I assume that this is what you're referring to, so this is for those that don't get the joke.

Ted Kennedy is on the TSA no fly list is consequentially hassled at airports. This was covered on Slashdot a few years back.

Not even if the Merlot is free as in beer?

Maybe if there is a fork, it can be White Wine and the original can be Red Wine.

And then if they merge back together, it'll be a blush!

OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL. Doesn't that mean that if Microsoft wanted to they could link to and include OO.o binaries, and only have to provide the source code for any changes made directly to LGPL code?

They're legally allowed to use the library functions from OpenOffice.org in their products, they probably aren't too worried about looking at the OpenOffice.org code. Even if accidental copying happened, surely they could afford to have the code audited for copyright violations.

Microsoft is in no position to blame lack of reference material for their failure to fill gaps in the 1.1 version of the standard in a way that is compatible with all the other ODF applications.

I think that the reasoning behind bans on child porn illustrations and fiction has more to do with fears that it encourages pedophilia than whether or not children are harmed directly by the creation or distribution of such works. The fear is that fictional child porn is like a sort of gateway drug leading to more serious deviances. Potential pedophiles could start out with "no children harmed" kiddie porn, develop an appetite for the real stuff and eventually be unable to stop themselves from molesting children.

The idea that fictional child porn could act as a gateway leading to behaviour where real children are harmed isn't really that far fetched. It's very common for non-pedophiles to experiment with porn and masturbation before moving to the real thing. Even after losing one's virginity I bet lots of people jerk off to porn of sex acts (with consenting adults) that they've been fantasizing about before trying them out in real life. For lots of people doing it alone first lets them get more comfortable with the fantasy, and could also fuel their desire and confidence to act the fantasy out. So it's not really that hard to see why some might be afraid that even fictional child porn can eventually, indirectly harm children.

Another fear is that potential molesters will find acceptance and reinforcement of their fantasies in the communities they get the fictional porn from.

It might not actually work that way. Or maybe it does for some perverts but not others. Maybe some pedophiles who have still only fantasized about molesting kids would actually benefit from fictional child porn. It could be enough of an outlet for them, allowing them to manage their urges instead of serving as a gateway. I'm not saying either way. I'm just saying that the argument could be made that even fictional depictions of child pornography harm children indirectly by encouraging perverts.

What's not clear is whether such a law will have such an effect. Will limiting access to fictional child porn actually reduce the number of child molestations? What if it merely drives pedophiles even further into the underground making them that much harder to detect? I certainly don't know the answers to these types of questions. The whole issue of what to do with child molesters woefully complicated, and probably one that humans will have to deal with until our extinction.

What's absolutely tragic about this particular law is its lack of focus. There's no reason at all for this law to contain language banning anything that is not child porn. Banning important cultural works like Watchmen or South Park is pathetic and embarrassing. I will never cease to be amazed at how politicians can continuously advocate such idiotic ideas without the normal human reaction of eventually being shameful and apologetic, and somehow manage to stay in office. It's very difficult to have any sort of hope for humanity when we keep giving power over our lives to morons and crooks.

I agree with you about FSO, it is shaping up to be pretty cool. For those who don't know, Openmoko is sponsoring development of freesmartphone.org which is an API for smart phones meant to complement the work done at freedesktop.org.

Phone, GPS, power, PIM and eventually wifi functions are all controlled by a d-bus api. This means that that developers can choose whatever gui toolkit they see fit.

FSO is cool, but I wish they had started with it. Instead they released a stop-gap gsm daemon called neod, then they ripped the phone functions out of Qtopia and ported it to X11, and now they're moving to FSO.

It seems to me that the biggest problem with Openmoko is they don't know how to communicate effectively. I bought the phone thinking it would work as a phone and they were letting developers access it early to start writing apps. WRONG! They released it early to get help diagnosing apm/suspend issues, poor GSM functionality, poor wifi... just about everything worked but only intermittently and not with the kind of results I was expecting.

But FSO development seems to be moving ahead. And at least with Openmoko the whole stack (multiple stacks!) are completely Free. With Android some parts aren't included in the open source release. And LiMo... I expect the most open source compliance we'll see out of them is a tar ball full of patches to the Linux kernel once a device finally ships.

