I agree with the idea, but it will be much easier for special interests to buy a few state legislators than it is to buy the majority of voters in a state.

No matter how they're chosen, senators have way too much power.

A good friend would have just loaned him some money to pay the ransom.

Appearing in a peer-reviewed journal isn't a stamp of authoritative correctness on a paper, just that a few people thought it was worthy of some space in the journal. Peer-review is (supposed to be) just a rough initial filter to cut down the noise; if a paper is actually good and useful it will be cited often.

Who do you think is doing all the work? From my experience as a grad student, the faculty are more "outside observers" than grad students, especially in the student's thesis area. Faculty tend to deal a lot more with finances and administration than research.

If the distros see that as a problem they should change their licensing. I'd like to see some kind of organized Linux branding too, but WalMart and Asus aren't getting away with something sneaky here. They're expressly allowed to do this, just like you and me.

Then they are incompetent. A lot (most?) of the music services besides iTunes used Microsoft's DRM before they went to mp3. I'm pretty sure that it's built in to Windows Media Player. Microsoft has the dominant DRM scheme on non-iPod media players, which is also integrated with Windows Media Player. Microsoft has been working on these technologies for years.

Microsoft should have been in an unparalleled position to roll out a service like this. It is another incomprehensible example of one Microsoft division acting completely unaware of the products of other Microsoft divisions. The same thing happened when the Zune didn't support PlaysForSure. What the hell is going on there? If someone has a good explanation, I'd love to know it.

The real shame is that Doc Brown never had to get involved with terrorists after all.

Everyone knows that Apples can only be used to kill aliens.

You're about five years behind the times, bud.

They get over it and pay to upgrade equipment and training. If they really cared about how their computers work, they wouldn't have been locked in to a single vendor whose entire business plan is forcing upgrades.

Well, as I remember the story, the original fundamental goal of the project was to teach kids critical thinking and self-directed learning by giving them a computer they could easily tinker with and reprogram. You were supposed to be able to push a button and see the source code for every piece of software on the thing. I think they were also using a lot of Python (or some other scripting language) so that it would be easy to experiment with the code.

First, the view source button didn't work when it shipped. When they later started offering XP it really drove home that they had abandoned the critical thinking goal, and had decided to just sell fancy ebook readers.

So originally the goal was to empower a portion of the recipients to make their world better. Now, the goal is to stay relevant.

I really want to see Norm Abrams building GNU software.

Always wear your safety glasses while building!

I think wiping your ass with an iPhone might be like using a ball of rubber cement to pick up more rubber cement.

What kind of education would future law students get if the relevant discussions from this very forum were not archived and available?

I think you forgot to mention Xenu.

And the donations.