I have been a devotee of Linux for nearly 15 years. I have faithfully followed first redhat, and now the fedora releases. All my PCs at least dual-boot, if not run native Linux all the time. I even TAUGHT Linux for a major computer company for a while. In my informally gathered experience, there are three things holding Linux back- 1) The cult of UNIX mentality - this is a belief, deeply held by many OSS fans, that it is morally wrong to make software easy to use. If it was hard to code, it should require effort from the user to make use of it, otherwise how will they appreciate your hard work? Microsoft on the other hand got it a loooong time ago. Ease of use isn't just nice to have, it is the one overiding factor that outweighs all others in software design. Flexibility just confuses most users. security is a sick sad joke that only security wonks care about. Until the Linux community embraces the overwhelming truth that ease of use is ALL that matters, they will be doomed to be a hobby OS for out-of-touch tech weenies. 2) Endlessly re-inventing the wheel. I think Redhat/ Fedora is now on their third version of the X-windows package, and there is talk of scrapping the whole thing for a new windowing paradigm. Every six months I do a version upgrade, and my desktop breaks, my icons disappear, my scripts stop working because the directories have changed. For the love of sanity PLEASE knock it off. If it ain't broke, DON"T FIX IT!!! If you want people to really use Linux, focus on a consistent user experience, keep the magic behind the curtain, and stop screwing up the user interface. 3) Fear of licenses. Every time I upgrade fedora, I have to spend hours getting my Xine video player, web browser, and games to work again. Give up the insanity guys. The world is not going to change to suit your whiny childish prejudices. There's all kinds of industry standard free software out there that EVERYONE uses. You are just marginalizing Linux by not supporting it in your distros. 'Nuff said.

Imagine this scenario. Since our sun is a 2nd generation star ( we know this from the presence of heavy metals - only created in supernovae), that means that most solar systems in towards the galactic center probably could have been at our stage of technical development 4-5 Billion years ago. At the VERY least, we can reasonably assume that they have learned to send communications via technologies as advanced and subtle as quantum-entangled pairs. And here we are broadcasting primitive RADIO waves at them. Why would they want to waste their time coming to visit a backwater, dirty, disease-ridden, slum like Earth ? Think of a nuclear submarine cruising by an island populated by primitive primates. The local baboons see the wake of the sub and decide to try to attract its attention. They rush to the beach and begin frantically beating their chests, screaming, and flinging their poop into the ocean (think escaped TV broadcast signals). Yet the sub makes no attempt to return their communication, nor does it stop to share its technology with them. Why should we be so conceited as to think we have anything interesting to say to an advanced alien race?

Mr. Gates has a long history of making warped predictions about the future. Remember this is a guy who has computer monitors hanging on the walls of his house that change the artwork to suit each visitor, because clearly a digitized picture of a masterpiece is just as good as the real thing, right? In the same way, a digitized copy of an education is just as good as a real education, right? But where will chemists perform labwork online? Where will biology students do dissections? Other than being a pale washed-out copy of a real education, there's the problem of quality control. On-line materials are going to include lectures on the "Jewish Communist Bankers" conspiracy written by Josef Goebels, and treatises on how the "government" is hiding reverse-engineered UFO's at "Area 51". What Mr. Gates is doing is hawking yet another revenue generating app for the Windows PC. Look at what the cesspool of the internet has done to corrupt the quality of everyday life, and you can easily see, Mr. Gates concern is for increasing his already vast fortune,. The public welfare can go to hell, as long as Mr. Gates and Microsoft get to charge a toll at the entrance.

A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy. All of which are a holdover form the days of royalty and privilege. The upper classes didn't have to work, so they spent their leisure time filling their heads with literature and philosophical trivia. This made them appear more intelligent than the working-class slobs whose days were filled by 16-hour shifts in the coal mines. And this in turn was used to rationalize a mythical genetic basis for the wealth and leisure of the upper class. It's time to bring colleges and universities into the 21st century. Instead of trying to recreate the old European culture of wealth and privilege, let's trash the whole university system, and create a whole new, publicly funded set of technical degree generating institutions that don't bother with dead and arcane subjects like English or Art. It would be well worth the investment of public funds to have a populace that can compete on a global scale in technical fields. Of course the useless f-tards from wealthy families can still waste their lives on "private sector" liberal arts degrees, the difference being that their lack of technical focus will label them as useless idle slugs instead of the erudite and effete members of the upper crust.

NASA has been collecting earth-observing data for five decades now, and in spite of the current wave of interest in climate related matters, little or no effort is put into examining this historical record. A small group of scientists within the US Geological Survey have heroically attempted to preserve this enormous treasure of historical climate data at a small data center in South Dakota. But hundreds of terabytes of irreplaceable data are at risk of being lost forever because no one seems to care. There are lobbyists galore for NEW satellite systems, but in many cases you might as well pour the data into a bit bucket, we spend billions of dollars collecting data, and pennies storing and analyzing it. Instead of relying on flawed computer models and bogus prognostications, the Global Warming debate could be based on real hard data, if anyone wanted to take the time to go look at it. http://eros.usgs.gov/#/About_Us

It appears that we have seen the last of an American icon, namely the "big block" V8 engine. There could not be a more poignant, even stirring example of the slow steady wimpification of US culture than the passing of this pillar of young male manhood. My brother Jim and I had a phrase for the thrum-thrum noise made by the revving of a big-block V8, we called it the "Happy Engine Song". Singing it required a displacement of no less than 350 cubic inches (about 6000cc's in today's parlance). But that song will now pass into obscurity, the victim of oil prices and economic decline. Global warming may give us a lot more beachfront property, but we'll be driving to those beaches in little tin 15HP hybrid-mobiles. No one will ever sing a song titled "She's real fine my 60mpg 2cylinder-electric hybrid".....meh!