Ran across this today, from one of the other news aggregators I read.
This stuck out at me:
The harrowing 13-minute emergency call was played to a jury who heard the girl screaming: "Mummy!" and crying: "Why are you stabbing mummy?"

I was reminded of the bumper sticker:
When seconds count, the police are only 15 minutes away.

This Saturday I had the opportunity to go over to my parents home and play the new Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 on the Wii. I should mention up front that I only got to play for a couple hours or so, so this review might lack some depth. That said:
Graphics: If you bought a Wii, you either consciously or unconsciously decided that the new control scheme is more important than graphics. Certainly, this game looks pretty good, but it's not going to be blowing people away with the graphics. The characters do look pretty good, but throughout the game jaggies abound.
Interface (menus): While the menus are not normally something you think about in a game, you will think about the menus in this game for a long time to come. I wonder if the Wii version of this game was ever play-tested past the, "ok, it boots, ship it!" stage? I will admit that I never got to personally control the menus, and for that I am thankful. Watching my father try to navigate around the menu system was like watching a fish flop about on land as it seeks water in a final attempt not to suffocate. Now, my father does not have the finely honed pointing skills of his sons who wasted much of their young lives playing video games, but he is still not the epileptic the game made him out to be. Watching my brother, who did misspend his youth, work the menu system wasn't quite as bad, it simply looked like a fly with one wing torn off dealing with a sufferer of Turrets Syndrome. While he could get around, it was not in a fashion which was normal; and he would occasionally go zipping about in random directions. On top of that, the game would simply select an item, seemingly at random, and spit it out at you. While I tend to believe both my brother and father that neither of them was pressing buttons when that happened, I do still wonder if it wasn't caused by them strangling the remote in frustration, wishing for that action to be trans-substantiated to the developer who came up with the control scheme for the menus. If nothing else, this was a great learning experience for my brother, who is a game programmer, and now has a great appreciation for just how god fucking awful a menu system can be.
Interface (avatar creation): One of the neat features of this game is the ability to make a character which is uniquely you. First and foremost, this process is hampered severely by the menu problems listed above; however, if your persevere enough you can come up with a reasonable facsimile of what a love child between you and a chineese woman would look like. I somehow doubt that the built in golf-pros were created using this tool, as nothing we could do could change the eye and jaw structure to anything even close to the norms for those of us of Eastern European descent (aka standard Caucasian). After a bit, we just gave up and accepted that this really wasn't that important to the game. Besides which, with the dominance of the overly muscled white males (read: Duke Nukem types) in video games these days, I figure this is a good way to get away from that. Of course, I should note that we only spent about half and hour on creating my avatar, so we might have been able to work something out, but with the menu system being what it was, I just want to get to playing and let the torture of watching my poor dad fumble around in the menus stop. One last note on characters, you can only have 4 on a system. For many people this may be OK, but for families or groups who get together and play, this is going to suck. We ended up with avatars for me, my brother, my father and my wife. When we went to create one for a family friend (who is over regularly with his wife) we were told that we would have to delete one of the existing profiles. Now, my father's Wii does not have a lot of save games, he owns Wii Sports and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, that's it. Neither my brother nor I live at home, so we aren't loading his system up with tons of save games, so he has tons of free memory. Why can't we just take a few more blocks of it and add some more avatars? We'll let the game know when it has consumed too much, and delete some.
