Note Grammar Nazi is an idiot. He knows no material science and did no research.
Titanium isn't a superstrong superlight alloy. Titanium has roughly twice the specific strength of aluminum. Titanium also has approximately the same specific stiffness as aluminum. This means the aluminum is just as springy as titanium, but it breaks sooner. Look it up.
Titanium will always be harder to work with than aluminum. True but not for the reasons you site. Titanium is about 50% stiffer than aluminum but is 200% stronger. This makes it a bear to machine as opposed to aluminum which is wonderful to machine. In terms of raw materials, the two may be close, but in terms of manufacturing aluminum beats titanium every time.
Titanium may become cheaper than steel. Steel is not cheap due to its abundance or ease of refining. Steel is used in many application today because it is easy to manufacture. You can weld steel. Most of a products cost is not in raw materials, it is in manufacturing. Therefore steel is cheap.
BTW as nice as titanium is for some things, it really doesn't matter. Compared to advanced fiber reinforced composites, titanium is nothing. Its most likely going to be too expensive to work with compared to steel and aluminum and not good enough as advanced materials go.
Presumably Carnivore would only be used once the FBI has a warrant, therefore the fourth Amendment does not apply. While there is still a question of "who watches the watchers" Carnivore has appropriate uses just as Napster has appropriate uses. It can be used for perfectly legal and moral purposes for criminal investigations.
IANAL, but the other problem is that the fourth Amendment in its strictest interpretation technically only applies to physical objects (effects, persons, houses, etc.). Electronic data is not physical really, however it is a type of correspondence which means it should still be protected by the 4th amendment.
Am I the only one to notice that Michael Nesmith, Liquid Paper Magnate and former Monkee, is one of the contributors to the program in the music field? I would be interested in seeing what he has to say since he doesn't actually need to make money from the music industry anymore. My only question is when was the last time he worked in the field pre-information revolution?
Ok, you are the US government and you are going to have someone review some software you may implement. You want them to be dependable and confidential. You will therefore pick (a) a group of security cleared individuals who have shown you good work before (b) a group of nobodies with a strong problem with authority. Gee, if I were the FBI who would I pick? If they gave it to you, you would either (a) rip it apart and publish all hacker utils on the net (b) insert code to create whopping great loophole and publish how to do exploit that on the net (c) blackmail them by threatening to make the code public so they most likely couldn't use it at all.
I am not saying Carnivore is the way to go about doing what it does. In fact it seems damned inefficient to effectively read everybodies mail in order to read one persons. However in the end the government has far less power than one of your ISPs sysadmins. Should there be a better program? Yes. Is this the way to test what they have? Yes.
I suggested something a while back called the flag system. Beside the reply, etc. buttons at the bottom of every article are two other buttons called "Flag Up" and "Flag Down." Flagged posts would draw moderator attention. Some sort of volume system could be used to see what the most active articles are and so maintain the flags meaning (keeping every post from being flagged the equivalent of "urgent"). A sort by flag would be nice I suppose.
One problem with slashdots moderation system is that it bows to a mob mentality. Napster=Good. MPAA=bad. Please, a monkey could do that. I'm not sure if flagging could help this.
The other problem is that it is hard to tell what needs to be moderated when there are 300 articles in the comments, you just can't read everything in a reasonable amount of time. Flagging would work towards solving this problem.
No Star Trek IF Porn in the running! Infidels thats all anyone reads...:)
But seriously, has someone hacked together a IF system, like TADS, for palm yet? Writing the instructions would be tedious, but would certainly make you look busy in those meetings.
When asked about shutting down the websites George Lucas commented, "I don't want anything to give the end of the movie away before the soundtrack does."
Not going to happen. Currently it is possible to build a no-frills but usable computer for under $500. That number is also going down not up. Microsoft will simply not be able to compete in the marketplace if they offer their base OS for much more than their current prices (~$100). The market simply will not spend twice their computers hardware cost for basic software. It is not going to happen. People from this market are already looking seriously at linux because of the money it will allow them to shave off their bottom lines.
