You call it "fragmentation". I call it "choice". Now if linux would go back to innovating and stop (badly) copying OS X and Windows I'd be a lot happier, but still.

You can choose not to have a car like I do. You can't choose not to have DNA.

And the Frost poem is not about Santa Klaus.

*blocked domains from non-US roots. Bleh, typo (braino?)

s/found/accused of being/g

Remember, the burden of proof is on the owner, and you can bet it won't be cheap, easy, for fast. Additionally, some iterations of PROTECT-IP include(d?) measures requiring the interception and blocking of non-US roots.

Don't confuse kangaroo courts for courts of law.

Don't worry citizen, I'm sure the entertainment industry would never use laws like this to get rid of sites that compete for users time like user generated content. That would be unethical.

If you can prevent most people from doing it, you can then start issuing insane prison sentences/fines on those who do. Isolate and punish. No one is going to give jail time or excessive fines...(right? please?)...to the 14 year old who stumbled on Napster, but the computer geek who "bypasses DNS" using a dangerous hacker operating system called "linux": http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090414/1837144515.shtml

In short, first you make sure only a tiny minority can sympathize with them, follow it up with character attacks, and BAMN: you can start sentencing people to a few decades in prison for a victim-less crime committed in their late teens.

Sure I'm being more than a little hyperbolic here, but the point is that the more steps you go to to bypass this sort of thing, the more you start to look like an unsympathetic, evil hacker to the nice gentlepersons on the jury...don't dismiss the value of making it harder for the average person to the censorship lobby's efforts.

This is a bit of a strawman. In high school English, it was explained to us as: humans write literature, and sometimes they have something to say. This doesn't mean that they are the final word on what broader meaning their work has, but it does mean they have a deep insight into it. So no, don't ignore authors, but don't expect appeals to their authority to be viewed as anything but a fallacy in and of itself.

Or put another way: Read Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" (http://www.iment.com/maida/poetry/frost.htm#stopping), (it's short). The dominant interpretation of this poem is that it is an allegory of old age and death. Frost, however, insisted that this poem was about nothing more than taking a ride through a wood on a snowy evening. Who's right? It's not an either/or. In literary analysis there are right interpretation*s* and wrong interpretations, but it's not like there's just one right answer.

Or at least that's what I remember from my last literary analysis class taken, which was in high school many years ago.

Not at all. Thanks to advances in saving screen space and window management, I am perfectly happy with a 1280x800 laptop for everyday use, development, etc. For those who insist on mobility it's nice to obsolete the giant monitor.

I wasn't criticizing Amarok 1.4, I was praising it.

Good to know, I've been putting off a major system upgrade until I get some free time (to give me the ability to work around the loss of something I'm used to). Sometimes I feel spoiled rotten by free software -- other people put in hundreds of hours to build software that ends up being almost exactly what I want. As much as I complain about some of it, I really do like what I can get overall.

Unfortunately that's not always an option. Code tends to rot in a number of ways -- old bugs go unpatched, it no longer plays nice with system libraries. Particularly with an octopus like GNOME that interferes with every part of the system, you can start to see package conflicts, dependencies on old system libraries, etc. This is slow, gradual, and can often be worked around item by item, especially for a hacker like Torvalds, but it takes time and energy.

I had this experience myself with Amarok. I really loved the old amarok (1.4), when it had all the features of the full-on bloated clients like iTunes yet was still light and fast like Rhythmbox. Also fully customizable and scriptable with dcop. I kept pulling it in from backports, and eventually even compiling it myself, when Amarok 2 started coming standard (hoping that the developers would realize the mistake they'd made in throwing away such a perfect interface for that crap). Eventually, I gave up, as it failed to compile due to newer libs one time too many.

Thankfully, some kind folks forked 1.4 and made clementine, but it still lacks many of the features Amarok had at its height (automated album art and lyrics fetching being some of my favorites).

All change is relative. When you stand still, the world moves around you.

The beauty of the desktop vs the cloud is you at least have some control over when you migrate to the new interface.

Destruction of evidence is a felony, especially if you get caught. Just conduct your own audit first THEN invite them in.

PhD students at tier 1 and 2 research universities are basically bottom-rung scientists-in-training (sometimes with UGs below them). For our first year or two we'll take a class or two a term, but the bulk of our time is spent doing research, writing and reading scientific papers, and presenting at conferences. For the last 3-4 years we typically take no classes and spend all our time doing research and teaching. We're professionals who make $20-$30k/yr depending on the location, plus full benefits and tuition waivers for any classes we do take. Expectations of workload are typically higher than entry level positions in industry (50-80 hours/wk, depending on the field and PI), and pay is obviously worse. The postdocs and professors do do some of the research themselves (especially when younger), but for the most part their time is spent directing the general direction of the research and applying for grants to fund it, doing the work (for free) to review and organize journals, and of course teaching. Most of us are aware we won't be going on in academia after the PhD, and I at least am okay with that.

It's nothing like a masters or a undergraduate degree at all. We really aren't students in any meaningful sense of the word given the modern sense of college, aside from the fact that we'll get a degree in time. In Europe there are post-graduate degrees awarded after the PhD, so I guess you could call their postdocs "students" as well.

It's completely different outside STEM, however, with PhD students typically earning little to nothing and sometimes having to pay tuition.

*shrug* different tools for different purposes. I'm a graduate student, and writing good, scaleable, maintainable code would take far more time than I have, and is not what I'm paid to do. I'm paid to produce results. I've worked in industry before building huge infrastructure systems with many other people, and it calls for a completely different product. I'd go so far as to argue different skill sets. But speaking as someone who knows how to write "good" code, it's a waste of time for most academic applications, particularly outside CS.

If the software is the product, write it well, if not, get it done fast and right.