> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.

How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.

Indeed. Going by cumulative CO2 emissions since industrialization, US + EU contributed the bulk of the load (US + EU - 51%, China - 9%, India – 3%). So, by the logic of DigiShaman logic, and I fully agree with it when taken in a nation-state sense, the bulk of the burden must be borne by wealthy elite: Citizens of US and EU.

First, it is a question of what the right thing to do is for the planet. It's not a question of doing the opposite of what the rich say. Second, all the rich are not for carbon taxes. Like everyone else, some are for it, some are against it.

Fine, bow to no man, I'm with that (and I get the carbon comedy of the recent climate conference). But do you bow to rationality?... given that the current scientific consensus is that we ought to be burning less carbon? Also, the rich will be the last to be effected by global warming. The poorest of the poor will be first effected, you and I will be next, the uber rich will be the last effected.

> rest of us having to cut back on our resource usage

Right. That's the point of it. Resource conservation... across all humans... you and I included. You have a problem because it is not socialism?!!

> The treatment consists of tricking someone into thinking they're going to get better. Occasionally, this will psychosomatically heal them.

A Homeopath does not believe that he is giving a placebo. He is not trying to get psychosomatic effects. He actually believes and argues that his medicine is chemically working.

Also, occasionally healing something just not make it a medicine. That just accounts for margin of error in probability theory.

If we use your logic and standards of evidence, every superstitious practice on disease ever devised qualifies as medicine.

Its just a polite way of saying it does not work. Also, logically, "no more effective than a placebo" does not necessarily mean: as effective as a placebo.

In that case, the product will just flop. There is no way you can tell the mass market to "Try Dramamine". A small enthusiast community will put up with a lot, but that will hardly provide the critical mass it needs.

This is really a communal conflict, rather than a religious conflict. But then again, that is the case with a few other so-called religious conflicts today.

Even with these riots, it is still difficult to paint Buddhism or Buddha as hostile. The rioters are not at all drawing from any religious teachings. In case of Abrahamic religions, the perps can quote scripture as justification. I don't think there is anything similar in Buddhism.

To add to what others wrote about his coming back, it should also be noted that he was a prince and an heir to the throne. It wasn't as if he abandoned his wife and child to destitution. Add to the fact that ancient and medieval royal marriages were nothing like today's.

Yes, but I would argue that Windows was not heavy even back then. In my tests, XP consumed a little less than 60 MB of RAM with unnecessary services turned off. In 2000, Linux certainly consumed less than that, but mainstream Linux desktops got more heavy than that fairly quickly. Most average Windows users had sluggish desktops because they had too many programs that put themselves in startup, rather than with the Win OS itself being bloated or sluggish. Vista did become a bloat, which was an exception rather than the norm. Win 7 quickly corrected that.

I am not arguing with the point that Linux can be as bloated as Windows or more. My KDE desktop is certainly not more responsive than my Windows boot. I am just saying that this is not a new thing.

And it was always the case that regardless of how much better Linux got with hardware support, Windows generally had it better.

15 years ago, most distros did not work out of the box on most *current* hardware then. The common quip in forums then was: "Oh, you did not check all the hardware for Linux compatibility before you bought it? It's your fault then". Then we got spoilt by Ubuntu which worked out of the box on most hardware.

Desktop effects did not work on most computers for many years or at least made the desktop unstable after some use.

I think you are pining for a past that never was. You *could* make old hardware work with Linux, but only with some effort. You always toned down your fancy desktops when running on old hardware. If you want to make old hardware work, try a stable, mainstream distro like Debian or Ubuntu, not some "preview" distro. For that old hardware, I'd go with Lubuntu desktop.

> Pointer and String handling are also better in Pascal

Used to be better. C++11 string handling and pointer features are certainly better than what Object Pascal can offer now.

The best parts about Delphi were everything except the language. VCL, IDE and the fast compiler were all great and I still favor them. The language itself was, although very clean, not as productive to work in (just tiedious to type and too verbose to read - no complaints about its semantics). It was however well-modified to support IDEs. It was Delphi that first had language level support for properties, event_handlers and the like.

I still use Lazarus/FreePascal, but wish that I could use/mix modern C++ into the projects.

What advantages does MSEide+MSEgui have over Lazarus? When I looked at it a few years ago, it seemed way behind Lazarus in every way.

Lazarus is pretty good. It is a Delphi like/compatible IDE based on FreePascal. I always thought that Delphi's approach to DB GUIs was the most straightforward.

CodeTyphon is a good cross-platform distro for Lazarus that bundles lots of components. It also specializes in cross-compilation. But you are probably not looking for that aspect. It can target multiple GUI toolkits including Win32, Qt & GTK with the same set of components. I am surprised why it isn't more popular. Perhaps it is because Delphi is not as well known as C++/Java/.NET. While I am not a particular fan of Pascal, the component framework (Delphi: VCL, Lazarus: LCL) makes it worth while.

http://www.pilotlogic.com/site...

Adam Smith's capitalism isn't what is in charge today. Why talk about some idealized version of capitalism that never was, beyond small town bakers that Adam Smith observed (you are not the only one who has read some economics). The world moved on. Its better to read Piketty than Smith to keep up with the times.

BTW, it makes it a lot easier to cuss and complain when you are anonymous, doesn't it. Does it feel good?