Spot on. Operating systems as we know them are going to split into two different animals. One will become a stub on which applications run, bundled right along with the application. So for example when you buy Adobe Illustrator, there is a version of Windows bundled right along with that, and all you do is plug the whole thing into your virtualizing host. Sounds great at first, but...
The other type of OS will be the hosting OS. Microsoft is positioning itself so that it becomes impractical to run a non-Microsoft host. So you will buy Windows as the host, and in addition you will buy Windows along with every application. They're aiming at multiplying their current revenue stream. This is why "partnering" with Xen is a trap, designed to discourage other OSes as hosts and when that is done they will poison other OSes as clients as well. The new Microsoft monopoly will be in place for the next 25 years.
As soon as they switch from a war mentality to a peace and cooperation mentality things will go a lot smoother.
I think it is almost the opposite. Microsoft has always been at its best when it was not in control of the market, and had to fight for success. I remember very, very fondly Word 2.0 on DOS. That was a thing of beauty, and it came out of the need to compete with WordPerfect and Wang and all the other word processors on the market in those days. Microsoft weren't trying to lock out new competitors in those days, they were participants in a competitive landscape. That is what is missing -- that idea that they are participants in a fray, not the idea that they should enforce the Pax Microsoftia where no competitors are allowed.
No study that concludes Microsoft's product is faster, more efficient or "better" in any way will ever be accepted here because holes can be poked in the methodology of any study. ANY study.
Nobody is asking for a bulletproof study. What we want is a study that (a) uses a valid sample size and (b) limits itself, as near as possible, to a single well-defined variable while controlling for all the other variables. A study with a tiny sample size is worthless. A study with 45 variables is worthless. Things that seem insignificant, like inequal expertise with the systems being tested, can distort the results to the point where they don't mean anything. You have to control for such things (or explain why you didn't) in order to be taken seriously.
Doing quality research requires taking great care with methodology. In addition you must always try to state where your own methodology may be faulty. Not taking care (which they didn't) and then compounding the error by not stating potential faults (which they didn't) means this study is not research. It's agenda-pushing.
I don't have any issue with real research that shows.Net frameworks are faster than LAMP frameworks. That would be an interesting result, but only if the study was conducted properly.
I thought the "problem" with gambling -- like the "problems" with prostitution and street drugs -- was that casinos in your neighborhood tend to bring with them a lot of undesirable activity, e.g., the underbelly of Las Vegas. But if the casino is not in your neighborhood, why should anyone care?
If YOU were that small business owner, with 10-15 employees and 10 older '98 machines, which do you think is more likely?
I am a small business owner.
Any small business owner interesting in remaining in business will take a hard look at all three of those alternatives. First of all, you need to pay the IT guy no matter what, so the IT personnel costs (and employee downtime costs) among options 1 and 2 and 3 are identical. And realistically the cost of obtaining 15 new desktop computers is not $500 each. Factor in the niggling upgrades, taxes, shipping, and support -- it's more like $1000/ea for those $500 machines. For most small businesses an expense of $15K is not something you take lightly. It sure isn't small potatoes for mine, and we haven't even talked about the software licenses yet for 98-vintage software that cannot be installed properly on XP.
The title of your post is "Cost of Training," which is also something that's identical among options 1 and 2 and 3. For every Windows 98 machine replaced by anything else there will be retraining costs of X. It's not 2X just because it's Linux.
Having worked with WinCE, this is a very scary proposition. I'd be terrified of putting it on any device that doesn't have a RESET button (hmm, why do all WinCE phones have reset buttons but Symbian ones don't?).
But at least the drivers will be able to use all their favorite applications.
he will need to wait one year before starting his new job because of a non-compete clause in his contract
That drives me insane. I had an employer once who tried to "get" me regarding a non-compete agreement, to wit he accused me of going after his customers. The problem was that no one could be excluded from that group -- he believed everyone on the planet was his customer. That's what I see when I read this. Google does not make operating systems or desktop software, they are a freakin' search company, and MS is not a search company. Yet MS identifies them as a competitor, just like they identify every company in existence as their competitor.
Whenever I see that in a statement from Microsoft, it is always code for "We have totally ignored the wishes of our customers and instead focused on lock-in, the breaking of standards, and the complete bollixing of normal user interface conventions."
You can toss a big boulder into the path of a river and -- guess what -- the river doesn't stop. It routes around the problem. That is what open source projects will do. Patent suit says stop using method X, well we just invent method Y to do the same thing without infringing the patent. Project goes ahead. You cannot stop this with patent suits.
