Surely it follows that as the most heavily armed society America would have some of the lowest violent crime rates in the western world... definitely not the case. This is the number the gun lobby always trotted out because the USA only measures aggrivated assault where just about everyone else measures ALL assault, but even using this metric the USA has been worse in recent years.

You have no other use for your RAM than surfing the net, media consumption and perhaps some bloated HP printer drivers? And on a tech site too. One can NEVER have too much headroom, and even though I have a PC on the higher end I run into limitations often enough, and this is despite running LXDE and a generally lean system. This is not strange amongst tech savy people I know.

Yes... which is why I use Libre Office.

Things are being done wrong... and doing the wrong thing with more more effort and money won't do much to change the outcome. Ken Robinson says it best, and with the entertaining delivery of a comedian. : http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html

Carrying a concealed firearm has ALWAYS been banned in Australia. The ban in question was ONLY for semi-automatic longarms. Any forcible rape connection is utter nonsense unless you think Australian women were packing assault rifles in their handbags up until the ban.

The "terrible computer-generated graphics" were actually quite realistic even considering their age. They made an effort to model the effects of light in a vacuum (eg. sharp uncomplicated shadows etc...), not to mention realistic inertia etc...

Have you seen the work that came out of that? The GUI frontend to it all is called GOsa (although there's a fork called FusionDirectory which I prefer). The whole infrastructure is managed via LDAP plus RPC, and allows deployment of Linux and Windows (via FAI and OPSI respectively). There are also a multitude of plugins for managing a multitude of network services and LDAP stored info. I use it for managing DNS, DHCP, groupware (SOGo), web proxy + filtering (Squid), Samba, windows OS + software deployment (OPSI), Linux + software deployment (FAI), Debian/Ubuntu repo management, centralised logging (rSyslog)... and I'm currently looking into connecting it to Asterisk. There are TONS more plugins.

OPSI for windows deployments... forgot to mention that. It's also LDAP-integrated, though its own webUI is nice too.

Eh? For imaging use PXE with Partimage, or FAI (if you want a non-imaging solution better suited to non-standardised hardware). With Linux on the server side you can manage Windows AND Linux deployments, plus lots of other stuff (groupware, dns, dhcp, phone, netfiltering, filesharing, kerberos along with HEAPS of other stuff not as relevant to an educational context). If you want a GUI integrating all that just use GOsa or FusionDirectory or any number of other LDAP + service management front-ends. It's not like Germany and europe in general is short of that expertise - I know GOsa and FD are projects based in Germany and Belgium respectively.

Being heavily armed seems to have worked very well for the Mexican and US police, not. If you cheapen life by escalation to lethal force your life becomes less secure as a consequence. History has borne this out time and time and time and time again. It's interesting to compare US and British TV - on British TV an arrest is not an anticlimax exactly, but rarely involves lethal force because that's how it is on the street.

If observations show a mathmatical model to be wrong, then it is so. However, if a mathmatical model can make interesting predictions ahead of our ability to observe then that's where we should strive to move our observations eg. LHC, space telescopes etc... Theory is largely ahead of observation in modern physics.

Eh? My brother only does work which he finds interesting... which is the difficult/expensive stuff involving several trades and reasonable money ie. bathrooms, kitchens and extensions. It's hardly uncommon either, especially at the moment where people are more likely to invest in their current home rather than trading up. Regarding software - there's a small engineering firm two doors down from where I live which employs a guy who hacks on open source for part of his time, and he's certainly not the only other person I know open-source-coding in the context of small/medium business. There's a HUGE potential labour market. It's a pity more of these traditionally disenfranchised end users had the power to change the software niggles which have been frustrating them for years. It IS immoral to inhibit people from helping themselves.

It's the same reason people can't waive their right to a contract cooling-off period (at least in my juristiction), or a myriad of other laws and conventions. A community can have rules, but these rules should be binding or they're more-or-less meaningless. If you feel like starting your own GPG (General Public Guidelines) feel free.

:) My brother is a builder whos work is mostly rennovation. I'm a sometimes-developer who has made changes to software for home users... though much more often for small businesses I'll grant. Both of us would lose work in a world where manufacturers were the sole gatekeepers to product modification. Just because in the software realm it's easier to enforce a modification-monopoly doesn't make it any more moral.

Obligatory : (The Bottle - old atomfilms comedic cartoon along these lines) http://www.podcast.tv/video-episodes/the-bottle-episode-1-7850528.html )