Interface (actual play): At some point, you'll finally get your avatar created, or just use one of the pros, and strike out on the virtual course to test your ability to whack a little white ball with a fucked up stick; or as it's known, play golf. The first thing you will get to do is select a course from one of several scenic locations. At the very least, I think they were scenic, but considering that some foul warlock had blotted out the sun, it was too damn dark to see the beautiful courses of Ireland. Now, first and foremost let me mention a problem we have noticed with my father's TV. It a 52" Samsung LCD HDTV, it's fairly new, having been purchased in December '06. But it seems that it suffers from a poor vertical viewing angle. The top of the TV sits at around 3 feet off the floor. So, standing, my eyes are just shy of 3 feet above that. And, in that position, the TV seems rather dark. Because of this peculiarity, In Wii Sports Golf, we tend to set up our shots, sitting down, and then stand up to swing; and this works quite well. In Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, you almost can't see anything on the screen sitting down, standing up, you'd do just as well to turn the TV off. Now, part of this might be that the Wii really isn't meant for HDTV's, it goes up to 480p and that's it. So, something (read: the brightness) maybe gets lost in translation. Though, I go back to the question of EA's QA, did EA decide that nobody who bought a Wii has an HDTV, so there was no need to test on one? Or, did they even do any testing of the Wii version?
So, you get your shot lined up at what might be the flag in the inky darkness, and start whacking away. With any luck, you'll hit a nice clean, straight shot. If not, you'll get a little arrow letting you know if you hooked. I would assume that it will also let you know if you slice, but that mechanic was strangely absent during our time playing. This is especially bad when you actually want to slice, on purpose, to get around an obstacle. While I have personally spent hours on the driving range trying to excise a slice from my golf swing, there are times when you realize that you can use it to your advantage. So, you open the club face up a bit, and bingo, you hit a shot straighter than an arrow. So, you open the club face even more, and wham! you have a shot straighter than a fundamentalist christian. In fact, no matter how hard we tried, a fade shot seemed impossible to come up with. For a game which bills itself as a "golf sim", this was a really bad oversight.
The gameplay wasn't all bad. Once you accept that you are shooting blind, and that you'll never hit a fade (draw shots do work); the game is actually fun. And crushing a shot out there around 250 yards is enjoyable. Chipping works pretty well, too. Putting though is odd. As you line up to putt you get this techno-grid with pretty lights running down it. The idea is that the lights show you how the ball is going to roll, and it actually works ok. The only downside is that it is distracting as hell. Though, since the game doesn't seem to pay much attention to your actual swing, it balances out.
Lastly, I should say read the dialog boxes on the screen carefully. During play, if you have more than one remote, they can occasionally go to sleep while you are waiting for your turn. If your turn comes up, and your remote is asleep, you will get a box telling you to hit the "1" button to wake it back up, or, hit the "1" button on another remote to end the game. Sadly, after several holes, this happened to me. Even worse, my brother, who had just finished his shot, saw the box and thought it was talking to him, so he hit the "1" button on his remote. Without any sort of, "are you sure?" type box, we were back at the main menu, our round of golf over due to a bad button press. Now, I do understand that too many "are you sure?" boxes get annoying quick, I've been using Windows for a long time; however, I don't think it would really hurt to have one come up when you are about to throw away a couple of hours worth of gameplay, because someone got jumpy on the button.
Conclusion: "EA sports, it's in the game." I'm not quite sure what "it" is, but in the case of Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, "it" is not a good game. "It" in this case may mean frustration, an evil warlock who has stolen the sun, or a golf sim which doesn't simulate much; but that's about it. I think my father put it best as, "I'm thinking about taking it back." He is, however, going to give it a few more days, to see if it grows on him; I'm betting on "no". Especially considering that after the "crash" of our round of golf, we switched over to Super Swing Golf for the Wii, which I had brought with me. Even having to deal with the fact that all of us were stuck playing the same character; and that we sort of had to figure out the controls by guessing and my iffy memory (note to self: always bring the manuals for games you haven't touched in a month or more); and the fact that it's very Anime, of which my father is not really a fan; still, all of us had a lot of fun with it; and it seemed to be a better golf sim, even with its quirkiness. If anything the quirkiness of the game just added to our enjoyment.
If you are looking for a hardcore golf sim, keep looking, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 isn't it. It has a lot of good ideas but the execution needs execution; preferably, the group who created the menu system first. It's an exercise in frustration just getting the game going, the actual golfing itself lacked any depth and light, and the game just misses out on really using a control system that is really spatially aware. But, with the way EA works, you can expect them to take another whack at it in '08. Maybe next time, they'll make a game worth playing.

