And if they don't fix the safety problems, there'll be a LOT of claims. Expensive ones, too, if they're starting on BMWs.
But his obnoxiousness overshadows the rest.
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's the classic case of a guy who doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut.
He'd garner far more respect for his technical contributions if he didn't make us accept his ravings^H^H^H^H^H^Hextreme socio-political opinions as a baseline for talking to him.
Fair or not, RMS the extremist cannot be separated from RMS the coder. And that limits the appeal of RMS the coder.
Their next example of "Our server crashed today, and the idiot IT person at our company couldn't get the thing running." isn't likely to be actionable either, even if it isn't true.
You're missing a whole other section of law here: if the company is a public company, leaking information like that could subject both employee and company to the wrath of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
NDAs aren't just there for competitive reasons, and (possible) libel isn't the only way for someone to be hurt. Insider leaks are as old as time, and have sent quite a few companies' stock prices down the tank when bad info has leaked. The weblog is just a new venue for the same old screwup: If stock prices move based on inside info somebody blogged, that somebody can be charged with insider trading.
I'm about as far from a lawyer as one can get, but based on my understanding of business law, there are good reasons for corporate security to be worried about stuff like this.
Free FrontPage, that'll cure the world's ills.
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Riiiiiiiiiight.
Funny, I can put together a pretty nice-looking website with any of several Windows text-editors. And there are free/low-cost WYSIWYG packages out there (some are old, but still usable).
I hope that's sarcasm, because if not, you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist in order to promote a class-warfare agenda.
the little guy, from whom we collect the REAL tax money from
Please check out the last screen here. For those of you who are too lazy to click and scroll, I'll just take a couple numbers from there, Neal Boortz's program notes for Election Day.
Taxpayers with incomes in the top 25% (above $55,225) paid 84.01% of total U.S. tax revenue. Taxpayers in the top 50% (above $27,682/year) paid 96.09% of all U.S. tax revenues.
If someone is getting screwed, it sure ain't your sympathetic "little guy."
Sheesh, in their letter to subscribers, it appears to me that they'd rather blame President Bush and the Republicans for their struggles (and for everything else too) than actually address the problem (not enough readers are interested in paying for ultra-highbrow, leftist rants cleverly disguised as intellectualism).
*shrugs* I'm sitting in my cube writing J2EE web apps. In this same cube, I've done Python, C/C++, and God-knows-how-many shell scripts; we've got everything from Visual Basic to Pascal (no kidding... we keep trying to bury it, but it won't stay dead) and AS/400 within the enterprise.
Limited-scope knowledge may be OK for limited-scope apps. But if my Java app returns a field so long that it causes a buffer overrun in C or (God forbid) confuses the AS/400, I'm in trouble. In real life, very few programmers will get to spend their entire careers on small, independent applications; at least a passing familiarity with the issues that face other systems with which they interact is absolutely necessary to properly (and securely) integrate with those systems.
Tunnel vision may seem great, but it's only so until something outside the tunnel hammers you. You don't make that mistake twice, as long as you can figure out what screwed you up. But half-trained Java monkeys calling themselves professional programmers don't just suffer from tunnel vision, they're militantly unaware that there is a tunnel, or a dangerous world outside its view.
When all these half-trained Java-based "CS major"s have to deal with real systems of all types, including those that require memory management by hand?
This is precisely why Java and C# SHOULDN'T be the primary teaching language at any serious institution. It doesn't just encourage bad habits in memory management, it breeds ignorance of the CONCEPT of memory management. I'm extremely glad I had a good background in C/C++ (and even some Pascal before those) before I ever learned Java or Python, or I wouldn't have a clue about half the concepts that a good C background forces you to learn.
The gelling problem is fixed as long as you buy your diesel from decent-volume stations. Winter diesel has anti-gelling additive mixed in before it gets to your car. The VW TDIs don't even have a way to plug the car in; some of the very anal types up in Calgary (or thereabouts) have retrofitted engine-block or coolant heaters because (a) they think it'll prolong the life of the engine and (b) they want to heat the interior faster. Some of the biodiesel devotees are working on fuel-tank heaters (since BD does gel, and anti-gelling additives for BD are virtually unavailable mass-market).
