I'll give credit to Google for at least responding directly to their detractors and explaining their position in what seems like an honest and open way (you'd think if they were trying to sell us on swampland that they wouldn't use the word "compromise"). In spite of everyone's criticisms I still think Google adheres to the "don't be evil" mantra as well as they possibly can.
That said they should've stuck to their guns. Their new Net Neutrality position sucks.
I've wanted this for as long as I've had dual-monitors. I wound up settling for an nVidia TwinView setup, but if I could find a way for each of these to be their own separate workspace that would really be terrific. I'm surprised this is so hard to set up--it seems like it shouldn't be that difficult with X.
I know it seems a little far-fetched, but the globalization possible due to technology has caused a lot of conflict and strife in terms of politics, business practices, etc. The open source movement, which became prominent mostly through projects like Apache, Firefox, and especially Linux, is one of the best examples we have so far for the potential good of globalization--where people are coming together across the world irrespective of race, religion, or nationality and working toward a common goal for the greater good of the entire world (or at least the part of the world who benefits from their software). It's a model for the potential of global peace and cooperation.
Not saying Linus is by any means a shoe-in for it, but I don't think it's an absurd idea.
In terms of government it is considerably harder to make bring these things into existence and to remove them once they're already there. Changing it after it already exists is trivial. And that's what's important and significant about this: it exists. The general population has facilitated access to something that was obscure and hidden behind a wall of government before. This may not seem like much but I think the successful creation of this type of transparency throughout the government, and if possible embedding it systemically into government processes, that we will see a great improvement in terms of freedom, success, and efficiency of our government.
It's similar to the way open source applications always get bugs patched faster than commercial implementations--crowdsourcing is a good way to catch errors. That will undoubtedly apply to government as well, especially when many politicians make their living relying on their practices being obscured from the public.
I don't know the tech details of ChromeOS yet, but I get the impression it's mostly if not entirely net-based.
I think that's going to leave Microsoft with a fairly comfortable marketshare even if it takes off because, to some extent, many people want *their* files and *their* processing to be solely under *their* control.
There's something to be said for having your own house with your own yard and fence versus living in an apartment building with millions of other people.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
IBM deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for this!!! This problem has persistently plagued me for ages! I'm glad someone finally came up with a solution to this. My only recourse up to this point has been to avoid SSN fields on any web form. If my boss wants something that requires a unique personal identifier I tell him it can't be done--not unless he wants to hire a team of interns to parse whatever voodoo people put into that SSN field!
Thank you so much for this new knowledge IBM! Now if we can do something about phone number fields I'll be in web developer heaven!
Complaints about lack of Photoshop and a 64-bit version aside (it's interesting how much Slashdot resembles a sewing circle of old ladies in the complaints department), this is actually pretty significant news. Especially if this is the beginning of a new Way Things are Done for the Flash developers.
With most major video sites using Flash-based players and the other wealth of Flash content on other websites, Flash support is pretty essential for desktop users.
This is a major stepping stone. Hopefully Adobe will see enough rewards from doing this that will encourage them to embrace the Linux platform even more.
I came to the conclusion within the last year that privacy is a product of a bygone era. The fact is technology has made it too easy to erode privacy, corporations have made it too profitable, and governments have made it too desired. I read an article that within five years we'll be able to carry enough storage on our person to record every waking second of our lives for a year. It's only a matter of time before people no longer have to blog, they'll just have to live and technology will allow us to record it all as it happens.
Privacy as a concept will not exist for our children's children, if not for our children directly. They'll know the word and the meaning but they won't understand at a deeper level what it is like to go outside and not have to wonder whether or not they're being watched.
The most concerning part of this for myself is and has always been the potential for abuse this has by governments and law enforcement. However now that I've accepted there's no avoiding our future as a surveillance society I've realized the solution. We must make sure that the surviellance and lack of privacy is extended and in fact *led* by government and law enforcement. If governments and law enforcement would be willing to sacrifice their own privacy first it would help (albeit mildly) make the sacrifice of privacy by citizens a little easier to swallow. Also it introduces accountability to the people which is essential. Hopefully the experience of their own loss of privacy will temper their judgment with how to use their ability to invade the privacy of others.
I only hope that within the next ten years we see a strong movement toward transparency and accountability in public officials and public servants. It's the only way to avoid 1984.
