I don't agree with you, but you do have a point. You aren't spending less, but the problem with the microsoft tax isn't the money I spent. The problem is that the said money is going to microsoft.

When I buy a computer from Dell, I figure they're going to make some profit either way. If they make more profit by selling Linux to me, then maybe it's encouragement to sell more Linux machines. In any event, that money going to dell doesn't bother me. That same money going to microsoft does.

The other viewpoint here is that you shouldn't be paying that money because you aren't buying an operating system. This seems to be the one that you're taking. This being the case, there are other vendors where you don't buy the operating system (TFA mentions quite a few vendors -- check them out). Or you could build your own if you have the time to deal with it. It's a matter of taste, I imagine. Or budget.

So, in short, you have a good point, but there are other arguments to be made as well. :)

KDE4 is a new concept for a UI. I think KDE3 will be around for a long time if you don't feel like using KDE4 (and, probably, if enough people are as annoyed as you, then it'll get forked, or Gnome will get another boost in popularity). But I'm not sure that scorning it for the new concepts is the right approach. I agree that a simple, responsive UI is a good idea. That said, simplicity is often a matter of taste: if you're used to the old way, then the new UI, even if it proves to be better in the long run, will be uncomfortable for a while. Change hurts. Always has. I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water is a good idea. Also, knowing what little I do about Qt4 development, it seems to me that the user interface should be relatively easy to change back. Perhaps a fork of Amarok's newest version which aims at a simpler interface would be a good approach. Basically, I think that your complaint is valid, but signifies that the program is experiencing growing pains rather than Amarok being ruined, per se. Feel free to disagree :)

And... Why HTML is bad (on its own):

- Odd e-mail situations. I often access my e-mail over SSH when I'm at school. It takes extra work to get past the HTML, even when used for legitimate purposes, when accessing e-mail in less common ways.

- Spam fighting. I know from firsthand experience that stripping e-mails of HTML significantly increases the accuracy of statistical filters (like bogofilter, my preferred spam-fighting tool). The conclusion I draw from this is that HTML messes with statistics. HTML is often the way spammers keep their e-mails harder to detect, for example by embedding all their text in an image to prevent (or try to prevent) text-based filtering.

- Readability. Sure, you can stick to <b>, <i>, <u>, and <a> if you want. But more often, the people who feel the need to send an HTML e-mail send me things with <img> and <center> and <font> and <style> and <h1>. These things are available for abuse.

- Necessity. The <b>, <i>, <u>, and <a> tags are easily replaced. How? Simple. *bold*, //italic//, _underline_ and Link[1]. It's been used for ages (long before I was around). This is even easily parsed by an e-mail reader who wants to see this rendered graphically.

HTML has its place. Slashdot, for example. Web pages that were the original purpose of HTML. Wikis that render their pages with HTML for deeply linked pages. E-mail, however, is not the place for HTML.

THANK YOU!

One of my pet peeves is the extreme excess of media produced today. TV is perhaps the perfect example of what I mean. We have cable from Comcast. For X dollars per month, we could get the basic package (60 channels or so). For X+10 dollars per month, we get the next package up (hundreds of channels). We have the X+10 dollar package because of two channels we did want (yeah, out of hundreds of channels, there are only about 4 that are worth watching). But what possible use is there for buying 400 channels? I mean, really. I cannot watch 400 channels, and most of them I don't want to watch. This is a heavy excess of material that isn't necessary to enjoy the TV that is worthwhile.

We don't need massive quantities of TV. We need TV that is engaging enough to give us our fill very quickly and leave time for something else (and time seems to be the one thing our society can't find enough of any more). I enjoy The Universe (a history channel documentary series about astronomy) because it is both interesting and generally well made. I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series of movies, for a similar reason (extremely well made, and a captivating plot. Although the books are still better). I wish things of this caliber were frequently shown. But instead, when I turn on the TV (which is often an exercise in futility), I see very few shows that are worth my time. I stopped turning to channels other than discovery, history, science, and national geographic. I often turn on the TV, look at even *those* channels, see nothing interesting and turn the TV off.

