I did quite explicitly say that "I'm not saying this is money poorly spent." I don't think spending money on schools and core science research is, in and of itself, bad. It can be, if you're spending it on wackos, or in placing schools in places that are at the end of their aging cycle (where the number of young families moving in drops to near zero), but the general concept is not one I was advocating against.
And when I said uninteresting, I used a very specific type of example. "Hey, cool, light can be split based on wavelength!" is not uninteresting, even though it wasn't commercially valuable at the time. That said, something that takes twenty years (never mind three hundred years) to become commercially viable is, without question, not valuable to this stimulus.
It's far better if you keep the research on a steady, relatively predictable funding. It's better to spread that money over many years than to flood the market with it all at once. Remember, this is the cream of the crop doing the research - you don't want to fund a bunch of lesser students in the field doing subpar research (because that's almost by definition what you'll get: you'll pick up the trailing edge of geniuses who don't get properly funded now, and when you run out, and you will, you'll start dropping into the nimwits who barely managed to get 90% in their PhD program...) (ok, not quite like that, but the point still stands - we don't want to drop from the PhD's doing research into the Master's, or, worse, Bachelor's degrees to find enough lead researchists).
Even if you do find all impeccable scientists to fund, you'll be doing them a boatload of disservice when the funding dries up after the stimulus package is over. A PhD in theoretical physics/chemistry/biology/whatever is not a seasonal career path (like, say, construction). They'll likely end up worse off after the funding dries up, career-wise, unless there is some sort of plan in place to find corporate positions - which might leach away other good scientists that you want to keep funding instead.
It's really far too convoluted to ram through. The repurcussions are way longer term than for those in the construction industry where their entire model is contract-based and seasonal already.
(Yes, other pieces that have not been cut likely have similar ramifications... I'm not defending that.)
Three apps... Hmmm, I wonder if it'd count three tabs in Chrome as three apps or one. "Sorry, you can't open another tab - you're at your three-app limit already."
Science is "pork" on this bill because the purpose of this bill is to stimulate the economy from the bottom up. And/., of all places, should know that science seems to have no place at the bottom of America... Seriously, "science" is such a general term that it doesn't really say what it's for. R&D? That has a future payout, like infrastructure, but only if it succeeds in finding something of value (cure for cancer, AIDS, etc., or proves the toxicity or carcinogenic nature of something, or disproves the toxicity or carcinogenic natures of something commercial, or finds new materials for building things better, etc.) Most of science seems to get results that are, let's face it, uninteresting. "Chemical X does not correlate with condition Y." It's useful knowledge in that it eliminates (or supports the elimination of) something. But that's not going to stimulate anything.
Science is probably also pork if it's moneys targetted to special interest groups - such as a specific Senator's home state college - especially if it's solely to get their vote.
Similarly, without having RTFA, the construction costs for education are much more convoluted than, say, building more roads and bridges. You need to ensure you're putting schools where they're needed, and not just in some CongressCritter's back yard, again, to get their vote. Proving additional road infrastructure as useful where you put it is MUCH simpler than proving optimal (or near-optimal) school placement.
I'm not saying that this is money poorly spent. Merely that I agree with sumdumass' assessment that these probably should be debated on their merits rather than rammed through with the stimulus package.
As a side note, theoretically when massive personal debt gets paid down so it's merely large personal debt, the banks will be in a better position to give out more credit, which is what the economy seems to be running on anyway.
I get that this isn't quite the way it ends up working, but that's the theoretical perspective from where I sit. Income and sales tax cuts happen today, and start putting money back into the economy: either buying more stuff or paying down debt or saving (which often goes back into the market via mutual fund purchases or GICs or bonds or whatever, or if it's in the bank, then the bank has more room for lending, which is also good - sometimes better given the ratio of debt to assets banks are allowed to keep). Infrastructure takes a few months to a year or more to kick-start. The economy could correct itself without a stimulus by then (isn't the average time to recovery from these recessions about 18 months, at least for the recessions since WW2? Since the recession is already a few months in, we have approximately a year to recovery anyway.)
