you go back far enough.

You're missing the point of "who anonymous is" just like all the media organization who call them an elite group of "hackers on steroids" or a domestic terrorist organization or any kind of organization. Anonymous is anyone who shows up on 4chan, or their IRC channels, or who DOESN'T show up there but participates in things that started there like trolling all their favorite tagets, posting flicker animations to epilepsy boards, Project Chanology, DDOSing the flame of the day, or whatever. Or anyone who doesn't show up there, doesn't participate, and calls themselves part of "Anonymous."

Anonymous is full of "moralfags" who hate the trolling. And it's easy to prove that a lot of the people who have recently been the most attention-grabbing members of Anonymous regarding HB Gary Federal are some of the most anti-troll people you can find. How? The female CEO of HB Gary [NOT Federal] actually popped by the AnonOps IRC channel to ask (or really an odd combination between beg and demand) them to remove her company's emails from the torrent.

So a bunch of people you're classifying as trolls have the female CEO of a large security company popping into AnonOps IRC to beg them for mercy... so they troll the fuck out of her, right? Wrong. In fact, the one total troll who pops up quickly has a bunch of the rest of the channel asking for +m to shut the trolls up. Nearly everyone is polite and courteous to her. Read it yourself, she comes in at 522, but it's interesting that before that there's a lot of discussion about setting +m to shut up the trolls. Everyone seems to admonish everyone over and over to slow down and be nice to her.

So again... don't classify Anonymous. Is it riddled with fierce trolls? Absolutely, a lot of people who hang out on 4chan are "the internet's hate machine" and love trolling the fuck out of anybody. But that doesn't mean you can classify Anonymous as trolls, because Anonymous is whoever shows up, or whoever doesn't show up but participates, or whoever doesn't show up or participate and calls themselves Anonymous. So Anonymous is scared deranged 12-year olds who hide in their parents basements and taunt strangers with horrible obscenities for lulz because they get beat up at school, but it's also people who will lay their personal well-being on the line to try damage a dangerous cult, and it's people who will risk potential life imprisonment to defend their views on freedom of speech, and people who want to help the people of Egypt communicate when their dictator shut down the internet, and it's apparently some people with actual cracking skills, and it's a surprisingly large number of people who want to maintain a civil dialog with a CEO who comes into an Anonymous forum to talk to them.

Only classify anonymous by the actions readily attributable to whoever's calling themselves Anonymous these days. If they were overwhelmingly a pack of trolls at one point, they could include the My Little Pony fan club next week. They include trolls. Maybe they do include terrorists. Maybe they include heroes. Certainly some of the members want to be V for Vendetta style terrorist-heros, and V was chivalrous in his heroism, an anti-troll.

Jesus christ. I swear, Steve Jobs is gone for one day and this happens.

Maybe Google doesn't need adult supervision anymore, but it looks like Apple still does.

Offering a leak vetting service is not a bad thing, though. There may be plenty of people with access to large quantities of documents that they feel could expose significant wrongdoing, but without the time, resources, knowledge, etc. to properly vet/redact them to prevent the leaking of information that could "get the good guys killed" or expose too much personal information incidentally contained in the documents about people who did no wrong, or other information that the person who wants to leak the documents feels should not be exposed. Promising never to redact anything might STOP a lot of potential leakers from handing over documents. Allowing the leaker to specify "I'm leaking this in order to show that group X is corrupt due to action Y, please redact other sensitive but irrelevant information for me and make these available" is a potentially valuable service.

Or next time they don't want one again.

This sounds familiar.

There are a lot of posts here pointing out that this is no-big-deal and it happens all the time, but I wonder if there's any movement to suggest it shouldn't happen? I mean, it sounds like a pain to make all these changes- maybe they should just make one change to label all runways according to true north, and to use electronic compasses on planes that compensate from magnetic north to true north, and never have to change a runway/chart again?