This is actually pretty smart social science. If you wanted to, you could gather actual statistics about PC saturation in households and the divorce rate or church attendance, and you could do the same for gaming.
Am I the only person who thinks it could actually be interesting to see what that would look like?

There are a few reasons why these typical excuses ("we're providing liquidity to the market;" "We are eliminating market inefficiencies") which hedge funds continually offer to justify their own behaviour sound shriller and staler with every passing month. In this case they definitely don't hold water.

1) This system trades only in the very largest of large cap stocks, which are covered by the news media in massive rivers of text, and traded in oceans of volume. If it is fair to say that a trader in these shares would ever have to wait for someone wanting to make the opposite trade, it would be safe to say there were maybe only 5 dollars in the world. Arguably, adding more liquidity to these markets does not help, but actually hurts, the security and stability of the markets. We have learned that lesson time and time again.

2) We are dealing in microseconds here, and in a battle of speed between computers, all of which make trades faster than a human hand can click a mouse. it is no longer valid to say that waiting times need to be shortened, or that inefficiencies need to be eliminated, from a market like this.

These trades are ultimately mercenary in nature, and shorting massive quantities of a stock in a short time period like this is precisely what triggers sudden drops like the one we saw in the US recently. The Germans have it right, and and the hedge funds will need to find better excuses to defend the status quo which caused the financial meltdown of the past three years.

Agreed - on a Lenovo s10, going to Lucid from Fedora 12 is like what it must have been going from Vista to Windows 7, for Windows people - waking up from an ice age. I installed fedora 13 on release day yesterday and couldn't have made a better choice than to junk it and go for Lucid.
I have it installed on all my systems now - it's a silver bullet for all those bugs that various distros had on various hardware. Hands down the best linux yet.

The most important thing is going to be to get a full-fledged Linux desktop onto people's little ARM devices, with a Thunderbird they can configure and an OpenOffice they can run. If people have that they are going to use it, and then it's going to be fashionable.
The most important job belongs to Aaron Siego and Arnaud Laprévote here - it's make-or-break to get a proper, usable Linux onto these devices, and not some flimsy excuse for an OS. If they can get a Linux into people's hands which they can use, they will!

How about a wikireader app for a mobile phone that reads Wikipedia off an SD card in the phone, rather than a separate device?

I also have been working this way for years. The small European company I currently work for actually had no office for a chunk of time before I got hired, and its entire workforce of half a dozen people worked this way. This has been going on for a long time actually.
I won't say I disagree with people who miss the social interaction aspect of the workplace, but people who need a workplace for social interaction might try thinking historically about how people were OK at social interaction a long time before they had offices. It's a pretty nice trade-off to be able to be in any country you want.

But upside or down, they still need the volatility to make a buck. Two sets of quant traders' boxes sitting in hedge fund offices somewhere pulling against each other equals volatility - without a connection to things like the performance of the businesses.

The typical justification for this type of trading is that it "eliminates market inefficiencies." But the problem is that these kinds of short-termist hedge fund strategies work by exploiting price volatilities, so they actually thrive on, and need, volatility in the market. There are some times when it can actually magnify them, creating price bubbles, etc. When large volumes are traded through quant strategies like this it's easy to see how that could happen. Some box says 'buy' because prices rise a millionth of a click; then a million shares are bought, driving the price up further. Other traders who follow the really fast quant traders follow suit, and then you have a price bubble.

I don't know who your average slashdotter is, but I guess compared to most of you all I'm a regular joe, and my backup method of choice is to have a whole second computer. Who doesn't have one kicking around? And if not, even so the price of a second drive is what it is, and then you can go to the pawn shop and choose between a USB bridge for it, or some ancient, probably hot laptop with a standard drive bay in it?

This is good Foucauldian history. The author has an excellent point about a nearly invisible way that choice is structured in our age. The fact that the word 'default' has a long etymology, like all words do is natural enough - and even that the technology had a predecessor in the way that NY subway trains were routed in the 1930s only serves to reinforce the author's point. Nothing is ever born out of nothing: it evolves - repetition with a difference. What the author has identified is a really important aspect of the management of knowledge in our age (all the more clearly so because it appears so 'basic' to us), and I think it's really insightful.

To the contrary! I feel optimistic about it. Take what he says at face value: this is one of the first acts of the new guy stepping up to lead Hungary, equivalent to Obama's closing of Guantanamo, and it's meant to send a message. And the language he uses is that the move is intended to "foster competition" in the marketplace, and to "encourage the growth of free thinking" (to render the second paragraph of the article Charles Dodgson posted above). It's beautiful talk coming from any government, no?

Also, note that the budget concretely will be 12 billion Forint for "Microsoft/Novell" and the same amount for FOSS. Whether or not that's including Novell's OSS products, it's a nice fat wad of cash in Hungary, let me tell you - it will mean rivers of money for programmers in an open source community which is already strong, and it will strengthen interest in open source among Hungarian programming students, PC repair folks, power users, etc. I really can see it making a difference culturally.

Rocks DO need backing up. Scribes in Sumer maintained traditions over thousands of years of recopying clay tablets to preserve them. Even the ancient Persian conquerors of Babylon constructed museums of the already very ancient objects they found there. The same was true of later scribal traditions on leather and parchment which preserved classical documents for us, and the ways of reading them. In fact, if it weren't for the far superior concern for posterity the middle ages showed, we would not have the smattering of knowledge about the classical world we have managed to hold on to.

I am a linguist who studies clay tablets and ancient writing systems, and let me tell you, I lose sleep over this problem every day. What will happen (and note that I don't say would, because it is inconceivable that the "cloud" will last a thousand years, let alone five thousand) when they don't know what kind of electricity we used? Where will the remains of our civilization be? There is a basic point here which the "wayback machine" doesn't go far enough to answer. Where will they find our information stored, and how will they ever, ever, devise a way to read it? Bear in mind that we have trouble deciphering the earliest and most primitive writing systems ever devised even now. There are still dozens of these we can't read, and many more we haven't even rediscovered yet.

And, it turns out, a lot of what has happened to survive for us to read from all that time ago really is about as exciting as server logs - receipts for tithes, buying and selling grain, etc. And those tell us so many surprising and extraordinarily valuable things about the way the people who produced them lived, which the documents they intentionally preserved (such as king lists, prayers, mythologies) would never have thought to mention. So don't underestimate the value of the information you think is worthless! A thousand years from now they will regard you as a deluded primitive, but they will be interested in your internet traffic and your credit card records. But of course, don't forget to preserve the art too.

Cowards can be right sometimes too!