Maybe if there was a "recession-buster" bill already passed before a recession was detected such that it could hit the economy at a run, it'd have more immediate effect and thus do more than tax cuts. That delay between passing and money actually getting to the people seems to be a pretty big negative to infrastructure spending...
I'm not sure how appropriate your nick really is, but I'd say it's not at all appropriate for this post. Here's hoping they keep taking the pork out of omnibus bills and debating them on their own merits.
Anyway, what is the big deal about $50 a year? If your web site has any volume at all, it's costing you thousands to to keep the lights on.
Really? I bought in to DreamHosts's new-year's special: $64.44US for two years, including domain name. I would think that if domains were $50/yr instead of $10/yr, I'd likely not have received such a low price. Even at their best rate (bought ahead of time) of $6/month, a jump in registration price of $40/yr (approx $3/month) would likely be noticeable.
But it's voluntary. Why not just avoid going there or never voicing a want to your ISP?
Because YOU will find your bill increased based on the drunken sportsmorons who WILL probably phone the ISP because they must have "sports" 24/7 injected directly into their veins or they will die of the realization of what sad, pathetic wastes of oxygen they really are.
So, um, why are you beating around the bush? Why not just tell us how you really feel?
The problem with that definition that you're looking at is that it fails to account for the entirety of reality. It's short, succinct, and missing a minor detail that happens to be significant in this case.
When you have a regional monopoly on a product or service, you are, in effect, like the government, in that you've removed the ability to choose from the consumer. In your definition, you mention "right to ownership of... exchange of wealth" - this is a two-way definition. If I, as an individual, have no choice about who to pay to get internet, such as with a monopoly, it's little different from having no choice about who to pay to get car insurance in states/provinces with government-run insurance (e.g., Saskatchewan). When your only choice is buy from a single supplier or simply don't drive, many people don't see that as a choice. Similarly, if you only have one broadband internet provider available, that's not capitalism, that's a monopoly. Your definition misses this distinction. Admittedly, it doesn't apply too often in most people's day-to-day lives, but this is one of those cases.
My wife does digital scrapbooking. She was using a cheapo scrapbooking app, but started to find it too limiting. She started to insist on a purchase of Photoshop, which I resisted. So she got the free trial version, played with it for 30 days and loved it. I asked her to give gimp the same 30 days, and she did. We never did make that Photoshop purchase - she has managed to find gimp tutorials online and even a dead-tree book that has all sorts of hints, tips, and ideas for gimp. Now she does all her scrapbooking in gimp. Maybe I'll be able to sneak a switch over to Gentoo from XP on her box now.:-)
She's no techie, she's artistic. (NOT AUtistic, ARtistic.) Took a bit to get over the learning curve to the point where she was productive, but it wasn't terribly worse than the learning curve for Photoshop.
As opposed to before this where it was no flash and no function? Honestly, I don't see any point in complaining. If you're reading/posting here, you're part of the problem, not the precipitate. Or solution. Or something.
"Three strikes" rules have come to Ireland in a sudden and unexpected way, as the country's largest ISP settles a court case brought by the music industry and agrees to take action on file-swappers. Repeat offenders will be disconnected from the 'Net.
To be a file-swapper you have to upload and/or download files.
Like, say, the ubuntu or gentoo live CD installer images? Or, worse, the DVD versions of same? Or how about fixes from Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever (there are some free things out there - DB2 and Oracle both have free versions which some techies would likely play with at home to learn)? There are lots of very large files out there that could cause spikes in usage (say, oh, the 200MB of source code I downloaded so I could install KDE 4.2). The challenge, then, is for the RIAA to actually only complain when people are actually downloading THEIR stuff. Which takes a lot more work than merely looking for heavy users.
Actually, an anecdote is proof of existance. If I have a black sheep, that is proof that black sheep exist. It's not even evidence of a certain number of black sheep (other than "at least one"), but it's proof incontrovertible of one.
That said, it does matter. If there is only one "Karen" (unlikely in my estimation, but I don't have any further evidence, so we'll ignore the likelihood here), then it's really not worth the effort for a major open-source drive. If "Karen" is representative of 80% of teachers out there (also unlikely, but I digress), then said drive would be worth it just in tax savings alone (cut their budgets by millions of dollars per year and get the same quality of education because the savings would be on software licenses). So, it does matter. A lot.