You know even in spite of all the problems with Linux I think a combination of factors may push it to finally become a mainstream Desktop OS. I'm reluctant to make predictions because people have been saying it'll be the year for desktop linux since I started using Linux a little after 2000.
That said Vista's obviously tanked worse than anyone could've guessed. Even the non-computer savvy are reverting to an OS that Microsoft is no longer developing and is already trying to cut support for entirely.
I know from my friends that's pushed a lot of people towards Mac OS, and it would seem that would be the natural way for things to go and it could be that Macs finally take over as at least an equal share desktop OS, if not become the dominant desktop. But then now Apple's having stock problems and a ton of concerns over Jobs' health and whether or not Apple can continue successfully should Steve Jobs have to retire.
Businesses are going to take the potential for Apple to suddenly go drastically downhill way more seriously than average consumers, which may push businesses toward Linux. Business workstations obviously are a major if not the biggest factor in desktop adoption for an OS.
This is obviously really hypothetical, but it seems like this combination of factors along with the increasing prominence of Linux (especially with the marketing work of Ubuntu/Canonical) are making this a great opening for Linux to move into an area where it has a signficiant enough marketshare that application developers such as Adobe will have to start supporting it as well as they support Windows/Mac. I'm not gonna say it outright because it'll take more than a year I think for this to become fully clear, and it could easily be taken away by Apple if they make the right moves, or if they clear up any uncertainties and concerns businesses might have about their future, but this is the first time Linux has an opening to take a huge chunk of desktop market share because it has non-technical reasons for being a superior alternative.
Make Time, Forego Lazy Conveniences, Active Hobby
on
How Do Geeks Exercise?
·
· Score: 1
If you want it make time for it. As someone who spends a significant portion of my week trying to stay in shape, it's become a huge pet peeve of mine for people to complain about being out of shape or overweight and never do anything about it. The fact is that people will make time for what's important to them. If it's not important enough for you to take a half hour out of World of Warcraft, then just accept that it's not really that important to you and quit complaining about it. That's all for my soap box.
I think everyone's touched pretty well on the fact that just doing away with conveniences can add a ton of exercise to your day--taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking at the back of the parking lot instead of circling around to find a closer spot, walking when going between any two points that are acceptable walking distance (I usually think if it's less than a mile I should probably be walking it; it may be different depending on your circumstances) etc. If you make these things habitual they add up, and while they don't do much if you only do them once or twice every few months their cumulative effect when done as a natural routine is significant.
If you're really worried about getting in awesome shape but don't like to work out, consider taking up an active hobby. My first suggestion would be a martial art. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo are both very physically active, burning as much as 900 calories an hour (compared to 300 for jogging and 600 for rowing). They're also great forms of self-defense, great ways to meet new people and make new friends, and they don't require you be a 20 year old athlete to make the moves work. If you prefer something like racquetball, that's fine as long. Just get a hobby that will help keep you in shape that you will actually enjoy doing.
To me, this is an example of people being ridiculous.
You're spot on about the free software versus open source debate bit. Obviously we can tell where you stand on the issue.
The big problem here is bias. "Free software" people are too frequently not content with being allowed to do their own thing. They want to criticize and insist everyone else do their thing too because their way is better or somehow morally right. You're doing that here claiming it's a "real shame that so many distributions have non-free software in their repositories." How is that a shame? Because it's not what you want? It sounds like a mild form of discrimination to me. Be content with the list of distributions you kindly linked to that are 'pure.'
What really inspired me to reply though was your 'there is no market' bit. I'm not sure if you were just aiming for a catchy sound byte or if you just have a fundamental lack of understand of how software, and in particular open source, works. Sure there's no "market" per se, but a wide userbase allows open source projects to attract more and better developers, find and patch bugs more quickly, and gives them influence to potentially change things that desperately need to be changed in the entrenched system (e.g., attempting to move away from the antiquated but universal System-V init). I'm sure there are other advantages I'm forgetting now too. The point being there are very valid reasons for trying to obtain "marketshare" for free software, it's not just because they're trying to win some stupid high school popularity contest.
I appreciate the free software philosophy. I also appreciate how religion helps some people feel good about themselves and gives them some sort of guidance. I just wish both parties would stop trying to impose their views on others.
I actually just recently found kneeling chairs online after years of looking for them. I desperately want one.
