The point about veterans is an important one. But it also seems obvious to me that if the US military was ever ordered to fire on the American people in such a way as to constitute a revolution, the main force that would end up fighting against the US military would be a huge portion of defectors from within it. US soldiers are US citizens, and probably most of them have families of some sort or another. Things have gotten pretty shitty in terms of legislation, but I'm still a long way from believing that if asked to, the military would simply comply with an order to assault US civilians.

As a computer science student who has planned his academic career with a commercial one in mind, but is considering tacking on a philosophy major because he just can't stay away from it, I agree. This is important. I hope that anyone seeking to get a degree in philosophy in order to pursue a career in philosophy is met with success. But anyone with such intent should know by now or very soon learn that academic philosophy is very difficult, extremely competitive, and generally requires a LOT of schooling. Aside from teaching, major success in philosophy only happens for a lucky few, and even some of today's most important philosophers were largely unrecognized or undervalued during their lifetime. (The political philosophy which grounds the legal tradition of the US and its Constitution, for example, pre-dates it by several generations.)

The mistake some people make is that a degree in philosophy is, or ought to be, a step towards a career elsewhere. If you are currently pursuing a degree in philosophy, but only because you enjoy that subject for your general education, make other plans for a career elsewhere. Don't pretend that you can do otherwise.

It sucks, because there are many wonderful pursuits that are hard to making a living on. I think they should still be pursued wherever that's possible, but we should just be honest with ourselves about (a) the difficulty of attaining success in our fields, (b) the motive for our pursuit of knowledge, and (c) whether or not the initial plan (a single bachelor's degree --> a professional career --> no more formal education ever again) will satisfy all our goals realistically.

We absolutely need good philosophers and psychologists, not to mention artists of all sorts. But there's no shortage of people who just kinda dug those subjects in their twenties, so don't pretend that kinda digging something for a few years is a career move!

Here are a few good command-line tools for managing and playing your music:
  dnuos, a list-generating script which you could use to create something like your catalog.txt file. It's pretty nice, and it can do things like read the metadata of the files if you want, as well as the file names.
  morituri, a command line CD ripper with error correction support and metadata fetching
  beets, a command line music manager which includes an MPD server and so can be interacted with using any number of command line MPD clients

I think beets + [some command line MPD client] would be best for you. I'm a happy Amarok user, but I've got a large collection that is partially hosted on a little Samba server that was for a long time headless, so I've played with command line management tools and I found beets and morituri to be very impressive. I hope one of those links is useful to you. :-)

Amarok has had Dynamic Playlists back for quite some time now. It's quite robust and sophisticated. Give it a look-see. :-)

He very well may be.

I work for a youth organization, and I always have kids watching what I do and going "Cool, can you teach me how to hack?" Invariably, they get disappointed when I show them how to ssh into a remote machine and recompile the kernel instead of breaking into a DoD mainframe and launch missiles at China or something. And anytime I do try and generate interest in actual programming, it is hard to get past the "How do you program games?" point. Let's work past printf and scanf first, junior.

This won't help OP, but I know that sometimes what it takes to get someone to realize what computer science really is a full computer science course. When I was in high school, I took a total of 5 computer science courses, three of which were for college credit. Although I definitely had ‘making video games’ in mind when I signed up for my first computer science course, but it wasn't long until I learned that what made programming fun for me wasn't the type of product I was building. By my second computer science course (the first with any real coding), I grew out of my ‘dream’ of being a video game programmer because I so enjoyed the problem-solving and algorithmic design aspects of ‘boring’ projects like text parsing, implementing data structures, storage formats (cheesy little text-based ‘databases’).

I doubt whether they can get it from a 20-minute talk, but I know that high-schoolers can certainly learn what computer science is really about, and also that the fundamentals of computer science and programming are more satisfying subjects in themselves than any video game.

$ aptitude show gnome-session-fallback
[snip]
Description: GNOME Session Manager - GNOME fallback session
  The GNOME Session Manager is in charge of starting the core components of the
  GNOME desktop, and applications that should be launched at login time. It also
  features a way to save and restore currently running applications.

  This package contains the required components for the GNOME 3 fallback session,
  based on the GNOME Panel. It can be started from a display manager such as GDM,
  and doesn’t have specific hardware requirements.

The GNOME 3 fallback session uses the same interpretation of the desktop metaphor as GNOME 2 (the panel). I think it shows up in the DM session list as ‘Gnome Classic’.

I've been using KDE as long as I've been using GNU/Linux (~7 years), and Kubuntu as long as I've been using an Ubuntu-based distro. I still love KDE.

That said, I've installed Unity/Oneiric on my secondary/guest computer in the main room, and I'm very impressed with it. I think it's a really cool system. I'm comfortable using it, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I like it much better than Gnome. You should give it a shot. Just install it alongside KDE and log into it once or twice to try it out.

Thank you! Finally someone who gets it. We can't pretend that services like healthcare are free, but at some point we have to acknowledge that a for-profit healthcare system can only succeed by maximizing revenue and minimizing payouts — i.e., by providing as little actual healthcare as possible.

There is plenty of space between recognizing that the capitalist model doesn't succeed in providing certain services on the one hand, and magical thinking about ‘free’ public services on the other.

That's kind of the point of a combative (that may not be the correct legal term) justice system. Each lawyer does everything they can for one side, and hopefully the truth comes out when they each push one-sided versions of the story. Each attorney only gets to select two persons to be removed from the jury. I'm not sure how big the jury is, but the impact should not be huge. The goal is to remove people with biases which would prevent them from ruling fairly. I guess it's supposed to prevent things like mistrials, based upon the idea that there will only be a handful of people with extreme, relevant prejudices in any jury pool.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that reasoning, but I don't think your characterization of it was very complete or fair, either.