BTW We still have two windows kernels out there, 9x and NT. Microsoft has been claiming that they will fold these together in the future since the release of Win95. Why aren't they? Money. M$ can make lots more by selling an unstable cheap OS (9x) and a stable expensive "server" OS (NT). A large part of the NT market is people who simply want a stable 95. No one would buy NT if the 9x kernel became stable by server standards. Thats ~$200 times the larger number of NT users who would downgrade.
I use IE because Netscape 4 crashed my computer hourly. IE doesn't. Likewise the majority of my friends who use IE do so because they simply got tired of Netscape's stability problems. I hate Microsoft and it kills me to say this, but IE is currently the better product until Mozilla gets really usable.
Pardon me, but when hasn't this been the case? For most of modern times knowledge=power in a very real sense for most of humanity, especially in war time.
Paying big bucks for the right to the Olympic telecasts is not about making money. It is about not losing money. IIRC no olympic telecast in recent memory has made turned a profit, however the networks without the Olympics lose money even worse. Is anyone running anything but reruns opposite the Olympics? Of course not, why waste a season premiere if everyone is watching dumbasses fix gymnastic vault horses.
That only works if the people doing the legal ordering actually don't have a leg to stand on or simply don't want to look bad by actually carrying through with their threat of litigation. Thats all a cease and desist order really is, a threat of litigation. This was the case with slashdot v. microsoft. Microsoft actually didn't have any legal protections on the code, it was a trade secret which worth almost nothing legally unless the person telling the secret it is violating a corporate confidentiality agreement.
If this wasn't the case, like if what was posted was legally protected and important then the situation would have been different. If someone posted the source to some large expensive copyrighted proprietary software for instance, slashdot would have had to go to court and most likely would have lost.
Its one thing to say that the content on the site is the property of the posters, it is another thing to treat it that way. Slashdot treats posts like they were the content of the community since you can't re-edit your post after it is made. IANAL, but as such it may be open to attack if someone does something way out of line.
Agreed, claiming that posts are the responsibility of the poster is the way to go. However if someone crosses the legal line and you do get a legal order of some sort, comply with it. Remove the offending content, etc. While you can say that "its their stuff not mine", unless they can edit their content after submission you most likely don't have a legal leg to stand on.
Have two accounts, one for adults and one for children. The childrens account has censorware to avoid deliberate or unintential viewing of porn, etc. (whitehouse.com would leave those kiddies thinking Clinton was having an intern frenzy.) The adult system does not. Anyone under 18 needs parental permission to use the adult settings, this could be blanket permission like an "adult" library card or temporary supervision by an applicable adult.
As for it "not being my job to raise someone elses kids", that is true, but it is also not your job to make it more difficult for them to raise their kids themselves. It is also your moral obligation to stop someone from doing something wrong if it is within your power, like stopping a 10 year old from viewing porn on the computer next to yours at the library. This is not you "raising someones kids for them" this is you being a good neighbor and a good citizen.
I find it very interesting that the average slashdot user thinks that it is someones moral obligation to report, and fix if possible, the bugs in code that they discover but that this obligation does not carry over from cyberspace to meatspace. I stepped in gum coming back from lunch today. Should I have cleaned it up so someone else didn't have to step in it after I did? Yeah probably. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we stopped being so apathetic and started making differences in the small things we notice that are wrong? Definitely. Will we? No because that would mean being selfless for a few seconds.
The problems with articles like these is that you never know what is being reviewed.
For instance, does this include the many many DoD defense grant and contract holders who have sensitive information? I mean most of those are educational institutions and you know what their security is like. Lord knows anyone could break into my lab with little more than determination and a swift kick.
The other question is, while the system may be wide open, how important is the data that is available on it? The DoE and DoD like to keep all the nasty secrets behind air walls so there is no chance they are going to get out unless someone physically penetrates the building.
BTW I have seen people posting thinks saying that higher government security will produce to a smaller government. These people obviously don't understand how government works. More security means more government to provide this security (additional security personnel) and more government to make up for the inefficiency caused by more stringent security. If you want a drastically smaller government then I suggest you look elsewhere, like privatizing programs for added flexibility.
