To many of us outside the US, the national obsession with firearms in that country looks like a bizarre mass psychosis. By any measure, the deadly proliferation of guns in that country is killing far more people than in any country on the planet.

Once upon a time I wondered if there could be a way to make people understand that it's a thing you need to let go of, but increasingly these days it's a case of sit back, grab some popcorn and watch the nation of gun nuts all kill each other.

"The book is pervasive its use of passive voice that can be annoying to many readers. It is hoped that the second edition of this book will be updated with the current tools of the time and a good re-editing of the text to ensure its readability doesn't suffer."

It is to be hoped that critiques of the use of the passive voice are not self conciously ironic.

This lot sound like they should all be on the Golgafrincham B ark: http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham

Some years ago we set up all of our systems using RHEL with a paid support subscription. As a government agency we considered this the proper risk averse thing to do. When we had an actual issue that required technical support, we discovered that the people tasked with delivering the support were clueless and once the query was laboriously escalated up the chain, we found that we were met with apathy, not much more clue and no effort to dig into the issue.

So we changed to another distro, stopped paying for support, and on the occasions where we do run into something strange, a few minutes of web searching usually uncovers an answer.

It would be *very* hard to make a compelling case to us for paid support these days.

> I don't expect to see this service enabled for any country south of the equator, except Australia.

Well, here in Australia I click the 'Request an Invitation' link and I'm served this page: http://music.google.com/music/usernotinvited
Which declares: "We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States"
No music soup for me.

Sanity on Slashdot? What do you think you're doing?

Um, yeah we are. We're an accountability agency, administered under the FMA and an executive agency under Prime Minister and Cabinet.

http://naa.gov.au/about-us/director-general/index.aspx

"The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."

Really?
http://xena.sourceforge.net/

My seven year old son says he'd *love* to have a job writing computer games. Some of the recent flash-based game sites where you 'design' the game that you then play have encouraged him and that's a good thing.

I have done 3D computer graphics at the CS Masters level, and I think it's worth pointing out that this stuff is *hard*. You need to have excellent skills in mathematics and physics (lots of matrices and vectors) and a strong foundation in computing. I applaud anyone who studies this stuff properly through the motivation of gaming, but as many other posters have said, don't make game development your only option.

Meanwhile, I'm getting the boy into computing by introducing the important concepts without a computer via http://csunplugged.org/

From TFA:
> "If the cost of assessing it was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice."
We don't understand it. Do you understand it? This stuff is hard. Have you tried rebooting?

> "While open source software may reduce licensing costs, the cost of support could be an issue."
I was flipping burgers last week and now I are teh IT guy. Have you tried rebooting?

> "Centrelink, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and National Archives of Australia were known to use open source products; however, it was up to individual agencies to make procurement decisions, AGIMO said."
Yes, yes we do. And so do quite a few others. Betcha no-one in the proprietary software world knows who we all are. We're here though, and we're not going away.