What I see happening is Openmoko derived distros and Debian with FSO being somewhat similar to how Linux is on the desktop now. People will buy phones with Windows Mobile or Android and install GNU/Linux because that's what they're looking for. So even if Openmoko fails, its legacy will be a decent open source phone stack for Linux.

Still, I wish them the best. And if they could make my Freerunner into a usable phone (without Android) then even better!

It's a little slow for me too. I only zoom out to create a new activity. I also can't find a way to switch activities with keyboard short cuts.

Right now I have two panels, one on the bottom and one on the top. The bottom panel has a task manager. The top panel has an "activity switcher" plasmoid that works like a tab bar for your activities. You can rename the activities in the appearance settings dialog.

Switching between activities using this tabbed switcher is very quick, even when my laptop is in powersave mode (800 MHz).

I've been using KDE 4.2 since the first beta on Kubuntu 8.10. There have been a few things I had to fix myself that typical end users probably wouldn't be able to figure out, but mostly that's been distribution related (conflicting audio servers, and for some reason I ended up with two power management daemons at first).

To be honest I like it so much I was even using it every day before Nvidia released updated drivers. Before the drivers things were a little slow and glitchy. But now everything is smooth and fast.

Plasma has been improved substantially in this release. It's very usable. I really like the idea of FolderView widgers. When you drag a folder from the file manager to the desktop you get a little menu asking if you want an icon or a FolderView. Plasma also lets you have multiple "activities". So I have a desktop set up for quick access to my music and videos, another one for reading comics, and a few more that a project specific. This is so much better than a single desktop folder. What they still need to work on though is removing some of the confusion between Plasma's multiple desktops (which controls the contents of the desktop background) and KWin's multiple desktops (which lets you have application windows on different virtual desktops like any decent window manager).

I also really like being able to place multiple images on the background (in the picture frame plasmoid, which also does slide shows).

Amarok 2.0 deserves special mention. It still doesn't have all the features from the 1.x series (notably the ability to transcode on the fly when you transfer to your mp3 player) but I am very impressed with the interface. It has its own Plasma containment for holding widgets, and when you drag items from your library to the playlist this containment becomes a set of drop targets for "append to play list", "queue" etc.

KTorrent is now my favourite bittorrent client. Actually KTorrent was pretty usable back when 4.0 was released, I even used it in Gnome for a while.

Kontact, KMail and the rest of the PIM suite I'm not so sure about. They're connected to Akonadi which hasn't been working very well for me. I loved KMail back in the KDE 2 and 3 days.

Dolphin is a pretty decent file manager. The only thing I really miss from Nautilus is the spatial mode, but at least they added tree style expandable folders in the list view.

In general I'd call this a good-for-end-users release. Hopefully there will have been a few 4.2.x point releases before Kubuntu 9.04 is released to clear up any remaining bugs.

In terms of speed the system is very usable. On my Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of ram it seems just as fast as using Gnome. On my friend's Pentium M with 512 MB of ram it's usable, but not as snappy as Gnome.

Since I've been using KDE 4.2 on my laptop, I've had a lot of people notice how cool Linux is. Instead of trying to show them something and explain it while their eyes gloss over, they're asking questions and wanting to know if it would work on their computer. That doesn't mean they're going to try it (on Linux at least) but it does mean that KDE has finally figured out how to be visually appealing to non-nerds. The default theme in 4 is much better than Keramik from 3.1, that's for damn sure.

So to answer your question, this is the release that distributions should have waited for before replacing KDE 3.5. It was simply madness that so many distros went to 4.0 and 4.1 as a default and not letting users switch back to 3.5.

If you have a Unix-ish desktop KDE 4.2 is definitely worth a try. It's probably also worth a try on Windows and Mac but I don't have those so I can't comment on them. Still, if you have a free afternoon and you're a big nerd like me who enjoys playing with new software, KDE 4.2 is worth a try.

And you can even configure power management profiles that disable the desktop effects, for when your battery is low for example. Having used Gnome for the last few years I'd forgotten just how flexible KDE is.

There's also Angstrom which you might call a PDA style distro but has a growing repository. They also manage ports to several ARM variations.

And of course there's the Debian ARM port. I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu is basing their work off of this.

You're absolutely right. Linux users aren't going to be the only ones seeing this story and thinking the woman is foolish. Sure with the attention span most people have many will miss the end of the story where it's explained that her Ubuntu computer was actually compatible with Verizon and Word documents.