The reason the early '80s US passenger diesel days didn't last is because those GM diesels uniformly SUCKED. The memories of those (my grandparents bought a GM diesel that didn't make it home from the new car dealer), plus FUD from the enviro-wackos who want hydrogen/fuel-cells or nothing, are much of what has hurt US diesel acceptance to this day.
Unless there was something very unusual about the '94-'95 diesel Passats, there's no way they could have gotten 70 MPG in US units. Perhaps 70 MPG in imperial gallons, which is ~58.3 MPG in US gallons, but that's still pretty high.
But the current VW TDIs, even the low-end versions we have in the U.S. because of our bad diesel, are great. I just purchased an '03 Jetta TDI, it's got plenty of pickup (that 90 HP means nothing against 155 ft/lbs of torque), and my mileage is climbing as I break it in. 46.2 mpg on the third tank; I'm expecting 48, and probably more like 49 on the next fillup.
U.S. enviro-wackos just have a vendetta against diesel, that's the biggest problem with diesel acceptance here. They'd rather get their way, all the way (fuel cells/hydrogen/other currently impractical tech), or nothing at all. Meanwhile, we could be cutting emissions and reducing foreign oil dependence in one fell swoop with Euro-style small diesel engines.
Higher-level concepts like maximizing return for shareholders and creditors are tough to get through to/.ers. It could be worse, though -- K5ers apparently don't believe in money.
Yeah, the business plan isdnip appears to want goes something like this:
XM and Sirius spend millions of dollars on R&D.
FCC mandates a technology, probably the inferior of the two. Other operator goes out of business.
Remaining operator spends hundreds of millions to put infrastructure in place, get receivers to market, etc.
He gets to commandeer however large a chunk of bandwidth he wants from the remaining operator, now several hundred million dollars in debt, to use however he wants to. Never mind little things like investment and ownership, those are merely outdated notions meant to keep the little guy in his basement down.
?
Profit! Oh, never mind... don't profit, lest you be called a "pigopolist." The money will keep coming from somewhere, right? (Hey, it would have been a great business model in '99...)
Fortunately, not too many people were listening to him.
And has been offered since the early days of XM and Sirius both. It's the biggest reason why I will be getting XM.
As for the others, there's no market -- BBC is the gold standard in (English-language) international news media, everyone else trails behind. And VoA still is not allowed to broadcast to the U.S. -- there's a good reason for that, the government isn't allowed to (overtly) propagandize to U.S. citizens. XM runs several international music channels programmed in non-English languages; I couldn't tell you whether they also contain foreign-language news.
...people who listen to Whitney Houston are capable of operating a computer, finding that music and downloading it. I think that's a bad presumption, myself.
If an album is leaked to the Internet, but the Internet doesn't listen to it, does anybody care?
The PalmOS Conduit setup help says that you should only sync your device with one computer using this, as "data corruption may result" or some other such jazz.
Has anybody tried this? I'd like to try out iSync to get my iPod into the calendaring world, but not if it's gonna work just fine for my iBook but screw things up on my work (Palm Desktop) and home (Outlook XP) PCs. (Yes, I know. I need to can Outlook anyway.) Thanks.
Clearly, the repo man knows "Um, Jimmy hasn't paid his car payment in 2 months, that Accord is ours now." And it's part of the contract that the purchaser/lessor and the dealership/rent-to-own/whatever signed.
The most frightening part of this is the total lack of proof required. "Suspicion" to me means "Wow, that photo of Edinburgh Castle at night from CNN reminds me a lot of the one I took last year on vacation; time to find some 31337 5kr1p7s and r00t their j0x0rz." It's the equivalent of me being allowed to build a 50-foot wall around someone's house who I *think* *might have given* out a recording of my a cappella group's concert.
The legislative branch has a big inherent problem. If their predecessors did their jobs right, then theirs is essentially a maintenance function. But having the executive branch enforce current laws is much less attractive than having a Congresscritter propose a new law and get the airtime for it, because Congress doesn't get credit when the cops bust someone for violating existing laws. (*ahem* Look at gun control for a good example of this.)