Perhaps my demands are too high, but it seems to me that interesting fiction is getting ever harder to come by. It's as though the imaginations of the producers are disappearing, although I'm pretty sure the ratings system is just as responsible for this (and the sheep-like consumerism model of our present society certainly doesn't help).

Summary: TV is dumbing down. Buying 400 channels is useless since you can't watch them all. We need more interesting shows/movies.

I think I understand what you're saying... but one thought still bugs me, and I think it's right about what I was trying to get at before. I'm pondering the definition of "exact same situation." Does this imply that, as well as external reality, memory is also the same? If this is so, then I can see it being possible that we would not be capable of making a different decision, as our decision-making is seemingly largely based on our memory. For example, a man on a documentary I watched a while ago has a severe case of amnesia, such that he has no long-term memory after a certain point, and short-term memory only for a few minutes. He writes the same exact sentence repeatedly in his journal, many, many times. He seems to be incapable of making a different decision given the same situation. Does that mean that he's lost free will? The other possibility, as opposed to memory being identical as well, is that memory of prior events is retained. Which means that a robot, even a deterministic one, could still make a different decision given the same situation. A hypothetical adaptive program operating with asimov's 3 laws might, for example, fail to account for some variable in one instance of an event. When the same thing happens again, that robot could remember what happened last time and account for it. It still seems very deterministic, but it would satisfy the condition of being able to act differently given the same situation. I suppose that if not retaining memory causes us to lose free will, it would follow that we are deterministic. But somehow that still doesn't seem right. I just can't quite put my finger on it right now.

Free will is such an illdefined concept. What does it mean to have free will? Does it mean that there are no restrictions on our decisions? No, not really. We can't decide to forget something. Does free will imply that our brains are somehow fundamentally different from all other matter, and, even knowing the precise state of every neuron in our brain at some moment, we will still be unable to determine the decision to be made? Presently, the concept of free will is probably simply too illdefined to be programmed at all.

That said, I think the movie version of I, Robot has a point to be made. Sonny (the main robot in the movie) was given free will by his creator by allowing him to disable one or more of the three laws. If such a system were made, what would we do when such a machine murdered a human (or another machine, for that matter)? Does requiring the adherence to laws restrict free will? If not, then why is it different for those laws to be hard-coded into the machine than externally imposed? How would this hard-coding be different from teaching a child that it's wrong to lie?

I think most would agree that it's not damaging to free will to forbid murder. Every country on earth today, and most civilizations throughout history, have disallowed murder. Yet we still consider ourselves to have free will. I believe it follows that imposing restrictions on machines by coding said machines so that they're incapable of committing the crime is not injurious to the machine's free will, if it has such to begin with. The three laws, as defined by Asimov, are not incompatible with a robot having free will. They are merely defining the limits of that freedom.

Just my $0.02, and hopefully food for thought.

Your absolutely right for miro, that it's probably not the right approach. Anyone who cares to know about the source code knows where to look. It might not be the right thing to adopt... but what about adopt-a-channel, split 50-50 between the channel and the developers? I'm sure something could be worked out.

More importantly, this would probably work better in a more source-savvy project. Like gcc or the Linux kernel. Some project where only people who care about the source code even know that it exists. Does this remind anyone of the pet rock?

I was windows-free *before* high school, technically. But it's cheating, because I was homeschooled and started high school 2 years late (still finished early).

I used the GUI some, but from a very early stage of the learning curve, I found the shell to be much more useful than the GUI. So I basically run the GUI for web browsing and background tasks (auto e-mail checking, jukebox, whatnot) and have about a dozen console windows open at any given moment. Compiz helps to organize them, though, and I think if anything it'd be compiz I'd have a hard time giving up if X died.

The clause looks like it applies to just about every wiki to me... and there are lots of those.

Anyway, I believe it has to do with the fact that Creative Commons didn't exist with the previous version (correct? I gathered that from the article... Didn't check that yet), or some similar situation. That CC happens to be a better license for such content, and the FSF seems to have decided this too, seems to make sense to me. Having a path for moving from one to the other makes some sense to me.

