Craigslist requires that you have a ReverseDNS on the connecting IP address that matches the domain in the FROM HEADER, not the HELO/EHLO. That's insane. Only large corporations can do that in the first place.
Wowee zowee... I never realized that my half-dozen computers and my big, lazy butt qualified as a large corporation. But since I've had proper reverse DNS on my mail server for that last 5 years, that's obviously the only explanation.
And what DynDNS is doing is simply preventing all people from using their service from knowing whether email is being delivered properly. If I typo an email address, I damn well better be getting an NDR from the recipient domain, because simply having it go into an email black hole and never knowing whether it got there is not an acceptable alternative.
Which is why you run a real secondary MX that can either do recipient callout or use valid recipient lists in order to reject during SMTP. DynDNS is a cheap hack for geek vanity domains - you're getting exactly what you pay for.
For those that haven't RTFDocument, it basically says two things:
1) Sony BMG Canada will not accept any binding injuction based on legal proceedings from a different country with a different set of laws, but...
2) Practically speaking, the actions of Sony BMG Canada will be the same as those of Sony BMG US (for technical/logistical reasons). That is, Sony BMG Canada will unofficially follow the terms of the injunction.
What more do you expect? I'm no fan of lawyers, but certainly no company is going let a precedent be set that their operations in one country will be bound by the legal system of a different country. The document is just saying to Canadian consumers "Look, we can't legally submit to this injunction, but we'll be playing by its rules anyway."
The whole Sony rootkit affair reeks, but this just looks like standard legal procedure - CYA of a fairly inoffensive variety.
There have been experimental verifications of General Relativity for quite some time now. IIRC, Einstein himself noted how his theory accounted for a slight deviation in Mercury's orbit that Newtonian mechanics could not. And, if you don't consider astronomy quite "experimental" enough, there have been experiments with clocks and other such things. The first Google hit got me this page, which looks like an understandable enough summary.
It's a waste of time not only for the obvious reason that kids would see right through this sort of crap as yet another wholly un-fun attempt at wrapping adult prohibitions in a cartoon package, but also for a less obvious reason. Teachers would never use it. I teach older kids myself, but I know quite a few elementary teachers and they're busy, busy people. These copyright goons seem to think that teachers have gaping holes in their classroom schedules that they're dying to fill. Hello? Accountability? High-stakes testing? NCLB? Yes, I know this particular example is Canadian, not US, but the idea is the same. If the industry wants teachers to shill for them, at the very least they need to package their propaganda in a way that won't appear to be a waste of time to teachers, parents, and administrators. Hook it up to reading, math, or some other core subject or else a teacher won't even look at it. I suppose I should shut up now before I give them ideas...
? Been a while since I've used Slack, but it's something like that. It's not like the package info just disappears into thin air or something. If the pipe offends your aesthetic sensibilities, just make a script or an alias for it.
Not that I particularly care, but since you're being such an arse about it...
According to the OED, "Free" as in freedom dates back to around 900 AD and was first used to describe persons living in a household by bonds of kinship rather than slavery. By about 1300 AD, it was specifically applied to ideas of personal liberties. "Free" as in free-of-charge dates to just before 1500 AD.
I may be missing something here but what does it matter what he said? Bittorrent is what it is independently of his expressed beliefs. Is he going to be prosecuted for what he did or what he thought?
Yes, he could be - that's precisely the gist of the MGM v. Grokster ruling. The Court focussed not on technology or its capabilities, but on the intent of the company, as demonstrated by its advertisements and communications. So with that precedent set, the simplest way for someone to shut down BT would be to demonstrate, via pages like the one linked above, that he developed BT with the intent to further piracy.
Doesn't the/savecred flag keep the password as a hash or something similar? It's been a while since I've used it (and, as others have pointed out, no "normal user" would ever discover it), but I thought it used the same credential caching scheme that Windows uses for file-sharing and similar activities.
If you actually follow school policy rather than just make brash generalizations, you might notice that many large, influential districts have taken significant steps in the last couple of years to improve student nutrition in general and cut out the vending machines in particular.
I teach in one of the largest public school districts in the States, and our district has followed the trend as well. There are still vending machines, but now they're filled with fat-free muffins, low-sodium low-cholesterol chips, pop-tarts, and similar fare. Not exactly broccoli, but it's a giant step away from years past where students ate through crates of Flaming Hot Cheetos and other utter crap every week. No more soda either - Gatorade is as close as it gets, and there's one machine that has a good selection of genuine 100% juice, which would have been unheard of before. Coincidentally, it also means that students buy less - much less - from the machines than they used to. And so we make less money to pay for expenses.