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
There are two basic strategies for voting. The first is to support and vote for the person with a chance of winning that you hate the least since you will gain influence by doing so should he/she be elected. The second is to vote for a third party candidate who doesn't have a prayer but who believes very similarly to you in hopes that important people will notice and try to include your views in later elections.
Now we know that method one works. The republicans did it in the parts of sixties and seventies when the democrats held the presidency and congress. If the internet vote were to unite and get visibly behind a candidate who might win, both with money and manpower, their influence would probably be noticed and rewarded. The problem with method one is that most people reading slashdot are unwilling to compromise to this degree on issues or are unwilling to actually give anything other than nominal support to any candidate. So while method one will work, it will not appeal to the community enough to be used.
Method two has its own problems. Unless the community unites behind a third party candidate, then their votes will be scattered and their purpose will be lost. They will essentially increase the percieved political noise in the system but accomplish nothing because in order for their votes to matter they must be noticed.
If they do unite then they face a different problem. Things will most likely get worse not better until the next political election cycle. Why? Because the person they most agree with will not get their votes and the votes of those that they attract to their cause. This means the candidate they least agree with has a higher chance of getting elected. Don't believe me? The net result of 8 years of a strong third party influence in politics (the Reform Party under Perot) is the Clinton Presidency. Clinton never won a majority of the vote. However the republicans lost most of their moderate voters to the reform party, robbing them of the strength to defeat him. Most reform party members are fiscal and political conservatives (small government, big industry) and moral moderates, most likely agreeing with the republicans more than the democrats.
BTW don't expect a Lincoln or Ventura miracle. Ventura won because he was ignored by the big two parties and managed to get enough an unheard of number of young males to vote and push him over the top. He was essentailly a fluke. Lincoln won because there were about five major candidates for president in 1860 and he squeaked through. In other words Lincoln was a fluke too. Don't bet on flukes.
As for Slashdot, the method of participation will probably produce the best results in the short and long terms but it is unpalatable for most of slashdots voting readership. Therefore I expect the majority of slashdot voters to vote for a multitude of third parties and have their voting power lost in the political noise of the election. Hear that silence? Thats the effect slashdot will have on national politics.
What does it do for them? It gets them "more" customers of course. Their customers really don't care if the software runs on FreeBSD or Windows (the suits in management who actually make the purchase). They therefore do not lose any customers if the switch to windows. However, they can effectively sell more of their own products. Now they get to sell the OS and the app, thats more money for microsoft. Each customer essentially counts twice. Plus, if they have any trouble, its an entirely microsoft system so they can claim they can better support it rather than a mixed BSD/MS system.
Forget these things, I want a taser jacket. A company in california used to make bomber jackets with a built in taser. The battery sat in the breast pocket and the jacket was woven with fine wires to carry electricity. You armed it by pressing a button in one sleeve and anyone that touched you got a nasty shock. Cool for feeling safe on a subway.
I remember seeing Richard Hart wearing one of these on the Next Step on Discovery channel back before he left for C|Net or whatever he is doing now.
Actually this is the second time he hasn't linked to linux site with an ISO. Last time he just said something like, "If you don't know where to get it I'm not going to tell you." I think it might have been slackware.
I would assume it is actually for legal reasons. The Qt libraries are not GPLed and this has caused ample problems in the past when there are legal conflicts. Using GNOME is the obvious way around this. Besides GNOME is currently looking to become more powerful with "new" ideas like Bonobo, where as KDE is basically doing more of the same. Are they adding an office suite and such? Yes, but this is really just a natural evolutionary path. GNOME, on the other hand, seems committed to following a more revolutionary path and revolutionary paths usually produce startling results much faster.
The two reasons why the commentator hates linux (1) doesn't trust his own tech guys (2) thinks linux will have higher labor costs than NT.
Part one is frankly his problem. Your tech guys don't have to screw with your system but they can if necessary. This is a plus not a minus. You have more options than with NT. Get good tech guys.
