Sorry, that's a crock of shit. Linux is ready for the desktop of the average user. The issue is that they should not be required to install it or do anything beyond okaying the installation of a variety of security updates to the software they use.

I've set quite a few people up with Ubuntu in the past year or so, compared with previously saying "don't do Linux". Your average user now has a real set of expectations from a computer. Linux can meet these needs and expectations, and there is a huge reduction in support headaches when you've convinced people only to install stuff made for their distribution and in a searchable repository.

Dealing with getting real people to use Linux is having someone with a clue set up support for Flash, DVDs, and stuff like that. The one I found hilarious was a friend who's used Windows for years - he asked what bittorrent client you could get for Linux. When I told him Ubuntu installed one by default, well, his jaw hit the floor.

but the problem is not the one the police chief is making it out to be.

The problem is that it is utter waste-of-space career political figures such as him don't like criticism. There are laws and processes he can follow to make a case for someone's identity - if he can show reasonable grounds that they have committed libel or deliberate defamation.

He says, "There ought to be a law against people saying nasty things about me."

I say, "Get lost you ignorant pigfucker. Don't go into politics if you can't stand being publicly criticised. Oh, and expect to have to pay for legal advice before you make yourself look like a rube hick crying to the press about what your critics say."

Honestly. If they're not litigious bastards, they want the laws changed or fabricated out of fictional whole-cloth to engineer the political landscape most suited to their aims. Constitutional protections are just an inconvenience.

But, but... You can escape to another box! For you have telnet.

Sheesh! Where you going to get all that data to grep if you don't go exploring with telnet?

What possible use would having the boss of Verisign in their back pocket be?

Verisign fulfills a 'trust provider' function by signing people's website certificates. The only use for that would be to have a clean certificate for, say, a typosquatting site.

Don't people remember what happened with Phil Zimmerman over PGP?

The munitions classification on encryption software was used against him for posting the PGP source code on Usenet. They really, really wanted to nail him to the wall over that one.

There was a certain irony in the restrictions on exporting crypto software deemed 'munitions'. You could take the source, publish it as a book in an OCR font (with the page numbers between comment delimiters), and export it anywhere in the world.

On that basis, I would be fascinated to hear your description of the BBC, considering how outrageously right-wing Fox really, and consistently is.

Unfortunately, it doesn't mean 'apt-get cure-for-cancer' works.

Yes, it is ideology if your choice of college or university is governed or significantly influenced by "Does it run Linux?"

It's a goddamn lie! I swear it! They're all FBI agents!

I wouldn't so much respond with "Who cares?", as with "Get your ideology out of here!".

Unless you are actually studying CS or IT, then Linux versus Windows versus OS-X is irrelevant.

Regardless of your own favourite platform, an institute of higher learning has to deal with reality. Sorry to break it to you, but that means that they are not going to invest in staff time and training on the off-chance someone wants to use Hanna Montana Linux. They're going to provide the computing resources they believe you need for your time there, with the lowest level of expenditure they can get away with.

That means you're on your own for Linux support. There might be a local user group, or the odd Linux user in the IT department, but that's it.

You're wasting your time asking about Linux, particularly asking the tour guide who's doing this for brownie points with future sales or marketing employers. Ask the college IT department, and *don't* ask about Linux, ask about which standards and protocols they use. Then you can decide if your Linux laptop is compatible with the college you'd like to go to.

Digital Personal Property? Why the fuck is anyone trying to apply real-world realities to something that is fundamentally different? What would be productive, and for the long-term benefit of society, would be to educate people about the differences, the reality of digital information, and the inescapable reality that duplication costs are zero.

Copyright is a social contract which has time, and time, and time again been abused and violated by large corporations and their lobbying groups. This DPP nonsense is a sop to their war on the public domain and the rights we are used to enjoying.

This proposal? Well, let's smoke some MPAA/RIAA crack and spend a fortune making computers work in a way that suits their old business models.

And then the morons at the recruitment company exclude all but the liars from the selection process. Go figure.

Binary is useful, because that really is how the computer does its calculations. Sure, for your convenience the machine has been set to work in base 10, but if you don't know binary you're clueless about the limitations of various types of numbers it uses and their binary representation. A classic example of this I encountered was a scientific application that had been enhanced by programmers from a financial background with a really, really strange error. Lots of different people looked at the problem, lots of them were baffled, but the damn problem wasn't going to be understood - or fixed - until you actually looked at the underlying numbers and their manipulation. Binary is useful, and is a cornerstone of computing. If you think it's useless, go back to writing tic-tac-toe programs.

Bullcrap. As I commented above, you don't know enough about computers if you think knowledge of binary is useless. Touch-typing? Well, it *is* useful, and nobody in their right mind wants an office full of people trying to use speech recognition software.

The technology is not obsolete, as I and others have explained. As to "skills to be taught in the workplace"? Get real! Most companies do not want to spend any money on training people to do anything. Just trawl the IT jobs market for proof of this, you'll find adverts laying out skills requirements (in terms of x years use) for new programming languages that could only be gained if you'd been one of the developers writing the damn language.

I really, really think anyone who's voted for AI is pretty clueless about the state of the field.

Unless you're talking about a small shell script that monitors Fox News and regurgitates Republican talking points. Even I could be convinced that was smarter than a random redneck.

Quite.

I seem to remember some floating-point error with Pentium processors.

I suppose the healthcare equivalent would be the 'wonder drug' Thalidomide.