In fact, this is not endemic to open source; it happens in all areas. If you block something with a patent that people want bad enough, they will route around it, whether legally or illegally (c.f. the motion picture industry). This often leads to quality patented inventions falling into disuse because the patentholder is a bully. Something else is quickly invented to fill the same market niche and well all go happily on our way.
Now of course the trick is that rational settlements may not be possible, e.g., ACME Patent Troll Co. sues Poor Developer Harold for $1 billion in damages and won't settle for his ceasing to use the method. Even if it turns out favorably for PDH, he could be bankrupted by the proceedings. That is what we need legislation about -- the bullying of persons and families by giant corporations with near-infinite legal funds, where the cost of defending against their allegations by itself is a de facto award of damages: trial and conviction without due process.
On the contrary, it is responses like yours that are getting tiresome.
Linux is not a viable replacement for Windows in all situations (especially on the desktop), if it were then it would have been coming preinstalled on home machines for a while now.
Err...except that there is nothing wrong with Linux as a desktop operating system. I use it all the time, as well as Windows XP, and the rate of problems is more or less identical between them. If XP is ready for the desktop, Linux is too. Everyone understands that there are not as many high-quality desktop applications for Linux, especially in the area of games, but that says nothing about Linux itself.
And what is truly infuriating, and I know you know it, is the second part of your statement, which implies that Windows comes preinstalled on computers because it is what users want. That is false. Windows comes preinstalled because that is what the OEMs are forced to do.
After doing an install [of Linux] I have to do extra work to get proper support for my NVidia card and be able to play mp3's (both of which required using a console).
Yes, and after doing an install of Windows I have to do exactly the same amount of work to get "proper" functionality from an nVidia card, i.e., download and install the drivers. Viz. mp3 support, that is simply a matter of dollars. Did you pay for your copy of Linux? No? Oh, then who is going to pay the Fraunhofer royalty? Money changes hands for your copy of Windows, and the royalty comes out of that pie. You can pay for a copy of Linspire and get out-of-the-box mp3 functionality too. I continually fail to understand why people think for-pay benefits should be given to them for free.
The console part is just pure baloney. A lot of Linux support forums tell people to use the console because instructions can be given plainly and briefly in that format, but it's hardly necessary. I can go System > Admin > Synaptic and install the nVidia drivers from there, and all the downloading, installing, and configuration will happen automagically.
As Samuel Johnson said: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Man, I read that as Samuel Jackson. "Depend on it, mother fucker. When a man knows he's gonna be hanged in a few weeks, it concentrates his mother fucking mind wonderfully."
My submission got rejected, but net neutrality is not the only bad thing on the way via bill S.2686. This is the same bill that grants the FCC the power to require audio and video broadcast flag recognition on every device made or sold. This is one of the last opportunities you have to contact your Senators to let them know you are opposed to this bill before it gets voted through in the middle of the night.
Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator.
Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?
I am not exactly an art guru, but I do use both Inkscape and Illustrator all the time. The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette (I use that in Illustrator a lot to save and reuse colors and gradients). Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.
I don't want to paint an overly grim picture of Inkscape, though. It's really quite good, and I am very eager to get my hands on this new version (but I'll wait for the debs).
They'd have 41% for about 10 seconds until users began migrating. There's no way Yahoo could fit comfortably into the MS spectrum of products. The real stickiness for Yahoo isn't search, it's webmail and the other services that get people using it as a portal. They search at Yahoo because its already loaded up in their browser. None of those services are something that MS wants to maintain -- there's way too much friction with MS's existing products. So they either kill it all off or force users toward Live et al, which is not what those users wanted, not the least reason being MS has a negative reputation in this space.
Poisoning all of Yahoo's services doesn't gain you any marketshare in search. Maybe a few percent as collateral damage, but nothing like what's being predicted here.
Step 1: Go to www.senate.gov and look up your 2 senators. There are 2, and you need to contact both of them.
Step 2: I like to prepare for an important call by taking 3 deep breaths and reminding myself that I am in control. Sometimes I drink a shot of vodka, because I know I am little more loudmouthed that way, and in this case that is a good thing. (Trust me, my brother was a Senatorial aid for a long time. Loudmouths get attention.) These calls are actually extremely easy to make -- the aids get these kinds of calls all the time -- so there is really nothing to worry about, but I prepare anyway to make sure I am a calmer and/or prepared to be loudmouthed.