I would assert that linux is easier to administrate not more difficult. Linux is designed to be administrated over a network unlike NT. This means that one tech may cost more (since linux has a steeper learning curve than windows), but he can effectively administrate many more servers. Total cost should go down not up for most applications.
If your going to go after linux, compare it to freebsd in terms of downtime (why yahoo etc. uses BSD). Or compare it to NT in terms of usability (not an issue for servers though). Or possibly talk about security issues you have with it...
The real problem is that when a university develops something patentable, they get the patent. If this was a corporate system and the university was treated like the contractor that it is, there is no way they'd be allowed to keep that patent. It would go back to whomever paid them to develop it, i.e. the government or private groups.
This is why NASA is effectively losing tons of money on research. They give someone a multimillion dollar grant to figure out how to make a single part. That person does so, but all the stuff they build in order to do the research and actually make the part they get to keep. Essentially all NASA gets is a recipe how to make it. They have the cookbook, but they have to pay even more to use the kitchen to bake the cake.
This is a problem because it means a lot of non-profit research foundations are being shafted. They get their new medical technology, etc. However the universities are the ones actually making a killing when the technology is implemented. All this means is the non-profit research groups are quickly running low on money.
Ok, I don't like to bash slashdot. Its done too much already really. "Slashdot went to hell when..." Its damn near a Jeff Foxworthy slogan. But...
Is it just me or does Slashdots technical objectivity ("Slashdot is owned by VA Linux Systems", etc.) not carry over to non-technical topics that show up? I mean "the GWB is the devil and I will never vote for him" (rough hyperbolic paraphrase) on the last RNC post was a bit much.
Why is this showing up on slashdot anyway? It is technically "Stuff that Matters" but Taco wouldn't post the Dot Com stock plummet until he was overwhelmed with submissions. Is the behavior of some cops during a protest really more relevant than something that effected most of tech sector? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
Note Grammar Nazi is an idiot. He knows no material science and did no research.
Titanium isn't a superstrong superlight alloy. Titanium has roughly twice the specific strength of aluminum. Titanium also has approximately the same specific stiffness as aluminum. This means the aluminum is just as springy as titanium, but it breaks sooner. Look it up.
Titanium will always be harder to work with than aluminum. True but not for the reasons you site. Titanium is about 50% stiffer than aluminum but is 200% stronger. This makes it a bear to machine as opposed to aluminum which is wonderful to machine. In terms of raw materials, the two may be close, but in terms of manufacturing aluminum beats titanium every time.
Titanium may become cheaper than steel. Steel is not cheap due to its abundance or ease of refining. Steel is used in many application today because it is easy to manufacture. You can weld steel. Most of a products cost is not in raw materials, it is in manufacturing. Therefore steel is cheap.
BTW as nice as titanium is for some things, it really doesn't matter. Compared to advanced fiber reinforced composites, titanium is nothing. Its most likely going to be too expensive to work with compared to steel and aluminum and not good enough as advanced materials go.
Presumably Carnivore would only be used once the FBI has a warrant, therefore the fourth Amendment does not apply. While there is still a question of "who watches the watchers" Carnivore has appropriate uses just as Napster has appropriate uses. It can be used for perfectly legal and moral purposes for criminal investigations.
IANAL, but the other problem is that the fourth Amendment in its strictest interpretation technically only applies to physical objects (effects, persons, houses, etc.). Electronic data is not physical really, however it is a type of correspondence which means it should still be protected by the 4th amendment.
Am I the only one to notice that Michael Nesmith, Liquid Paper Magnate and former Monkee, is one of the contributors to the program in the music field? I would be interested in seeing what he has to say since he doesn't actually need to make money from the music industry anymore. My only question is when was the last time he worked in the field pre-information revolution?
I like "Brain" or Topo Gigo (sp?) myself.
