I always log out and post anonymously.

Doh!...

... I heard that Julian Assange has accepted an invitation to speak publicly in New York City's, Central Park on November 30, 2013 at 6:00 PM. I also heard that large numbers of people were going to show up dressed as Julian Assange. Is there any truth to that rumor?

I'd have to disagree. I'm using FreeBSD on my laptop right now. I think it makes a great desktop. Linux supports more hardware. But if (and it's a big IF) your hardware is supported by FreeBSD, then you're better off running it.

"poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women". We could add deforestation, global warming, dwindling supplies of fresh water, etc.
But aren't all these symptoms of an exploding human population over the last few centuries and especially the last few decades. If you don't do something to fix that problem, then you're wasting your time and money on anything else. I like capitalism too but I don't think capitalism solves all problems and a fair number of problems are better addressed with socialism.

I'm grateful for Slackware because that's how I discovered that it was possible to use a PC without being trapped in the tyranny of MSWindows and various other expensive proprietary software. I still have the 4 CD set Slackware 96 from Walnut Creek as a souvenir. I wonder if old software CD's are a collector's item like baseball cards or comic books.

I think all administrators and teacher and parents should be required to read the following:
http://georgedpcarlin.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/george-carlin-on-children/

You're right about the word "homophobia". In a witch hunt, the problem is not that people are afraid of witches. It's that they're afraid of people whom they think are afraid of witches. Similarly people who are called "homophobes" aren't really afraid of gays. They're afraid of the reaction of heterosexuals who might think they're not anti-gay enough.

Northern Indiana?

In an earlier time, the voters would have approved of broadband access as a public utility without much hesitation. We still have some public utilities today in the wake of those times (thank God). But such debates today are off-limits due to corporate ownership of the media. Notice how quickly Obama threw the single-payer advocates under the bus when the debates over health care began. That was a complete capitulation to the health insurance industry.(And some of you are naive enough to believe Obama is a liberal or even a socialist). Look for the Mayor of Seattle to be demonized as a "communist" throughout the right wing echo chamber.

I love it when the scientists try to distill their work for the layman and resort to these sorts of explanations. In this case, here's what I got from the summary. The universe was full of things. God wanted to measure one of the things and when he did so an unmeasured "control" thing popped into existence because of some sort of uncertainty principle. In fac, the control popped into existence for each of the things in the universe. So every thing was now a pair of things, one from the universe where one or more things was measured, and another in the original, unmeasured universe, and the divergence of the properties between the pairs of things is what we experience as time.

Apparently, in France the government has the authority to distinguish between a cult and a religion. The U.S. government (and its states) would be expressly prohibited from having this authority by the 1st amendment to the U.S. constitution. I think the U.S. Constitution is correct in this regard. Government shouldn't have the authority to declare whether any religion is legitimate or not.

Python is being suggested frequently here. If you do go with that, I'd strongly suggest taking a look at the Spyder IDE:
http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/
It's especially useful for scientific work and entirely cross-platform. I even have it running under FreeBSD.

The DNA is long degraded. That's disappointing I was looking forward to barbecuing up mastodon steaks.

Am I the only one who sees the irony in the "Communist Party" overseeing "the privatization of state-owned assets"? It's like "we'll go instantaneously from the extreme totalitarian left to the extreme totalitarian right without passing through any democratically controlled space in between. Oh, but we'll hang on that 'Communist' brand name because to admit that didn't work would be losing face."

I take it from the anti-spending tirade that you're among those who think that overly inflated teacher salaries are at the root of the failure of education in the U.S. I thought about becoming a school teacher once. Many people who know me have commented that I would be a very good teacher. But I became an engineer instead. Why do you suppose I decided to withhold my services as a school teacher?