Step 3: Make a note of the bill. In this case, it is S.2686. This is very important.
Step 4: Make a note of why you are objecting/agreeing to the bill. In this case, you are objecting because there is a rider regarding the broadcast flag. That is all you need to say: "I object to this bill because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag." The good Senator will do the rest.
Step 5: Dial the number of each Senator and an aid will answer, e.g., "Hello! Senator Kohl's office!" they will say in an alert-sounding voice. Your immediate response should be: "I am a long-time supporter of Senator X, but I would like to voice my objection to a bill that is before the Senate." It doesn't matter whether you have supported this Senator or not, just say that you did. Nobody knows -- it's an anonymous system.
Step 6: State the name of the bill you are objecting to: "I am opposed to bill S.2686, because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag. I am very much opposed to that."
Step 7: The aid will ask you for your name and address. The reason they do that is to verify whether you can actually vote for the good Senator or not (oddly Senate offices from, say, Texas get calls from Idaho, so they want to filter that). Give them accurate information. It's not a harm in this case.
Step 8: Thank the aid for their help. They will probably thank you too.*
Step 9: Bask in the knowledge that you helped democracy.
*Despite the fact that the aids get 2,000 calls per day voicing all kinds of f'd up opinions, as long as yours is stated clearly and has specifically to do with a certain bill and this specific Senator, the aid will form an opinion about that bill, and will communicate that opinion to the Senator. I kid you not, this system works, just pick up the phone and call.
People who love porn would not mind DRM or any other restrictive technology - most porn lovers don't wish to have their names advertised, and a bit of money is not an issue.
I dispute the premise that shame is a bigger driver than good old customer satisfaction, unless you are talking about unusual proclivities. Going by observable evidence, I perceive that embarrassment about mainstream porn is relatively low. Yes, there are some demographic and geographic areas where this is untrue, but blue-staters under 40 (and certainly under 30) seem to be pretty calm about it.
I do my own whiteboxing, and whiteboxing for all the friends and family around (Ubuntu only of course!), and I have always used AMD processors. This has been mainly a price decision. AMD chips and boards have always been much less expensive than Intel. However, I recently did my first Intel box. It was a success, and the price was more or less the same. I was pretty impressed, and I gave up a little of my AMD snobbishness.
Yeah... it reminds me of the new math they're teaching in elementary schools. My wife is a teacher... and we both agree that it's as gay as hell. Instead of teaching kids long-hand division and how to actually do their math... they teach the kids how to guess & check on division
This is not as dumb as it seems. (Note: I agree with your sentiment that math education sucks.) I do something similar to this to do complex math in my head, sometimes, although a much more useful trick is to realize what differences and quotients actually mean. For example, the number of times 400 can be split into chunks of 20 is exactly the same as the number of times 40 can be split into chunks of 2. The "rule" isn't that "you can throw away zeros" but rather that quotients have a certain mathematical meaning that applies no matter what the actual numbers are. It's the same with differences: when asked "What is 80 minus 17?" people respond "I have no idea!" But if you ask them "What is 73 minus 10?" a lot of them can come up with the answer pretty easily. If you paid attention in algebra you'd know that this is the same mathematical question.
You're the same guy who posts "Why no love for Rogues" on the WoW forums and launches into a screed about how horribly broken and unbalanced WoW is, aren't you? Something like:
WoW is the most polished and the nicest version "out of the box" that any MMORPG team has ever released. It's a fantastic game and one that has worked amazingly well since the alpha versions with one major glaring exception. The rebalance for Rogues is a giant leap backwards. Equipment seems to be a large part of the problem, with talents as the the other part.
since the amount of money being spent on educating our young has diminished
I do not dispute your conclusion (that the quality of education has been in decline), but this particular statement is false. The dollar figures for education have been rising every year. Despite how it is construed, getting a 15% increase instead of a 20% increase is not a budget cut when student enrollment remains flat (as it has for many years).
I would argue instead that the money is simply misspent. When I was in K-12, the focus was on doing math problems, building vocabulary, and learning science and history. In other words, education. Now the focus is on shiny new buildings, universal Internet connectivity, self-esteem, and zero tolerance rules. When your main concern is that there is a "counselor" for every 3 students, and you're dumping real science education in favor of the FSM, you're very, very likely to produce the fat, contented, ignorant kids we have today.
A money shortage is definitely not the problem here.