Ok, you are the US government and you are going to have someone review some software you may implement. You want them to be dependable and confidential. You will therefore pick (a) a group of security cleared individuals who have shown you good work before (b) a group of nobodies with a strong problem with authority. Gee, if I were the FBI who would I pick? If they gave it to you, you would either (a) rip it apart and publish all hacker utils on the net (b) insert code to create whopping great loophole and publish how to do exploit that on the net (c) blackmail them by threatening to make the code public so they most likely couldn't use it at all.
I am not saying Carnivore is the way to go about doing what it does. In fact it seems damned inefficient to effectively read everybodies mail in order to read one persons. However in the end the government has far less power than one of your ISPs sysadmins. Should there be a better program? Yes. Is this the way to test what they have? Yes.
I suggested something a while back called the flag system. Beside the reply, etc. buttons at the bottom of every article are two other buttons called "Flag Up" and "Flag Down." Flagged posts would draw moderator attention. Some sort of volume system could be used to see what the most active articles are and so maintain the flags meaning (keeping every post from being flagged the equivalent of "urgent"). A sort by flag would be nice I suppose.
One problem with slashdots moderation system is that it bows to a mob mentality. Napster=Good. MPAA=bad. Please, a monkey could do that. I'm not sure if flagging could help this.
The other problem is that it is hard to tell what needs to be moderated when there are 300 articles in the comments, you just can't read everything in a reasonable amount of time. Flagging would work towards solving this problem.
No Star Trek IF Porn in the running! Infidels thats all anyone reads... :)
But seriously, has someone hacked together a IF system, like TADS, for palm yet? Writing the instructions would be tedious, but would certainly make you look busy in those meetings.
When asked about shutting down the websites George Lucas commented, "I don't want anything to give the end of the movie away before the soundtrack does."
Not going to happen. Currently it is possible to build a no-frills but usable computer for under $500. That number is also going down not up. Microsoft will simply not be able to compete in the marketplace if they offer their base OS for much more than their current prices (~$100). The market simply will not spend twice their computers hardware cost for basic software. It is not going to happen. People from this market are already looking seriously at linux because of the money it will allow them to shave off their bottom lines.
BTW We still have two windows kernels out there, 9x and NT. Microsoft has been claiming that they will fold these together in the future since the release of Win95. Why aren't they? Money. M$ can make lots more by selling an unstable cheap OS (9x) and a stable expensive "server" OS (NT). A large part of the NT market is people who simply want a stable 95. No one would buy NT if the 9x kernel became stable by server standards. Thats ~$200 times the larger number of NT users who would downgrade.
I use IE because Netscape 4 crashed my computer hourly. IE doesn't. Likewise the majority of my friends who use IE do so because they simply got tired of Netscape's stability problems. I hate Microsoft and it kills me to say this, but IE is currently the better product until Mozilla gets really usable.
Pardon me, but when hasn't this been the case? For most of modern times knowledge=power in a very real sense for most of humanity, especially in war time.
Paying big bucks for the right to the Olympic telecasts is not about making money. It is about not losing money. IIRC no olympic telecast in recent memory has made turned a profit, however the networks without the Olympics lose money even worse. Is anyone running anything but reruns opposite the Olympics? Of course not, why waste a season premiere if everyone is watching dumbasses fix gymnastic vault horses.
That only works if the people doing the legal ordering actually don't have a leg to stand on or simply don't want to look bad by actually carrying through with their threat of litigation. Thats all a cease and desist order really is, a threat of litigation. This was the case with slashdot v. microsoft. Microsoft actually didn't have any legal protections on the code, it was a trade secret which worth almost nothing legally unless the person telling the secret it is violating a corporate confidentiality agreement.
If this wasn't the case, like if what was posted was legally protected and important then the situation would have been different. If someone posted the source to some large expensive copyrighted proprietary software for instance, slashdot would have had to go to court and most likely would have lost.
Its one thing to say that the content on the site is the property of the posters, it is another thing to treat it that way. Slashdot treats posts like they were the content of the community since you can't re-edit your post after it is made. IANAL, but as such it may be open to attack if someone does something way out of line.
