Funny, but also maybe relevant. Boston is one of many cities that resulted from the slow expansion and merger of a group of small towns that were essentially separate communities before the days of modern transportation. It has lots of "centers" that used to be separated by forest and farmland, but are now a continuous urban area.

It's not hard to find other cities that developed this way. Other cities grew from a specific original center, usually a port area, and were never a "merger of equals". I wonder if the study distinguished these two major cases, and has anything to say about what (if any) structural differences we might find between them.

Does this include ads?

I can only presume your talking about research grants combined with salary, despite saying "The average salary" because otherwise you are simply flat wrong. The average salary for (full) professors in the US is $98,974.

I've done a number of demos of what a site can do to you with pre-fetching. I make a page that shows viewers a few pictures, but also has "hidden" links that you don't see to other images, videos, etc. There are several ways of including such links without the browser actually showing them, which I won't waste time with here. I also include at least one link that's visible as an ordinarily link pointing to a large file that takes a while to download. After talking a while about other parts of the page, I tell the person to click on that link -- and observe that the content shows instantly, although it's obvious large and should take a while to download. This gets across the concept of pre-loading, and why it's useful. But I can also explain that it means stuff you never looked at may have also been downloaded.

Then I tell them to take a look at the source (perhaps teaching them how to do that), and point out the hidden links. I invite them to imagine what the pre-loading could have "installed" in their browser's cached without their knowledge. For instance, they could now be on their local government's terrorist or drug dealer or religious heretic or kiddie-porn lists because of what was just pre-loaded, and the evidence is sitting in their cache. I invite them to discover just what those links actually pre-loaded. And no, I won't tell them how to do that, any more than an actual hostile web site will.

Sometimes I grin and tell them that if they haven't done anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, right? ;-)

Actually, the hidden links generally point to rather innocent stuff, like tourism photos or wikipedia pages or cute cat videos, but they don't know that unless they figure out how to see the hidden content. The most useful is probably a page that simply explains that I could have linked to anything on the Web, and I'll leave it to their imagination what could be in their cache as a result.

Heh. I have a number of friends (acquaintances, colleagues, etc.) who are giving up on IOS, after numerous cases of their apps rejected by Apple, and then in many cases duplicated a month or two later by an Apple app. This tends to lead to a certain amount of what we might call cynicism about the whole process.

I like to remind them (or tell them, if they haven't read their history) that this has always been the story in "cottage industry". You do the work on your own time, and the employer then decides whether what you did deserves pay (and often keeps the rejects rather than returning them to to the worker). Historically, people working in cottage industries have been rather poor, since the employers control the market and take most of the income for their own coffers. In the modern software industry, the employers also normally claim any "intellectual property" that you develop, which of course includes everything that you create if you're a software developer.

But it's nothing new; it's how "unregulated" industries have always worked. Maybe it'll be fun (in a historian sense) to stick around and see how it all plays out in the long run.

You're arguing from a misconception, and looking like an idiot doing it. I haven't "lost" anything, because I'm not in a competition with anyone. This war that you think I'm fighting against Microsoft exists only in your own mind.

It is undeniable reality that millions of people, many of them non-technical, use a Linux desktop every day. You can make up your own definition for "year of the Linux desktop" if you like, but good luck getting everybody else to follow your lead.

I won't even throw a temper tantrum if you dare to present an alternative definition.

Which suggests that for your first job or three, the people hiring you will, indeed, care where you got your degree.

This is false. (Where are you getting your information from?) Not only are they not required to check, both Visa's and Mastercard's policies say that although the merchant may ask for ID, they cannot refuse a transaction if you refuse to show it.

Discover apparently does say that they should check alternate ID if there are any suspicions, although it doesn't require it all the time.

Sources:
http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guidelines-for-visa-merchants.pdf
http://www.mastercard.com/us/merchant/pdf/BM-Entire_Manual_public.pdf

While it's common in the US, both Visa and Mastercard policies say that merchants should not accept a card with "see ID" or similar instead of a signature. Technically, the merchant could be on the hook for fraudulent charges if they accept a card without a signature.

From a practical point of view, I've only heard of refusal to accept a payment because of that once or twice. But the cashiers aren't obligated to check your ID to validate the signature, so you don't have much call to get mad at them because of that.

That's their definition. It's by no means a universally-accepted one.

If you want to argue about whether or not particular goals have been met, then you're going to have to define what those goals are and who is trying to achieve them. The phrase "year of linux on the desktop" doesn't do so.

There is no standard for what the "year of Linux on the desktop" means, so it's not possible to move the goalposts. The fallacy that you reference cannot apply.

Linux-based OSs have had reasonably advanced desktop functionality for well over a decade now. Millions of people are using one of them as their primary OS today. The AC is right. Your "year of Linux on the desktop" is the year that you decide to use it.

Does Netflix give you everything you want? Then just subscribe to that and be done with it, no more complaining needed.

If not, then the existence of Netflix doesn't really say anything one way or another about whether a similar model works for whatever it is you're interested in.

I have no idea why people are arguing with you about this. The evidence (not least from the desktop computing industry) is everywhere, with catastrophically declining sales over the long term, offset by increases in mobiles and tablets—which, incidentally, Linux has already won, though in large part by leaving the distro community behind.

Linux could actually conquer the desktop in the end—a few years down the road when desktop computing is a specialized, professionals-only computing space. The users of other desktop operating systems are slowly bleeding off to mobile and tablet.

But this can only happen, ironically, if distros and devs stop trying to conquer the desktop in the present. If they continue down the path they're on, the long-term desktop community, which would be a natural fit for the Linux of yore, will probably be on some other OS. (MacOS? Surely not Windows at this point.)