I used to volunteer in the physical therapy department of a hospital and we had kneeling chairs all over the department. I remember really loving those chairs. They were very comfortable and the nice thing was that you could sit in a variety of comfortable ways (e.g., 'proper' kneeling, with one foot on the knee pad, etc). When you sit in the proper kneeling fashion it actually forces your body to sit upright with good posture.
Even though I'm convinced these are the best chairs available I want to offer a few caveats so you're fully informed. First of all, I don't think I ever worked more than four hours in the physical therapy department at one time. Even then I would often have to get up and walk somewhere else, so I don't know if there are any issues with sitting in one of those chairs for 8 hours solid. Secondly, I could see how it might theoretically make your lower back sore till you get used to it, as it probably requires the use of stabilizer muscles people using modern chairs seldom use in your lower back to maintain posture in the absence of a back rest. I personally never had a problem with that, but I was also 16 at the time. I don't know if it would be a factor or not but it could potentially be. That said when your stabilizer muscles developed it should cease to be an issue.
Kinda makes you wonder how different things might be or how much farther things might've come had a better architecture become the de facto standard of commodity hardware.
I've heard it said that most of the processing of x86 architectures goes to breaking down complex instructions to two or three smaller instructions. That's a lot of overhead over time. Even if programmers broke down the instructions themselves so that they were only using basically a RISC-subset of the x86 instructions, there's all that hardware that still has to be there for legacy and to preserve compatibility with the standard.
But I'm not a chip engineer, so my understanding may be fundamentally flawed somehow.
If RedHat is accepting they're not going to aim to be kings of desktop Linux, they should work on integrating their server product with Ubuntu desktop workstations. That could be a killer feature for them, cause then they don't *have* to worry about the desktop. I think collaboration between the two companies in this respect could actually be really beneficial for both.
This is actually exactly what I was going to suggest. People running Linux are often either programmers themselves or interested in free/open source software. People running Mac OS and Windows, however, are obviously willing to trade money for the convenience of a point-and-click installer.
There's another option depending on how well you've defined a core/UI split--open-source the core engine, but charge for the GUI (or possibly for a web interface).
I got into a conversation about alternative energies over the holidays with a friend of mine who has her PhD in something Agricultural Science related from Purdue, and when the conversation went to ethanol she informed me that apparently there's a much better alternative in butanol. According to the first link I've provided, Butanol is both a "cleaner" fuel source than ethanol and has a higher energy content (110,000 Btu per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol, for reference gasoline is 115,000 Btu per gallon). It requires little to no modification of existing engines and can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines. Historically it's been considered less viable than ethanol because of relatively higher production cost.
However a researcher from the midwest (Ohio I think) has patented a process by which it can be produced more cheaply than ethanol *without having to change existing gasoline infrastructure.*
From what my friend told me, the only thing preventing this right now is a lack of funding and public awareness. So please read it for yourself and spread the word.
This is very close to a no-win situation.
You try to prevent killing people by providing tasers as an alternative to guns. In my opinion, that's perfectly valid and how it should be.
Then cops overuse and abuse their power since the taser won't actually kill their target. I think we're all in agreement that sucks.
So which is worse? Only offering cops the option of lethal force which they'll be more hesitant to use but will cause near-certain death when it is used or offering cops an option that they'll abuse and will harm a lot more people but (theoretically) kill or maim none?
Obviously the ideal situation is that cops get more and better training and take using the taser more seriously. That said you're never going to prevent 100% of abuse of a situation like that, and it's going to get significantly worse as long as cops are underpaid and tend to attract the type of people who shouldn't be cops in the first place (policemen, firemen, and military are the three most likely professions for an abusive husband/boyfriend).
In an ideal situation police officers and teachers should be some of the highest paying professions so that they attract the best candidates, instead of being some of the lowest paying professions. But then again if the world was ideal what would people on Slashdot have to complain about?
While I doubt it will happen, things like this should be funded by the government as it provides a huge benefit to society. It allows people to increase their own education and allows others to build off the existing pool of knowledge.
Education, research, and making academic information available to everyone should be the most important interest of the government, not near the last.
Slashdot Mirror
Doh! That's what I get for just searching for the word and not for * replacements.
I still take issue with the list if that is #34.
Nope. The list seems to miss Fucking, Austria.