Agreed, claiming that posts are the responsibility of the poster is the way to go. However if someone crosses the legal line and you do get a legal order of some sort, comply with it. Remove the offending content, etc. While you can say that "its their stuff not mine", unless they can edit their content after submission you most likely don't have a legal leg to stand on.
I think the debate is over. The answer is:
Have two accounts, one for adults and one for children. The childrens account has censorware to avoid deliberate or unintential viewing of porn, etc. (whitehouse.com would leave those kiddies thinking Clinton was having an intern frenzy.) The adult system does not. Anyone under 18 needs parental permission to use the adult settings, this could be blanket permission like an "adult" library card or temporary supervision by an applicable adult.
As for it "not being my job to raise someone elses kids", that is true, but it is also not your job to make it more difficult for them to raise their kids themselves. It is also your moral obligation to stop someone from doing something wrong if it is within your power, like stopping a 10 year old from viewing porn on the computer next to yours at the library. This is not you "raising someones kids for them" this is you being a good neighbor and a good citizen.
I find it very interesting that the average slashdot user thinks that it is someones moral obligation to report, and fix if possible, the bugs in code that they discover but that this obligation does not carry over from cyberspace to meatspace. I stepped in gum coming back from lunch today. Should I have cleaned it up so someone else didn't have to step in it after I did? Yeah probably. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we stopped being so apathetic and started making differences in the small things we notice that are wrong? Definitely. Will we? No because that would mean being selfless for a few seconds.
The problems with articles like these is that you never know what is being reviewed.
For instance, does this include the many many DoD defense grant and contract holders who have sensitive information? I mean most of those are educational institutions and you know what their security is like. Lord knows anyone could break into my lab with little more than determination and a swift kick.
The other question is, while the system may be wide open, how important is the data that is available on it? The DoE and DoD like to keep all the nasty secrets behind air walls so there is no chance they are going to get out unless someone physically penetrates the building.
BTW I have seen people posting thinks saying that higher government security will produce to a smaller government. These people obviously don't understand how government works. More security means more government to provide this security (additional security personnel) and more government to make up for the inefficiency caused by more stringent security. If you want a drastically smaller government then I suggest you look elsewhere, like privatizing programs for added flexibility.
There are two basic strategies for voting. The first is to support and vote for the person with a chance of winning that you hate the least since you will gain influence by doing so should he/she be elected. The second is to vote for a third party candidate who doesn't have a prayer but who believes very similarly to you in hopes that important people will notice and try to include your views in later elections.
Now we know that method one works. The republicans did it in the parts of sixties and seventies when the democrats held the presidency and congress. If the internet vote were to unite and get visibly behind a candidate who might win, both with money and manpower, their influence would probably be noticed and rewarded. The problem with method one is that most people reading slashdot are unwilling to compromise to this degree on issues or are unwilling to actually give anything other than nominal support to any candidate. So while method one will work, it will not appeal to the community enough to be used.
Method two has its own problems. Unless the community unites behind a third party candidate, then their votes will be scattered and their purpose will be lost. They will essentially increase the percieved political noise in the system but accomplish nothing because in order for their votes to matter they must be noticed.
If they do unite then they face a different problem. Things will most likely get worse not better until the next political election cycle. Why? Because the person they most agree with will not get their votes and the votes of those that they attract to their cause. This means the candidate they least agree with has a higher chance of getting elected. Don't believe me? The net result of 8 years of a strong third party influence in politics (the Reform Party under Perot) is the Clinton Presidency. Clinton never won a majority of the vote. However the republicans lost most of their moderate voters to the reform party, robbing them of the strength to defeat him. Most reform party members are fiscal and political conservatives (small government, big industry) and moral moderates, most likely agreeing with the republicans more than the democrats.
BTW don't expect a Lincoln or Ventura miracle. Ventura won because he was ignored by the big two parties and managed to get enough an unheard of number of young males to vote and push him over the top. He was essentailly a fluke. Lincoln won because there were about five major candidates for president in 1860 and he squeaked through. In other words Lincoln was a fluke too. Don't bet on flukes.
