that they didn't really care so much about how fast people drive their cars once devices like this eliminate the income they got from speeding tickets.

The big key is that this device is dependent on a GPS. It would be easy to design a system that limits the speed of a car, but making it depend on a GPS means they will have records of distances and times travelled, as well as the roads used. This kind of information will allow them to seamlessly charge tolls, access charges and peak travel time disincentives. Speeding is small potatoes compared to those new sources of revenue.

I have worked with people who have a Master's in Comp Sci and can barely install IIS. I had to draw pictures to explain host headers. Installing Linux would give them a stroke.

I think the degree was from the University of Illinois for those who are curious, but I am not sure.

I also worked with someone who had a Bachelor's degree in Comp Sci from the University of Cincinnati who almost found DOS batch files that zipped up and password protected a directory full of files indistinguishable from magic.

Almost every criteria you put forward is subjective, and the rest of what you propose (Conference, Observe, Remediate, Terminate) bears a strong resemblance to union contracts in many fields.

The problem is that management and parents never want to follow the rules that are laid out in the contract. Read the comments in this thread and you will see that many people are complaining about the fact that at some stage in a process similar to what you outline the teacher was found to be competent/compliant with the rules. People want to fire "bad teachers", but they want to fire them the second they themselves identify them, not wait until after there has been some verifiable non-subjective proof of wrongdoing or incompetence.

Any review or remediation will be called "bureaucratic obstacles" or "politics" by the people who think this is easy. See bad teacher=fire bad teacher, simple.

Never mind the teachers that would get fired because they tried to teach something that violated the parent's world view (e.g. evolution).

I'm sure every person in this thread who is in favor of abolishing tenure is well intentioned, but most of them have probably never found themselves unemployed at the age of 55 with a "bad teacher" reputation hung around their neck because the school board realized they could save tens of thousands in salary and retirement costs by firing a teacher that ran against them in the last election.

At least removing obstacles from the firing path will never lead to a world where teachers will be afraid to publicly complain about waste and corruption in the schools, right? Whistle blower laws are just another legal trick in the union's arsenal.

The teachers that are "bad" because they dared to tell a well connected parent that their precious little butterfly has no business being in an advanced class will sleep better knowing that they lost their job to save us from the scourge of easily identified bad teachers.

I have to disagree for the following reasons.

Powells is an independent bookstore that has been a LITTLE more successful than average but they still have fewer than 15 stores. They certainly do nothing to encourage you to come to their brick and mortar shops unless you live near one. I think they are a good online bookseller because they have spent some time and effort to develop a web presence, but by all means use an independent local store if you have one.

Calling Powells a mega book outlet is ridiculous compared to Barnes and Nobles or Borders. As a matter of fact Barnes and Nobles probably has a many locations in Oregon as Powells has in the country.

So it has nothing to do with Powells being "cool" or "where the cool light skinned people live" (WTF?) I live in Cincinnati as a matter of fact, but when I order something on-line that I can't get easily at a local store (because most of them are closed because of Borders) I use Powells because they have a decent selection and good turn around on order.

They are everything Amazon is not, privately owned, good to their employees, socially responsible even when it doesn't show up in the press. They even have some brick and mortar locations (Portland OR, and Chicago). And the toll free phone number to contact then is on the front of the web page instead of being something you can only find in a 3rd party blog around Christmas time.
Are they perfect? No. Are they small enough to care what even one or two percent of their customers think? YES. When corporations get too big they get arrogant, it is in your interests to not let companies you like feel as if they can ignore you. Punish bad behavior with vocal and public criticism.

And to all those who say they are just creating an adult section, ask your self why children's books that try to discuss homosexuality delicately are delisted, but racy explicit romances is not.

A cure for chytridiomycosis has already been found. Researchers in New Zealand have found that infected Frogs can be treated with Chloramphenicol. Incredibly cheap to make, effective, and only causes aplastic anemia in 1 in 25,000 to 40,000 humans. What could possibly go wrong? It's not like interfering with nature using chemicals ever has any unintended consequences.

The "Mojave Experiment" was supposedly to show that people had just a bad opinion of Vista because of bad hype but that once they saw it they liked it. This "experiment" showed that they could have been shown any different or flashy interface and many people would have responded positively.

So, you explain it well, you can pull people off the street and dupe them into all kinds of things. This "experiment" tells us nothing about OSS, KDE 4, and nothing about Windows 7. It does tell us lot about marketing campaigns and specifically the "Mojave Experiment".

All these years and most marketing is still a giant circle jerk.

You may want to take a look at the pulse2 link from a little earlier in the thread.

http://pulse2.mandriva.org/