No, you are right to paint the picture, but it is only part of the story,

the oligarcs, but more than 20, influence thru Congress and the MSM, if there is any real push back,

they go away, and try another day. Then, increasingly, technology overwelms them, because they are
trying to support the status quo and do not investigate disruptive technologies.

The long view is they always loose, You guys in the USA need to get a life and figure out how to control your
Congress-Critters/Senate-Placemen.

Then you get the Supreames back and all will be OK

Then it wont really matter who is President.

Sorry you guys, you have completely lost the plot. Most posts, but not most of the internet is USA offshore.

We dont like you, care much about your CRAP ISP subscription rip-offs, or your broken and benighted legal system which deliverers Justice, only to the very rich (costs in cause) tort-reform, the "American Centuary" or who is patent fucking or time wasting today, your debt is huge, your productivity carp and the whole economhy is in the tank while your leaders still do Keynsian eye-shut and continue to try to spend other peoples money.

"The problem with re-distribution/socialism is when you run out of other peoples money"

You will be very lucky to last another 10 years

That is a nice idea, but not really true, one real use for calculators and computers is to check things

caculations

proofs ...

The way you find out if you have nasent mathematicians is with the well known class of problems with a quick, lazy solution eg

12^12 = (12^4)^3

which do you think is the easier to calculate by hand?

Efficient computation, Game Theory, and (with/without) statistics simulation SHOULD be hard too.

The lack of widespread general understanding of statistics, errors and simulation are a grave political threat to modern society.

By way of example, only, AGW would not stand a chance if the average Joe could understand the CODE in the climategate leak. It is far far more damning than the e-mails.

As society becomes more complicated One-Man-One-Vote only makes sense if the Men understand the issues.

Sadly the NSF and Research Councils in the UK are vulnerable, and have fallen to corruption and group think, exacerbated by Seniority and Pork. This is NOT to say that they are not useful, or that is easy to do that job but it is to say that a dose of accountability is urgently needed and it can not be to more OLD BOYS groups.

While the whole matter is complex, and in research, anyway, you are lucky if 1% of your bets come in, BUT the rate of progress in Maths, the Hard Sciences (eg Physics, Chemistry and Biology) as well as in Medicine is disappointing with far too much incremental technology and not expected break-throughs.

This is symptomatic of Government enterprises, lots of Beaurocracy and not a lot of Leadership.

I would suggest the way to do it is to make a short list of headline areas in Science, Engineering and Medicine to get funding priority eg Safe Nuclear Fusion, Cure Virus Diseases, Interplanetary Travel to focus attention on National and International goals and needs. A pure lottery for 10% of the funding to prevent starving of outlier and unfashionable ideas and a Death Squad to go after, mostly fashionable me-too research in The Environment and Social Sciences.

One of the main problems of government is that loosers are never reaped eg the Shuttle and AGW because of beaurocracy, colligiality and face.

This leads to rediculous Political policies, eg Carbon Taxes, Renuables, where as Fission would let us systhesise oil where needed.

Is becomming a really serious problem coupled with the media-beloved mantra "Scientists say ..."

In general public policy, but particularly:

AGW, corrupt statistics, modeling

Finance, risk, pricing

Health, pandemics, junk pharma, vaxination fear

You have a single intellectual thread, mis-used mathematics and particularly modeling,
unwarrented veneration of authority, fostered by the MSM, and the results of BS research
focused by directed funding.

The root cause is innumeracy, but focused by too much power in too few un-accountable
hands is becomming a real threat to our political process.

I could not agree more:

Lack of a simple and convenient Exchange replacement strangles many, many commercial Linux deployments particularly in mixed environments,

Google Docs would be very nice

I wish LibreOffice all the best, and hope that, freed from Corporate America's help, it will now flourish. All projects with a horrendous build system please note!

I agree, we dont want to save IP4, or encorage any more kludges, and there are LOTS of other good things in IP6 beside long names.

In the transition ISPs can do the band-aid routing, and the end user situation will stop getting worse.

IP6 already has transition features, eg embedded IP4 addresses, which facilitate this.

NO MORE nonsense, and ignorant MSM commentary, start the transition to be done in 2 years.

1. This is the POLITICAL part of government and is as easily bought as ISO, maybe easier.

2. Look at the record of UK Government IT projects.

3. It is not IE that makes Windoze insecure, it is the OS and the design philosophy

-- COM is a security disaster

-- executing any vaguely executable rubbish based on its extension is a disaster

4. Backward compatibility, and a zillion features that assume an essentially insecure and trusted
world are a disaster. M$ has no way out.

for Profit is not evil, M$, by action reputation and legal determination is.

So the correct question is would you entrust your data to evil for profit?

The Excel ODF bug was another deliberate considered example of M$ screwing up the interoperability experience.

The form of the bug is that Excel sc cells have either a value, or a formula, or BOTH, both in the file and at run time.

If you load from a '.odf' in M$ Excel the values only are loaded and the formulae are dropped on the floor, so the sc no longer works.
need more large finesn
This works the other way too, Excell is notorious for failing to correctly determine dependencies, which is why you find habitual users hit RECALCULATE several times.

The value CACHE is an example of 'defective by design', and since these guys are evil, not stupid, this was deliberate.

The only question is whether EU governments will fully migrate from M$, or whether they need more big fines "pour encourager un comportement honnete"

Slashdot, ISO 8953-1 isnt new

Your lies and bias are so blatant that the even hurt your evil master STFU, please.

Listen, idiot, with Virtualization, most of us, in a professional sense NOW have instant access to a Windoze VM, and MS office, and commonly several versions, and I now almost never use M$ Office, for anything but testing. An when I do I cringe since I see software make harder to use, eg the ribbon, simply for marketing reasons; that is M$ greatest sin, they think they are ENTITLED to frig with the software to force sales.

By any objective standards all M$ software is crap by design, M$Word typeset algorithms are a crock of shit, the documents looks so awful that you can tell it must have been set by Word. Excel and its many 'mathematical' bugs and quirks is well known for creating un-auditable business process, usually a big SOX headache. And so on, on, on.

So even though I have essentially free access to the OS, Office and Outlook I almost never use them because they are so bad. When it comes to Development the WinWorld is even worse. M$ regularly shoots itself in the foot in security, portability and flexibility terms.

At an even more basic level, if you follow the history of the industry, things move on, you adapt or die, look at past greats IBM, DEC, Wang, Compaq, SUN, HP all now shadows of their former greatness.

If you look closely M$ is in terminal decline.

And all power to his elbow, maybe he can leverage the OOXML debacle into anti-trust, and clean up that mess foe a profit too.

--
Der Feind meines Feindes mein Freund vielleicht.

So, so, so like the DEC demise, I like the badge numbers, and the UNLOYAL marker 123B, when you were re-hired!