My digression: take the average knowledge/comfort level with open source you find in the general population. Apply it basically unchanged to the teaching population. Yes, teachers are, in general, more prone to learning (though I've seen my share of extremely lazy teachers). But, like any other human being, they're going to concentrate their spare-time learning on things they enjoy. Obviously, one of those things is teaching itself. Computers in general as a subject likely won't be significantly different from the population at large - there are some computer geeks, and some technophobes among the teaching population. And, among those who enjoy learning about computers, they're more than likely to go with the flow and learn what they think everyone else is using: Windows, MS Office, etc. If they were truly geeks, they'd probably have taken up computer science rather than teaching. Now, granted, this is all pure logic based on some fairly broad assumptions, but I do think it makes sense. I don't see teachers being especially special in this regard - their knowledge level of open source may be a tiny bit higher than average, but I don't think it significant. Thus, given all these assumptions and that my logic holds, I would propose that targetting teachers for open source would be a wise thing: not only in tax savings on their budgets, but in preparing the next generation for a wider software choice than the current generation thinks it has.
What were the chances that v != ma? That one is still difficult to believe, though I know it's true.
The chances are actually quite high that v != ma. Assuming SI units for a minute, the LHS (Left Hand Side) is in m/s, while the RHS is g * m/s^2. The units don't match, which makes it a probability of one that v != ma.
(I'm not sure if you're thinking F=ma or v=at, but I'm pretty sure you're not thinking what you actually wrote...)
Read the rest of your wikipedia link. Perhaps the summary has been changed, but precedent is precedent, whether binding or not. In this case, because it was settled, absolutely NO precedent is set. Had it proceeded through trial, persuasive precedent could have been set, and if appealed, then even binding precedent could be set. By settling, they avoid all of this.
First off, I'm not sure that you can take one blog post as representative of a community's position anymore than you can take a single response on slashdot to represent the community's position. For example, in this blog post, while I see what he's getting at, I think he's missing a bigger sociological issue: for many developers, it's the users that drive their contributions. If no one is using it, they may not contribute (as it may be working well enough for them). It's only when a user comes in and says, "hey, you know what? It'd be awesome if your product does X" that they may realise that, hey, it would be awesome. Maybe not for the blogger you linked to, but not only am I unconvinced that this is representative, but all we need to do is find a couple of developers who think the other way (as in my example) to show that KDE, like most OS projects, really does need users.
As for your "simple usability report" - I'd like to point out that KDE said there that they have UI guidelines that explicitly reject this layout. It's nice that they actually do have written usability requirements on their applications and that they enforce it. Now, we can all disagree as to whether the guidelines are appropriate or not, but it's a sign of a good organisation that they get these things down in writing so that their developers can concentrate on functionality rather than eye-candy. If the guidelines said that the toolbars were allowed next to the menubar, it would be just as good from the developer perspective - rather than debating whether to allow it or not, wasting a bunch of time on their own dev lists, they just know whether to allow it or not, and the problem is solved. Basically, what this means is that rather than having a conversation with individual developers, you need to have the conversation with the over-all KDE UI owners. This actually is good for you, too: if you convince them of its usefulness, you won't need to convince the owners of kmail, kate, konqueror, kontact, knode, ktorrent, etc. Most likely, they'll just make a change to kdelibs, and all of these will get the functionality for free. If you fail to convince them, you know better than to waste your time (or theirs) trying to convince individual devs.
Personally, having submitted many bugs to KDE, especially since I'm running the 4.2 snapshots as if it were production, I'm not finding the issues you have. My biggest issue is really turn-around time on serious bugs... I'm sure if I found the right developer in the project and handed him/her sufficient cash, that'd change. Or if I found the issue myself and submitted a patch, it might change.
I've been using KDE 4 since pretty much the day 4.0 shipped. I'm even running a KDE 4.2 snapshot (4.1.96). Generally speaking, the KDE folks have been pretty up-front about the details: when I installed 4.0, I knew full well that it wasn't intended to replace 3.5 yet. When I installed 4.1, I knew full well that functionality (especially IMPORTANT functionality like kmail) was getting there, but I shouldn't expect any polish. As I've been installing the snapshots, I knew that they were snapshots and should expect to open bug reports.
