[citation needed]

You want to live in a country with no legal system? The judiciary is part of the government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_power

You do realise that "normal laws" are written, enforced and may be changed by the various branches of government, right? The judicial system is generally defined as one branch of government, and policing is ultimately funded and directed by politicians.

Maybe we rely on the *government* to protect us from that?

Ah, the moment I run out of mod points...

I've used a BlueGene/Q. It sucks for web browsing and gaming, the processors are only 1.6 GHz and it doesn't even run Windows ;-)

Implementing MPI scalable parallelism into Firefox would actually be a pretty interesting exercise for somebody with the time on their hands...

Unfortunately the commercial fluid dynamics codes often have quite restrictive licenses where you pay for a certain number of cores. I've seen academic HPC queues full of 8-core jobs with hundreds of cores available, because that was all they could justify a license for. It's an absurdly artificial restriction (a bit like limiting numbers of tracks in cut-down music software), but >Ansys are fairly unrepentant at the moment.

This mostly agrees with my experience. Here's some data: This is a breakdown of the codes used on HECToR, the main UK academic cluster. It is dominated by chemistry; generally in chemistry the main computational challenge is in performing very large matrix diagonalisations to solve approximations of quantum mechanical systems. Clearly generous allocation and effective sharing of memory is critical for this kind of task.

I approve of this world view! Now we just need to convince professionals not to attend unprofessional conferences... This could be difficult if it is the professionals who are making the environment unprofessional, but we must try. I personally find it difficult to challenge "low-level" sexism without seeming overly judgemental or sensitive; to some extent it is this low-level criticism we need to make more common, instead of strong reactions to isolated incidents which provoke strong and unproductive debate.

Judith Butler showed that to be a very problematic statement. If both sex and gender are socially constructed, it's difficult to employ any kind of biological argument. You may need to broaden and update your idea of "feminism".

In database design, I thought the answer to this was "yes"?

(IANADatabasePerson. My scientific codes have all kinds of vulnerabilities to unexpected input.)

Looking forwards to Finder Tabs. I use a Mac at work and Linux at home and find the tabs in Dolphin and Konquerer a pretty much essential aspect of any gui filesystem work. (Mostly I like CLI but sometimes you have to accept that clicking and dragging really is quicker). Just like multiple desktops, Apple are a few years behind but doing well to pick up the useful bits. Speaking of which, I hope they've dropped the absurd restrictions in moving windows between multiple monitors and workspaces.

You missed my point.

I'm not trying to make you switch. I'm not saying you've been irrational or unethical. I'm just trying to point out that getting messed around by DRM on freaking AUDIO SAMPLES is an insane situation to be in. Audio samples are one of the most basic resources in music production. Not being able to hack around your samples is like having a pen that only writes on branded paper. What if you want to write on the side of a tin can? This is supposed to be art! Sure a computer is a tool, and a tool should not make too many assumptions about what you are doing. I only mentioned WINE options as an example of a transition for someone that has already been screwed; it's still a rubbish situation to be in. The best course of action is to make some great music with your DRM while you still can! And then sell it to a DRM-free indie game ;-)

For general-purpose sampling, there are quite a few companies out there offering samples in SFZ or gigastudio format. Personally I'd be reluctant to call a sample pack "samples" if you don't have access to the audio files. It looks like Vienna Symphonic Library used to be available in a friendly format, but is now closed off, so there is a genuine lack of professional-level orchestral samples. Of course, if you can afford VSL then you can probably justify extra hardware like an offline winXP box or a Muse Receptor, controlled over MIDI.

  Failing that, I hear Kontakt works well in WINE if you have a proper audio setup. (The Muse Receptor compatibility would support this.)

There are plenty of great reasons to not use Linux for professional audio. I remain unconvinced that getting taken for a ride by sample producers is one of them.

This. I also find spreadsheets conceptually limiting; I'm a scientist and do most of my data processing in the form of multi-dimensional arrays and structures in MATLAB or Python. (Octave is also respectable but isn't as good at importing data files.) Excel really limits you to two dimensions, and referencing between multiple tables and sheets can get very awkward very fast. I worry that when people grow up with Excel it limits the way they think about data.