I got a call late this morning. It's an adjunct faculty member. Apparently, she was just informed that she would be teaching a specific class, starting tomorrow, and wanted to find out if the lab was set up for it. Now, in this case there are no lab computers, each student uses his or her own laptop which is provided by the University for the program. After telling her this, and asking, "what class?!?" she sends me a document detailing the system requirements. It's not terrible, and I figure about half the class is currently good to go, the problem is, the other half's systems are going to need some work before tomorrow morning (technically, this morning, now). So, send out the mass email, "Please bring your system by and it will be vetted, and made right." And wait for the flood of students. Sure enough about 4pm nine of them show up with system in hand. Now, I expected I would be working late, that happens, it's part of being in IT. As I roll though checking and prepping systems, I have 2 start acting funny. Both are borking on the last step. This step actually involves installing MS SQL Express 2005.
Turns out that the first one had a corrupted WMI service, with the rights for it way out of whack. How it got this way, I'll never know, but I at least had figured that out and fixed it by 10pm.
This other one though, has not been so nice. It's now 3am, and I still have yet to figure the source of the problem out. The install goes beautifully, right up until the installer tries to start the sqlexpress service, and then it just hangs. If I let it sit for about 20 minutes it will finally time out and state that it failed to start. The install then fails and I am back to scratching my head. As I write this, I am waiting on that timeout again; seems that the latest attempt to fix the issue didn't do any better than the last few. Unfortunately, the student will need the system first thing in the morning, or I'd set it aside and go home and sleep for a while.
I'll be the first to admit that late nights are just in the cards for IT folk, but it still doesn't make these nights any less annoying. Ever just have one of those nights where nothing seems to fix the problem, and the hours are slipping by unnoticed? Take some time and share, after all misery loves company. ;-)

A while back I wrote in my journal about the idea of sending police officers out with cameras bolted to their heads. Well, apparently someone in the UK has been reading my journal. I was over pursuing Fark today and saw this. Apparently, some areas of the UK are actually putting cameras on the heads of their police officers. While the picture makes me think that the data is stored locally, i.e. on the officer, it's a start.
Of course, I expect that this will be used more as a way to prosecute people than a way to deter abuse, but it may just be the start we need. My primary concern at this point is how is the data handled? If it is incumbent on either the officer or a citizen complaint for it to be reviewed, then it's not likely to be very useful; if they actually review all of it, or at least randomly review some of it, this could help make things better. Also, does the officer have control over when it records? Ideally, it should be always on, with any gaps investigated with the assumption that a crime occured during such a gap. I doubt that this will be the case.
I do realize there are concerns about privacy; however, considering that anything the camera sees is going to be seen by the officer anyway, this hardly seems like an invasion.

The search is over, I finally found my Wii. Actually, to be completely honest, a friend found it for me.
Apparently, my friend stopped into one Toys R Us and asked about Wii's. They had just run out, so he figured that, if this store had recently received some, other Toys R Us's may have as well. So, he drove over to a different one and found several in stock. He purchased one for himself and one for my wife and me. Last night, I picked it up from him (and paid him back, obviously). After that my wife and I went to GameStop to pick up our copies of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, since we had pre-ordered them. While there we bought a nunchuck for a second controller, figuring that we may as well get one while we could. We then headed over to the Toys R Us to see of they had any of the Wii-mote condoms in colors we liked. To our amazement, Toys R Us actually had a bunch of Wii accessories. We turned a corner into one of the aisles and my hand shot out and grabbed a Wii-mote off the rack, my wife's hand did pretty much the same thing to one of the classic controllers. Both of which have been nearly as hard to find as the actual system itself. we also managed to get Zelda and Red Steel for the system. And, as the icing on the geeky cake, we bought the Zelda themed system stand/organizer. The two condoms which came with it were black/grey and green/light-green respectively, the exact colors we wanted. It also came with a green game/CD carrier with a Triforce on the front, and the Wii-mote condoms have Zelda logos embossed in them as well! Why yes, I am an easily pleased geek.
Last night we played with our Wii till 11:30, maybe tonight I'll install Burning Crusade, or maybe I'll just play more Zelda.