Of course, you couldn't use it if you had pets or kids, but just imagine... give the thing infrared sensors to find heat sources, radar to keep it from running into cold objects, all the necessary AI to control movement, and an RF on/off switch similar to the keyring unlock switches that come with most new cars now, and you've got the home security system from hell.
Just imagine the look on your unfriendly neighborhood criminal's face when he breaks into your house or apartment, only to be pursued by a vicious-as-hell robot. The only problem you'd ever have would be explaining to the cops what had happened to the perp after you got home and found the mauled body on your carpet (perhaps the AI would be able to figure out when it "scored" and back off so as to avoid killing the guy?). Actually, cleaning the blood out of the carpet and off the walls would be a bit of a pain, too.
Now if I could just figure out a way to keep it from attacking my Athlon, I'd be set.;-)
I forget who the quote's by, but it's that simple.
There is no theoretical capacity to the bandwidth of the air (or, really, even of wires) so long as newer, narrower protocols are being devised -- or even additions onto existing protocols that would provide distinguishment between multiple transmissions that otherwise interfere.
I'm with you on this one. The poster I responded to was calling for the "destruction" of "oppressive information" like CC debt. My point was that if you do the deed, you've gotta pay the piper. Don't credit-card yourself into oblivion and then say "oh, we've got to destroy oppressive information like credit-card debt." That's just abdicating personal responsibility for your own actions.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
OK, maybe I'm reading this too simplistically, but what I get from this sentence is that you think consequences for a person's actions are the real culprit here.
Tracking information? OK, I'll give you that one. I'm not too fond of having my web history (not that it'd be all that interesting... you could sum it up with slashdot.org, espn.com, cnn.com and hokiecentral.com) passed around like a left-over newspaper on the morning train.
But destroying "oppressive information" like credit-card debt, prison histories, etc.? That's simply a record of consequences for an individual's actions. If you were dumb enough to spend yourself into a hole (and I have plenty of friends who are), you need to either pay it off or accept the consequences of a bankruptcy filing. Prison history? Commit a crime, do the time, and then an employer still should be able to know before s/he hires a shoplifter as cashier at a store.
Banning "oppressive information" is just calling for mandated happytalk, not anarchy. If you think anarchy would be a good thing, then you ought to be fighting against rules like this.
And banning consequences for people's actions? Guarantee of societal decay. Plain and simple. It's a peculiar commonality between anarchists and old-time Communists: their vision that people would act for the common good if allowed to do so, rather than their own personal good. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in the real world.
That's MS's ace in the hole. No matter how bad it is (at least once it passes the only-crashes-once-an-hour-or-so baseline), they'll be able to browbeat/bribe universities into teaching C#.
MS has "nonrestrictive" contracts with all kinds of university CS departments (including my own at Virginia Tech) to use their software in teaching. At VT, it's "encouraged" in 1000-level CS classes to use Visual C++; it's really dependent on the professor as to how much of a fight you have to put up to use Linux/UNIX-based utils. As you proceed up the levels of classes, the MS evangelism isn't quite as obvious (i.e. teaching the VC++ IDE in class, as is done in the first-semester freshman Programming in C course), but it's still there.
If MS puts it out there, some university CS departments will get a few hundred G's tossed at them, and then C# will become a teaching language there. Enough of these, and enough researchers at such universities detailed onto C#-centric research, and C# will become mainstream, cross-platform utility or no, proprietary or no.
I'm the music director for Technophobia, an a cappella group on campus at Virginia Tech. I arrange songs you might hear on your friendly local radio station (for example, one of our biggest crowd-pleasers right now is Why Don't You Get A Job), and then I and six other guys sing them without instruments.
Currently, my process when creating music for us to work on is:
1. Arrange music -- listen to it, write down melody, bass line and vocal harmony, convert guitar and keyboard parts into something singable, and figure out a vocal percussion line that works.
2. Save this file and send it out to all the guys (we use a software package called NoteWorthy Composer). Guys listen to it/sing it through with their home computers if they have time. All guys print out the music.
