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I see you're trying to parallel park

Service jobs do not produce tangible objects.

I think the Ob/Gyns that delivered the Monsterettes from the womb of The Bride of Monster produced something tangible. I think the cook and waitress that get my dinner to the table at Denny's tonight (after closing time at the library where KCLUG meets) are producing something tangible.

Oh, sure, the Monsterettes were more tangibly produced by TBoM, and the dinner is more tangibly made by the chickens who laid the eggs, or the pigs turned into bacon... But why is it that the service provided by the farmer who collected the eggs from the chickens, or saw to it the pig got fed is any different from the services provided by the trucker who hauled the produce off to processing plants, etc.?

And labor jobs are leaving

People who talk about vouchers forget something: just because one has a voucher doesn't mean that they're going to be *able* pursue their choice of education. There are many logistics to consider - like schools of choice already being filled to capacity. And then there's the transportation issue - if the school happens to be across town, who will be responsible for ensuring that the kid can even get there?

It is mind-boggling to me that the very people who make arguments like this poo-pooh supply-side economics. Does anyone doubt that a program that gives thousands of parents the means to choose where thousands of government dollars go will encourage good teachers, stymied by the Byzantine rules of the public schools, to start schools?

I do the s/voucher/food stamp/g thing to make the point that the decision to have government funding for some good or service does not require that the government doing the funding directly provide the good or service in question. Another reason I do that is to show the idiocy of the argument that parents shouldn't be able to use vouchers at religious schools. Nothing prevents the use of food stamps for kosher or halal foods, or requires vegetarians to purchase meat. Those are choices left to the consumer.

Even without vouchers to help them out, parents vote with their wallets. In Kansas City, MO, the government-run schools are so bad that a federal judge took over the district and imposed tax increases. A Jesuit school in KC, Rockhurst High School offers arguably the best education in the entire state, at a tuition rate roughly 2/3 the per-pupil cost to the taxpayers in the government schools.

I'd venture a guess that vouchers or not, for many, the public school system will be the only option *left*.

Two members of KCLUG home-school their kids. One of them fits the stereotype; a very conservative Christian. The other is a leftist atheist. They seem to agree on very little other than their right to choose things like how their their computers and children will be educated. They can choose what sorts of rules their children will have to follow, and there's no need for a court to decide what those rules are.

And because when she buys a wireless card she has to learn about something called "ndiswrapper".

But I didn't have to learn it, because It Just Worked(TM). And that, I believe, is the essence of the Aunt Tilly Test. Of course, Aunt Tilly isn't going to buy a WAP and wireless card in the first place. If she gets a laptop, it's probably going to have 802.11g built in, which will let her use the WiFi at Starbucks just fine. If she doesn't have that, or wants a WAP at home, she'll probably get Cousin Delbert the computer nerd to set it up anyway.

And because asking a little old lady to get root so she can edit /etc/sudoers is hopeless bullshit, but thanks for playing.

Even AT can understand that she logs into her computer as tilly so that Evil Computer Crackers in Dirkadirkastan can't break into her computer. All Delbert has to tell her is that if she wants to install programs, the computer should ask her to prove she isn't a Dirkadirkastanian terrorist, and if she's minding her own business surfing the Web for scrapbooking tips, and that thing pops up all on its own, maybe it's because the scrapbooking website got pwn3d, and she can just cancel out of it.

If she ever slips up and completely hoses her system somehow, the install is so simple that she can handle it solo just fine, after watching Del do it the first time. Or he might just leave the CD in there and never even bother to install anything, if all she needs is a web browser.

Linux can do that, and more, and with more freedom

It should be called GNU/Freax.

From spam@zandura.net Fri Jun 30 12:14:34 2000
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 23:22:29 -0500 (CDT)
From: Dustin J. Decker
To: Emmett Plant
Subject: Re: Slashdot article

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Emmett Plant wrote:
Okay, I'm writing the big 'LinuxFest 2000' piece tonight. To do this, I need to ask everyone on this list questions, and I need long, descriptive answers so I can pull some fantastic quotes from you and make you look like the sexy men you really are. :)

Emmett you take my breath away baby. OK, now the answers...

> 1. What is your full name and position at your company?
Dustin Decker - Network Systems Administrator
Preferred Physicians Medical (dd1@ppmrrg.com)

> 2. What was the first time you heard about LinuxFest 2000?
I'd approximate the first mention of LinuxFest 2000 to me was a post forwarded to either of two LUG mailing lists I'm subscribed to in the Lawrence/Kansas City area. Greg Palmer, organizer of the show briefly introduced himself and the event. My first contact with Greg was about two weeks prior to march 21 2000. Greg met with the members of KCLUG (http://www.kclug.org) that day and I immediately volunteered to host a KULUA (http://kulua.org) meeting the following Saturday, inviting Mr. Palmer to attend the meeting and introduce himself to our community. In short, we were offering to support his efforts to put on a good show. Greg was unable to attend.

To clear the air I'll just say once that there was an e-mail from somewhere I don't recall, that cast a doubt on whether this thing was on the up and up... I nearly apologize for mentioning it but it's important as it cast a shadow of doubt from our first hearing of this fest. When Greg was unable to break bread with us it didn't help our understanding of where he was at or where his intentions were planted.

> 3. What did you think of the show?
What did I think of the show? There's a fun question . I expected a great deal more from what hype had either been passed on to me by Mr. Palmer or I had perhaps created in my own mind. Either way, it is perfectly natural having attended well organized events (such as SANS Security 99 in New Orleans) that were really exciting; I expected to be blown away. I was not.