On my way to work this morning, my wife calls me in a bit of a panic. She managed to lock herself out of the apartment. Now, while this is one of those "doh!" moments, it's pretty understandable. The latch on our door is the kind which can be opened from the inside regardless of whether or not it is locked. Because of that we have both, on occasion, opened the door, stepped out and closed the door behind us. Then, when we go to lock the deadbolt we realized that we had left our keys inside. Fortunately, every time we have done this in the past either one of us has still been inside, or both of us stepped out at once, which meant that I was on hand. The reason that my being there is fortunate is that I am pretty good at "credit-carding" a lock. This being an apartment the lock is about as cheap of a lock as can be found, so it doesn't have an anti-credit card mechanism. The only difficulty is that the door opens inward, so any attempt to open it requires that the card be flexible enough to make a turn around the edge of the door, yet rigid enough to force the lock; a grocery store customer card works well. So, both times this has been an issue, I have managed to pop the lock in a couple of minutes.
Now, when my wife called, I'm about 45 minutes from home and getting further away by the minute. Remembering what she had seen me do, she asked if I could talk her though popping the lock. Well, I figure it beats me having to drive home to open the door for her so I start trying to explain how to do it. Besides which, if I have to turn around, I'll need to make it to the office first (another 15 minutes further away), just to let everyone know that I wouldn't be in for quite a while (or probably not at all). In about 10 minutes, and with a bit of verbal coaching, she has the door open.
It just goes to show that you never know when an odd skill you picked up as a kid will suddenly be very useful. Also, it goes to show just how worthless cheap door locks are.

Along with far too many other people, I have been trying to get a Nintendo Wii since December. So far, no luck. Part of the problem is that I haven't been trying all that hard to get one. I have yet to wait out front of a store all night for anything, and I don't plan on starting now. So, today on my way home from work, I decided to hit the usual suspects (I had heard that one local Target had received 50 units today an sold out already). Also, with my commute, I am able to make a few quick changes to the normal routine and hit several stores with ease. So, 10 stores later and still no Wii. I guess I'll just have to try again another day, possibly tomorrow.
The thing that struck me as truly funny in all of this was that, at every store I visited, there was at least one PS3 available. In one store, out of curiosity, I checked to see if it was the 60GB version, and sure enough, it was. I know that the Wii has gotten all of the press and that the PS3 has taken a beating in online forums and the like, but is it really doing that bad? Granted, I know that personally the only way I would get a PS3 at the moment, is if someone gave it to me, but that's just because I have only seen one game that looks good at the moment, and for $600, it had better suck me off while I'm playing. Whereas, I would dry-hump the leg of a store clerk who told me that a Wii was in stock. Even if all I could get was the system and the bundled WiiSports, I would be ecstatic.
Of course, my true shame in not having a Wii yet is that my father managed to buy one at the second shipment in December and he hardly even qualified as a casual gamer. Now he an my mother are WiiGolf an WiiBowling addicts. Though, they cheated, they were buying a $2000 TV and signing up for DirectTV at CircuitCity and just asked the salesman about it, he offered to hold one for them. They had gotten their first hit from my brother bringing his over an showing it off. He really cheated, he's a programmer at a game company, they get all of the cool toys first.

Working at a private university has it's trade-offs. I don't get most of the national holidays throughout the year. I don't get Labor Day off, I don't get President's Day off; however, I do get the entire week between Christmas and New Years off, with pay (actually I'm salary so it doesn't make a damn bit of difference for me, but the hourly folk get paid). With the campus closing down tomorrow at noon, and the commute I have, I have setup that I won't even be in tomorrow (2 hours of driving for 4 hours of work, not exactly worth it). So, I get to spend today making sure everything is done which needs to be done before the break, and thinking about how I'm going to spend my week. (and posting to slashdot in between. Hey, it's a slow say what do you expect?)
With any luck, said week will be spent playing with my Wii, I just have to figure out how to get a hold of it. So far, all of the stores have been emptied before I have managed to get up in the morning; but, I think I should be able to get it with this week's shipment.
On a related side note, the name for the Wii still feels wrong.