I'll give credit to Google for at least responding directly to their detractors and explaining their position in what seems like an honest and open way (you'd think if they were trying to sell us on swampland that they wouldn't use the word "compromise"). In spite of everyone's criticisms I still think Google adheres to the "don't be evil" mantra as well as they possibly can.
That said they should've stuck to their guns. Their new Net Neutrality position sucks.
I've wanted this for as long as I've had dual-monitors. I wound up settling for an nVidia TwinView setup, but if I could find a way for each of these to be their own separate workspace that would really be terrific. I'm surprised this is so hard to set up--it seems like it shouldn't be that difficult with X.
I know it seems a little far-fetched, but the globalization possible due to technology has caused a lot of conflict and strife in terms of politics, business practices, etc. The open source movement, which became prominent mostly through projects like Apache, Firefox, and especially Linux, is one of the best examples we have so far for the potential good of globalization--where people are coming together across the world irrespective of race, religion, or nationality and working toward a common goal for the greater good of the entire world (or at least the part of the world who benefits from their software). It's a model for the potential of global peace and cooperation.
Not saying Linus is by any means a shoe-in for it, but I don't think it's an absurd idea.
In terms of government it is considerably harder to make bring these things into existence and to remove them once they're already there. Changing it after it already exists is trivial. And that's what's important and significant about this: it exists. The general population has facilitated access to something that was obscure and hidden behind a wall of government before. This may not seem like much but I think the successful creation of this type of transparency throughout the government, and if possible embedding it systemically into government processes, that we will see a great improvement in terms of freedom, success, and efficiency of our government.
It's similar to the way open source applications always get bugs patched faster than commercial implementations--crowdsourcing is a good way to catch errors. That will undoubtedly apply to government as well, especially when many politicians make their living relying on their practices being obscured from the public.
Apples and oranges. E-mail is an application that only makes sense if there's a network connection. Editing my home movies, not so much.
I don't know the tech details of ChromeOS yet, but I get the impression it's mostly if not entirely net-based. I think that's going to leave Microsoft with a fairly comfortable marketshare even if it takes off because, to some extent, many people want *their* files and *their* processing to be solely under *their* control. There's something to be said for having your own house with your own yard and fence versus living in an apartment building with millions of other people. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Sure, *quality* journalism probably isn't cheap, but if Rupert's paying much for Fox News-caliber journalism, he's getting ripped off.
IBM deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for this!!! This problem has persistently plagued me for ages! I'm glad someone finally came up with a solution to this. My only recourse up to this point has been to avoid SSN fields on any web form. If my boss wants something that requires a unique personal identifier I tell him it can't be done--not unless he wants to hire a team of interns to parse whatever voodoo people put into that SSN field!
Thank you so much for this new knowledge IBM! Now if we can do something about phone number fields I'll be in web developer heaven!
Is there any way we can get this post modded "+10, The Freaking Truth"?
Complaints about lack of Photoshop and a 64-bit version aside (it's interesting how much Slashdot resembles a sewing circle of old ladies in the complaints department), this is actually pretty significant news. Especially if this is the beginning of a new Way Things are Done for the Flash developers. With most major video sites using Flash-based players and the other wealth of Flash content on other websites, Flash support is pretty essential for desktop users. This is a major stepping stone. Hopefully Adobe will see enough rewards from doing this that will encourage them to embrace the Linux platform even more.
I came to the conclusion within the last year that privacy is a product of a bygone era. The fact is technology has made it too easy to erode privacy, corporations have made it too profitable, and governments have made it too desired. I read an article that within five years we'll be able to carry enough storage on our person to record every waking second of our lives for a year. It's only a matter of time before people no longer have to blog, they'll just have to live and technology will allow us to record it all as it happens.
Privacy as a concept will not exist for our children's children, if not for our children directly. They'll know the word and the meaning but they won't understand at a deeper level what it is like to go outside and not have to wonder whether or not they're being watched.
The most concerning part of this for myself is and has always been the potential for abuse this has by governments and law enforcement. However now that I've accepted there's no avoiding our future as a surveillance society I've realized the solution. We must make sure that the surviellance and lack of privacy is extended and in fact *led* by government and law enforcement. If governments and law enforcement would be willing to sacrifice their own privacy first it would help (albeit mildly) make the sacrifice of privacy by citizens a little easier to swallow. Also it introduces accountability to the people which is essential. Hopefully the experience of their own loss of privacy will temper their judgment with how to use their ability to invade the privacy of others.