The difference in student energy levels is noticeable. And that leads to better student achievement which, contrary to whatever tinfoil hat theories you espouse, is what the vast majority of teachers and administrators actually care about.
I'll be interested to see how this plays out over the next few months. On one hand, it does seem like quite a rip-off. But on the other hand, I understand that business is business and that's no execs are going to be devoting serious man-hours to maintaining a free online service when people have already paid their money.
$15 feels a little steep to me, but I would have gladly paid $5 or $10 per month for Bliz to maintain BNet for Diablo 2, rather than let the prepubescent dupers and spammers turn it into the cesspool it's become. When you're talking about playing a game for months or years rather than buying something new for ~$50 every month or so, that monthly cost doesn't seem quite so bad.
Still, as you said, they had better do a damn good job of it now - money is certainly no longer an excuse.
Seriously, there is no 'incentive to upgrade'. How many people replace one version of Windows by another?
Corporations and other volume buyers certainly do. Maybe not the moment the new version comes out, but eventually many will want all their desktops to run the same version OS - even small differences in the system's behavior and management tools can add up to a lot of extra complexity when you're managing hundreds or thousands of machines. So after they get a few dozen new machines in the door (likely to be loaded with Longhorn), the pressure to upgrade the rest will start to build.
Flash forward 10-12 years, and imagine what this could do for other organs. Regrow a finger or a hand for amputees maybe? Suppose we get to work on other organs, such as the heart? Old guy in his 60's can just have new organs regrown to extend his healthy life expectancy to 150 years?
All of those sound like wonderful, noble goals for medicine, but even with my limited knowledge I can see that this particular achievement doesn't lead there directly. The nice thing about a bone that made this achievement possible is that (to a large extent) shape=function. Thus, the doctors could grow some bone matter into a mold and stick the resulting shape into place. But that's a big difference from doing something like "programming" the bone cells to become a jawbone, which is the kind of thing that would need to happen for regrowing arbitrary organs.
Not denying the utter coolness of this procedure at all... I just don't think it's quite as far-reaching as you make it out to be.
Joking aside, anyone have any practical uses for such a gadget?
I'd love it. I'm a teacher, and I keep my grades in an online system that allows students and parents to check them at their leisure. At the moment, I either have to keep the initial grades on paper and then enter them later, or carry my crappy school-provided laptop around my classroom when I check work.
In this situation, the difference in size between a Palm and a laptop is significant. Cost, too - if I lost a Palm due to theft/stupidity, I'd be pissed. Super pissed, in fact. But I'd live. Losing a ~$1500 laptop, however, would require a whole lot of explaining to the wife.
I'm not really sure what the point of this watermarking is. It's really not copy protection - they would need a proper activation system to enforce that. And, even apart from the huge political backlash that would entail, I can't imagine that TG would devote the technical and clerical resources required to make an activation system work. Especially since so many Linux users change distros and hardware more often than their socks. They can't be crazy enough to try activation.
So what's the point, then? Copies will still make their way through P2P. I guess they could go after people that share the file (if they're dumb enough not to wipe the watermark), but there's no way they'd do more than cancel that person's subscription. Again, apart from political issues, any legal proceedings would be ridiculously expensive for the damages involved. Are they saving dev time on support? No, not really - you have to have a subscription to access the message boards. There's IRC, I guess, but if a dev's sitting there already, that's not much of a loss.
I feel like we're missing something here. The guys at TG are clearly not dumb. They can't believe this will help them sell more copies. There's got to be more to it somewhere...
So how about the leeches among us start supporting the rare breed of company that shows any interest in Linux on the desktop?
No joke - somebody mod this fellow up. TG is, by all evidence I've seen, a totally community oriented gig. They let you vote on future developments, send status updates containing at least a modicum of technical detail, provide packages in all sorts of formats, and have their devs man their message boards with reasonable regularity. What the hell more could you ask of a company?
If you rip off TG, you're ripping off the good guys. Don't even try to tell yourself otherwise.
I remember when Transgaming was going to open source everything they wrote, if only they got enough subscribers. Well that pipe dream fell through.
Um... AFAIK, everything is in CVS apart from the copy protection code, which they have contracts not to release. What more can you ask for? If you want to play games with copy protection (that being basically all of them), what other choice do you see for them?