But even to a non-technical audience it should be clear that this woman didn't try very hard at all. If she had have called Verizon tech support herself they would have been able to guide her through the process, and they were even willing to send a technician to her house to help her.

She must be thoroughly embarrassed, and rightly so. Before dropping out of school and alerting the media, she could have also asked a friend, friend of a friend, or a relative for help. Even if she ended up with her 12 year old niece installing a pirated copy of Windows she would have been able to stay in school.

The sad thing is that many people won't pay make it to the end of the story and will be left with the impression that Linux is a bunch of headaches that they don't have time for.

When I was a kid they told me to find a cop. I was trying to not be gender specific in my suggestion to get someone else involved. But you're right that people are generally less threatened by women than men. If what people might think about you helping a child really scares you though, I think the important thing is getting someone else involved so that you're not handling the situation alone.

You could also ask a couple. Hell... you could even ask other kids for help. Just use common sense. You probably don't want to get the guy in the clown mask wearing a "hey kid want a ride in the spanky-van?" sign involved.

If the child gets all touchy-feely, you as the adult always have the option of telling them "no, please don't. i don't like that." Say it loud enough for other people to hear.

And you don't have to bring the child anywhere. Chances are you should do the opposite. Get them to stay put while you look for help.

The funny thing is, I don't even like children, and here I am making a big deal on the internet about helping them. I just wish people weren't so afraid of each other.

Sorry if I was a little harsh on you. It's just that the idea of seeing a child who needs help and getting as far away as possible sounds so ridiculous to me.

My experience has always been the exact opposite. I'm not overweight but I'm generally scruffy looking, unshaven and wearing dirty clothes. Maybe I just give off a trustworthy vibe.

Still, how else can we change people's opinions about strangers if we don't prove them wrong?

I do understand this problem. In different situations I try to be sensitive about it. For example: walking down a dark street behind a single woman. If I sense that she's uncomfortable being followed I'll sometimes cross the street out of respect for her sense of security.

I just find it somewhat repulsive that adults would not stop to help a child out of fear that their intentions will be questioned. I'm sorry to dismiss your legitimate concerns, but in my opinion falling for that kind of fear is pathetic.

Maybe it's just different where I live. But refusing to help a child because someone might think you're a pervert seems downright selfish and cowardly to me. And like I said above, if you're worried you can always take steps to reduce those risks: don't act creepy and get others involved so you're not handling the situation alone.

Helping others and being a good person is what helps people learn the very things this study found. The world is mostly full of good people. I certainly wouldn't be very happy if I lost my kid in a crowded place and nobody helped her.

It's really too bad that you're that afraid. That society has somehow put so much fear in you that you're afraid of helping a child.

In all likelihood any child who has lost her or his parents is far more scared than you.

If you ever find yourself reconsider the "I don't help children because it puts me at risk" policy, here's some pointers that might make it a little less frightening for you:

1. Respect the child's personal space. You don't have to touch the child, just stand back a few feet and ask if everything is all right, or if they know where their parents are. Where did they last see their parents?

2. Get someone else involved. Ask another stranger if they've seen the child's parents. It doesn't matter whether you think the other stranger may have actually seen the parents. The point is that you're no longer a strange, single guy talking to a kid. Now you're a strange, single guy and someone else. If it makes you feel better, try asking a cute, elderly woman for help. Grandma probably won't hurt you. And she might have better ideas on comforting the child too.

3. If nobody else is immediately around, ask the child to stay where they are while you go look for help. Assure the child that you won't go out of their sight, and that you'll keep an eye on them to make sure they're okay too.

4. There's probably someone who works at the place you found the lost child who can help. Find someone official. A store employee, a security guard.

5. If the child starts to yell at you to stay away or pulls a gun or dirty needle or something, just keep going. Leave the child alone but you should still let someone else know that a child is in distress.

The point is to use some common sense. Don't threaten the child by invading their space. Don't try to be inconspicuous. Drawing attention to the situation is the exact opposite effect that anyone dangerous to children would want. Why would someone who wants to kidnap a child draw attention to them self that way?

I've helped a few lost kids find their parents. It usually doesn't take very long as parents are generally eager to find their children once lost. And every single time the parents expressed genuine gratitude.