I only hope that within the next ten years we see a strong movement toward transparency and accountability in public officials and public servants. It's the only way to avoid 1984.
You know even in spite of all the problems with Linux I think a combination of factors may push it to finally become a mainstream Desktop OS. I'm reluctant to make predictions because people have been saying it'll be the year for desktop linux since I started using Linux a little after 2000.
That said Vista's obviously tanked worse than anyone could've guessed. Even the non-computer savvy are reverting to an OS that Microsoft is no longer developing and is already trying to cut support for entirely.
I know from my friends that's pushed a lot of people towards Mac OS, and it would seem that would be the natural way for things to go and it could be that Macs finally take over as at least an equal share desktop OS, if not become the dominant desktop. But then now Apple's having stock problems and a ton of concerns over Jobs' health and whether or not Apple can continue successfully should Steve Jobs have to retire.
Businesses are going to take the potential for Apple to suddenly go drastically downhill way more seriously than average consumers, which may push businesses toward Linux. Business workstations obviously are a major if not the biggest factor in desktop adoption for an OS.
This is obviously really hypothetical, but it seems like this combination of factors along with the increasing prominence of Linux (especially with the marketing work of Ubuntu/Canonical) are making this a great opening for Linux to move into an area where it has a signficiant enough marketshare that application developers such as Adobe will have to start supporting it as well as they support Windows/Mac. I'm not gonna say it outright because it'll take more than a year I think for this to become fully clear, and it could easily be taken away by Apple if they make the right moves, or if they clear up any uncertainties and concerns businesses might have about their future, but this is the first time Linux has an opening to take a huge chunk of desktop market share because it has non-technical reasons for being a superior alternative.
If you want it make time for it. As someone who spends a significant portion of my week trying to stay in shape, it's become a huge pet peeve of mine for people to complain about being out of shape or overweight and never do anything about it. The fact is that people will make time for what's important to them. If it's not important enough for you to take a half hour out of World of Warcraft, then just accept that it's not really that important to you and quit complaining about it. That's all for my soap box.
I think everyone's touched pretty well on the fact that just doing away with conveniences can add a ton of exercise to your day--taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking at the back of the parking lot instead of circling around to find a closer spot, walking when going between any two points that are acceptable walking distance (I usually think if it's less than a mile I should probably be walking it; it may be different depending on your circumstances) etc. If you make these things habitual they add up, and while they don't do much if you only do them once or twice every few months their cumulative effect when done as a natural routine is significant.
If you're really worried about getting in awesome shape but don't like to work out, consider taking up an active hobby. My first suggestion would be a martial art. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo are both very physically active, burning as much as 900 calories an hour (compared to 300 for jogging and 600 for rowing). They're also great forms of self-defense, great ways to meet new people and make new friends, and they don't require you be a 20 year old athlete to make the moves work. If you prefer something like racquetball, that's fine as long. Just get a hobby that will help keep you in shape that you will actually enjoy doing.
To me, this is an example of people being ridiculous.
You're spot on about the free software versus open source debate bit. Obviously we can tell where you stand on the issue.
The big problem here is bias. "Free software" people are too frequently not content with being allowed to do their own thing. They want to criticize and insist everyone else do their thing too because their way is better or somehow morally right. You're doing that here claiming it's a "real shame that so many distributions have non-free software in their repositories." How is that a shame? Because it's not what you want? It sounds like a mild form of discrimination to me. Be content with the list of distributions you kindly linked to that are 'pure.'
What really inspired me to reply though was your 'there is no market' bit. I'm not sure if you were just aiming for a catchy sound byte or if you just have a fundamental lack of understand of how software, and in particular open source, works. Sure there's no "market" per se, but a wide userbase allows open source projects to attract more and better developers, find and patch bugs more quickly, and gives them influence to potentially change things that desperately need to be changed in the entrenched system (e.g., attempting to move away from the antiquated but universal System-V init). I'm sure there are other advantages I'm forgetting now too. The point being there are very valid reasons for trying to obtain "marketshare" for free software, it's not just because they're trying to win some stupid high school popularity contest.
I appreciate the free software philosophy. I also appreciate how religion helps some people feel good about themselves and gives them some sort of guidance. I just wish both parties would stop trying to impose their views on others.