Re:Whats next for the maker of Doom, Quake and Wol
on
Life After Doom
·
· Score: 1
If you RTFA, you might notice Hollinshead stating that a Doom 3 demo is on the way.
...it seems that few people are actually following any links before posting corporate conspiracy theories.
Now, I will admit that there's something slightly unsettling about a government giving official coverage to particular businesses. Though, as pointed out above, it may be better than taxes.
But in any event, these ads are specifically for their GIS (Geographic Information Systems) portal. That's relatively specialized stuff - people visiting it (property owners and developers) have a pretty high probability of needing some kind of service the businesses advertise there. If they don't see the ad there, they'll go to the Yellow Pages - so who do you want the money to go to, the local gov or the telecoms?
While this still strikes me as a little odd, it's not like Aunt Tilly is going to be checking a web site for the garbage pickup schedule and be confronted with flashing ambulance chaser ads or something.
I suppose the router manufacturers will take this step, which would certainly generate more tech support calls and higher engineering costs, out of the goodness of their hearts?
The manufacturers are in a beautiful position on the spam/virus issue - they just route the packets, virii are Microsoft's problem. Why rock the boat?
While I have some sympathy for your opinion, it is outweighed by one thing - put bluntly, GNOME's got balls. And I respect that a lot. Ever since 2.x began, they have taken their design goals and refused to let them be compromised by the hordes of bickering Slashdotters that can't live without their favorite features. Forcing people into spatial Nautilus is just another aspect of that - they push you into it because it's part of the project's goals. They have a vision of how the desktop should work and they refuse to dilute it by making everything an option. Like many others, I hated spatial at first and then grew to appreciate it. Their decision was a good one. If you truly dislike something, you have the source code - most behaviors are easily modified there if you're as hardcore as you proclaim to be.
And if you don't like GNOME's design goals, then fine - use something else. KDE accomodates every preference in the universe - to the extent that you need a search function in the control panel. Or use Openbox - it's lean and has lots of neat gadgets. But don't waste your breath complaining about GNOME. Your comments won't come as any surprise to them.
Is it time for the Open Source community to consider switching to another license model.?? Or changing the GPL....??
That sounds pretty foolish to me. You're scared of some oddball interpretation of one clase? Or that the GPL has never been tested in a court? That should make you more confident, not less. OSS has been fairly high profile for what, close to 10 years now? For all of its enemies, not one has tried to directly challenge the GPL in court. After all this time, that should tell you something - they know the GPL is unassailable, and figure that uncertainty is the best position for FUD-launching that they've got. So they'll stay out of direct challenges in order to leave the GPL a supposed "gray area".
If anything, the GPL's history tells us that it's doing very well. If OSS needs any "defensive measures", it's in keeping the kinds of paper trails that help defend against frivolous patent suits like the ones in the memo. Patent litigation and license weaknesses are two different avenues of attack, and it's the former that is the bigger threat now.
Somebody mod this AC up, please. He is stating a simple fact, which most coders will admit - most coders can't design UI. Is there proof of this? Not exactly, I guess. But I know in my experience that I'm so into the architecture of most technology I use that I have very little idea anymore of what "hard" and "easy" are for a regular user. When a friend/coworker comes to me with a problem, I'm frequently surprised at the problem's existence at all. The solution to me seems intuitive. Yet at the same time, I'll see the same user perform other tasks that seem clunky to me without any issue. I'm happy to admit - I should not be designing a UI. I don't have the training, and the more I learn about everything else, the further I get from "normalcy".
The NewsForge article flatly contradicts my opinion, yet offers no evidence whatsoever. It's nothing but cheerleading. "They say we need experts to design usable interfaces! I say we just need to try harder!! Rah! Rah! Rah!" Go on, write some HowTo's, file some more bug reports. But the whole point of the AC's comment (and mine) is that you have no point of reference for your solutions. The FOSS model is powerful, but it needs to face up to its limitations as well as celebrate its strengths.
We've been hearing about bad K-12 science education, too few American science and engineering students, and the real-soon-now employment nirvana in technical fields for, like, the last 20 years.
Longer than that, actually. The beginning of all of this was the launching of Sputnik in 1957. It was the prospect of losing the Space Race against the USSR prompted the infamous "New Math" of the early 60's.
