This whole issue is ridiculous. Look, I'm not going to get into the moral debate over capital punishment. What's ridiculous is how people can't seem to figure out how to kill someone efficiently, humanely, and without drama.

Forget all this "lethal injection" nonsense. Just go with nitrogen suffocation. It's cheap, you get drowsy, you fall asleep, and you don't wake up. End of life, end of drama. Done. Christ, you'd think this was difficult like calculating the orbit of a mars probe or something....

Why all this focus on phones? How about the idiots who are putting on makeup, stuffing their face, having an argument with the person next to them, or dealing with rowdy children in the backseat? I've seen all of the above produce some truly horrific driving that nearly resulted in calamity.

Or how about the morons who *just can't drive safely in the first place* yet who wind up with licenses churned out by states who treat it more as a revenue generator than a regulatory process? I've seen plenty of incompentence out there as well.

But I've also seen a lot more self-entitled jackasses who just *have* to get where they're going 2 seconds faster than the rest of the traffic driving hideously irresponsibly and recklessly.

Sure, phones are a distraction.. but so are a lot of other things.. (Including, I might add, being blinded by the 4 billion lumens of police flashers at night or in adverse visibility conditions..) Some people can manage them competently while driving. Other people can't even manage the *car* while driving. Yet I don't see anybody having a "get idiots off the streets" crusade...

I mean, back when I was in high school.. the local D.A.R.E. program put a smashed car on the school lawn with a sign that said "50% of all traffic fatalities are due to drunk drivers." Well, that means that an equal number are due to stone cold sober drivers who are just too incompetent to be behind the wheel, but I don't see any outcry about *them*.

I dunno how secure they are.. I mean, I heard that Kevin Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone..... It was all over the news.. I mean, the government wouldn't lie about something *that* serious!

As another hater of the War on Drugs, I still have little sympathy for the person pulled over because of weed stank.

Seriously, if you can't be professional enough to at least plastic wrap your 30 lbs of weed in multiple layers of plastic wrap with at *least* one layer of instant coffee in the middle to cover up the dank, you're just lazy and don't belong in the business.

Except "you get shot once, and you are dead, and you couldn't rejoin the multi-player game until it was over" isn't realistic either, at least not according to the 55,000+ Purple Hearts awarded as of 2012 in Iraq and Afghanistan.. vs the 5200-ish combat deaths in those conflicts..

Apparently it is more "realistic" to be able to survive a bullet wound.

"personal computers used to sell for 4 digit numbers in the past."

They still do, if you want a decent one. But yes, prices have dropped.

The only place prices *haven't* dropped, in aggregate terms, is enthusiast computing. 15 years ago, I could build something really "bleeding edge" for $4-5k.. Today, as more capable enthusiast products have cropped up.. getting to that "bleeding edge" threshold could potentially cost me 5 digits.

I can't really say that Peoria has been a cultural touchstone for humorless reactionary behavior..

I grew up in a small suburb of Peoria.. lived in the area most of my life, so I know a few things about the city. The "Will it play in Peoria" statement dates back to the Vaudeville days, where Peoria was, at the time, the measure of "average joe american" entertainment preferences.

The town is many things.. some good, some bad. I can't say "humorless" though (we did give the world Richard Pryor). or even terribly "reactionary" compared to some places..(I haven't heard of any 5 year olds getting expelled or suspended for drawing a picture of a gun or a knife here yet..)

I will say one particularly negative thing about Peoria that materially impacts understanding the story in question.

"The town is a cesspit of corruption."

Seriously. Most people in the world think Chicago is bad in terms of that.. Well, Peoria gives them a significant run for their money.. just on a smaller scale. Everything bad about government... graft, double standards, backroom dirty deals, criminal complicity of the police force and prosecutors, extortion, organized crime, members of city government and their friends getting free passes on criminal activity, journalistic collusion...