3. I throw my 20-lb., 4-foot-long electronic keyboard in my truck to drive to campus for practice twice a week, cart that thing through the student center to our practice room, and then play through the guys' parts. Badly.
With this, I could simply save the song files as MIDI files, copy them over to my IIIx, and leave the damn keyboard at home! We'd have a better way to listen to the songs (minus my screwups when I try to play through the arrangements on the keyboard), and no pain-in-the-ass keyboard hauling for me.
This thing'll be VERY useful. If it really does wind up as only ~$200, I'll be first in line for it.
The question is, was "democracy" ever the real intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution?
Democracy is one of the most misused words around, as far as describing a government goes. A good case can be made that "democracy" should only be used to describe a system where citizens themselves have a personal say in each decision that is made (commonly known as "direct democracy").
What we tend to define as "democracy" in the U.S. is actually a republican (I'm not talking about the party here) system of government. The whole idea of electing representatives (little-r, includes Senators, House Reps, and whatever local governmental types you may have) was originally to remove the decision-making at least one layer from the common folk, on the theory that the hoi polloi didn't have the time, inclination or ability to properly educate themselves on all the issues that must be decided by a modern government.
The devolution of republican government into a true democracy (through such things as ballot initiatives etc.) is one of the biggest issues affecting our lives today. Whether that movement is a good or bad thing is really up to you, and often those lines don't coincide with party labels. What scares me, though, is how much this could change how our nation is governed, and yet most people don't even know the proper words to describe it.
DC has one of the highest murder rates in the USA. Keeping law-abiding District of Columbia residents from owning handguns hasn't managed much, except to keep them from defending themselves against those who just don't care about legal restrictions, and won't until they're locked up.
Sure, the phrase is trite, but it's damned true. No municipal ban on handguns has ever stopped Joe Crackhead down the street from packing heat, and no law ever will. Laws banning firearms in a pre-armed society like the United States simply mean that only the segments of the society that we can least trust with them will have them. Law-abiding citizens then are unable to protect themselves, and law and order proceeds to break down.
Criminals need to be disarmed, not law-abiding private citizens. Existing laws, if enforced, would take care of the first part; most gun-control measures under consideration would affect part 2 with very little effect on part 1.
Slashdot Mirror
...then rates will sure as hell be higher.
And if they don't fix the safety problems, there'll be a LOT of claims. Expensive ones, too, if they're starting on BMWs.
It's the classic case of a guy who doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut.
He'd garner far more respect for his technical contributions if he didn't make us accept his ravings^H^H^H^H^H^Hextreme socio-political opinions as a baseline for talking to him.
Fair or not, RMS the extremist cannot be separated from RMS the coder. And that limits the appeal of RMS the coder.
Their next example of
"Our server crashed today, and the idiot IT person at our company couldn't get the thing running." isn't likely to be actionable either, even if it isn't true.
You're missing a whole other section of law here: if the company is a public company, leaking information like that could subject both employee and company to the wrath of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
NDAs aren't just there for competitive reasons, and (possible) libel isn't the only way for someone to be hurt. Insider leaks are as old as time, and have sent quite a few companies' stock prices down the tank when bad info has leaked. The weblog is just a new venue for the same old screwup: If stock prices move based on inside info somebody blogged, that somebody can be charged with insider trading.
I'm about as far from a lawyer as one can get, but based on my understanding of business law, there are good reasons for corporate security to be worried about stuff like this.
Riiiiiiiiiight.
Funny, I can put together a pretty nice-looking website with any of several Windows text-editors. And there are free/low-cost WYSIWYG packages out there (some are old, but still usable).
I hope that's sarcasm, because if not, you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist in order to promote a class-warfare agenda.
the little guy, from whom we collect the REAL tax money from
Please check out the last screen here. For those of you who are too lazy to click and scroll, I'll just take a couple numbers from there, Neal Boortz's program notes for Election Day.
Taxpayers with incomes in the top 25% (above $55,225) paid 84.01% of total U.S. tax revenue. Taxpayers in the top 50% (above $27,682/year) paid 96.09% of all U.S. tax revenues.