Slashdot Mirror
Craigslist requires that you have a ReverseDNS on the connecting IP address that matches the domain in the FROM HEADER, not the HELO/EHLO. That's insane. Only large corporations can do that in the first place.
Wowee zowee... I never realized that my half-dozen computers and my big, lazy butt qualified as a large corporation. But since I've had proper reverse DNS on my mail server for that last 5 years, that's obviously the only explanation.
I'm sure when signing up to be a camp counselor, you are fully debriefed in all the legal hoopla that may stem from any possible circumstances.
These days, I'd be surprised if they didn't.
And what DynDNS is doing is simply preventing all people from using their service from knowing whether email is being delivered properly. If I typo an email address, I damn well better be getting an NDR from the recipient domain, because simply having it go into an email black hole and never knowing whether it got there is not an acceptable alternative.
Which is why you run a real secondary MX that can either do recipient callout or use valid recipient lists in order to reject during SMTP. DynDNS is a cheap hack for geek vanity domains - you're getting exactly what you pay for.
For those that haven't RTFDocument, it basically says two things:
1) Sony BMG Canada will not accept any binding injuction based on legal proceedings from a different country with a different set of laws, but...
2) Practically speaking, the actions of Sony BMG Canada will be the same as those of Sony BMG US (for technical/logistical reasons). That is, Sony BMG Canada will unofficially follow the terms of the injunction.
What more do you expect? I'm no fan of lawyers, but certainly no company is going let a precedent be set that their operations in one country will be bound by the legal system of a different country. The document is just saying to Canadian consumers "Look, we can't legally submit to this injunction, but we'll be playing by its rules anyway."
The whole Sony rootkit affair reeks, but this just looks like standard legal procedure - CYA of a fairly inoffensive variety.
There have been experimental verifications of General Relativity for quite some time now. IIRC, Einstein himself noted how his theory accounted for a slight deviation in Mercury's orbit that Newtonian mechanics could not. And, if you don't consider astronomy quite "experimental" enough, there have been experiments with clocks and other such things. The first Google hit got me this page, which looks like an understandable enough summary.
It's a waste of time not only for the obvious reason that kids would see right through this sort of crap as yet another wholly un-fun attempt at wrapping adult prohibitions in a cartoon package, but also for a less obvious reason. Teachers would never use it. I teach older kids myself, but I know quite a few elementary teachers and they're busy, busy people. These copyright goons seem to think that teachers have gaping holes in their classroom schedules that they're dying to fill. Hello? Accountability? High-stakes testing? NCLB? Yes, I know this particular example is Canadian, not US, but the idea is the same. If the industry wants teachers to shill for them, at the very least they need to package their propaganda in a way that won't appear to be a waste of time to teachers, parents, and administrators. Hook it up to reading, math, or some other core subject or else a teacher won't even look at it. I suppose I should shut up now before I give them ideas...
Something like...
cat /var/log/packages | grep foo
? Been a while since I've used Slack, but it's something like that. It's not like the package info just disappears into thin air or something. If the pipe offends your aesthetic sensibilities, just make a script or an alias for it.
Not that I particularly care, but since you're being such an arse about it...
According to the OED, "Free" as in freedom dates back to around 900 AD and was first used to describe persons living in a household by bonds of kinship rather than slavery. By about 1300 AD, it was specifically applied to ideas of personal liberties. "Free" as in free-of-charge dates to just before 1500 AD.
Check the dictionary before you rant, please.
I may be missing something here but what does it matter what he said? Bittorrent is what it is independently of his expressed beliefs. Is he going to be prosecuted for what he did or what he thought?
Yes, he could be - that's precisely the gist of the MGM v. Grokster ruling. The Court focussed not on technology or its capabilities, but on the intent of the company, as demonstrated by its advertisements and communications. So with that precedent set, the simplest way for someone to shut down BT would be to demonstrate, via pages like the one linked above, that he developed BT with the intent to further piracy.
Doesn't the /savecred flag keep the password as a hash or something similar? It's been a while since I've used it (and, as others have pointed out, no "normal user" would ever discover it), but I thought it used the same credential caching scheme that Windows uses for file-sharing and similar activities.
If you actually follow school policy rather than just make brash generalizations, you might notice that many large, influential districts have taken significant steps in the last couple of years to improve student nutrition in general and cut out the vending machines in particular.