It all goes on here in spades. You can't get a city contract unless you're buddy buddy with somebody with influence, scratch somebody's back, or hand them cash under the table. We have judges, prosecutors and cops openly snorting cocaine in downtown bars, sometimes with city council members.. parties at the big downtown hotels with hookers and blow and prominent citizens..

The police dept and the media collude with city hall to underreport crime.. I know of at least a dozen murders that have happened since the first of the year that have received no mention in any of the local press.. all to reduce the damage that accurate accounting of the city's crime rates would do to the city's reputation..

Why is that important? Because how how *filthy* city politics has been in Peoria for decades, nobody gets elected in this town without two things.. first, being dirty to the bone, and second, having a deep belief that they are entitled to a very different standard of treatment than the rest of society.

It's very much a "Legal? Who gives a sh*t. I'm the law in this town." kinda thing.

So the question I would ask you, as a board member, is "Who was responsible for oversight of the OPW program?"

I understand that keeping track of the finances is rather a pain in the ass, but at some level, somebody has to be responsible for doing it, somebody has to be responsible for looking over the shoulder of the person who is supposed to be doing it, etc. Eventually, one would assume, the buck has to stop at the Executive Director, the person who presumably is responsible for making sure that everything the organization does is working.

This would, if my chain of reasoning is solid, put this solidly in Karen Sandler's lap, and this makes the timing of her resignation suspicious indeed.

Of course, that said, I admit to knowing *nothing* about the inner functioning or organization of the Gnome Foundation. But I've known quite a number of business owners, bosses, and even a few CEO's who had some form of "The Buck Stops Here" engraved on some kind of desk widget or other. The good ones kept it as a reminder that they were responsible for what occurred on their watch within their organization. The bad ones kept it as a gaudy sign of their own power.

And while I'm certainly welcoming, in principle, of any initiative that engages in outreach to women in tech.. I would also question *why* the Gnome Foundation chose to implement such a sizeable outreach program when it doesn't particularly correspond to anything in its primary mission statement?

These questions aside, I'm glad to hear the Foundation will be able to patch up its finances in reasonably short order.

You're really on to something here, Tigersha..

Just looking at my own little town in the USA, the effect of culture and environment are tremendously noticeable.

The other kids I went to school with from grades 9-12 have now all grown up and gotten very diverse lives for themselves. I haven't myself, for various reasons (whole other story), but when I correspond with them, the effects of culture are striking.

My former high school consists of two primary populations, White Suburbanites and White Rurals. We did have two "token" black families... who were pretty much just "White Suburbanites with Really Good Tans". So we can rule "race" right out.

Between the two populations.. The "White Rurals".. whom we call "rednecks".. primarily have jobs working at gas stations, doing manual labor, or, if the individuals possess a certain level of drive, have furthered their education and gone into the skilled trades.

The "White Suburbanites", whom we call "yuppies", primarily have gone on to have jobs in the Corporate sector..IT, Business Management, Accounting, Medicine, and Education.

Yet it's only the "Weird Kids".. who were called "freaks".. that you can actually have an intelligent conversation with. Those "freaks" were the oddball outcasts who didn't fit into either the Redneck or the Yuppie groups. They had their own interests, pursued education more more heavily in the main, even informally, and acquired a depth of experience and erudition that allows them to be decent conversationalists and thinkers.

Members of this tiny minority have gone on to become Academics, Entrepreneurs, Artists, or, like me, "Professional Weirdos".

This is all from the same school.

If you correspond with these individuals online.. somewhere like Facebook..the differences become immediate in terms of language. There is an increased difficulty for linguistic analysis in such a system, as some members of both main demographic groups have resorted to "text-speak" primarily as a result of accessing Facebook only via a mobile device..

But the Rednecks, for instance, almost constantly use hideous misspellings, "text-speak", and brutally poor grammar, resulting in difficulty parsing what they're trying to communicate.