It's not like the KDE folks were hiding this. Sure, they were overly optimistic, but they didn't hide these things from the users. If your distro hid it from you, that's a different issue - they'd probably hide it from you if they were embedding unstable-as-advertised gnome or anything else. Take that up with your distro.
I expect KDE 4.2 to be a vast improvement, mostly in stability, over 4.1. But I don't expect it to be as stable as 3.5.10. I'm hoping they get there within the next 6-12 months, but I don't expect the 4.2 release to be there.
The difference, though, is that with MS, you're paying for a product to work. With open-source, you're not paying for it, and they (generally) tell you what to expect. If you can live with it, great, open bug reports as you find them. If you can't live with it, then don't use it - use the old version, use another piece of software that fills the same role (gnome as an example in this case), or go proprietary. I don't think it's quite reasonable to compare MS's.0 releases (at full price) to open source.0 releases ("release early, release often"), and thus I have no compunction against slamming MS's release policy. I instead compare it to $work's release policy, since I get paid for proprietary coding, as I think that's a much more fair comparison.
On my home network, which has a publicly visible email server for an entire domain, I have a few things set up. First is to tell postfix to "reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org" - that gets rid of 90% of the inbound right there. I then have a homemade milter set up that rejects anything to an invalid domain (DNS lookup is fast enough for this - all hosts are mentioned in DNS for me - but I can also check users, etc.). And then I have spamassassin set up with kmail to get the last of it. Though, I have to admit, spamassassin sees very very little use - out of ~20,000 inbound connections per day, including some legitimate email, spamassassin finds about 10-15 spams per day. I'll get about 2 or 3 a day that get through all of that, and then I send it back to spamassassin to learn it.
So, the basic idea is: blocklist FIRST. Of course, you disable relaying (except to your own network), but the blocklist is probably looked at first. And what's left can be caught by spamassassin fairly well. Mind you, I have a user base of "1" (since my wife seems to have switched over to gmail), so there's not a lot to learn from.
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
What they're OBVIOUSLY trying to do is find out what bin Laden is viewing on YouTube.
Or maybe the US Federal government is so big with so much diversity in personnel that they can have their webmonkeys play with websites to keep the general public informed as to what is going on (transparency in government, hopefully, though propaganda is just as likely at this point) while their military/intelligence personnel can focus on the war, and their economists can focus on, well, the economy.
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
You think their webmonkeys will contribute positively to these issues?
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
Think of it this way: that's a million bucks they CAN'T spend on the war instead. And these lawyers and support staff probably all live in the US and will likely spurn on the economy in their own area (largely DC, but they might order anal toys on-line from MA or something). If you're having difficulty thinking of it this way, don't worry, so am I.
Personally, I think that a legislative solution to a technical problem is troubling in its own right. There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that would love to be able to issue waivers to themselves to bypass some annoyance (e.g., waste treatment, carbon emissions, etc.), but they can't. Abuse of a small power on day two of your new job is NOT a positive step. Apparently, you need to hire more technically-minded webmonkeys. But, make no mistake: it's a SMALL thing.
To me, it kinda works both ways. On one hand, you don't want to be dependant on YouTube. On the other hand, you don't want the government to be able to replace a video with another and claim that it always was this way. "We never said that... see our video?" When it's self-hosted, it's too easy to change. When it's YouTube-hosted, it's easy for YouTube to prove the change (and they may still have the old version, who knows). This is good for government transparency.
I would agree that there needs to be a public discussion about pros and cons, but thus far it doesn't seem cut and dried that YouTube hosting government videos is entirely a bad thing. Or entirely a good thing, either.
Slashdot Mirror
No effect on me? Really? And where will the money to pay for this come from? India?
I was thinking much worse: cats living with dogs. Signs of the end of times and all that.
Sigh.
