KDE is definitely a nice desktop environment, though I confess I'm still a big fan of KDE3 (and even Windowmaker). There are still a couple of things I just don't get though, so there's still some room for reason to prevail as the KDE4 platform matures. (I'm using opensuse 12.3, for the record).

1. It annoys and scares me that all of the Plasma desktop widgets seem to have an option where they can be controlled remotely. I absolutely don't understand the point of that, worry about its security implications, and find it a waste of disk space.

2. No offense (and this is coming from a guy who prefers KDE over Gnome) but a lot of Plasma desktop applets are really useless. I can dig the newstickers, RSS feeds, comic-of-the-day stuff, etc. But what's up with the red bouncy ball? What's the point of that?

3. I'm a bigger fan of the KDE4 apps than I am of the Plasma desktop (even if I do respect and agree with how they've made it into a system that can produce different screen/work environments for tablets etc. instead of the Gnome "stuff-it-down-your-throat approach; Win8 as well). And there are some great KDE4 apps. But Kontact is not one of them. I anxiously install and run it on every new desktop, thinking "this time, it's going to work." And it never does. Kontact on my opensuse box regularly gets hung trying to open a "choose a file" dialog box (say, if I'm attaching something to an email). I blame its ridiculous database and akonadi semantic crap foundation. I find myself using Sylpheed or Thunderbird, but more often I just go to Mutt, which remains unsurpassed for the power emailer. But Kmail/Kontact has so much promise. Why can't they ever get it right? (by the way, a QT alternative I like more and more is Trojita. It's standalone, super fast, and interesting.)

You know, just noticed something about most of the responses to this article: most people saying "I live near a major city and still only have X.Y bandwidth" are American.

This seems to be a reminder that lots of the world has awesome broadband (S. Korea anyone?) while the United States of Dysfunctional America is still struggling with crappy bandwidth and monopoly provider ISPs.

You'd think the NSA would lobby for better bandwidth so they have more interesting stuff to listen to.

It's an interesting article, but I have trouble sympathizing with anyone "suffering" with low speed DSL. I lived and worked in Benin, West Africa for four years, with a DSL connection that was barely any faster than dial-up. I even got myself a dial up connection as well, to compare, and found them nearly equivalent during most of the day.

Here's what I learned about it: http://www.therandymon.com/index.php?/166-Life-in-56K.html

I can tell you one thing, the idea of downloading an ISO and burning it just disappears. Youtube is not an option (I don't even bother clicking on the links). And most crappy webpages stuffed to the gills with scripts, javascript, counters, ad displayers, and the like, are useless. I did a lot of websurfing with Lynx, which I'm surprised to say was a better experience for many sites, including sometimes this one.

Good luck with your DSL, buddy. I hope you don't suffer too much during the drone wars.

This doesn't bode well for the electronic textbook industry, and it's their own damned fault.

In theory, I'd personally love digital textbooks. Searchable, I could carry them all with my on an appropriate gadget or gadgets the way I can access my Barnes&Noble books either on my Nook or my Nexus 7 on a Nook app, etc. I didn't think I'd like ebooks since I like the paper versions so much, but over the past two years I've actually come around to the idea and now like it very much.

But look at the history of textbook selling. Over the past twenty years they've gone to desperate measures to destroy the resale value of books that are otherwise perfectly resellable, via once-only mandatory digital downloads, problem sets that are only on line and that expire, and tricks like that. That is an unholy annoyance to any person with a sense of dignity, and it's all to inflate profits for publishers that want to sell a physics 101 textbook for $100, and then sell it again a year later regardless of how little the content has changed.

So if this is the "company" you're doing business with, why would any rational consumer be stupid enough to accept going to a digital format? If that's the way you do business you can guarantee it will be DRMed out the whazoo, be untransferrable to other devices, expire/disappear if they can make it happen, and all that other funny business. And that industry would LOVE to sell you the digital version for the same $100 they sold the paper version.

I'm glad to see the digital textbook business die at the moment, but every failed attempt is another nail in the coffin for these rapacious publishers intent on surviving by screwing over the consumer. Once they've crashed and burned, the market will be ripe for a more honest textbook seller interested in a different business model. The sharks on the market now? They can all go piss off.

Never under estimate the power of "a free an unfettered marketplace" to encourage rapacious companies to live well by screwing the consumer.

Free, huh? That's the right price.

I was actually one of those hold-outs sticking with XP (rather, my bosses at work were, since it's their machine) until last year. Last year we got Win7 and I really am surprised at how much I like it.

But Win 8 and brothers? No way. They'd have to pay me.

I'd read about this before ... last year, I think. It's not exactly news.

Having had to do some normal things in IE8 this week, I'm reminded that if I were forced to use that browser I'd probably spend a lot less time on the Internet (maybe that would be a good way to kick the addiction?) I find IE to be a stunningly unusable piece of software, that perfect nexus of slow, not helpful, and capable of choking on a website like a box of dicks.

The cart has run away with the horse. It doesn't matter what they do now, he's a popular hero whose reputation is growing as fast as popular discontent/outrage is growing against the tactics of the NSA and the failures of the administration to stop it or even come clean about who knows what and when.

This is a huge problem for the government - once the popular hero becomes truly a hero, their every effort to try him or bring him to justice deepens the hole they're in, and god help the US government if Snowden goes to jail - he'll immediately become a demigod.