I actually just recently found kneeling chairs online after years of looking for them. I desperately want one.
I used to volunteer in the physical therapy department of a hospital and we had kneeling chairs all over the department. I remember really loving those chairs. They were very comfortable and the nice thing was that you could sit in a variety of comfortable ways (e.g., 'proper' kneeling, with one foot on the knee pad, etc). When you sit in the proper kneeling fashion it actually forces your body to sit upright with good posture.
Even though I'm convinced these are the best chairs available I want to offer a few caveats so you're fully informed. First of all, I don't think I ever worked more than four hours in the physical therapy department at one time. Even then I would often have to get up and walk somewhere else, so I don't know if there are any issues with sitting in one of those chairs for 8 hours solid. Secondly, I could see how it might theoretically make your lower back sore till you get used to it, as it probably requires the use of stabilizer muscles people using modern chairs seldom use in your lower back to maintain posture in the absence of a back rest. I personally never had a problem with that, but I was also 16 at the time. I don't know if it would be a factor or not but it could potentially be. That said when your stabilizer muscles developed it should cease to be an issue.
Kinda makes you wonder how different things might be or how much farther things might've come had a better architecture become the de facto standard of commodity hardware. I've heard it said that most of the processing of x86 architectures goes to breaking down complex instructions to two or three smaller instructions. That's a lot of overhead over time. Even if programmers broke down the instructions themselves so that they were only using basically a RISC-subset of the x86 instructions, there's all that hardware that still has to be there for legacy and to preserve compatibility with the standard. But I'm not a chip engineer, so my understanding may be fundamentally flawed somehow.
If RedHat is accepting they're not going to aim to be kings of desktop Linux, they should work on integrating their server product with Ubuntu desktop workstations. That could be a killer feature for them, cause then they don't *have* to worry about the desktop. I think collaboration between the two companies in this respect could actually be really beneficial for both.
This is actually exactly what I was going to suggest. People running Linux are often either programmers themselves or interested in free/open source software. People running Mac OS and Windows, however, are obviously willing to trade money for the convenience of a point-and-click installer.
There's another option depending on how well you've defined a core/UI split--open-source the core engine, but charge for the GUI (or possibly for a web interface).
I got into a conversation about alternative energies over the holidays with a friend of mine who has her PhD in something Agricultural Science related from Purdue, and when the conversation went to ethanol she informed me that apparently there's a much better alternative in butanol. According to the first link I've provided, Butanol is both a "cleaner" fuel source than ethanol and has a higher energy content (110,000 Btu per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol, for reference gasoline is 115,000 Btu per gallon). It requires little to no modification of existing engines and can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines. Historically it's been considered less viable than ethanol because of relatively higher production cost.
About Butanol Energy
However a researcher from the midwest (Ohio I think) has patented a process by which it can be produced more cheaply than ethanol *without having to change existing gasoline infrastructure.*
Here's the researcher's company.
More Butanol Information
From what my friend told me, the only thing preventing this right now is a lack of funding and public awareness. So please read it for yourself and spread the word.
This is very close to a no-win situation. You try to prevent killing people by providing tasers as an alternative to guns. In my opinion, that's perfectly valid and how it should be. Then cops overuse and abuse their power since the taser won't actually kill their target. I think we're all in agreement that sucks. So which is worse? Only offering cops the option of lethal force which they'll be more hesitant to use but will cause near-certain death when it is used or offering cops an option that they'll abuse and will harm a lot more people but (theoretically) kill or maim none? Obviously the ideal situation is that cops get more and better training and take using the taser more seriously. That said you're never going to prevent 100% of abuse of a situation like that, and it's going to get significantly worse as long as cops are underpaid and tend to attract the type of people who shouldn't be cops in the first place (policemen, firemen, and military are the three most likely professions for an abusive husband/boyfriend). In an ideal situation police officers and teachers should be some of the highest paying professions so that they attract the best candidates, instead of being some of the lowest paying professions. But then again if the world was ideal what would people on Slashdot have to complain about?
I didn't know Apple had a sex-toy product line.
While I doubt it will happen, things like this should be funded by the government as it provides a huge benefit to society. It allows people to increase their own education and allows others to build off the existing pool of knowledge. Education, research, and making academic information available to everyone should be the most important interest of the government, not near the last.