I did quite explicitly say that "I'm not saying this is money poorly spent." I don't think spending money on schools and core science research is, in and of itself, bad. It can be, if you're spending it on wackos, or in placing schools in places that are at the end of their aging cycle (where the number of young families moving in drops to near zero), but the general concept is not one I was advocating against.
And when I said uninteresting, I used a very specific type of example. "Hey, cool, light can be split based on wavelength!" is not uninteresting, even though it wasn't commercially valuable at the time. That said, something that takes twenty years (never mind three hundred years) to become commercially viable is, without question, not valuable to this stimulus.
It's far better if you keep the research on a steady, relatively predictable funding. It's better to spread that money over many years than to flood the market with it all at once. Remember, this is the cream of the crop doing the research - you don't want to fund a bunch of lesser students in the field doing subpar research (because that's almost by definition what you'll get: you'll pick up the trailing edge of geniuses who don't get properly funded now, and when you run out, and you will, you'll start dropping into the nimwits who barely managed to get 90% in their PhD program...) (ok, not quite like that, but the point still stands - we don't want to drop from the PhD's doing research into the Master's, or, worse, Bachelor's degrees to find enough lead researchists).
Even if you do find all impeccable scientists to fund, you'll be doing them a boatload of disservice when the funding dries up after the stimulus package is over. A PhD in theoretical physics/chemistry/biology/whatever is not a seasonal career path (like, say, construction). They'll likely end up worse off after the funding dries up, career-wise, unless there is some sort of plan in place to find corporate positions - which might leach away other good scientists that you want to keep funding instead.
It's really far too convoluted to ram through. The repurcussions are way longer term than for those in the construction industry where their entire model is contract-based and seasonal already.
(Yes, other pieces that have not been cut likely have similar ramifications... I'm not defending that.)
Three apps... Hmmm, I wonder if it'd count three tabs in Chrome as three apps or one. "Sorry, you can't open another tab - you're at your three-app limit already."
Science is "pork" on this bill because the purpose of this bill is to stimulate the economy from the bottom up. And /., of all places, should know that science seems to have no place at the bottom of America... Seriously, "science" is such a general term that it doesn't really say what it's for. R&D? That has a future payout, like infrastructure, but only if it succeeds in finding something of value (cure for cancer, AIDS, etc., or proves the toxicity or carcinogenic nature of something, or disproves the toxicity or carcinogenic natures of something commercial, or finds new materials for building things better, etc.) Most of science seems to get results that are, let's face it, uninteresting. "Chemical X does not correlate with condition Y." It's useful knowledge in that it eliminates (or supports the elimination of) something. But that's not going to stimulate anything.
Science is probably also pork if it's moneys targetted to special interest groups - such as a specific Senator's home state college - especially if it's solely to get their vote.
Similarly, without having RTFA, the construction costs for education are much more convoluted than, say, building more roads and bridges. You need to ensure you're putting schools where they're needed, and not just in some CongressCritter's back yard, again, to get their vote. Proving additional road infrastructure as useful where you put it is MUCH simpler than proving optimal (or near-optimal) school placement.
I'm not saying that this is money poorly spent. Merely that I agree with sumdumass' assessment that these probably should be debated on their merits rather than rammed through with the stimulus package.
As a side note, theoretically when massive personal debt gets paid down so it's merely large personal debt, the banks will be in a better position to give out more credit, which is what the economy seems to be running on anyway.
I get that this isn't quite the way it ends up working, but that's the theoretical perspective from where I sit. Income and sales tax cuts happen today, and start putting money back into the economy: either buying more stuff or paying down debt or saving (which often goes back into the market via mutual fund purchases or GICs or bonds or whatever, or if it's in the bank, then the bank has more room for lending, which is also good - sometimes better given the ratio of debt to assets banks are allowed to keep). Infrastructure takes a few months to a year or more to kick-start. The economy could correct itself without a stimulus by then (isn't the average time to recovery from these recessions about 18 months, at least for the recessions since WW2? Since the recession is already a few months in, we have approximately a year to recovery anyway.)
Maybe if there was a "recession-buster" bill already passed before a recession was detected such that it could hit the economy at a run, it'd have more immediate effect and thus do more than tax cuts. That delay between passing and money actually getting to the people seems to be a pretty big negative to infrastructure spending...