They should use this as a wake-up call and change tactics or hopefully even policy. But it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

Run, Snowden, run.

I'm not sure there's an issue here. There are ton of VPS providers out there that you can build anything you want on. Odds are, anyone who wants specialized services (or the broad range of services) you do needs to build his own server anyway, since you have to set up and config each service.

I wanted something unusual - a news server delivering NNTP - plus some other stuff. I got it at http://www.rockvps.com/. They offered me a network address, a bunch of monthly bandwidth, and a bare FreeBSD server I could do (almost) anything with.

How is what I wanted different from what you want? Sounds like if you want to build out a server with some special demands, you need to search for a good VPS (there are dozens, if not hundreds out there) and go for it!

Not sure there's a crisis here. Unless YOU are working for the NSA and this is actually a devious scheme to get us to help flesh out your database, ha ha ha.

Haw, haw, haw. If you're appalled by the gall, the outrageousness, the cojones then you've been duped: this kind of stuff is happening all over the place. When I researched and wrote the Dictator's Handbook: a practical manual for the aspiring tyrant in 2012 I found dozens of examples of this kind of stuff. In the words of an expert, "it's not the vote that counts, it's the count that counts." Have a look at chapter 11 covering elections for some other good examples, including Russia, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, and elsewhere. Hell, there are even some good examples at home, but why bother citing them when the NSA is watching me type?

I'm not going to say democracy is flawed, it's in fact probably the strongest of systems that attempt to bring order to a flawed species. But democracy is a game that's too easily manipulated, which makes dictators of the sort that read my book all-too-capable of having some fun to keep power. Welcome to the real world.

That reminded me to go have a look at Foxit, which is a great little PDF reader and more for Windows. They used to have a version for Linux (unless I'm remembering wrong?) but just went to their website and saw no trace of it.

Did they give up trying to sell to us freetards that don't want to pay for software? If so, too bad, it's a pretty good little PDF renderer. I'm using Okular, and like it too. Evince I'm not a big fan of.

Cool demonstration. The last time I had a similar experience (except for the low bandwidth and latency) was about ... yesterday, when I used Lynx. It's still a great browser in my opinion. I prefer text, and it's fast on sites like nytimes.com or linuxtoday.com which both spend so much time loading crap and analytics when using a regular browser that they're almost unusable in my low bandwidth environment.

I still like Lynx and don't care that I don't receive all the pics and javascript shininess and flash advertisement and crap. I just want to read the damn articles. Even Slashdot on Lynx is decent.

You guys both have it slightly wrong.

The last time this happened, everyone was split into two groups: "essential staff" was required to come to work, but for no pay because even in absence of a budget it was dangerous for them to not perform their duties (the guys who fix broken traffic lights, for example, and others). The other grou was "non essential" and sent home with no pay.

After the budget was resolved, everyone came back to work and was paid for those days. But the essential staff complained that although everyone got paid, the "non-essential staff" basically got a free vacation and were paid for it, while the 'essential staff' had to work for their money.

The economists agreed it was basically unfair. So while at some point the political folks can make a decision about whether to pay back-pay or not, there's no guarantee. In fact the fair thing to do is not pay back salary for the non-essential staff, since they did not perform their duties.

Point is: they have to decide what to do, and there's no guarantee anyone will be paid for their time, which sucks.

Well, it's a democracy, and the people voted. That's good. But they voted in a bunch of Tea Party imbeciles. That's bad. Congress debated competing budget proposals. That's good. They were all politically-driven, ideological dreck more intent on sinking Obamacare than on reaching a deal. That's bad. The government is closed! That's bad. But security ops are still funded. That's also bad. But it's still a democracy! That's, uh, aaaa, hang on a sec, that's go- I mean b- that's, well, hell, I don't know if that's good or bad. Can we hand it over to a strongman tyrant now, so we can do away with the endless debate over nothing and actually get something done. Maybe this book would be of some use to the new guy?

Oh my God, Gopherpedia is the coolest thing to catch my attention in years. This is awesome - truly a spectacular project.

I used gophernet at Cornell back from '89 to about '93 and for some reason, retain a strange nostalgia for it.

I sympathize with the submitter: dude, your situation sucks. I know of a similar case. Why do so many women decide to have a kid before deciding they're lesbian? That sucks.

On to the phone: I've got young kids, and I'd personally choose the cheapest price (read: easy to replace) and strongest build quality possible. I'm thinking of something like a $20 Samsung clamshell. Put speed dial on the keys, so your kid long-presses "5" to reach you and "6" to reach grandma and "7" to reach social services (kidding, that last one, ha ha). 4 year olds are perfectly capable of understanding this.

On the other hand, that phone is going to get sand in it from the sand box, fall out of a pocket from the swings, and get peanut butter and jelly on the screen. It's going to fall into the bath tub and/or toilet approximately once a week, etc. My kids are 5 and 3 and you'd be amazed the things they do to electronics.

I'd not get the kid a smart phone, even if it has fun games. You want games, get him/her something else like a fun kid's tablet or an Xbox or something. Keep the phone a phone, so he/she can talk to you every day.

Bonus points: don't give the ex-wife the number. "I'm not a misogynist. I don't hate all women: I only hate YOU!"