If someone is getting screwed, it sure ain't your sympathetic "little guy."
Sheesh, in their letter to subscribers, it appears to me that they'd rather blame President Bush and the Republicans for their struggles (and for everything else too) than actually address the problem (not enough readers are interested in paying for ultra-highbrow, leftist rants cleverly disguised as intellectualism).
Do they use that excuse in their SEC filings too?
*shrugs* I'm sitting in my cube writing J2EE web apps. In this same cube, I've done Python, C/C++, and God-knows-how-many shell scripts; we've got everything from Visual Basic to Pascal (no kidding... we keep trying to bury it, but it won't stay dead) and AS/400 within the enterprise.
Limited-scope knowledge may be OK for limited-scope apps. But if my Java app returns a field so long that it causes a buffer overrun in C or (God forbid) confuses the AS/400, I'm in trouble. In real life, very few programmers will get to spend their entire careers on small, independent applications; at least a passing familiarity with the issues that face other systems with which they interact is absolutely necessary to properly (and securely) integrate with those systems.
Tunnel vision may seem great, but it's only so until something outside the tunnel hammers you. You don't make that mistake twice, as long as you can figure out what screwed you up. But half-trained Java monkeys calling themselves professional programmers don't just suffer from tunnel vision, they're militantly unaware that there is a tunnel, or a dangerous world outside its view.
When all these half-trained Java-based "CS major"s have to deal with real systems of all types, including those that require memory management by hand?
This is precisely why Java and C# SHOULDN'T be the primary teaching language at any serious institution. It doesn't just encourage bad habits in memory management, it breeds ignorance of the CONCEPT of memory management. I'm extremely glad I had a good background in C/C++ (and even some Pascal before those) before I ever learned Java or Python, or I wouldn't have a clue about half the concepts that a good C background forces you to learn.
Go over and visit TDIClub.com, we're good people.
The gelling problem is fixed as long as you buy your diesel from decent-volume stations. Winter diesel has anti-gelling additive mixed in before it gets to your car. The VW TDIs don't even have a way to plug the car in; some of the very anal types up in Calgary (or thereabouts) have retrofitted engine-block or coolant heaters because (a) they think it'll prolong the life of the engine and (b) they want to heat the interior faster. Some of the biodiesel devotees are working on fuel-tank heaters (since BD does gel, and anti-gelling additives for BD are virtually unavailable mass-market).
The reason the early '80s US passenger diesel days didn't last is because those GM diesels uniformly SUCKED. The memories of those (my grandparents bought a GM diesel that didn't make it home from the new car dealer), plus FUD from the enviro-wackos who want hydrogen/fuel-cells or nothing, are much of what has hurt US diesel acceptance to this day.
Unless there was something very unusual about the '94-'95 diesel Passats, there's no way they could have gotten 70 MPG in US units. Perhaps 70 MPG in imperial gallons, which is ~58.3 MPG in US gallons, but that's still pretty high.
But the current VW TDIs, even the low-end versions we have in the U.S. because of our bad diesel, are great. I just purchased an '03 Jetta TDI, it's got plenty of pickup (that 90 HP means nothing against 155 ft/lbs of torque), and my mileage is climbing as I break it in. 46.2 mpg on the third tank; I'm expecting 48, and probably more like 49 on the next fillup.
U.S. enviro-wackos just have a vendetta against diesel, that's the biggest problem with diesel acceptance here. They'd rather get their way, all the way (fuel cells/hydrogen/other currently impractical tech), or nothing at all. Meanwhile, we could be cutting emissions and reducing foreign oil dependence in one fell swoop with Euro-style small diesel engines.
If
/.ers. It could be worse, though -- K5ers apparently don't believe in money.
v_intan0 > $25
then pay the money and keep them.
Higher-level concepts like maximizing return for shareholders and creditors are tough to get through to
Fortunately, not too many people were listening to him.
And has been offered since the early days of XM and Sirius both. It's the biggest reason why I will be getting XM.