I'm not sure how appropriate your nick really is, but I'd say it's not at all appropriate for this post. Here's hoping they keep taking the pork out of omnibus bills and debating them on their own merits.
wouldn't that be a Wii^2?
So, what, the one after that would be a Wii Cube? Talk about re-using names...
Anyway, what is the big deal about $50 a year? If your web site has any volume at all, it's costing you thousands to to keep the lights on.
Really? I bought in to DreamHosts's new-year's special: $64.44US for two years, including domain name. I would think that if domains were $50/yr instead of $10/yr, I'd likely not have received such a low price. Even at their best rate (bought ahead of time) of $6/month, a jump in registration price of $40/yr (approx $3/month) would likely be noticeable.
But it's voluntary. Why not just avoid going there or never voicing a want to your ISP?
Because YOU will find your bill increased based on the drunken sportsmorons who WILL probably phone the ISP because they must have "sports" 24/7 injected directly into their veins or they will die of the realization of what sad, pathetic wastes of oxygen they really are.
So, um, why are you beating around the bush? Why not just tell us how you really feel?
The problem with that definition that you're looking at is that it fails to account for the entirety of reality. It's short, succinct, and missing a minor detail that happens to be significant in this case.
When you have a regional monopoly on a product or service, you are, in effect, like the government, in that you've removed the ability to choose from the consumer. In your definition, you mention "right to ownership of ... exchange of wealth" - this is a two-way definition. If I, as an individual, have no choice about who to pay to get internet, such as with a monopoly, it's little different from having no choice about who to pay to get car insurance in states/provinces with government-run insurance (e.g., Saskatchewan). When your only choice is buy from a single supplier or simply don't drive, many people don't see that as a choice. Similarly, if you only have one broadband internet provider available, that's not capitalism, that's a monopoly. Your definition misses this distinction. Admittedly, it doesn't apply too often in most people's day-to-day lives, but this is one of those cases.
My wife does digital scrapbooking. She was using a cheapo scrapbooking app, but started to find it too limiting. She started to insist on a purchase of Photoshop, which I resisted. So she got the free trial version, played with it for 30 days and loved it. I asked her to give gimp the same 30 days, and she did. We never did make that Photoshop purchase - she has managed to find gimp tutorials online and even a dead-tree book that has all sorts of hints, tips, and ideas for gimp. Now she does all her scrapbooking in gimp. Maybe I'll be able to sneak a switch over to Gentoo from XP on her box now. :-)
She's no techie, she's artistic. (NOT AUtistic, ARtistic.) Took a bit to get over the learning curve to the point where she was productive, but it wasn't terribly worse than the learning curve for Photoshop.
As opposed to before this where it was no flash and no function? Honestly, I don't see any point in complaining. If you're reading/posting here, you're part of the problem, not the precipitate. Or solution. Or something.
Apparently, you need to compile wine for XP... :-)
"Three strikes" rules have come to Ireland in a sudden and unexpected way, as the country's largest ISP settles a court case brought by the music industry and agrees to take action on file-swappers. Repeat offenders will be disconnected from the 'Net.
To be a file-swapper you have to upload and/or download files.
Like, say, the ubuntu or gentoo live CD installer images? Or, worse, the DVD versions of same? Or how about fixes from Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever (there are some free things out there - DB2 and Oracle both have free versions which some techies would likely play with at home to learn)? There are lots of very large files out there that could cause spikes in usage (say, oh, the 200MB of source code I downloaded so I could install KDE 4.2). The challenge, then, is for the RIAA to actually only complain when people are actually downloading THEIR stuff. Which takes a lot more work than merely looking for heavy users.
Actually, an anecdote is proof of existance. If I have a black sheep, that is proof that black sheep exist. It's not even evidence of a certain number of black sheep (other than "at least one"), but it's proof incontrovertible of one.
That said, it does matter. If there is only one "Karen" (unlikely in my estimation, but I don't have any further evidence, so we'll ignore the likelihood here), then it's really not worth the effort for a major open-source drive. If "Karen" is representative of 80% of teachers out there (also unlikely, but I digress), then said drive would be worth it just in tax savings alone (cut their budgets by millions of dollars per year and get the same quality of education because the savings would be on software licenses). So, it does matter. A lot.