I'll start off by saying that I have read and liked the book. While it followed many of the fantasy stereotypes it was overall well written and a good read. Since the movie is supposed to be a retelling of the book, I'll compare the two from time to time.

The Good: The dragon looked really good. Obviously the dragon is done with computer graphics, but looking at it you can hardly tell. It's movements are very fluid and when they have Eragon riding it, it doesn't suffer from the obviously fake creature under a blue-screened actor problem, which is common in movies where you have a person riding some sort of creature.

The Bad: Just about everything else about this movie. Ok, so the book was stereotypical for fantasy, but the dialog was at least believable. The movie's dialog went from corny to bad to downright horrible. What few dramatic scenes this movie had were just ruined by dialog which sounded like it was pulled out of some Saturday morning kid's special. Which leads me to the next problem: This movie was about an hour short. The entire movie felt rushed from the start to the finish, none of the characters were ever developed at all. The movie kept jumping from one important scene to the next with overly dramatic music and a fly-over. Unfortunately, this transition usually signaled that the script writer had decided to skip several chapters from the book which had all of that boring character and plot development stuff in it. In the end this had the effect of preventing me from really caring about any of the characters. This really shows when a short way into the movie the character "Brom" is killed. In the book this is a sad event, as you had spent a lot of time learning about him and seeing his effect on Eragon. In the movie, he's dead so quick and with so little screen time that he may as well have been a Star Trek "Red Shirt" for all I cared about him. Because of this, the subsequent burial of Brom and the dragon, Saphira, turning his grave into some giant crystal just seems out of place.

Conclusion: I would give this movie a 2 of 5. What little of it there was, was fairly faithful to the book, and the dragon looked really good. But, I think that, if the second book gets made into a movie, the producers should really try to hire a writer who has actually read the book and not just the Cliff Notes. If you get a chance to catch this movie on HBO, watch it, but don't waste the money going to the theater for it.

Can someone explain to me why the Left Behind series managed to spawn not only a lengthy series of books, but also a made for TV movie (or series, I forget which), and now even has a video game? I made it through about half of the first book before the paper thin plot, 0-dimensional characters, and overall bad writing finally got to me and I had to give up. Does the series get better, or is this just fueled by a bunch of Christians looking for something to validate their faith in our modern world?
It's not that I have anything against Christian writing, though I do tend to stop reading stuff when it's obvious that the attempt to preach is getting in the way of the story. But of all of the good Christian writing out there, this one is getting attention. At the very least The Chronicles of Narnia tend to be good books, and thank goodness that they are now getting most of the press. While The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is a bit thin in places it is still far and away a better book than Left Behind. And Narnia tended to get better as it went along. Heck, even C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy was better than Left Behind and that one got pretty preachy towards the end.
Even doing The Divine Comedy would make more sense to me. So, what is it about Left Behind that has Christians going nuts? Is it really a good book and I just wasn't into it enough?

I was over at Fark and ran across this gem. And it occurred to me, we've already mandated (at least here in CA) that police cruisers have dash-mounted cameras in them, when are we going to finally break down and just require some sort of always on, remotely recorded, camera be worn at all times by police officers? While I tend to believe that 99% of police officers are good people who really do want to help people, the 1% that have lost (or never had) perspective are a real big problem. As a society we have given police special powers, in order to protect the common good, when they abuse those powers, they are in a position to do a lot of damage to the common good.
An officer mounted camera would be good for all parties involved. For example, the news has heavily covered this shooting recently. One of the key questions in the death is whether or not the officers identified themselves sufficiently. If each of the officers raiding the home had been wearing a camera (with audio, of course) this question would have been real easy to answer. As it is, the dash-mounted cameras have been a boon for both the public and officers. For the citizens, there is hard evidence when an officer goes overboard, and also the officers know that the camera is there, so it makes them think about what they are doing. On the other side, there are some great videos of people who will bang their own head against a police car's hood while cuffed, and then claim police brutality; in this case the video protects the police officers.
The technology is already there. Currently soldiers in Iraq are using helmet mounted cameras to record and post videos to the internet. I'm sure that adapting this to police work would not be hard.
Also, think about the advantage this would provide for evidence collection. Anything the police do would be recorded, which means that they don't have to rely on memory or recognizing important things the first time.

