Programming something I'm not particularly fond of is better than spending 35 hours/week I'm probably even less interested in. Obviously you have to put in those hours in order to make a living, and the point of this article is "if you didn't have to do it for a living (i.e. you already have more money than you need), what would you be programming?", not "what would you do with a tons of money?"

You'd even copy and resell it on a mass scale? No, you obviously can't do whatever you want.

Georgia Tech fully supports Linux, from ssh/scp, wan, san, and printing, to full desktops and software. Linux student software distribution. In addition, it even provides full linux OS's (just rhel). Everything you stated above is at Tech also.

I never had a single issue running Linux (gentoo) my entire time there, and there was a pretty decent LUG there too. In fact, even my freshman English courses made us use Linux for some tasks.

I live in a rural area of the old deep south, and have yet to hear that applied to him even one time, anywhere. I've heard him referred to as a "commie", but nuthin else really. It must happen of course but I haven't heard it. Most folks don't seem to care one way or the other about his race, that part isn't important at all, there's basically just a general distrust of the federal government, and it doesn't seem to matter who is in charge or not.

Like most other areas, either the traditional choice A or B gets voted for in the big elections, but there ain't a lot of love attached to the "lesser stupid big city urban 'tards" vote choice either. El shrubbo the lesser received a lot of condemnation from people around here all the time the last 8 years, I heard that a lot, and that big bank bailout..shazzam, man people HATED that...

    Most people voted for him, ..hmm..sort of like when confronted with the choice of having to cross the street and only having the option of stepping in dog crap or some wino's vomit as you exit the curb. You still need to get across the street, so you make your choice, don't think about it much, and start walking...

    There's just this feeling of near despair and mostly disgust, that nothing that ever comes out of washington will be anything but something that enriches a few fatcats at the top, meaning the DC and manhattan axis of power and greed "top". And I share that view 100%.

When I was much younger and just getting involved in politics I just didn't see it, but since then, having lived both heavily urban and rural, with a scosh of suburban in there, both in the north and the south..I can see it readily now. The US is a nation that still practices internal imperialistic colonialism (along with the external we all see obviously). No one wants to really acknowledge it though, but that's what it is.

There's one topic on slashdot where you can see this come up all the time to prove the heavy split, and that is the great debate on rural broadband. You can see the imperialistic supporters dismiss the notion that people in the rural areas should get broadband..even when almost all of their urban life is heavily subsidized from rural economic exploitation. They can't or won't see it, seems to be impossible.

    That topic and the great "mass transportation" topic. We are all supposed to be riding the subway and carrying sheets of plywood and bulk firewood and cows and refrigerators on the backs of bicycles according to the mostly urban audience here, and we are lucky we don't get fined for daring to do otherwise. Oh, and also lucky we get some pittance back from washington with not just strings, but chains and shackles attached. We should be grateful for that. Yass massah, we uns bes greatful and stuff....thankee kindly fer only using the small whip this time... ... and how dare we not want huge packs of timber wolves living in the backyard with us, we must be backward hick yokel "anti environmentals" or something, and we should feel lucky that every congressional session another huge swath of useful employment is deemed dangerous to the three eyed flying newt so it is made illegal. Oh, it's OK to get the same stuff from china or elsewhere where they *eat* the three eyed flying newt, after first smashing it with boards to soften up the meat while it is still alive, because that increases their "stock portfolio" worth by shipping all the blue collar jobs over there and for destroying ag here. That's good for urban "business". Urban business increases "IT" jobs, so it must be all good!

That's one of the reasons I chime in on those debates, it is the epitome of political and social junk science that is believed fervently by most heavily urban centric folks I have found. They just *can't* see it, it is invisible to them, but their contempt and derision shows plainly, and is reflected in their heavily urban centric mainstream media news, their culture with TV shows and movies, etc, and is reflected in our national politics where anything that might help the rural areas is termed wrong, or harmful... It is rare to see depictions of either rural folks or southerners in anything but the most derogatory terms.

I'll tell you of the places I have lived, including where I am now, the top place for the most blatant racism and class elitism and snobbery..*Boston*. Hands down.

And the worst place for normal human values..NYC. I have never been ANYPLACE where people would just ignore a frozen to death dead person on the street, like I witnessed when visiting there. All that huge wealth, and thousands of centrally heated and cooled buildings..and people freeze to death on the sidewalk and the average passerby just looks up and doesn't see it and keeps walking right on by.