As for Slashdot, the method of participation will probably produce the best results in the short and long terms but it is unpalatable for most of slashdots voting readership. Therefore I expect the majority of slashdot voters to vote for a multitude of third parties and have their voting power lost in the political noise of the election. Hear that silence? Thats the effect slashdot will have on national politics.
What does it do for them? It gets them "more" customers of course. Their customers really don't care if the software runs on FreeBSD or Windows (the suits in management who actually make the purchase). They therefore do not lose any customers if the switch to windows. However, they can effectively sell more of their own products. Now they get to sell the OS and the app, thats more money for microsoft. Each customer essentially counts twice. Plus, if they have any trouble, its an entirely microsoft system so they can claim they can better support it rather than a mixed BSD/MS system.
because the masses are where the money is.
Forget these things, I want a taser jacket. A company in california used to make bomber jackets with a built in taser. The battery sat in the breast pocket and the jacket was woven with fine wires to carry electricity. You armed it by pressing a button in one sleeve and anyone that touched you got a nasty shock. Cool for feeling safe on a subway.
I remember seeing Richard Hart wearing one of these on the Next Step on Discovery channel back before he left for C|Net or whatever he is doing now.
Actually this is the second time he hasn't linked to linux site with an ISO. Last time he just said something like, "If you don't know where to get it I'm not going to tell you." I think it might have been slackware.
I would assume it is actually for legal reasons. The Qt libraries are not GPLed and this has caused ample problems in the past when there are legal conflicts. Using GNOME is the obvious way around this. Besides GNOME is currently looking to become more powerful with "new" ideas like Bonobo, where as KDE is basically doing more of the same. Are they adding an office suite and such? Yes, but this is really just a natural evolutionary path. GNOME, on the other hand, seems committed to following a more revolutionary path and revolutionary paths usually produce startling results much faster.
The two reasons why the commentator hates linux (1) doesn't trust his own tech guys (2) thinks linux will have higher labor costs than NT.
Part one is frankly his problem. Your tech guys don't have to screw with your system but they can if necessary. This is a plus not a minus. You have more options than with NT. Get good tech guys.
I would assert that linux is easier to administrate not more difficult. Linux is designed to be administrated over a network unlike NT. This means that one tech may cost more (since linux has a steeper learning curve than windows), but he can effectively administrate many more servers. Total cost should go down not up for most applications.
If your going to go after linux, compare it to freebsd in terms of downtime (why yahoo etc. uses BSD). Or compare it to NT in terms of usability (not an issue for servers though). Or possibly talk about security issues you have with it...
The real problem is that when a university develops something patentable, they get the patent. If this was a corporate system and the university was treated like the contractor that it is, there is no way they'd be allowed to keep that patent. It would go back to whomever paid them to develop it, i.e. the government or private groups.
This is why NASA is effectively losing tons of money on research. They give someone a multimillion dollar grant to figure out how to make a single part. That person does so, but all the stuff they build in order to do the research and actually make the part they get to keep. Essentially all NASA gets is a recipe how to make it. They have the cookbook, but they have to pay even more to use the kitchen to bake the cake.
This is a problem because it means a lot of non-profit research foundations are being shafted. They get their new medical technology, etc. However the universities are the ones actually making a killing when the technology is implemented. All this means is the non-profit research groups are quickly running low on money.
Ok, I don't like to bash slashdot. Its done too much already really. "Slashdot went to hell when..." Its damn near a Jeff Foxworthy slogan. But...
Is it just me or does Slashdots technical objectivity ("Slashdot is owned by VA Linux Systems", etc.) not carry over to non-technical topics that show up? I mean "the GWB is the devil and I will never vote for him" (rough hyperbolic paraphrase) on the last RNC post was a bit much.
Why is this showing up on slashdot anyway? It is technically "Stuff that Matters" but Taco wouldn't post the Dot Com stock plummet until he was overwhelmed with submissions. Is the behavior of some cops during a protest really more relevant than something that effected most of tech sector? I think not.