If:
a) You do not have privacy concerns about Google tracking you,
b) Your customers don't, either,
c) You and/or your customers would prefer easy install over privacy, and
d) You and/or your customers trust all of the newest releases of all software without review,
then sure, I see no problem with it.

However, if you answered "no" to any of the above, then you might have a problem with it. I would answer no to 'c' and 'd' above, personally. That being the case, I want to be able to disable the thing that I do not trust.

Giving this a typical car analogy: if you ride in a taxi or a bus, you are trusting that the driver won't crash, speed, try to kill you, or record your cell phone conversations. Some of these are, of course, more likely than others (notably, the chances of your bus driver trying to kill you are pretty slim). None of them are particularly likely. However, if you had some reason to believe that the driver would do any of these things, you probably wouldn't ride the bus.

Of course, most people just get on the bus and don't think about these things. Most people just install Google updater and don't think about their privacy or potential code issues. That does not, and should not, negate the need for the rider/user to be able to choose whether or not to ride the bus/run the program.

I'm not saying that Google updater is bad. I'm saying that the inability to disable it is bad.

I don't necessarily object to such censorship on a privately owned and operated forum. Anyone who operates such a forum will, for obvious reasons, have some desire to keep their comments in check.

But I feel it should be made fairly clear that this censorship is occurring. And, just as important, there must be a place where this censorship does *not* occur. There needs to be a cyberspace sidewalk, where much as on a real sidewalk, nobody can stop you from saying what you want. Freenet (or something like it) is a good place for this to happen, personally. It has the advantage that anybody who doesn't want to see the completely anonymous and uncensored comments has no requirement to look at them.

Basically, my problem with censorship is only when it's enforced and unavoidable. I can say whatever obscenities I want to my family (which I wouldn't do out of respect, obviously) and have no risk of prosecution. I can privately tell my friends at a movie theatre that there is a fire in the building when there isn't. It's only when I start screaming "FIRE!" at the top of my lungs and inciting panic that a problem arises. What an anonymous person says isn't what needs to be controlled. It's how or where it is said.

I will grant you that many news stories we read online originated on paper or from a major news reporter. But not all, and not all has to. The key is to realize that you don't need people dedicated to reporting. Instead, you need lots of people who are all over the place, who can, by chance, find the news themselves. Given an internet of users, it seems absurd to me that none of them would post interesting news they come upon. Aggregators are just a way to help that information to flow.

I think the real key to solving the journalism problem, then, is not trying to keep full-time major journalists in business (if they want to stay around, they can compete like the rest of us), but rather, it's about getting rid of badly written libel and copyright laws that make everyone else afraid to post the news they hear about.

Just my .02 :)

I agree with what you're saying. I just wanted to point out that, prior to hotmail, etc., e-mail was largely not free. Often came with your ISP, but in the early-to-mid 90's, we just didn't have the sort of internet we have today.

Of course the alternative is to be like me and embrace your caffeine addiction :)

I, for one, am a proud caffeine addict! I keep a jar of caffeine anhydrous on my desk! My fridge has more energy drink than milk! I have a shelf devoted to a variety of caffeine products! I always have a tin of Foosh in either my backpack, locker, or pocket!

I'm afraid about the only way to separate me from my caffeine would be a crowbar or a rehab clinic.

For the record, I'm well aware that it's a drug, and, like all drugs, can be helpful in carefully metered doses, but possibly harmful over time or if too large a dose is taken. Shakes and nervousness are indicators, of course, that you've had too much caffeine. I fastidiously avoid this problem.

You don't have to use separate functions in C. C does have GOTO's, thank you very much :)

The only note is that you can't jump to the end of a block. So if your loop is nested such that no loop has code at the end of it, then you might run into a problem. In that case, an empty function that does nothing (and could be optimized away by the compiler) would suffice as a line of code to allow you to jump.

I'm not an expert, just a hobbyist (at the moment). But that's been my experience. I'd be happy if someone could tell me a better way (which doesn't involve a flag indicating that each loop is supposed to break!)