My digression: take the average knowledge/comfort level with open source you find in the general population. Apply it basically unchanged to the teaching population. Yes, teachers are, in general, more prone to learning (though I've seen my share of extremely lazy teachers). But, like any other human being, they're going to concentrate their spare-time learning on things they enjoy. Obviously, one of those things is teaching itself. Computers in general as a subject likely won't be significantly different from the population at large - there are some computer geeks, and some technophobes among the teaching population. And, among those who enjoy learning about computers, they're more than likely to go with the flow and learn what they think everyone else is using: Windows, MS Office, etc. If they were truly geeks, they'd probably have taken up computer science rather than teaching. Now, granted, this is all pure logic based on some fairly broad assumptions, but I do think it makes sense. I don't see teachers being especially special in this regard - their knowledge level of open source may be a tiny bit higher than average, but I don't think it significant. Thus, given all these assumptions and that my logic holds, I would propose that targetting teachers for open source would be a wise thing: not only in tax savings on their budgets, but in preparing the next generation for a wider software choice than the current generation thinks it has.
What were the chances that v != ma? That one is still difficult to believe, though I know it's true.
The chances are actually quite high that v != ma. Assuming SI units for a minute, the LHS (Left Hand Side) is in m/s, while the RHS is g * m/s^2. The units don't match, which makes it a probability of one that v != ma.
(I'm not sure if you're thinking F=ma or v=at, but I'm pretty sure you're not thinking what you actually wrote...)
Read the rest of your wikipedia link. Perhaps the summary has been changed, but precedent is precedent, whether binding or not. In this case, because it was settled, absolutely NO precedent is set. Had it proceeded through trial, persuasive precedent could have been set, and if appealed, then even binding precedent could be set. By settling, they avoid all of this.
First off, I'm not sure that you can take one blog post as representative of a community's position anymore than you can take a single response on slashdot to represent the community's position. For example, in this blog post, while I see what he's getting at, I think he's missing a bigger sociological issue: for many developers, it's the users that drive their contributions. If no one is using it, they may not contribute (as it may be working well enough for them). It's only when a user comes in and says, "hey, you know what? It'd be awesome if your product does X" that they may realise that, hey, it would be awesome. Maybe not for the blogger you linked to, but not only am I unconvinced that this is representative, but all we need to do is find a couple of developers who think the other way (as in my example) to show that KDE, like most OS projects, really does need users.
As for your "simple usability report" - I'd like to point out that KDE said there that they have UI guidelines that explicitly reject this layout. It's nice that they actually do have written usability requirements on their applications and that they enforce it. Now, we can all disagree as to whether the guidelines are appropriate or not, but it's a sign of a good organisation that they get these things down in writing so that their developers can concentrate on functionality rather than eye-candy. If the guidelines said that the toolbars were allowed next to the menubar, it would be just as good from the developer perspective - rather than debating whether to allow it or not, wasting a bunch of time on their own dev lists, they just know whether to allow it or not, and the problem is solved. Basically, what this means is that rather than having a conversation with individual developers, you need to have the conversation with the over-all KDE UI owners. This actually is good for you, too: if you convince them of its usefulness, you won't need to convince the owners of kmail, kate, konqueror, kontact, knode, ktorrent, etc. Most likely, they'll just make a change to kdelibs, and all of these will get the functionality for free. If you fail to convince them, you know better than to waste your time (or theirs) trying to convince individual devs.
Personally, having submitted many bugs to KDE, especially since I'm running the 4.2 snapshots as if it were production, I'm not finding the issues you have. My biggest issue is really turn-around time on serious bugs... I'm sure if I found the right developer in the project and handed him/her sufficient cash, that'd change. Or if I found the issue myself and submitted a patch, it might change.
