I think parent's question may be somewhat rhetorical, but I think it could be an interesting discussion, so here's one non-American's idea (having said that, we face a similar issue in Australia, we voted in Rudd to spend our surplus without providing any *new* services. But I can't think of a truly unbiased way to measure who's voting population is "dumber" on average).

This problem took significant time to develop, and it will take time to resolve. I feel that neglecting the subject of formal logic in modern education is near the root of the problem. I am strongly reminded of Professor Diggory's furrowed-brow wondering "what do they teach them in these schools?" What then can we do? I would love to see a twofold solution.

1. Training in formal logic in schools. Teach children (maybe as part of the mathematics curriculum, since I suppose this is applied mathematics) to recognize and reject common logical fallacies like false equivocation, affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent and the non-sequitur.
2. Reference to these principles in political debate(s). If a politician gives a speech or presentation where they use flagrantly poor logic, their opponent could (should) point these out and force the presenter to attempt to persuade the public of their position on more rational grounds.

Would this fix every problem even if executed perfectly? No. Evidence could still be fabricated to support false premises, while maintaining logical validity. But it would be better than the current situation where flawed logic and emotive non-answers are consistently employed to sway an uncritical public. Is this a pipe dream that will never happen? Maybe. But if we have a goal we can at least work towards it.

Thoughts slashdot?

I think parent's question may be somewhat rhetorical, but I think it could be an interesting discussion, so here's one non-American's idea (having said that, we face a similar issue in Australia, we voted in Rudd to spend our surplus without providing any *new* services. But I can't think of a truly unbiased way to measure who's voting population is "dumber" on average).

This problem took significant time to develop, and it will take time to resolve. I feel that neglecting the subject of formal logic in modern education is near the root of the problem. I am strongly reminded of Professor Diggory's furrowed-brow wondering "what do they teach them in these schools?" What then can we do? I would love to see a twofold solution.

1. Training in formal logic in schools. Teach children (maybe as part of the mathematics curriculum, since I suppose this is applied mathematics) to recognize and reject common logical fallacies like false equivocation, affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent and the non-sequitur.
2. Reference to these principles in political debate(s). If a politician gives a speech or presentation where they use flagrantly poor logic, their opponent could (should) point these out and force the presenter to attempt to persuade the public of their position on more rational grounds.

Would this fix every problem even if executed perfectly? No. Evidence could still be fabricated to support false premises, while maintaining logical validity. But it would be better than the current situation where flawed logic and emotive non-answers are consistently employed to sway an uncritical public. Is this a pipe dream that will never happen? Maybe. But if we have a goal we can at least work towards it.

Thoughts slashdot?

I disagree. While legalisation might seem like a good idea at first, I don't think it will dry up the black-market for prostitution very much.

1) Johns still want the discretion afforded by the black market (legalisation will likely lead to at least some minimal paper trails, etc.)

2) People's requirements in a prostitution experience get kinkier over time as they become jaded (same thing as with drugs, it takes a harder hit to get the same high). This will inevitably lead to a black market where prostitution involves acts that are outlawed within the confines of the law (such as pedophilia). I'm given to understand that beyond the confines of the well-known red light district, there are places in amsterdam that are home to this kind of thing already, with girls as young as 18 months being used for prostitution. Note that this is in a place where adult prostitutes are already readily available, so legitimising adult prostitution obviously has not alleviated the problem.

Parent should be marked as troll. "Microsoft has never really locked down their desktop OS"? It "lets you run anything you want"? Please. OSX is just as open as Windows in that sense. All "open" means in this context is that they release a compiler for it (so technically you can run any "app" you want). What that doesn't give you is the ability to not run things on the system that you don't want to run. You only get that privilege with a real open source system. Not trying to come across as a FOSS hippie, just saying that the parent is plugging Microsoft on flashy-sounding but quite invalid reasoning. I call troll.

Some of my reasoning:

Why Fedora?
I was reading a lot about the Gnome 3 PPA being broken and didn't want to have to set up a whole spare partition just to try out a desktop ui. So I just used the LiveCD image from gnome.org Figured the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora bases wasn't going to actually affect these numbers much.

Why VLC?
It's what I actually play my videos in, and so its yields the numbers I care about.

Why not Totem? / Why do I say software rendering?
I chose not to make comments about using Totem from the liveCD because (and this is just a guess) I thought they may be skewed significantly by the lack of propietary drivers. Running glxinfo on the Fedora LiveCD shows SGI as the vendor (i.e. the free 3D drivers were not in use).

