You must be Catholic!

A quick tip: use a rod to hit children so as to spare your wrists. IIRC it's somewhere in the Catholic manual, too. Chapter "Proverbs" I believe. I quite understand if you can't keep track of everything in the book, though. Thinking of the children is hard work. It's the same for me an Unix man pages. So many systems to look after, so little time. Oh well, we do the best we can I guess.

(I'm happy to have found at least one area of common ground with Catholics. We both fail to see the difference between physical and sexual abuse of children...)

Ah, you must be Catholic! Just a quick tip: use a rod to spare your wrists, when hitting children. I believe it's mentioned in your operating manual as well. Somewhere under "Proverbs" although I do understand you wouldn't know the manual by heart as you're so busy thinking of the children. I have the same with man pages and watching many systems ;).

(I fail to see how physical abuse of children is any better than sexual abuse, and it seems that the Catholic church has come to the same conclusion. At last we have something in common...)

I believe the likes of http://www.nexenta.org/ and http://www.getgreenbytes.com/ would like to differ.

that nobody even cares to comment any more. :)

I'm pro-vacination. Lets /really/ look at the odds, then:

>150mi women (CIA Factbook) in the US. Chance of contracting HPV during full lifetime: 90%. (hpvhealth.net).

If we estimate 2mi girls aged 14 a year, the maximum age to vaccinate if you /really/ want to get there before they become sexually active, we should have about 13 deaths each year due to the vaccine.

Chance of dying, annually, of HPV related cancer: "Between three thousand and four thousand women die of cervical cancer every year, with HPV being responsible for around 70% or more of all cervical cancer cases." (hpvhealth.net) Which means some 2450 deaths attributable to HPV related cancer annually. Those deaths are probably (I haven't researched those statistics) >35yo's.

Now calculate for yourself if you like the odds of 13 kids dying of the vaccine or rather almost 2500 deaths among adults. If you're gonna be nerdy about it, calculate the years saved/spoiled by either approach. Perhaps you can go deeper and calculate years in good health.

Now that's an acurate description of how best to look at it.

Thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong with electronically supported counting of votes, as long as the votes themselves are each seperately available in physical form.

Here in the Netherlands we've recently switched back wholesale to voting with a red pencil instead of voting computers precisely because it's the only way to have those votes available for a true recount. Funny thing is, right after the most recent election officials started complaining counting was 'difficult, timeconsuming and old-fashioned'. Just a few days after said election, several districts have resorted to recounts that demonstrate why having the votes on paper instead of in a computer is a good idea.

Might this have something to do with the fact that US companies have different strategies and simply do not want to change their ways for the European market but do want the benefits of that same market? Said in a different way: if they don't like the European rules they could choose to not compete in the European market.

Anyway, The good news (to you) is, that ms Kroes is leaving office for another post real soon now. The bad news (to you), is that she's leaving it for the post of foreign trade, which deals with ict, e-commerce en telecom, among other things. I wouldn't count her out just yet. In Europe, things will get better, as far as I'm concerned. I'm quite certain that the wave of ever bigger companies because of 'economies of scale' were bad for society at large and I hope the trend will be reversed.

Replying to you, belatedly because of time difference, as you make the two points that interest me most:

I think you're right on both counts and it makes me think again. As with science, immediate usability isn't always what counts most. I guess I was a bit too cynical and dismissive at first.

I'll take a wait-and-see stance for now. The problem that remains is, if anyone will use it untill it's been worked out to a point that it'll 'just work'.

The best chance for that, is if the tools allow people who already do tag simpler ways of working and tagging information is made portable. In other words, the KDE people may be on to something but I didn't get that impression from how the presentation I saw.

I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.

Other people may be better at this than I am, but I can't even be bothered to tag my e-mails, let alone each and every file. Granted, this system does some 'auto-tagging' but to call it a semantic desktop because of that is a bit rich. YMMV and I like to be persuaded to look again.