In Canada or the US, the constitution grants us rights.
No no no no no no no no. The U.S. Constitution recognizes rights that you inherently possess by dint of being a human being. It is strictly impossible in the United States to "grant rights" to the citizenry. What might happen is the citizenry grant rights to the government (theoretically, very sparingly), but never ever the other way around.
When new bits and pieces are amended onto the Constitution, it is properly viewed as an act of clarification, not fabrication.
And what is wrong with this picture...Google Desktop only runs on Windows? What about Linux??
I'm sure the Google engineers would be happy to make a Linux version, but this is not about cool new technology, it is about corporate warfare. Google have to target Windows with these things to establish a bulwark against Vista. Then there is also Yahoo! to keep an eye on, who are also waging war on the Windows battleground.
No, you won't see anything but Windows supported anytime in the near future. It'll take the breaking of the MS monopoly to have otherwise.
Hey, what's that sound? Oh that? That's nothing -- it's just the four 90-cm quad-turbine cooling fans venting heat off that particular bank of cooling pipes.
This is already held by some Big Brains. My last reading of Universe in a Nutshell was a while ago, but I distinctly remember multiple time axes being discussed.
Slashdot Mirror
Spot on. Operating systems as we know them are going to split into two different animals. One will become a stub on which applications run, bundled right along with the application. So for example when you buy Adobe Illustrator, there is a version of Windows bundled right along with that, and all you do is plug the whole thing into your virtualizing host. Sounds great at first, but...
The other type of OS will be the hosting OS. Microsoft is positioning itself so that it becomes impractical to run a non-Microsoft host. So you will buy Windows as the host, and in addition you will buy Windows along with every application. They're aiming at multiplying their current revenue stream. This is why "partnering" with Xen is a trap, designed to discourage other OSes as hosts and when that is done they will poison other OSes as clients as well. The new Microsoft monopoly will be in place for the next 25 years.
I think it is almost the opposite. Microsoft has always been at its best when it was not in control of the market, and had to fight for success. I remember very, very fondly Word 2.0 on DOS. That was a thing of beauty, and it came out of the need to compete with WordPerfect and Wang and all the other word processors on the market in those days. Microsoft weren't trying to lock out new competitors in those days, they were participants in a competitive landscape. That is what is missing -- that idea that they are participants in a fray, not the idea that they should enforce the Pax Microsoftia where no competitors are allowed.
Nobody is asking for a bulletproof study. What we want is a study that (a) uses a valid sample size and (b) limits itself, as near as possible, to a single well-defined variable while controlling for all the other variables. A study with a tiny sample size is worthless. A study with 45 variables is worthless. Things that seem insignificant, like inequal expertise with the systems being tested, can distort the results to the point where they don't mean anything. You have to control for such things (or explain why you didn't) in order to be taken seriously.
Doing quality research requires taking great care with methodology. In addition you must always try to state where your own methodology may be faulty. Not taking care (which they didn't) and then compounding the error by not stating potential faults (which they didn't) means this study is not research. It's agenda-pushing.
I don't have any issue with real research that shows .Net frameworks are faster than LAMP frameworks. That would be an interesting result, but only if the study was conducted properly.
I thought the "problem" with gambling -- like the "problems" with prostitution and street drugs -- was that casinos in your neighborhood tend to bring with them a lot of undesirable activity, e.g., the underbelly of Las Vegas. But if the casino is not in your neighborhood, why should anyone care?
I am a small business owner.
Any small business owner interesting in remaining in business will take a hard look at all three of those alternatives. First of all, you need to pay the IT guy no matter what, so the IT personnel costs (and employee downtime costs) among options 1 and 2 and 3 are identical. And realistically the cost of obtaining 15 new desktop computers is not $500 each. Factor in the niggling upgrades, taxes, shipping, and support -- it's more like $1000/ea for those $500 machines. For most small businesses an expense of $15K is not something you take lightly. It sure isn't small potatoes for mine, and we haven't even talked about the software licenses yet for 98-vintage software that cannot be installed properly on XP.
The title of your post is "Cost of Training," which is also something that's identical among options 1 and 2 and 3. For every Windows 98 machine replaced by anything else there will be retraining costs of X. It's not 2X just because it's Linux.
But at least the drivers will be able to use all their favorite applications.