As for the others, there's no market -- BBC is the gold standard in (English-language) international news media, everyone else trails behind. And VoA still is not allowed to broadcast to the U.S. -- there's a good reason for that, the government isn't allowed to (overtly) propagandize to U.S. citizens. XM runs several international music channels programmed in non-English languages; I couldn't tell you whether they also contain foreign-language news.
...people who listen to Whitney Houston are capable of operating a computer, finding that music and downloading it. I think that's a bad presumption, myself.
If an album is leaked to the Internet, but the Internet doesn't listen to it, does anybody care?
The PalmOS Conduit setup help says that you should only sync your device with one computer using this, as "data corruption may result" or some other such jazz.
Has anybody tried this? I'd like to try out iSync to get my iPod into the calendaring world, but not if it's gonna work just fine for my iBook but screw things up on my work (Palm Desktop) and home (Outlook XP) PCs. (Yes, I know. I need to can Outlook anyway.) Thanks.
Clearly, the repo man knows "Um, Jimmy hasn't paid his car payment in 2 months, that Accord is ours now." And it's part of the contract that the purchaser/lessor and the dealership/rent-to-own/whatever signed.
The most frightening part of this is the total lack of proof required. "Suspicion" to me means "Wow, that photo of Edinburgh Castle at night from CNN reminds me a lot of the one I took last year on vacation; time to find some 31337 5kr1p7s and r00t their j0x0rz." It's the equivalent of me being allowed to build a 50-foot wall around someone's house who I *think* *might have given* out a recording of my a cappella group's concert.
The legislative branch has a big inherent problem. If their predecessors did their jobs right, then theirs is essentially a maintenance function. But having the executive branch enforce current laws is much less attractive than having a Congresscritter propose a new law and get the airtime for it, because Congress doesn't get credit when the cops bust someone for violating existing laws. (*ahem* Look at gun control for a good example of this.)
Of course, you couldn't use it if you had pets or kids, but just imagine... give the thing infrared sensors to find heat sources, radar to keep it from running into cold objects, all the necessary AI to control movement, and an RF on/off switch similar to the keyring unlock switches that come with most new cars now, and you've got the home security system from hell.
;-)
Just imagine the look on your unfriendly neighborhood criminal's face when he breaks into your house or apartment, only to be pursued by a vicious-as-hell robot. The only problem you'd ever have would be explaining to the cops what had happened to the perp after you got home and found the mauled body on your carpet (perhaps the AI would be able to figure out when it "scored" and back off so as to avoid killing the guy?). Actually, cleaning the blood out of the carpet and off the walls would be a bit of a pain, too.
Now if I could just figure out a way to keep it from attacking my Athlon, I'd be set.
I forget who the quote's by, but it's that simple.
There is no theoretical capacity to the bandwidth of the air (or, really, even of wires) so long as newer, narrower protocols are being devised -- or even additions onto existing protocols that would provide distinguishment between multiple transmissions that otherwise interfere.
I'm with you on this one. The poster I responded to was calling for the "destruction" of "oppressive information" like CC debt. My point was that if you do the deed, you've gotta pay the piper. Don't credit-card yourself into oblivion and then say "oh, we've got to destroy oppressive information like credit-card debt." That's just abdicating personal responsibility for your own actions.
While I support technology, I have come to the conclusion that oppressive technology and information (credit card debt, tracking information, prison histories, etc) must be destroyed, blocked, or circumvented in order for any real social progress to occur.
OK, maybe I'm reading this too simplistically, but what I get from this sentence is that you think consequences for a person's actions are the real culprit here.
Tracking information? OK, I'll give you that one. I'm not too fond of having my web history (not that it'd be all that interesting... you could sum it up with slashdot.org, espn.com, cnn.com and hokiecentral.com) passed around like a left-over newspaper on the morning train.
But destroying "oppressive information" like credit-card debt, prison histories, etc.? That's simply a record of consequences for an individual's actions. If you were dumb enough to spend yourself into a hole (and I have plenty of friends who are), you need to either pay it off or accept the consequences of a bankruptcy filing. Prison history? Commit a crime, do the time, and then an employer still should be able to know before s/he hires a shoplifter as cashier at a store.
