The stakes are stellar.

He probably meant SDL v1.2 which was licensed under the LGPL.

Thank you. That is interesting. I did find something similar for New York (2007) that varied quite a bit depending upon location. https://www.univerahealthcare.com/download/files/med_malpractice_premiums.pdf

Out of curiosity, what is the cost for malpractice insurance in Canada? The doctors may actually net more there. Sadly, the giant ACA had nothing, as far as I know, to reduce that cost to doctors which only gets passed to us.

I understand that he may not understand everything, but a lot of what is in his list is frivolous. Here is another NSF-funded robotics research "project": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwBOBeDFHw If they want to play, then they can do it on the universities' dimes. The universities certainly charge enough to pay for this.

Referencing some more from here: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.serve&File_id=2dccf06d-65fe-4087-b58d-b43ff68987fa

• How about this: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0909289 This does not benefit the U.S. society all that much. It seems like something that the travel industry should pay for.
• We even paid to research if terrorism affected John McCain's chances for the 2008 election: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/10/01_terror.shtml His campaign or the GOP could have researched that themselves.

It depends on what is meant by duplication. If two groups are researching the same thing using the same means regarding the same factors, then that is doing something in parallel. I can see that as a (possible) waste of money that could be used to research something else concurrently. Only slight related, when it is different agencies funding the same party, then you have fraud: http://www.nature.com/news/duplicate-grant-case-puts-funders-under-pressure-1.9984

Replication is different and would not fall under duplication as it is done serially. First, one group does research into the topic followed by a separate group that tries to reproduce the results. Trying to replicate the results at the same time as another group that is unfinished with their research is potentially wasteful.

If the results are useful, then I am sure some entity will try to reproduce it without government funding. If the project was politically-motivated, then I am almost certain another party will fund research into that topic without need for government funding.

Personally, I wish the news would do a little research into past projects that were duplicated to either prove or disprove the issue with duplication. They just want a fight between the two parties to get more readers. I guess this was too hard for them to find: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.serve&File_id=2dccf06d-65fe-4087-b58d-b43ff68987fa Page 20 talks about duplication between the various agencies. Skimming through that report really makes me want to have the NSF cleaned. For example, "An Indiana University (IU) professor received a $263,281 grant from the NSF to study the social impact of tourism in the country of Norway." Funding that over cancer research?!?

There was no balanced budget under Clinton although the budget was probably better than now.

Please read these two articles:
http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16
http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/30

The scary part is that they are both right.

Have there been any attempts to pass a serious budget in the senate regardless of what the Republicans are doing? I have heard of budgets being brought forward that neither party was going to support which I would call political versus a serious budget.

I hate politics.

For what they have done, I think it is a good thing since it looks like a lot of the changes are bug fixes where language would not matter.

From the description of Lotus Symphony ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Symphony#Features ), it looks like Eclipse is for some shell, so I do not know if that is part of what they will even consider using or not. OpenOffice may be taking ideas from it without the Eclipse requirement to develop their new task pane: http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Sidebar. The only thing I can tell is that there is a lot of C++ work in the sidebar branch of their repo.

I agree that Java was overused in places that it did not need to be. I personally prefer C and/or Python for work I do.

I am pleased with OpenOffice (v3.4.1). I have not seen any need to try LibreOffice personally. My take is that both are developing new features.

Regarding new features in OpenOffice, https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/merging_lotus_symphony_allegro_moderato talks about what is being merged into OpenOffice from IBM's Lotus Symphony. As long as IBM continues to develop Lotus Symphony, I think that OpenOffice will benefit earlier than LibreOffice as IBM tends to do a lot with the Apache foundation. I say earlier since LibreOffice can always get the code from OpenOffice.

I am fine with these visas, however, they should make it very easy for the person hired using one of them to switch jobs at will without a slew of requirements that keep them effectively owned by the first company.

Of course, many corporations would oppose it because the people here on such a visa would be asking for much better salaries and benefits, but the only stated purpose to increase the number of visas and the whole idea of the H1-B is to get more workers. Note: I said "stated" purpose.

How does that factor in the tax breaks (income tax and mortgage deductions) that California takes advantage of? A CNN bit about it: http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/06/news/economy/state-local-tax-deductions/index.html

Do they really have a surplus? http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Does-California-Really-Have-a-Budget-Surplus__Bay-Area.html