I teach in one of the largest public school districts in the States, and our district has followed the trend as well. There are still vending machines, but now they're filled with fat-free muffins, low-sodium low-cholesterol chips, pop-tarts, and similar fare. Not exactly broccoli, but it's a giant step away from years past where students ate through crates of Flaming Hot Cheetos and other utter crap every week. No more soda either - Gatorade is as close as it gets, and there's one machine that has a good selection of genuine 100% juice, which would have been unheard of before. Coincidentally, it also means that students buy less - much less - from the machines than they used to. And so we make less money to pay for expenses.
The difference in student energy levels is noticeable. And that leads to better student achievement which, contrary to whatever tinfoil hat theories you espouse, is what the vast majority of teachers and administrators actually care about.
I'll be interested to see how this plays out over the next few months. On one hand, it does seem like quite a rip-off. But on the other hand, I understand that business is business and that's no execs are going to be devoting serious man-hours to maintaining a free online service when people have already paid their money.
$15 feels a little steep to me, but I would have gladly paid $5 or $10 per month for Bliz to maintain BNet for Diablo 2, rather than let the prepubescent dupers and spammers turn it into the cesspool it's become. When you're talking about playing a game for months or years rather than buying something new for ~$50 every month or so, that monthly cost doesn't seem quite so bad.
Still, as you said, they had better do a damn good job of it now - money is certainly no longer an excuse.
Seriously, there is no 'incentive to upgrade'. How many people replace one version of Windows by another?
Corporations and other volume buyers certainly do. Maybe not the moment the new version comes out, but eventually many will want all their desktops to run the same version OS - even small differences in the system's behavior and management tools can add up to a lot of extra complexity when you're managing hundreds or thousands of machines. So after they get a few dozen new machines in the door (likely to be loaded with Longhorn), the pressure to upgrade the rest will start to build.Flash forward 10-12 years, and imagine what this could do for other organs. Regrow a finger or a hand for amputees maybe? Suppose we get to work on other organs, such as the heart? Old guy in his 60's can just have new organs regrown to extend his healthy life expectancy to 150 years?
All of those sound like wonderful, noble goals for medicine, but even with my limited knowledge I can see that this particular achievement doesn't lead there directly. The nice thing about a bone that made this achievement possible is that (to a large extent) shape=function. Thus, the doctors could grow some bone matter into a mold and stick the resulting shape into place. But that's a big difference from doing something like "programming" the bone cells to become a jawbone, which is the kind of thing that would need to happen for regrowing arbitrary organs.
Not denying the utter coolness of this procedure at all... I just don't think it's quite as far-reaching as you make it out to be.
Joking aside, anyone have any practical uses for such a gadget?
I'd love it. I'm a teacher, and I keep my grades in an online system that allows students and parents to check them at their leisure. At the moment, I either have to keep the initial grades on paper and then enter them later, or carry my crappy school-provided laptop around my classroom when I check work.
In this situation, the difference in size between a Palm and a laptop is significant. Cost, too - if I lost a Palm due to theft/stupidity, I'd be pissed. Super pissed, in fact. But I'd live. Losing a ~$1500 laptop, however, would require a whole lot of explaining to the wife.
I'm not really sure what the point of this watermarking is. It's really not copy protection - they would need a proper activation system to enforce that. And, even apart from the huge political backlash that would entail, I can't imagine that TG would devote the technical and clerical resources required to make an activation system work. Especially since so many Linux users change distros and hardware more often than their socks. They can't be crazy enough to try activation.
So what's the point, then? Copies will still make their way through P2P. I guess they could go after people that share the file (if they're dumb enough not to wipe the watermark), but there's no way they'd do more than cancel that person's subscription. Again, apart from political issues, any legal proceedings would be ridiculously expensive for the damages involved. Are they saving dev time on support? No, not really - you have to have a subscription to access the message boards. There's IRC, I guess, but if a dev's sitting there already, that's not much of a loss.
I feel like we're missing something here. The guys at TG are clearly not dumb. They can't believe this will help them sell more copies. There's got to be more to it somewhere...
So how about the leeches among us start supporting the rare breed of company that shows any interest in Linux on the desktop?
No joke - somebody mod this fellow up. TG is, by all evidence I've seen, a totally community oriented gig. They let you vote on future developments, send status updates containing at least a modicum of technical detail, provide packages in all sorts of formats, and have their devs man their message boards with reasonable regularity. What the hell more could you ask of a company?
If you rip off TG, you're ripping off the good guys. Don't even try to tell yourself otherwise.