In case anyone missed it, I enjoy shooting guns. Going out with my Father and Father-in-law target shooting has always been an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday to me. While I do not own my own firearm right now, I do plan to own a couple eventually; mostly a matter of when money permits. Also, there is the fact that I will probably inherit a veritable arsenal of weapons when my Parents and my In-laws check out. My parents own a .22 rifle, a German Ruger (authentic WWII from my grandfather, the barrel needs replacing though, you can almost see your reflection in it where the rifling used to be), and a re-machined German Mauser rifle (My understanding is that the receiver was from an K98k, it had a newly machined barrel and stock fitted on it by my grandfather after he brought it home). My brother may want the .22 since it has some sentimental value to him as he learned to shoot with it in the Boy Scouts, I'll almost certainly end up with the other two. My Father-in-law is even more of a gun enthusiast, he has a several handguns (.44, .357, .22) two shotguns and a number of rifles (FN-FAL, .308, M1 Garand (reproduction)) My Brother-in-law doesn't like guns and I am certain at this point that they will be given to me and my wife when her parents die. Which means that I am going to have to buy a pretty big gun safe by then.
So, this week my Father-in-law asked me if I would go deer hunting with him. He's never been but has been invited by one of his friends (who goes occasionally) to go out next year. My Father-in-law is a bit worried about his friend's health, and does not see himself as being physically able to deal with a problem should one arise (e.g. The guy has a heart attack out in the forest). So, he asked me to go. Also, the friend's son might be going as well and he can be a bit of a loose cannon, I would be there as a counter-balance.
My first reaction was, "I'm not sure." While I do not have a problem with the idea of hunting in general, and I am certainly no stranger to a good cut of venison, I'm not quite sure I could actually kill an animal myself; survival situations excepted (I'm somewhat hypoglycemic, and I know that I have a tendency to be much more aggressive when my blood sugar drops). Like many Americans I have become so detached from the collection of the meat that I eat that I am somewhat squeamish the whole process. Even my Father-in-law is somewhat unsure if he will be able to pull the trigger. I guess Bambi really did have an effect on people. On the other side of this, hunting is used as a method to control the deer population. The alternative is either increasing the number of predetors to keep the population in check, or watching idly as the population outstrips the food supply and the population crashes due to famine. The former is not a good idea as eventually, there will be a lean year and we will have predators coming into population centers to supplement their diet, and those will be necessarily killed. The latter is even more cruel than hunting. Yes I realize the predator issue is really a descendant of the issue of human encroachment on wilderness areas, and I don't see it stopping as our population continues to grow. Though, I am sort of hoping that as we fall below replacement level in births in this country that our population declines.
In the end, I have agreed to go, pending the cost of the trip. It's actually a local trip, but there will be a hotel stay involved and ammunition costs and any other gear and food we need. Also, assuming we actually kill anything we will end up paying for butchering services and possible skinning and tanning for use in making gloves or boots (assuming I kill something I intend to use as much of the carcass as I can. Though no mounted heads or antlers, that's just creepy.) Also, if there is enough horn I have an associate who makes custom knives, and I would probably have a horn handled hunting knife made.