Well, I seem to have the exact same trouble with a KK 64-bit upgrade from JJ, on a dell Latitude E6500. I'm guessing all the Intel changes in the new kernel and the use of advanced features in that kernel by Karmic might have something to do with it. My desktop machine, on the other hand, is fine. Exact same upgrade but AMD/Nvidia hardware.

Another two useless data-points :)

And the simple truth is that you should be nervous. The cloud has distinct advantages that are being overshadowed by large disadvantages: the 'Next Big Lock-in (tm)'.

Basically this is the same thing 'our' community has been saying for years now: it's all about Open standards, Open document formats and Open API's. In classic style, the blogger either fails to see this point clearly or fails to clearly point this out. Your pick :).

Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, held a talk at the Open World Forum in Paris last week. He explained how Canonical is putting its support behind Project Eucalyptus because they see an Open implementation of Amazon's API's as the way to force an Open standard for cloud computing. I think they may have a point.

"And I have seen Ubuntu (one of my FAVORITE desktop OS'es) take no less than 8 hours to complete."

With version 9.04, from CD on the same hardware? I've seen Ubuntu take a long time to install, but not that long on P4 hardware. Please elaborate on the circumstances.

I happen to think the answer is actually quite easy. It's the same answer we use for many other issues or problems in society. It's an answer most people in Western society agree on to be good for many differentiated parts of societies challenges. Western societies like to export the answer at every chance they get.

What's that answer? Education. Make drugs available on a personal basis to those that completed an exam on the specific drug. You can't drive a truck with your drivers license for a normal car. Make sure that the user understands all aspects of a drug. For heavier drugs, have them take a practical exam under supervision. This attacks the issue on several levels. It makes it 'uncool' to do drugs, a major incentive for younger people. It will reduce cases of unintentional overdose, mixing of substances or accidents due to being under the influence in conditions that don't allow for it (driving, operating machinery or even something as simple as cooking while stoned.)

Combine this with a system where drugs are made available cleanly and afford-ably and you'll have a society much less burdened by drug use even if the number of users increase due to legalisation. I'm quite certain, though, that the numbers of users of all types of drugs, including alcohol, will /decrease/ with such a scheme, especially with younger people.

Please tell me how you feel about such a system and what you would think should be changed?

One would hope, perhaps unrealisticly, that the interest of these parents would be for their children to be happy instead of being 'as much as the rest of the population as possible so as to not stand out.' Especially in a place like /. where abberation from the norm is probably the norm, I think your point of view is odd :).

I see no reason why gay parents are worse than straight parents and I personally know children being raised by gay people around me. These kids aren't gay themselves and the role-model doesn't seem to influence that 'position' in the least. If having grand-children (even with their own DNA) is the biggest interest parents have, their children being gay does not have to stand in the way so that argument is out the window. The argument that gay parenting or 'gay propaganda' begets gay children is unfounded(*) and sounds much like arguments brought forward by racists against mixed-race mariages or TV shows showing such mixed race bonds. Oh. Wait. Isn't that one of the last big taboos on US TV? :D.

To answer your final question

perhaps superfluously: for the same reason the best way to beat racim is for children of different races to play together so that when they grow up, differences in color of skin and other racial characteristics are a natural thing to them. It doesn't turn someone from one race to another (with the odd exception, here and there ;), but it makes these "impressionable minds" accept more easily that there is more than one way to do things so they won't discriminate against those who are different. Perhaps nerds and geeks should start such propaganda in pre-schools as well... :P

(*)If you know of independant, verifyible scientific studies that support the 'gay surroundings turn you gay' idea, please point them out so I can read up.

I'm unsure why you're labled funny. I think you managed to hit the nail on the head. Autism an autistic tendencies might very well lead to a taste for minimalism.

This is a testable hypothesis: are there any other ways in which the interior of these houses is minimalistic? Interior blinds instead of (draped) curtains, leather instead of fabric on the chairs and couch? Vynil _or_ tiles instead of carpet?

I do think alternative underlying reasons for the correlation can and will be found :).