Yes that's a lot of caveats, but given the wide disparity in the figures, I think the point largely still stands. These variables should collectively yield only fairly negligible differences. If you want more thorough tests, you're totally welcome to put the time and energy into running them. I just wanted to do other things with the rest of my day off :)

Its not actually that ridiculous. I pay for hosting for my personal website now, and have done for about six years. This hosting includes email, there's no reason it couldn't include calendaring, social-networking, etc. through some open source web apps. I still primarily use gmail, mainly because I genuinely think they're less likely than me to screw up the backup procedure, lol. But it has crossed my mind a number of times to go entirely self-hosted. I don't necessarily mind targeted advertising either. It tends to be a lot more tasteful than non-targeted advertising for some crazy sexual performance product.

There is a video lecture I watched recently called "What does Linux prove" from an old linux.conf.au event. In this lecture, the speaker shows how to use lamda calculus to implement the C language from scratch - including implementing the "if (boolean)" functionality using only pure functions with parameters and return values.

It's not something immediately obvious to every high school kid, but conditionals apparently are available in pure mathematics.

Link to lecture: http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/215.html

For all the panic about losing some of the networked functionality and Canonical doesn't care about non-traditional desktop setups (with mounted networked home dirs, etc), no one seems to have brought up Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu is not just a desktop OS, the server variant is looking more formidable all the time. Do we really expect Canonical to take its actively maintained server version (which they're pushing for cloud applications) and neuter the ability to deploy it in big server environments where home dirs are NFS mounted and people want to use GUI config tools on headless servers?

I have just finished several years of distro hopping because I felt Ubuntu (my first full-time Linux) wasn't hardcore enough for my taste. After moving to Debian, then Arch, then Fedora for 6-12 months each, I'm now back at Ubuntu with a renewed appreciation for how good a distro it is.

I give Canonical more credit than to screw it up that badly after getting so many things right over the last few years.

+1 to Internode. Been with them for 6 months. Pricing is great, what little support I've needed has been prompt and very useful. And I've been positively abusing the unmetered content (Arch, Debian and Ubuntu mirrors in particular).

I call hogwash. How many Microsoft employees must be posting in this forum. The measure that matters is the real world. I've been working in a university I.T. dept, thats a LOT of machines spread amongst a huge breadth of user skill levels (our particular uni consists of roughly 40% OSX, 50% Windows (XP and 7) and 10% Fedora Linux (and yes, we do put end users on the Fedora boxes for classwork). I am yet to see a Linux or OSX machine get with a hijacked browser session.

I'd be very interested in a show of hands. Linux does have a decent share of the server market, and systems running it do get exploited (but my bet is that its very predominantly from exploits in sloppy PHP web apps and the like). But aside from that, how many of you out there have *ever* had malware get on to your Linux desktop and start hijacking your browser? My bet is very nearly zero. Windows is as secure as anything else? You may like to think that in principle it could be, but the experimental evidence strongly disagrees.

... after considering switching back to vanilla debian for some time, this might be the straw that broke the camels back. Where free software meets the corporate world, trust is everything. And trust is not something I have for yahoo/bing search. I don't trust them to provide good, comprehensive search results (I DO trust google to do that), and I don't trust them not to screw the Ubuntu community (tests on google doing that are inconclusive thus far, but fairly promising).

It need not necessarily be irrational without a creator If the theory predicts neither a rational nor irrational universe, you are left with only the assertion that we have a rational universe purely by coincidence (and absolutely no confidence that this rationality is anything more than illusory). Effectively, having been asked why an incredibly unlikely event came about, you have responded "why not?". It's a non-answer, try again.

This appears to be falling back on neo-darwinian evolution as a logical axiom. Unfortunately the neo-darwinian hypothesis of evolution by natural selection of traits arising from random mutation CANNOT account for biology as we observe it. I refer you to the overwhelming body of evidence. 1 2 3 4 5 . Yes I'm a fan of CMI's website :)

As a person is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of an integrated circuit, so an intelligent agent well beyond humans is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of even a single cell.

So, this statement,

is proved invalid by denying one of its axioms. Unless of course, you can prove me wrong and build a cell personally. Then I'd have something to think about. I'll recant my whole setup if you can get a cell to arise from non-living components without human intervention. And pay you every cent in my bank account :)

So again, what is your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?

Agreed, but lets not get ahead of ourselves ;)