The Fine Summary sayeth:
That drives me insane. I had an employer once who tried to "get" me regarding a non-compete agreement, to wit he accused me of going after his customers. The problem was that no one could be excluded from that group -- he believed everyone on the planet was his customer. That's what I see when I read this. Google does not make operating systems or desktop software, they are a freakin' search company, and MS is not a search company. Yet MS identifies them as a competitor, just like they identify every company in existence as their competitor.
Whenever I see that in a statement from Microsoft, it is always code for "We have totally ignored the wishes of our customers and instead focused on lock-in, the breaking of standards, and the complete bollixing of normal user interface conventions."
Meh.
You can toss a big boulder into the path of a river and -- guess what -- the river doesn't stop. It routes around the problem. That is what open source projects will do. Patent suit says stop using method X, well we just invent method Y to do the same thing without infringing the patent. Project goes ahead. You cannot stop this with patent suits.
In fact, this is not endemic to open source; it happens in all areas. If you block something with a patent that people want bad enough, they will route around it, whether legally or illegally (c.f. the motion picture industry). This often leads to quality patented inventions falling into disuse because the patentholder is a bully. Something else is quickly invented to fill the same market niche and well all go happily on our way.
Now of course the trick is that rational settlements may not be possible, e.g., ACME Patent Troll Co. sues Poor Developer Harold for $1 billion in damages and won't settle for his ceasing to use the method. Even if it turns out favorably for PDH, he could be bankrupted by the proceedings. That is what we need legislation about -- the bullying of persons and families by giant corporations with near-infinite legal funds, where the cost of defending against their allegations by itself is a de facto award of damages: trial and conviction without due process.
On the contrary, it is responses like yours that are getting tiresome.
Err...except that there is nothing wrong with Linux as a desktop operating system. I use it all the time, as well as Windows XP, and the rate of problems is more or less identical between them. If XP is ready for the desktop, Linux is too. Everyone understands that there are not as many high-quality desktop applications for Linux, especially in the area of games, but that says nothing about Linux itself.
And what is truly infuriating, and I know you know it, is the second part of your statement, which implies that Windows comes preinstalled on computers because it is what users want. That is false. Windows comes preinstalled because that is what the OEMs are forced to do.
Yes, and after doing an install of Windows I have to do exactly the same amount of work to get "proper" functionality from an nVidia card, i.e., download and install the drivers. Viz. mp3 support, that is simply a matter of dollars. Did you pay for your copy of Linux? No? Oh, then who is going to pay the Fraunhofer royalty? Money changes hands for your copy of Windows, and the royalty comes out of that pie. You can pay for a copy of Linspire and get out-of-the-box mp3 functionality too. I continually fail to understand why people think for-pay benefits should be given to them for free.
The console part is just pure baloney. A lot of Linux support forums tell people to use the console because instructions can be given plainly and briefly in that format, but it's hardly necessary. I can go System > Admin > Synaptic and install the nVidia drivers from there, and all the downloading, installing, and configuration will happen automagically.
Man, I read that as Samuel Jackson. "Depend on it, mother fucker. When a man knows he's gonna be hanged in a few weeks, it concentrates his mother fucking mind wonderfully."
My submission got rejected, but net neutrality is not the only bad thing on the way via bill S.2686. This is the same bill that grants the FCC the power to require audio and video broadcast flag recognition on every device made or sold. This is one of the last opportunities you have to contact your Senators to let them know you are opposed to this bill before it gets voted through in the middle of the night.
I am not exactly an art guru, but I do use both Inkscape and Illustrator all the time. The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette (I use that in Illustrator a lot to save and reuse colors and gradients). Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.
I don't want to paint an overly grim picture of Inkscape, though. It's really quite good, and I am very eager to get my hands on this new version (but I'll wait for the debs).
They'd have 41% for about 10 seconds until users began migrating. There's no way Yahoo could fit comfortably into the MS spectrum of products. The real stickiness for Yahoo isn't search, it's webmail and the other services that get people using it as a portal. They search at Yahoo because its already loaded up in their browser. None of those services are something that MS wants to maintain -- there's way too much friction with MS's existing products. So they either kill it all off or force users toward Live et al, which is not what those users wanted, not the least reason being MS has a negative reputation in this space.
Poisoning all of Yahoo's services doesn't gain you any marketshare in search. Maybe a few percent as collateral damage, but nothing like what's being predicted here.
Step 1: Go to www.senate.gov and look up your 2 senators. There are 2, and you need to contact both of them.