I've been using KDE 4 since pretty much the day 4.0 shipped. I'm even running a KDE 4.2 snapshot (4.1.96). Generally speaking, the KDE folks have been pretty up-front about the details: when I installed 4.0, I knew full well that it wasn't intended to replace 3.5 yet. When I installed 4.1, I knew full well that functionality (especially IMPORTANT functionality like kmail) was getting there, but I shouldn't expect any polish. As I've been installing the snapshots, I knew that they were snapshots and should expect to open bug reports.
It's not like the KDE folks were hiding this. Sure, they were overly optimistic, but they didn't hide these things from the users. If your distro hid it from you, that's a different issue - they'd probably hide it from you if they were embedding unstable-as-advertised gnome or anything else. Take that up with your distro.
I expect KDE 4.2 to be a vast improvement, mostly in stability, over 4.1. But I don't expect it to be as stable as 3.5.10. I'm hoping they get there within the next 6-12 months, but I don't expect the 4.2 release to be there.
The difference, though, is that with MS, you're paying for a product to work. With open-source, you're not paying for it, and they (generally) tell you what to expect. If you can live with it, great, open bug reports as you find them. If you can't live with it, then don't use it - use the old version, use another piece of software that fills the same role (gnome as an example in this case), or go proprietary. I don't think it's quite reasonable to compare MS's .0 releases (at full price) to open source .0 releases ("release early, release often"), and thus I have no compunction against slamming MS's release policy. I instead compare it to $work's release policy, since I get paid for proprietary coding, as I think that's a much more fair comparison.
I think your typo on "innovation" is quite apropos.
A video camera on every other corner?
I dunno, I'm not sure there are too many countries that can claim they're nonsense-free.
On my home network, which has a publicly visible email server for an entire domain, I have a few things set up. First is to tell postfix to "reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org" - that gets rid of 90% of the inbound right there. I then have a homemade milter set up that rejects anything to an invalid domain (DNS lookup is fast enough for this - all hosts are mentioned in DNS for me - but I can also check users, etc.). And then I have spamassassin set up with kmail to get the last of it. Though, I have to admit, spamassassin sees very very little use - out of ~20,000 inbound connections per day, including some legitimate email, spamassassin finds about 10-15 spams per day. I'll get about 2 or 3 a day that get through all of that, and then I send it back to spamassassin to learn it.
So, the basic idea is: blocklist FIRST. Of course, you disable relaying (except to your own network), but the blocklist is probably looked at first. And what's left can be caught by spamassassin fairly well. Mind you, I have a user base of "1" (since my wife seems to have switched over to gmail), so there's not a lot to learn from.
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
What they're OBVIOUSLY trying to do is find out what bin Laden is viewing on YouTube.
Or maybe the US Federal government is so big with so much diversity in personnel that they can have their webmonkeys play with websites to keep the general public informed as to what is going on (transparency in government, hopefully, though propaganda is just as likely at this point) while their military/intelligence personnel can focus on the war, and their economists can focus on, well, the economy.
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
You think their webmonkeys will contribute positively to these issues?
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
Think of it this way: that's a million bucks they CAN'T spend on the war instead. And these lawyers and support staff probably all live in the US and will likely spurn on the economy in their own area (largely DC, but they might order anal toys on-line from MA or something). If you're having difficulty thinking of it this way, don't worry, so am I.
Personally, I think that a legislative solution to a technical problem is troubling in its own right. There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that would love to be able to issue waivers to themselves to bypass some annoyance (e.g., waste treatment, carbon emissions, etc.), but they can't. Abuse of a small power on day two of your new job is NOT a positive step. Apparently, you need to hire more technically-minded webmonkeys. But, make no mistake: it's a SMALL thing.
-- not an Obama supporter.
To me, it kinda works both ways. On one hand, you don't want to be dependant on YouTube. On the other hand, you don't want the government to be able to replace a video with another and claim that it always was this way. "We never said that... see our video?" When it's self-hosted, it's too easy to change. When it's YouTube-hosted, it's easy for YouTube to prove the change (and they may still have the old version, who knows). This is good for government transparency.
I would agree that there needs to be a public discussion about pros and cons, but thus far it doesn't seem cut and dried that YouTube hosting government videos is entirely a bad thing. Or entirely a good thing, either.
-- not an Obama supporter.