Shortly after learning that Eric S. Raymond would be a keynote speaker, I invited Eric to attend dinner with our LUG for some excellent Kansas City BBQ. Eric accepted, and he kept me in the loop on his travel schedule. I experienced vicariously a few weeks on the road with Eric, but just bad parts that is; missing planes due to poor communication, fear of not making a much desired trip to Korea, and a modification of Eric's not-unreasonable-to-begin-with travel rules. I volunteered to help Mr. Palmer with rides to and from Kansas City International Airport for dignitaries, with a bare minimum intention of assuring this sort of hell would not encroach upon the Kansas City portion of Eric's trip. I'm am greatly disappointed to say that despite my attempts, poor communication interfaces with Mr. Palmer made that very hard to do.

I attend the DeVry Institute of Technology in Kansas City in pursuit of a Bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems. Larry Augustin was scheduled to keynote a dinner at the Overland Park Trade Center the first evening, and coincided with two very important finals for me. I had expected to be tied up, but a storm had interrupted power at the school and all tests were postponed until the next day. I called a friend to arrange to get together for the dinner, and he invited me to Dick Clark's American Bandstand resturaunt about three miles from the trade center. I assumed this was to meet up with LUG members prior to the dinner, we kept the conversation very short.

But what later became evident was that dinner was now being held at the resturaunt... which was fine by me until about five minutes before Larry was to speak with between twenty and thirty guests in the audience. It was then that I realized the web page for the event indicated dinner would be at the trade center. I drove there quickly in an attempt to inform all who may be milling about as to the new location of dinner. There wasn't anyone there I'm afraid, the doors were locked and anyone who had been there had no indication of whether Linux Fest 2000 was really happening or not. As I type this, those details are still erroneously posted at http://www.linuxfest.com/speakers.html.

Emmett of /. had accepted an invitation by our LUG to attend the festival and be present in a booth which folks from the BeOpen group had graciously offered to pay for to sponsor us. We quickly requested donations from our membership, and the details were solidified and paid for within hours. This same precision coordination could easily have been afforded to Greg if he had put any great effort into solidifying a relationship with us. To be blunt, he was pleasant but just had lousy organizational skills.

Other factors came into play... RedHat received a shipment of computers from Dell that didn't work out quite the way they had intended, and accompanied by any other rumors I would never repeat chose to tear down their 40' by 40' booth space and leave the same day they had arrived. Informix left the next day. As time progressed, more and more vendors for various reasons chose to leave as well. Turnout was paltry, and there was much mumbling about lack of promotion for the event.

There were of course a few highlights... I managed to get interviewed by local television station Channel 9 in my shorts and a t-shirt. I spoke of my opinions of the use of the words hacker and cracker in context by the media, answered a number of questions about how home cable and DSL subscribers can take a more secure posture on the Internet, and completely forgot to "plug my LUG". Hal Duston of KCLUG, wearing a suit, did a lengthy interview with FOX4 as well. The local Linux community was on display for Kansas City viewers.

> 4. What was the best part of the show?
I would say the best part of the show for me really wasn't the show itself at all. I spent a good portion of time with Eric S. Raymond, sharing some meals and a net connection in addition to firing fully automatic weapons at his Geeks with Guns gathering on day two of his trip. Eric is a truly down to earth guy, with a wonderful ability to explain how the open source movement works. Of course we all know he's very involved in the Linux cause, but it was just really neat to have him in the Kansas City area and to have face to face access to him. (Please Note: I'm not a teenaged groupie geek type, I just like to meet neat people.)

We linux users also had dinner at the Plum Tree resturaunt in Lawrence Kansas on Friday evening, with a turnout of about fourty people. Dinner with that measure of my tribe was of course a very joyous occasion - better than a Baptist revival.

> 5. What was the worst part of the show?
The bad turnout, the bad vibe that ensued, and the exhaustion. I assumed one of the many savior roles that appeared from nowhere, and volunteered to put together a Quake3 tournament with Linux. The only hardware I lacked to get 6 or more machines up and running in hours were a handful of 3D video cards, which Sam Dein of a local computer store Telectronics loaned me on a moments notice. Oddly enough, I use Linux as my primary OS at home, but haven't played many games on it. As a result, I never really managed to get Quake3 running well by the last day, and after having lost much sleep over it packed up my own gear and left the event on Friday the final day of the event around 5:00 pm.

> 6. If it happened again, would you attend?
Not only would I not attend, but I would probably be one of many who would petition Greg against organizing another of these events next year. I would instead prefer that someone with more experience organize the event.

> 7. Did you attend any panels? If so, which ones, and how were they?
I was very busy, but managed to catch Kevin Fenz of tummy.com giving a talk on the replacement for ipchains, net filter. The tummy.com folks were at the geeks with guns event, and were really a great bunch of guys. Kevin provided some very detailed advice on the use of net filter, and I loved it. These sort of knowledge sharing moments in great number would have made the event much more successful. (BTW, Kevin is the co-author of the Linux Security HOWTO.)

> 8. What was the best thing the organizers did?
Executed a flash-pot glimpse of what might have been great in the corner of my eye.

> 9. How does the show affect your view of the Linux community on the whole?
On the whole, I meet a lot of the folks I hear about all the time but haven't been closer than 500 miles to. Folks like Bruce Perens, Larry Augustin, and Eric S. Raymond. I try to catch appearances by prominent members of the greater Linux community for a good dose of religion at least twice a year. It keeps me refreshed, solidifies my faith in the open source movement, and keeps my finger on the fleshy pulse of the community that's warmer than the on-line representation thereof.

> 10. Please include anything about the show that you would like to see in the Slashdot story about it.
I think I covered everything in the first nine. Emmett, it was indeed apleasure to get to know you.
[Personal notes to Emmett removed.]