Step 2: I like to prepare for an important call by taking 3 deep breaths and reminding myself that I am in control. Sometimes I drink a shot of vodka, because I know I am little more loudmouthed that way, and in this case that is a good thing. (Trust me, my brother was a Senatorial aid for a long time. Loudmouths get attention.) These calls are actually extremely easy to make -- the aids get these kinds of calls all the time -- so there is really nothing to worry about, but I prepare anyway to make sure I am a calmer and/or prepared to be loudmouthed.
Step 3: Make a note of the bill. In this case, it is S.2686. This is very important.
Step 4: Make a note of why you are objecting/agreeing to the bill. In this case, you are objecting because there is a rider regarding the broadcast flag. That is all you need to say: "I object to this bill because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag." The good Senator will do the rest.
Step 5: Dial the number of each Senator and an aid will answer, e.g., "Hello! Senator Kohl's office!" they will say in an alert-sounding voice. Your immediate response should be: "I am a long-time supporter of Senator X, but I would like to voice my objection to a bill that is before the Senate." It doesn't matter whether you have supported this Senator or not, just say that you did. Nobody knows -- it's an anonymous system.
Step 6: State the name of the bill you are objecting to: "I am opposed to bill S.2686, because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag. I am very much opposed to that."
Step 7: The aid will ask you for your name and address. The reason they do that is to verify whether you can actually vote for the good Senator or not (oddly Senate offices from, say, Texas get calls from Idaho, so they want to filter that). Give them accurate information. It's not a harm in this case.
Step 8: Thank the aid for their help. They will probably thank you too.*
Step 9: Bask in the knowledge that you helped democracy.
*Despite the fact that the aids get 2,000 calls per day voicing all kinds of f'd up opinions, as long as yours is stated clearly and has specifically to do with a certain bill and this specific Senator, the aid will form an opinion about that bill, and will communicate that opinion to the Senator. I kid you not, this system works, just pick up the phone and call.
I dispute the premise that shame is a bigger driver than good old customer satisfaction, unless you are talking about unusual proclivities. Going by observable evidence, I perceive that embarrassment about mainstream porn is relatively low. Yes, there are some demographic and geographic areas where this is untrue, but blue-staters under 40 (and certainly under 30) seem to be pretty calm about it.
This is not as dumb as it seems. (Note: I agree with your sentiment that math education sucks.) I do something similar to this to do complex math in my head, sometimes, although a much more useful trick is to realize what differences and quotients actually mean. For example, the number of times 400 can be split into chunks of 20 is exactly the same as the number of times 40 can be split into chunks of 2. The "rule" isn't that "you can throw away zeros" but rather that quotients have a certain mathematical meaning that applies no matter what the actual numbers are. It's the same with differences: when asked "What is 80 minus 17?" people respond "I have no idea!" But if you ask them "What is 73 minus 10?" a lot of them can come up with the answer pretty easily. If you paid attention in algebra you'd know that this is the same mathematical question.
Pretty close?
I do not dispute your conclusion (that the quality of education has been in decline), but this particular statement is false. The dollar figures for education have been rising every year. Despite how it is construed, getting a 15% increase instead of a 20% increase is not a budget cut when student enrollment remains flat (as it has for many years).
I would argue instead that the money is simply misspent. When I was in K-12, the focus was on doing math problems, building vocabulary, and learning science and history. In other words, education. Now the focus is on shiny new buildings, universal Internet connectivity, self-esteem, and zero tolerance rules. When your main concern is that there is a "counselor" for every 3 students, and you're dumping real science education in favor of the FSM, you're very, very likely to produce the fat, contented, ignorant kids we have today.
A money shortage is definitely not the problem here.
No no no no no no no no. The U.S. Constitution recognizes rights that you inherently possess by dint of being a human being. It is strictly impossible in the United States to "grant rights" to the citizenry. What might happen is the citizenry grant rights to the government (theoretically, very sparingly), but never ever the other way around.
When new bits and pieces are amended onto the Constitution, it is properly viewed as an act of clarification, not fabrication.
I'm sure the Google engineers would be happy to make a Linux version, but this is not about cool new technology, it is about corporate warfare. Google have to target Windows with these things to establish a bulwark against Vista. Then there is also Yahoo! to keep an eye on, who are also waging war on the Windows battleground.
No, you won't see anything but Windows supported anytime in the near future. It'll take the breaking of the MS monopoly to have otherwise.
This is already held by some Big Brains. My last reading of Universe in a Nutshell was a while ago, but I distinctly remember multiple time axes being discussed.