You don't have to pay for a copy of Firefox, so nobody's worried about an infringing copy phoning home.

(Speaking from experience, from when I was poorer and couldn't afford a couple of licenses.)

An excellent rebuttal except for two minor points:

* GP is AC so we don't know who they are.
* If we don't know who they are then we can't be sure they're not John Carmack.
* John Carmack has developed plenty of stuff in OpenGL, and still favours it.

I know that's technically three points but I haven't achieved much with my life or written any 3D software, so I need the extra point in order for my opinion to count.

People already figured that out. From the post you're replying to:

If you want faster flash right now then the buck stops right where you say it stops. Buy a faster computer.

If your cat has a nuke, then its past data will also not apply. Also there are a lot more cats out there than terrorists: There are 64 million house cats in the US, which is more than the entire population of humans in Iraq.

We already know that cats look at child pornography. Acquiring the materials to make a nuclear weapon is just the next step.

Access is important. Owning, sharing, borrowing from a library are all means to access.

DRM is about controlling access, which is what we worry about. Will we be able to look something up from this book later on? Can we hear the tune we like again? Will that be possible? Will it drain all our spare money away just to remember things we like?

I did the scripts because I found that I always had one workspace empty - a blank desktop - so I made the script update things automatically so that there was always one empty desktop. However as you suspect I had trouble because previously I relied on the spatial layout of the workspaces. I used Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right to move through them in a horizontal row (because then they're not too small on a small panel).

I think dynamic workspace creation could work provided they remember their position or order. If there was a means of telling what task a workspace was then they could be sorted primarily by task type, and you'd choose the order of task-types somewhere. Ultimately a task type would begin from a set of program launchers and shortcuts to documents and folders.

At the moment I'm using Gnome on Ubuntu 9.04, and I make use of workspaces quite a lot. I like that implementation most out of everything I've tried so far. I tried making a script to automatically create and remove workspaces but it seemed a bit clunky (which I think was mostly down to my implementation - it polled the output of 'wmctrl -l'), so now I just have several by default.

Yeah, plus spaces/workspaces offer the added benefit of being able to see multiple task-relevant windows at once. For example one to read from and the other to type into, or having multiple information displays at once.

What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).

THEY do! They're everywhere, clicking the links in the summaries on tech sites.

They could've called it Graham

There is at least one open source IDE: MonoDevelop, licensed under the GPLv2.

The British system as I recall - starting age 4:

7 years primary school.
5 years secondary school (after which education is no longer compulsory).
2 years college or some secondary schools teach the same courses as a "sixth form".
University, 3 years (or 4 with a work placement) bachelors degrees, masters and upward.

Also they changed the numbering system to use zero indexing, so year 1 is actually the second year of primary school, but year 0 is called FILE_NOT_FOUND^W "reception". When I was there it was divided into 3 years "infant" followed by 4 years "junior".

Yes. I have had full screen flash in Linux for about a couple of years now, ever since I started using it.

The income from a service should ideally be proportional to how good it is. The income from a good should ideally be proportional to how good it is. The income from a work of art should ideally be proportional to how good it is. This would encourage people who want more money to provide better service, make better goods and create better art.

The way I see it though, a more popular artist would likely attract the attention of more people prepared to pay, so there would be some kind of relation to popularity. But people being prepared to pay when they don't have to might make for a more substantial measure of quality than just popularity alone.

I can also see art being made for the people who pay rather than marketed to children who would likely just take a free copy.

It's kind of cute. They should make it fluffy. But not self replicating.