Some days the ability of the internet to bring people together, or back together, amazes me.
Today was a fairly typical work day. Backups are ticking along, Dell is being slow to respond as normal, get a couple of quotes in and get the PO process rolling, answer the odd question here and there, all in all a light day. I go into the server room to talk with the building engineers, answer a few questions about our A/C deficiencies. When this building was built 2 years ago the sever room's A/C unit got changed on the drawing and no one noticed; end result is that we disipate about half the heat we generate. Fortunatly, we have a locked work room in front of the server room, so I can keep that door open and use fans to keep my servers from baking themselves. Unfortunatly, the process to get this fixed has managed to be more dragged out and difficult than it should have been.
Anyhow, after sorting that out and answering a few questions for my tech, I head back to my desk and pop open Outlook (Yes, I'm mildy email addicted). In my box there is a new message with a familiar name and an odd subject line. The funny thing is, if the name is correct, then the email must be from a friend which I haven't seen in nearly a decade and had prety much given up hope of ever seeing again. Open the email and sure enough, it's that friend sending out one of those, "I'm not sure if this is the right person but..." emails. Well, it turns out that he hit the nail on the head.
Obviously, I sent out a response asking all kinds of questions: how are you? where have you been? etc. One question I couldn't aviod asking was: how in the world did you find me? As I wrote it, I have a feeling that I know. So, I go to Google and type in my name. Sure enough, my resume comes up first hit. It's the policy of the Institute I work at to post employees' resumes, sans address and any worrying information. Given that the email came to my work account, I am fairly certain that this is how it happened.
I guess I shouldn't be too suprised, but I just can't help thinking that it's truly amazing how the internet can help people reconnect. I was almost certain that I would never hear from this guy again, but there he is, emailing me.

At my place of work (a University) we are once again facing licensing costs for a number of software packages as students come in. Specifically, we have a number of students who are given laptops as part of their program, on which we normally install a suite of software. Because we don't want the costs of the program to spiral out of hand, we have a hard limit on the amount we spend per laptop. As is often the case, it's a balaning act. We need a reasonably powerful system, as the students will be working with ArcGIS and can end up doing some pretty massive analysis tasks. We don't want systems which weigh too much, since most of the students will end up either carrying the system in a backpack regularly and/or will need to take the system in the field to collect data (it's a masters level program, so they have to do a real project for it). and, of course, we can't spend a ton of money on the system.
So, normal installs include: Windows XP (Included in the laptop cost, and requred), ArcGIS Desktop (required, but we get it at no cost. Thank you ESRI.), Microsoft Office (I'm thinking about getting one of the instructors to give OO.org a whril and see if I can move us that way.), Adobe Acrobat Pro. (We need PDF authoring.), Photoshop (Right now I'm seeing if Gimp will be a good replacement.), EndNote (For tracking bibliographic references, etc.).
The problem is, all of this software costs money, and a significat chunk of the laptop cost is being eaten up in software costs. When the new director of the program was faced with the costs for Photoshop he was a take aback. At that time, I was able to convince him that it might be worthwhile to pursue other, free, options. So, has anyone out there tried this? Any suggestions? The list I need to replace amount to:

• MS Office
  • The replacement has to cover Word, Excel, and Visio
  • Also need a replacement for Outlook with the same meeting and calendaring functionality
  • Also would want to replace Exchange while I'm at it
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Acrobat
  • Has to be able to generate and read PDF's. The Arc products output PDF's, so this is a hard requirement
• EndNote

While reading either Slashdot or Fark, I ran across a comment along the lines of Thomas Jefferson having been opposed to a standing army, in order to reduce the temptation for the government to go on militray adventures. Needless to say, that this was a comment made in a discussion about the current war in Iraq and the possibility of war in Iran. So, I started chewing over this idea (I have an hour commute each way to and from work, I spend a lot of time letting my mind wander). I found that the more I thought about the idea of disbanding the military in whole, the more it appealed to me, though there needs to be some limitation on it. So, in thinking about it, I came up with an idea for a way to change our current military and probably society as a whole.
So, here's my proposal for an amendment on this (It would need to be such, as it would radically change accepted federal powers)
1. During times of peace, the government shall keep only such a standing military as is necessary to maintain and monitor equipment which provides for the detection of and first response against any attacks against the territories of the United States.
2. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, upon reaching 18 years old or upon being being naturalized, if older than 18 years, shall be required to spend 1 year in either militray training or public service, at the descretion of said person.
A. Such military training shall not include any service in a war zone, nor shall it include any service in actual military operations; unless such involvement is the only option to prevent an imminent attack on the territories of the United States, and may only last as long as is necessary to prevent the imminent attack.
B. Upon completion of the military training program, each person who chose military traing shall be issued the current prevailing weapon for infantry use. Each person shall be responsible for the maintenence and storage of said weapon.
C. Public service shall be defined as those public works projects which are necessary or beneficial to the country as a whole. Such public works may not include direct support of the military or its infrastructure.
3. Upon formal declaration of war by Congress, the President shall be authorized to recruit soldiers for the execution of the declared war.
A. Recruitment may only occur on a volutary basis. Under no circumstances may the government force any person into service.
B. Such recruitment shall last for the lesser of 4 years or the duration of the declared war. In the event that a war extends beyond 4 years, Congress must formally declare such a war again to allow recruitment to continue.
C. No person, who has volutarilly been recruited, shall be forced to serve in the military beyond 4 years. A person may voluntarilly sign up for more than one 4 year term, but must wait at least 1 year after the end of each term to do so.
D. Only those persons who have completed the 1 year military training may be recruited.


