These would be the "Foreign Policy Wizards" in the way that Pratchett's Wizards are Wizards rather than the competent Gandalf types?

It was a tax break, not a payment. Amazon was going to pay less tax, it wasn't going to get a payment from NYC. So you're idea of allocating the resources elsewhere can't work because the funds do not exist.

Get a P52 ThinkPad. Goes to 128 GB of RAM. Has a Xeon Proc. More than enough grunt to maintain Alpha Geek status.

Are you interested in beta readers? If so ping me orin@lspace.org

This is possible. You create a second virtual desktop in Windows 10. You run VcXsrv full screen on that desktop, start your Windows Subsystem for Linux distro, configure display for 0.0, start your Linux desktop binaries and then run the Linux desktop there. You can then switch back to the Windows 10 desktop on the first virtual desktop.

And internet advertising isn't paying for it. The utopia of free didn't give us a sensible net where the truth rises to the top.

The 25th anniversary ThinkPad. You'll pay more for it than you would a comparable machine, but it has a 2007 era ThinkPad keyboard rather than the more modern ThinkPad keyboards (the P50 and X1 Carbon have great keyboards, but without the travel of the 25th Anniversary). If keyboard is really important to you, go with that.

Microsoft put together a huge infrastructure in MS Learning to teach people to use and support their software. This meant that while you had to pay more to license their software, it was relatively easy to find people that could use and support their software. Because it's more challenging to "grow" people who can support open source software, their services have never come cheap. The most expensive part of any IT deployment is the geeks - reduce the cost of that (by prioritizing the creation of training material) and the cost of licensing your software really becomes a secondary concern.

Every generation thinks it will be the exception. Gen-X techies were computer literate. We were around when the internet went mainstream. We were sure that Tech was going to grow up with us - but lots of Gen-X'ers found themselves on the wrong side of 40. Some got to hang around, but most moved on. The same will happen to the millennials, replaced with those born after 2000. Younger is cheaper.

The high selling general "101" type textbooks subsidize other publications. If this is successful (there's not a great history around high quality open source textbooks because writing a text doesn't scratch the same itch and this looks like they are aiming the authoring role at people who generally have little experience writing textbooks, but lots writing academic papers) academic publishers are going to be less likely (and able) to publish the more advanced books that don't sell as well.

If people were really interested in doing something about the cost of tuition, they'd do something about the ballooning number of administrators that are directly paid out of student fees. But University Presidents like Choi aren't really interested in doing that, so they come up with schemes like this.

It's Office 2016. Which falls out of partial support at that date (for some features, there will still be security updates). So they are saying "hey, if you want to interact with Office 365, you won't be able to use Office 2016 from that date to do it". By then we'll have had several more versions of "not Office 365 Office (such as Office 2018 and Office 2020" come out, which will work with Office 365 premium services. And they'll each be supported for 5 years. Because support for all services isn't perpetual. And you'll still be able to use Office 2016 with your Skype for Business On-Prem deployment (if you have one). What they want to do is to not have to support some premium features for what at that point will be a 5 year old product. Like an LTS version of Linux. How long are they supported again?

Writing textbooks sucks as much as writing documentation. There isn't any real payoff for anyone in writing textbooks in terms of reputation (other than having the opportunity to write more textbooks). At least with open source software there is more of a structure to the intangible benefits one gets out of contributing to such projects (such as being able to show contributions when applying for jobs).

People and organizations that create and distribute IP almost always legitimately earn and report income. This is because it all goes through banks and can be audited. Sure there can be "hollywood accounting" - but the average person working on the creation of intellectual property earns an income and this income is taxed. Piracy reduces that tax take because it reduces the income made from the creation of material. With automation taking almost every type of job except the creative ones, is it much of a surprise that governments have decided to step in to protect one area of the economy that will be difficult to automate?

Comments like this explain why no-one gives a rats arse when IT jobs are outsourced. If someone else's job gets outsourced because they have a "shit job" - then the default assumption is that all jobs that are outsourced are "shit jobs"

If it is just a drain on the Aussie taxpayer - some sort of open ended research organization to plow endless funds into - shut it down and spend the money on something useful like Aboriginal health.