I've been using Linux since I was in 6th grade: Mandrake 6.something, Suse 7.something, Slackware 10, Redhat 9, a bunch of smaller live-cd and media-centric distros, Ubuntu, and now Fedora 16. I've used KDE, Gnome 2, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and flirted with FVWM and a couple others. I appreciate minimal aesthetic and functionality as much as any Linux nut, but this is why I like Gnome3.

No, it's not very customizable. But I find its setup intuitive and functional. No, it's not graphically minimal, but computers are far more powerful now than they were even five minutes ago... Graphic simplicity used to be very important, then it was preferable, but now--I feel--it's okay to have a little eye candy. (Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I have become a casual user over the years.)

Still, they should have kept up Gnome2 the way people knew and loved it.

Racism is: canceling a conference because of the race of the speakers.

"no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for"

Why not? You pay for cable TV and see ads, you see product placement in the shows you watch between the ads, there's product placement in movies, advertisements for other products on the products you buy, ads for books on the backs of books, and the list goes on. The only thing, I think, that really KEEPS ads OUT of a product is the value of its aesthetic. You'll never see an ad on the back of a fancy-looking leather-bound book, because you're paying for an aesthetic that precludes it. You won't find an ad in, say, a free Linux distro, because the aesthetic of the culture precludes it.

So I think we should look at this from the opposite perspective: why are ads showing up in Windows NOW? It may be a sign that Microsoft's business model is changing in some way, but I think it may have more to do with the adoption of the app-market aesthetic. You may not expect to see an ad in an app that you paid for, but you REALLY wouldn't expect to see an ad in a traditional program like Excel or Photoshop.

Could that be overcome by conventionally breaking up pi into blocks of certain sizes, then conceptualizing those blocks as matrices of conventional height and width?

I am (pleasantly) surprised by how many of my friends have "come out," as it were, as atheists over the last few years. I'm a young person, and I suspect that the amount of closet atheists among younger people (in America at least) is much greater than that among older people. In general, how optimistic are you about humanity getting past religion in the next few decades?

Things I have never seen: 1. a bicyclist obeying a stopsign. 2. a unicorn. 3. a bicyclist stopping at a crosswalk.
Things I have seen rarely: 1. a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. 2. a car passing a cyclist without giving them a berth of at least 2 extra meters.
Things I see all the time: 1. cyclists cutting off pedestrians. 2. cyclists running red lights. 3. cyclists cutting in and out of traffic.

I live by a college campus. I've talked with a campus police officer about all the bike accidents we've had here. He says the overwhelming majority are the fault of the cyclist. Helmets are small potatoes compared to 1. the devil-may-care attitude toward traffic laws that seems to prevail among cyclists and 2. the unsafe piggybacking of considerations for bicycles onto existing roads. Consider the bike lane: it continues straight through an intersection, ACROSS the right turn lane for cars! Furthermore, drivers are not used to this situation because it's both novel and counter-intuitive. Someone please design a better road and let's all tell our cyclist friends to obey the signs.

Contrary to popular belief, the Romans knew about lead poisoning and figured out ways to avoid it. For instance, aqueducts were lined with lead to make them waterproof. New aqueducts were mandated to run for a certain amount of time before water was drawn from them. In that time, the Romans knew, the minerals in the hard water would deposit on the lead and form a protective coating. Nevertheless, lead shavings were used as a seasoning on food. You may say that's horrendously stupid in a society that knows about lead poisoning, but then there's cigarettes today.

Handwavium? I like it. I like it more than "unobtanium."

The Language abilities of Star Trek computers are extremely advanced compared to today's latest and greatest. Of course most of the things in this article are only inklings, on their way but nowhere near what Star Trek showed. But I find many people are fooled by the usefulness of Siri et al. into thinking that real language processing and synthesis is only N years away. Talking with Siri is like using an old text adventure game: you put in words, it filters those and matches them to a small set of commands, and if that fails it returns an error dressed up as a polite English phrase. The biggest advancement is speech recognition and speech synthesis, which are indeed very good at this point. But this only deals with the physical forms of words at the level of phonetics. All higher linguistic levels (phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) are woefully closed off to the electronic brains we use today. With our current language technologies, we are only about half a step above text.

If we combine the two statistics, we should arrive at a useful number. I have done the maths, and it seems that 105% of Americans are uninformed about the cloud. But now, being an American, I am forced to look at myself in this new light. I, for one, have looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow it's clouds' illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.

Consider how long children's books have been heavily illustrated. When I was little I won a "reading award" in my first grade classroom because I always had out this science book. Truth is I was just looking at the pictures and reading the captions. Nevertheless I obviously did learn to read, and I can assure you that seeing pictures as a child ruined my imagination in no way. Think of the vast amounts of data we are presented with every day. There are images, written words, music, speech, on advertisements, street signs, in movies, on television, in books, in classrooms, at home... If having one possibility illustrated (in a broader sense) before you actually stifled human creativity, there would be far fewer inventors, artists, and writers. And if you want proof you can search for "fanfic" and see thousands of young adults (perhaps older adults?) and children writing stories based on their favorite movies and television shows and books, simply because they want to apply their own creativity to the fiction. I found one story, obviously written by a young child, which sought to give a back-story for how pokemon evolved out of present-day animals.

In short, I think the least of your worries should be any new media constraining the imagination.

Thinkofthechildren! Technology improves illustrations --> Entire generation rendered illiterate! Soon they'll invent an entire GENRE of new media with moving pictures and sound and no need to read at all! And what will happen then!?

So it's running Linux?