The Yuppies, on the other hand, tend to spell better, but exhibit high levels of mistakes with contractions, and a slightly exaggerated tendency towards substituting "b" for "be" and "u" for "you".

Curiously enough, the Freaks show very little tendency towards shortcuts, misspellings, or grammatical improprieties, other than the occasional lapses one would expect to find from an educated person. Even more curiously, they tend to adopt proper spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure even when sending text messages.

Everyone being discussed here grew up within 20 miles or so from each other, yet I can clearly see the delineations between these groups even now, 20 years later. To my mind, this strongly supports your theory, and raises the question "What can we do about it, as a society?"

I just dropped $2200 on a new pc specifically to get back into gaming. My old Linux box would have worked fine for most of the "Games for Linux" on Steam.. but no, for what I really wanted to play, I needed slightly more capable hardware and I needed Windows.

That annoyed me.

I was overjoyed when I heard about Steam OS. I thought that finally I'd be able to play the titles I really wanted on Linux. I read all kinds of promises about "major announcements Q1 2014"... and I've heard diddly squat.

That's the problem with SteamOS and the SteamBox. Until the major devs sign on, or some way shows for our favorite titles to get ported over to Linux in a fully playable fashion.. it just ain't happening.

They get Bethesda Softworks to sign on, and I'll go to SteamOS in a *heartbeat*. But they really need to at least... keep the momentum building by talking about how the process goes getting the Triple-A's onboard..

Hell, some of the more maladjusted friends of mine from my High School graduating class could pull that off. One doesn't even need to get the Survivalist or Militia movements to put off their infighting.. You just need a few angry, maladjusted people around the country who share the idea at the same time.

Fortunately, I've explained to all of them why terrorism doesn't work.

Not everybody who gets ticketed was breaking the law. The vast majority simply don't challenge the officer in court for a variety of reasons. I've been ticketed for speeding before when I was not speeding at *all*. I was, however, driving out of state within 10 miles of the border leaving the state in question. I'd just been ticketed 10 minutes before by a different Arkansas State Police Officer in a zone where I was the only out-of-state license plate in traffic that was passing *me* left and right.

Sometimes, Cops are just abusive scumbags.

Hell, the town of New Rome, Ohio was so bad at writing false tickets that a guy ran for mayor on the promise of dissolving the municipality and firing the police force. He won, and he did exactly that. It was one of the worst speed traps in the nation for years. It was so bad that anybody who actually challenged the ticket in court got it dismissed out of hand, and the State Police would actually run off the New Rome cops if they happened to see them pull someone over.

I lived 10 miles away in another small town for about 2 years and got to watch the whole drama unfold.

Just because the police *say* you are breaking a law doesn't mean you actually *are*.

There are a lot of ways to implement "free to play". The problem arises when developers (or more likely the suits who control the company) forget that what they're developing is a *game*, and not just a "revenue stream".

I've not gotten into mobile gaming, beyond an ad-supported word game that I've spent maybe 5 hours playing on my phone while waiting in parking lots. But I've played a few F2P online games, usually MMORPGs, and quite a few of the more "Standard model" games as well.

Some games, like Runescape, for instance, did a decent treatment to F2P.. It's possible to play a free "version" of the game and have rather a lot of fun doing it.. but you need to be a paid subscriber to access the other 80% of the game content. I eventually got bored and wandered off to other pastures, but they got my reasonably inexpensive monthly subscription for a good several years. And it was quite worth it, from an entertainment value perspective. I could get hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of less than the cost of 1 movie.

The other side is the "Pay to Win" model..which I abhor. I briefly got hooked on Evony.. (yes, I feel stupid admitting that).. Which was so poorly designed from a *game* perspective that it not only was impossible to "win" without paying, but it became impossible to "remotely contend" without paying a *lot*.. AND without botting nearly 24/7.