So, the first obvious question would be, why? Why would I want to change the way our military exists so drasticly. The first reason is cost. The US people spend a ton of money on the military (aoubt 4% of our GDP goes to it currently, not counting the war in Iraq). This money could be better spent elsewhere. We no longer need a military which is capable of fighting a full scale war on two fronts, the technology of war has changed so much that such a war would be suicide to begin with. Moreover, we do not have an enemy which is capable of providing a major threat. While Al Queda et al. may be bent on the destruction of the US, they have neither the manpower nor the resources to do more that cause a few thousand deaths, with a bit of luck.
The second reason is to remove the temptation and ability of the Executive branch to engage in wars across the globe, which are not actually defending our country. While it could be argued that Afghanistan was a threat to this country, in that they were providing material support to Al Queda, it would be hard to say the same of Iraq. While Saddam was a bad person, and probably would have supported attacks against the US, the need to engage in an invasion and occupation is questionable. Then we look to Iran, which it would seem that the rehtoric is starting to build up as our next invasion target. Again, Iran definatly does not like the US (for some valid and some invalid reasons), and they might consider supporting groups who are attacking us; however, I don't see that pre-emptive war is really the way to go. Such an argument could eventually be tied to any such action, no matter how much of a threat a country really posed. It would seem that Rome had Carthage, we have the Middle East.
The next bit of my thinking lies with the idea of keeping our country safe from its own leaders. I fear a police state or military coup far more than I fear terrorists. Yes, the destruction of the World Trade Center was tagic; however, the chances of being killed by terrorists are still very small compared to the multitude of other ways to die. Statisticlly, I am far more likely to be killed driving into work each day than I am to be killed by a terrorist attack. The easy way to prevent such occurances, is to have an informed voting populous. Failing that, a populous who is capable of resisting oppression is the next best option. The amendment above would create a trained and armed populous, would elminate the military as a threat to that populous and as a possible source of coup and would keep the government from raising an army to oppress the people easily.
Moving on from there, one of the other things which this amendment would do is eliminate any sort of military draft. I should state that, I view forcing someone to go fight in a war is one of the greatest infringements on a persons rights, in my opinion. Not only does it infringe on the liberty of the person, it quite possibly strips them of their life as well. For a government, which is legitimatly supposed to secure a person's rights, to so thuroughly infringe upon them is unconsionable, in my opinion.
Now, before someone points out the seeming paradox in my logic, yes, the above amendment would require that a person either accept a year of military training or a year of public service. However, this would not be directly putting the person's life in danger. One of the ideas which we accept with a government is some level burdern placed on each of us for the operation of that government. Usually this is taken in the form of monetary taxes. The year of training or service is simply an extension of this. Like all taxes, it does impose on a person's rights to some extent, however, it does not carry with it the possibility of such total destruction of a persons rights as does a military draft. In effect, this year would be a time tax. A person would spending a year to help secure or build the country.

I'll add some more comments as to my thinking when I have more time later.