I also think that no school system should be more secure that the enterprise world in general is. This way, the student wouldn't be faced when employed with an alien environment. If in school everything was perfect, the student will be surprised and put in a difficult situation when he will for the first time join a work environement.

If the school system is also imperfect, the student will innerently start searching/thinking for solutions and should be encouraged to experiment on test machines the implementation of potential solutions, wich are not that many (active directory, ldap auth, pxe booting, virtualising)

Now if after highscholl a student will only be familiar with these elements, this will be THE achievement wich they have benefited from the school OS environement.

I'm working as a programmer since '99, and most usefull to start my career life was tha fact that I already knew how to fix Windows. In school, our computer policy was "you break-it, you fix-it", and face at a virused computer all teachers did was to tell us some names of free antivirus tools, show us how to regedit, give us some links concerning registers towards msdn, and show us some good forums to search on for info. The teacher was there if needed, watching our advancement.

Nowdays, sooner or later, in enterprise, an IT employee will - sooner or later - face Linux. But since you only put MacOS as alternative, this Unix will do. But here too, you shouldn't lock-it down. I mean, let them do theyr user stuff, no one says they should have root access, but they - at least - have to be regular users.

I think you should PXE boot either OS. That way, they may tear-it down, once the machine rebooted, the initial state will be restored.

I have a question and an answer.

The question is - why would a respectable brain like Hawking’s miss-lead us on the supplies issue? Is his wanting to afraid us? Does he want us (people of Earth) to be scared of aliens? Because it is unquestionably better to know your (potential) enemy than to play the ostrich.

Meanwhile, sooner or later the need will come for us to encounter another intelligent species. Just to show us that is possible. This will have the same effect on Earth's population as Jesus’s philosophy did, showing the way, showing the other way. And if we will be at a critical point where an extremely important decision should be made about our future, they're better show up: dropping by, just to say hi!

Today, for some people (like what, 2? maybe 10%?) of Earth knowing for sure, having a proof of alien existence will be a boost, an incredible one. But for a large majority it will be a nightmardesque awakening from different beliefs. And you can't just destroy a philosophical system, a human's beliefs without driving him crazy. That is brainwash. So for now, no, it's not the moment just yet.

The answer I found is that the only useful thing to us from a more technologically advanced alien race is one of their history books. This book should contain information only up to 50 years more than our actual technological level. Initially I thought 100, but even 10 are huge. The most interesting part, tough, will not be the technical advancement history, but the real history, the conflicts, how did they solved them, their beliefs (religions), their philosophical system, their way of life. Now that will be awesome!