I was even part of the "player advisory board".. which made a lot of very good, considered suggestions to the company on how to re-balance things and fix some of the serious problems from a "gameplay" perspective. The company's response was to ignore every single one of the suggestions we put forth and release a major "update" that did exactly the opposite.

That was when I quit playing, despite the friends I had made and all the effort I had put into building my virtual kingdom. I realized that what the Developers were actually developing was a revenue stream, not a game. That was the deception. I was sold the idea of a game, not the idea of an "experiment in marketing."

I realize that game developers need to make money. But like any company, some become scumbags in the pursuit of it. With a standard development model.. "you pays your money and takes your chances". Everybody's been burned on a crap game at least once. But studios who put out crap games in that environment don't tend to survive long. The F2P model allows for a lot more subtle and insidious douchebaggery to persist for much longer periods of time, and *that*, I think, is the real reason it gets the skepticism and derision.

You know.. I think one aspect of the problem that a lot of folks are just missing.. especially if they work for Microsoft.. is that a lot of the reason why people are fond of XP isn't because they're explicitly "fond of XP" or that they need it for particular hardware/software that isn't supported on anything newer.. Although I'm sure that does happen to be important for a sizeable percentage..

I think a lot of it is that there really hasn't been anything compelling on offer in any post-XP version of Windows. That statement alone is pretty damning of the Management of Microsoft's Windows division.

The last version of Windows I personally *owned* was XP.. although I worked for a year at an office computer with 7 on it. Friends and family have had Vista and Windows 8.

XP worked. It did what it was needed to do without much bullsh*t... a rarity for a Microsoft product. And look at what replaced it. Vista. (that should almost be a "'nuff said" in and of itself) Bloated, slow, overfocused on bling and underfocused on actual usability... (I swear, it's like every other release of Windows is designed by the Marketing department, and then on the alternate releases they let the engineers in to try to repair the damage to the brand...)

The Windows 7.. and it's a *decent* OS. Improves some things.. makes other things kinda needlessly complex.. Most of the "new features" however.. are just things that I couldn't care less about. The only thing I particularly took away from a year of using 7 was that it was "a more complicated version of XP with weird eye-candy stuff that I turned off."

Windows 8? The words "Flaming pain in the ass" come immediately to mind anytime anybody mentions it. I don't know what the bigwigs in Redmond were smoking when they thought these UI changes were a good idea, but it's certainly not anything you can buy where I live. Even the druggies look confused when sat down in front of a Win 8 UI. It's like the same "UI Zombie Virus" attacked the Windows Dev team, the guys behind Unity at Canonical, and the Gnome 3 people all at once.

Because honestly... it's the *height* of idiocy to take a device that operates almost exclusively on one input format and try to make it identical to a whole class of devices that use an entirely *different* input format. This. Is. Braindead.

The lack of particularly useful *benefits* from any post-XP release for the average user, even though we've now been through 3 such releases is the elephant in the room nobody's talking about.

and a total waste of money.. typical bureaucrat thinking.

I work for a snow removal company in a more northerly city. We service some 300 commercial properties in our area, and a have a contract for servicing city streets when the city's crews can't keep up. In additon, we have a constant pool of subcontractors that we can tap for extra help when events require it.

The only difference between a "salt truck" and a "dump truck" is a salt spreader attached to the back gate. Ties right into the PTO system. Buy a stack of those, subcontract with some of the local haulage or construction companies that have dump trucks, and in that rare event of a winter storm, have a plan in place where these companies report to various city maintenance yards for outfitting and loading with salt, and get them out on routes covering the major roads. Highways being the priority.

Instead of $55,000,000 worth of trucks added to a city's fleet, all you really need is under $1m worth of salt spreaders and a bit of logistical coordination. That itself would make a world of difference. And they could use the money saved for some Public Service Announcements like "What is that white stuff falling from the sky?" and "No, it's not cocaine, get back in your cars and quit trying to snort it." and "Snow is slippery, drive a little slower."