To "The Toe" : terrific list. I've read some and now will plan to read the rest. I'll add one: The Difference Engine.

Here in Hawai`i, where electricity in Honolulu is about $0.32/kWh right now (over $0.40 on some of the other islands), ditching the incandescents was for us a really easy decision.

Sagemath seems like quite a good freeware alternative as well. I've come to prefer it to Scilab (though the Scilab simulation feature is pretty awesome).

Wish I still had my Epson 286. It was actually good for doing work.... I mean real work, not writing a letter with 100 fonts in it or making a spreadsheet so large and complex that no one could ever find all the errors in it.

That's exactly what corporate people do all the time. Salespeople blitz into big corporation/government manager's offices and sell a bill of goods. The managers are hardly competent enough to know if anything is any good. Then later when staff complains the same salespeople are back to sell upgrades or consulting.

Granted that open source projects sometimes lack something in the user interface, I'm not sure that closed-source proprietary products are necessarily better, although the big companies do have the resources for significant usability testing and design. But that can be seriously abused, too. MS changes interfaces at will. Look at the "ribbon" and even worse, Windows 8. Where was the usability testing there?

"Because when you are handicapped and you do something great it's not the great thing they talk about it's the being handicapped part. It's patronizing"

You have a point and I can't myself speak to that aspect. However, the rest of us can learn something from these stories, which is that you can overcome the odds and saying "I can't" is just an excuse. This woman would have had all kinds of excuses but she doesn't think that way. Like I said, something big to learn from that.

I think all the warming/no-warming climate-change/no-change argument misses an important point. There may be controversy and uncertainty, but it's got to be to our advantage to act prudently and reduce emissions. In other words, do we dare take a chance? It's a shame this has been reduced to politics instead of objective science.

"While the anti-Americans world-wide are wagging their fingers at the US, China is killing itself with pollution" Of course fingers are wagged at the U.S. Isn't the U.S. responsible for every evil ever created, past, present and future?

As a former owner of a small studio back in the 90s I regret the loss of quality as reflected in poor playback conditions (ear buds, bad headphones etc.) and the ubiquity of MP3s (no they do not sound the same, and it's the difference between pretty good and superb). I recorded to 16 channels of analog tape with Dolby S, and it was fantastic quality sound.

The other side of this, though, is the easy availability of very good digital processing equipment. Now that the standard is 24 bit, there are no longer headroom problems and the noise floors are low. A studio like the one I had would be today largely superfluous, or at the least not very busy. (Good mics still cost, and, leaving aside possible questions of technique, that's where many home recordists seem to fall back in quality.) Music is easy to distribute.

So it's hardly all a black picture. The marketplace delivers what the market demands. Live with it.

It's something all slashdotters can agree on, Mr. Pohl was true greatness and has left a legacy that will last for generations upon generations.

This is the usual argument, which has two points. (1) There is (are) killer feature(s) in Word that Writer doesn't have. (2) I need Word compatibility.

As to item 1, I won't presume to tell you what features you need. If there is something in Word that Writer lacks, and you can't do your work without it, then your choice is made for you. (At times, of course, those important features either do really exist in Writer or are not truly mission critical, but I can't judge that for someone else.)

As to item 2, compatibility, that is a real issue in organizations that do any amount of exchanging documents outside of their own sphere of control. Writer compatibility has vastly improved, but I know there are issues and I know sending a PDF is not always an option (and you probably won't get the other party to switch to Writer).

That said, as a retiree (without an office to deal with, praise heaven), I go with LO at home because it runs on Linux and it has no cost. I do run into compatibility issues at times but I just live with them. It isn't worth a few hundred dollars and the unpleasant experience of working on a Windows system.

That's a really good point. If MS had no competition at all just think what they could--- and would--- charge.

Except ... well, we have politicians in the mix. That was/is as true with the atomic weapons issue as it is with climate change.

One thing we have today that's different is political correctness. That wasn't such a big thing during the peak of the arms race and the cold war.

I can see little possible good coming from the politicization of science. Nor can, frankly, I see much good in making science "politically correct."

Science should just be science, objective and dispassionate. The conclusions are whatever they are without regard to popularity.

I am no Microsoft fan but I have to ask why this is being flagged as a problem that Microsoft didn't fix?