$360,000

-

That's a good move for KDE, and it helps users a bit, but does nothing to help you find and install the applications you want in the first place.

Photoshop is the big exception, and it probably only worked because of "photo" right in the same.

I've never heard of someone "iTunesing" or "Winamping". Nobody has ever "Firefoxed" the web, or "Outlooked" their e-mail.

The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees... It was always a ridiculous argument, since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.

But here, the employees are trained and working on Linux. So how is it that the fees for all that Microsoft software, PLUS the retraining fees, PLUS the undeniable reports of money savings, are still going to make a switch to Windows somehow worthwhile?

Seems to me that any ISP that redirects browser HTTP requests becomes liable to suit from the customers - for substantially more than $20.

Microsoft now likes to act like they are an open source company that believes in open standards.

But they DO. It's step one - embrace:

1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit.

Well, they cannot become martyrs by just dropping dead. At least they have to kill some unbelievers as well...

Actualy, they CAN become martyrs by dropping dead - after deliberately NOT leaving the area of a plague and thus avoiding the spreading it, at the cost of their own lives.

Martyrdom doen't just come from being killed in a religious war.

Another way to become a martyr, for instance, is to die in childbirth.

Yet another is to die while defending your home and/or family from robbers or other attackers (as my wife pointed out to a crook who was trying to extort "taxes" for a local gang.)

According to a report I saw (following a link from the Drudge Report yesterday):

1)The early symptoms of Ebola are very similar to those of Malaria, to the point that people with malaria are being thrown into the ebola quarantine camps. (Also: Many of the people who HAVE ebola, or their support network, may THINK thay have malaria.)
2) The camp ran out of gloves and other protective gear - leaving the staff and patients unable to clean up after and avoid contagin from the body fluid spillages of the actual ebola patients. Come in with SUSPECTED ebola and you soon have ebola for sure.

That, alone, would make it rational for someone not yet sick or mildly sick, incarcerated in the camp, to break out and hide out.

3) Stories are circulating in the area that ebola is a myth and the oppressive government factions/first worlders/take your pick of enemies are using this story, plus the odd malaria case here and there, to create death camps and commit genocide in a way that gives them plausible deniability.

That idea, of course, can lead to mass action by some of the local population to "rescue" their fellows and sabotage the camps.

The whole think is a real-world example of the cautionary tale "The Boy who Cried 'Wolf'". When the officials lie to the people for their own benefit, repeatedly, until the people come to expect it, the people won't believe them when they are telling the truth about a real threat - and all suffer.

Ebola is one mutation away from being airborne transmissable. It already happened with Ebola Reston -- fortunately for us all, that turned out to be transmissable to monkeys but not humans.

I've heard reports that it may have happened with this one, too.

It doesn't have to be as GOOD at doing airborne transmission as, say, the common cold, to be a BIG problem.

Nobody knows for sure. There was a recent analysis that purported to show that the King's gambit is a loser for white, but even that wasn't a completely exhaustive analysis. Instead, the analysts decided to prune any line that resulted in a sufficiently lopsided position as presumptively winnable, which reduced the analysis to something tractable. But even that was for just one possible line of play, and one that was considered relatively easy to analyze. Nobody has come anywhere close to solving the whole game.

You must not have looked very far, then, because checkers- also on the list- has no random element, at least when played from the standard starting position. In some tournament variations, the starting position is chosen randomly from a few positions with the first few moves already made, but beyond that it has no random element.

In any case, it's not clear that inclusion of a random element is a bad thing. One of the drawbacks of chess is that the lack of a random element allows it to be analyzed in depth in advance. That places a huge emphasis on memorizing standard opening libraries, which seems counter to the point of individual strategic skill. In contrast, games with a random element can't be analyzed to the same depth in advance. That forces players to adjust their strategy on the fly rather than relying on somebody else's analysis.

Nuke the server from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.