    Yes that happened to me, I was the one to go find a cop, me, joe grizzly zog who had hitchhiked in just to see "america's city!!" walking around gawking at the buildings, more or less looking like crocodile dundee with my backpack and complete with big belt knife on my side (my dad's WW2 navy knife), I went to the cops to report the frozen dead guy.

I will never forget that, that's my impression of heavy urban "culture", just not giving a care at all to your neighbor. Oh, and I happened to be there during a "garbage strike" as well, the same exact time. Wasn't that just *lovely*. Rural areas "trash their environment so they must be punished" with more taxes and stacks of regulations and permits and so on, because they want to do some logging or mining or farming, and NYC type urban areas just wallow in garbage and trash when they aren't sticking it on ocean liner sized barges and just hauling it out to sea to be dumped, making it "invisible". That trash then I saw was some feet high all over the sidewalks and had spilled out all over the street and was being smashed flat by cockroach hordes of scuttling honking yellow cabs and huge steenking buses provided for people who can't walk two blocks on their own steam.

  And they put US down...

Years later after that event, I found myself with a serious folding money job offer (web work back in my mac days), with one caveat..I had to move to NYC. It would have meant near quadrupling my gross pay, and I turned it down instantly. Some things just ain't worth the money...

Why is a space program such a high priority? Manned missions to the moon are completely useless at this point. Unmanned missions are cheap. Pretty much anything would be a better use of money than moving a huge bubble of air and human to the moon and back so we can gawk and take pictures.

No, they didn't do it right, they just chopped the functionality out. This is determined by the launch services database and the LaunchServices framework. The only thing you can use to "set" something using LaunchServices is the function LSSetItemAttribute, which only supports kLSItemQuarantineProperties. There's also stuff like LSSetExtensionHidden, but they didn't add anything for this.

There is no way to programatically influence what application a file should open in when running on Snow Leopard, and there was before. This is a significant loss of functionality. Text files are a great example of this; if I have a set of text files (or even XML) files that I like to create using with BBEdit because of BBEdit's feature set, I want to open them in BBEdit again. I don't want to save one, open an info window in the Finder, and select BBEdit from the popup menu, that's just stupid.

If I'm saving PDF compatible files in Illustrator with a .pdf extension, I still want them to open in Illustrator! Not with Preview or Acrobat.

There are only two ways to set a file type in OS X: using a file extension (which is stupid, but supports the lowest common denominator) or HFS+ meta data (which is actually a good idea, because it's file meta data). There's no new extended attribute where you can set a UTI or other attribute that influences launch services other than quarantine (if you happen to find one, run to the top of a very large hill and yell loudly, preferably screaming the name of the attribute; then put a recording of it on YouTube).

Ideally, you'd have more file-system metadata to determine this kind of behaviour, but the "change" popup in the Get Info window only modifies the .DS_Store file next to the file you're inspecting.

The reason would be thinking really long term. As in, on a scale of hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

No, of course sending people to the Moon or Mars will not produce "profit" (in the financial sense) on a scale of years or decades. But in the extreme long term, we'll have new worlds to populate, new planets to colonize.

We can't stay solely on Earth forever.

Sure, but where's the comparison here?

All I see is an AND. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. TMI didn't hurt anyone and everything was done right, but it's still a situation that's worth avoiding in the future, no?

Daily Productivity Loss I hate you, but not as much as I hate myself.

The slashdot post makes it sound worse than it is. It seems there are 150 firefighters on Mount Wilson the observatory as their highest priority. While mother nature is always unpredictable, we have a large group of skilled people fighting very hard to save it.

We're moving to project constellation with the Ares series of rockets and the Orion space capsule. A 5 year delay doesn't mean we're dropping NASA like a ton of bricks, it just means we're not wasting money keeping the shuttle fleet running when there's a private sector version available. Hopefully it'll be cheaper, but even if it isn't giving the private sector a boost isn't all bad.

Yeah, it's something most Slashdotters haven't heard of called "socializing."

They're not stealing money, they're just asking for it. You guys are the idiots giving to them. I keep my money in my mattress.

Statistically, it's more dangerous to let kids play at a house with a pool than at a house with a gun.

Wow, you're an idiot. It costs much more money to copy a book or a shirt than to just buy a mass produced one. Videogames, and all other non-DRM'd digital media, can be copied in seconds at nearly zero cost.