Banning "oppressive information" is just calling for mandated happytalk, not anarchy. If you think anarchy would be a good thing, then you ought to be fighting against rules like this.
And banning consequences for people's actions? Guarantee of societal decay. Plain and simple. It's a peculiar commonality between anarchists and old-time Communists: their vision that people would act for the common good if allowed to do so, rather than their own personal good. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in the real world.
That's MS's ace in the hole. No matter how bad it is (at least once it passes the only-crashes-once-an-hour-or-so baseline), they'll be able to browbeat/bribe universities into teaching C#.
MS has "nonrestrictive" contracts with all kinds of university CS departments (including my own at Virginia Tech) to use their software in teaching. At VT, it's "encouraged" in 1000-level CS classes to use Visual C++; it's really dependent on the professor as to how much of a fight you have to put up to use Linux/UNIX-based utils. As you proceed up the levels of classes, the MS evangelism isn't quite as obvious (i.e. teaching the VC++ IDE in class, as is done in the first-semester freshman Programming in C course), but it's still there.
If MS puts it out there, some university CS departments will get a few hundred G's tossed at them, and then C# will become a teaching language there. Enough of these, and enough researchers at such universities detailed onto C#-centric research, and C# will become mainstream, cross-platform utility or no, proprietary or no.
I'm the music director for Technophobia, an a cappella group on campus at Virginia Tech. I arrange songs you might hear on your friendly local radio station (for example, one of our biggest crowd-pleasers right now is Why Don't You Get A Job), and then I and six other guys sing them without instruments.
Currently, my process when creating music for us to work on is:
1. Arrange music -- listen to it, write down melody, bass line and vocal harmony, convert guitar and keyboard parts into something singable, and figure out a vocal percussion line that works.
2. Save this file and send it out to all the guys (we use a software package called NoteWorthy Composer). Guys listen to it/sing it through with their home computers if they have time. All guys print out the music.
3. I throw my 20-lb., 4-foot-long electronic keyboard in my truck to drive to campus for practice twice a week, cart that thing through the student center to our practice room, and then play through the guys' parts. Badly.
With this, I could simply save the song files as MIDI files, copy them over to my IIIx, and leave the damn keyboard at home! We'd have a better way to listen to the songs (minus my screwups when I try to play through the arrangements on the keyboard), and no pain-in-the-ass keyboard hauling for me.
This thing'll be VERY useful. If it really does wind up as only ~$200, I'll be first in line for it.
The question is, was "democracy" ever the real intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution?
Democracy is one of the most misused words around, as far as describing a government goes. A good case can be made that "democracy" should only be used to describe a system where citizens themselves have a personal say in each decision that is made (commonly known as "direct democracy").
What we tend to define as "democracy" in the U.S. is actually a republican (I'm not talking about the party here) system of government. The whole idea of electing representatives (little-r, includes Senators, House Reps, and whatever local governmental types you may have) was originally to remove the decision-making at least one layer from the common folk, on the theory that the hoi polloi didn't have the time, inclination or ability to properly educate themselves on all the issues that must be decided by a modern government.
The devolution of republican government into a true democracy (through such things as ballot initiatives etc.) is one of the biggest issues affecting our lives today. Whether that movement is a good or bad thing is really up to you, and often those lines don't coincide with party labels. What scares me, though, is how much this could change how our nation is governed, and yet most people don't even know the proper words to describe it.
DC has one of the highest murder rates in the USA. Keeping law-abiding District of Columbia residents from owning handguns hasn't managed much, except to keep them from defending themselves against those who just don't care about legal restrictions, and won't until they're locked up.
...only the outlaws have guns.
Sure, the phrase is trite, but it's damned true. No municipal ban on handguns has ever stopped Joe Crackhead down the street from packing heat, and no law ever will. Laws banning firearms in a pre-armed society like the United States simply mean that only the segments of the society that we can least trust with them will have them. Law-abiding citizens then are unable to protect themselves, and law and order proceeds to break down.
Criminals need to be disarmed, not law-abiding private citizens. Existing laws, if enforced, would take care of the first part; most gun-control measures under consideration would affect part 2 with very little effect on part 1.