I remember when Transgaming was going to open source everything they wrote, if only they got enough subscribers. Well that pipe dream fell through.
Um... AFAIK, everything is in CVS apart from the copy protection code, which they have contracts not to release. What more can you ask for? If you want to play games with copy protection (that being basically all of them), what other choice do you see for them?
If you RTFA, you might notice Hollinshead stating that a Doom 3 demo is on the way.
...it seems that few people are actually following any links before posting corporate conspiracy theories.
Now, I will admit that there's something slightly unsettling about a government giving official coverage to particular businesses. Though, as pointed out above, it may be better than taxes.
But in any event, these ads are specifically for their GIS (Geographic Information Systems) portal. That's relatively specialized stuff - people visiting it (property owners and developers) have a pretty high probability of needing some kind of service the businesses advertise there. If they don't see the ad there, they'll go to the Yellow Pages - so who do you want the money to go to, the local gov or the telecoms?
While this still strikes me as a little odd, it's not like Aunt Tilly is going to be checking a web site for the garbage pickup schedule and be confronted with flashing ambulance chaser ads or something.
I suppose the router manufacturers will take this step, which would certainly generate more tech support calls and higher engineering costs, out of the goodness of their hearts?
The manufacturers are in a beautiful position on the spam/virus issue - they just route the packets, virii are Microsoft's problem. Why rock the boat?
While I have some sympathy for your opinion, it is outweighed by one thing - put bluntly, GNOME's got balls. And I respect that a lot. Ever since 2.x began, they have taken their design goals and refused to let them be compromised by the hordes of bickering Slashdotters that can't live without their favorite features. Forcing people into spatial Nautilus is just another aspect of that - they push you into it because it's part of the project's goals. They have a vision of how the desktop should work and they refuse to dilute it by making everything an option. Like many others, I hated spatial at first and then grew to appreciate it. Their decision was a good one. If you truly dislike something, you have the source code - most behaviors are easily modified there if you're as hardcore as you proclaim to be.
And if you don't like GNOME's design goals, then fine - use something else. KDE accomodates every preference in the universe - to the extent that you need a search function in the control panel. Or use Openbox - it's lean and has lots of neat gadgets. But don't waste your breath complaining about GNOME. Your comments won't come as any surprise to them.
Is it time for the Open Source community to consider switching to another license model.?? Or changing the GPL....??
That sounds pretty foolish to me. You're scared of some oddball interpretation of one clase? Or that the GPL has never been tested in a court? That should make you more confident, not less. OSS has been fairly high profile for what, close to 10 years now? For all of its enemies, not one has tried to directly challenge the GPL in court. After all this time, that should tell you something - they know the GPL is unassailable, and figure that uncertainty is the best position for FUD-launching that they've got. So they'll stay out of direct challenges in order to leave the GPL a supposed "gray area".
If anything, the GPL's history tells us that it's doing very well. If OSS needs any "defensive measures", it's in keeping the kinds of paper trails that help defend against frivolous patent suits like the ones in the memo. Patent litigation and license weaknesses are two different avenues of attack, and it's the former that is the bigger threat now.
Somebody mod this AC up, please. He is stating a simple fact, which most coders will admit - most coders can't design UI. Is there proof of this? Not exactly, I guess. But I know in my experience that I'm so into the architecture of most technology I use that I have very little idea anymore of what "hard" and "easy" are for a regular user. When a friend/coworker comes to me with a problem, I'm frequently surprised at the problem's existence at all. The solution to me seems intuitive. Yet at the same time, I'll see the same user perform other tasks that seem clunky to me without any issue. I'm happy to admit - I should not be designing a UI. I don't have the training, and the more I learn about everything else, the further I get from "normalcy".
The NewsForge article flatly contradicts my opinion, yet offers no evidence whatsoever. It's nothing but cheerleading. "They say we need experts to design usable interfaces! I say we just need to try harder!! Rah! Rah! Rah!" Go on, write some HowTo's, file some more bug reports. But the whole point of the AC's comment (and mine) is that you have no point of reference for your solutions. The FOSS model is powerful, but it needs to face up to its limitations as well as celebrate its strengths.
We've been hearing about bad K-12 science education, too few American science and engineering students, and the real-soon-now employment nirvana in technical fields for, like, the last 20 years.
Longer than that, actually. The beginning of all of this was the launching of Sputnik in 1957. It was the prospect of losing the Space Race against the USSR prompted the infamous "New Math" of the early 60's.