Of course human nature is changed by systems. Before money, humans didn't live, breath, and eat money like people do today. When there is a shortage of something, people compete. When there is an abundance of something, people share. Beyond that, human nature is shaped entirely by the systems that surround it, and likewise shape those systems by interacting in it.

Humans used to kill each other all the time. Now it rarely happens (directly), because of a system of crime and punishment. By nature, individuals were sick of being attacked, so they created a system to protect themselves.

That said, you probably meant it is foolish to think you can change human nature from the top-down. Justice may be enforced top-down, but obviously its origins are from the the very grassroots up. Just because you weren't alive when it happened doesn't mean your nature as a person wasn't affected by the justice system, or political system, or that the it was a foolish endeavour.

If you can come up with a system which is so beneficial that even those people who profiting from the status-quo would want to switch to it, then you can change human nature.

Wouldn't Google Wave fit the bill for collaboration on legislation pretty well? With the release, they've been heavily pushing a new "Add email address" feature to current Wave users which just sends invites, so it should start spreading pretty quickly if creative people in the beta can actually make it useful for something. That plus the gradual federation of servers and diversification of clients, just like email, could make XMPP the collaborative protocol of the next decade. Seems like the right direction to head in, anyway.

Hmmm, not for me. Note there are two scaling options, regular and "smooth" scale. http://img148.imageshack.us/g/kolourpaintsmooth.png/

Highly recommend that everyone scroll through tons of pretty screenshots and feature lists on this developers blog which will give you a way better idea of how awesome KDevelop is going to be than the summary links will.

But the great thing is that there are umpteen different ways to use most of that free software in open-source operating systems. Virtualization is probably the most reliable, but the progress in Wine has been astounding and it works great for running VirtualDub, and can use Windows video encoders like the XviD binaries for Windows. And I've been watching online television from CTV in Firefox using the Silverlight plugin, so that is a testament to progress in Mono.

Your first sentence answered the question in your second. Is this a trick? What do you want from us?

Do you assume he arranges all of his international trips and conferences sitting cross-legged on the side of a mountain?

Now I do want to be a Jackalope.

At Loblaw's our President's Choice gift cards need to be peeled out of the frame they are inset into, with backing. There's no way to get anything off of the card until then. Plus the frame holds the little hole so you can hang them on the shelf.

And phone cards all just have identical barcodes. The POS system then generates their activation code upon confirmation of payment, and prints it on their receipt.

This is in little ol' Canada, by the way.

You really need to keep your eye on KDevelop 4.0 then. Check out one of the main developer's blogs for tons of screenshots. It's a complete rewrite from 3.5 that takes advantage of just about everything KDE and Qt have to offer. I'm sure it is going to blow every other Qt/KDE IDE out of the water.

It's just a shitty headline. The courts didn't decide the truth, medicine did and just passed it along.

If a company designed a product to operate in the whitespace radio band, wouldn't they want to market it to people in Baltimore and Philadelphia too? So why would they make a device that would interfere with DTV transmissions in those cities? Or, do you mean that they are so far away that your ability to pick them up isn't protected?

I've always been planning to implement a file backup system, but that's pretty boring stuff. The reason I brought up Dropbox is because ultimately I think it'd be the penultimate reason to pay for webhosting, were the idea implemented in FOSS. In the meanwhile, how do you backup your personal files to your webhost?

How can I make my life easier by using my hundreds of gigs of space, and thousands transfer each month? I googled for a while and couldn't find much geared towards answering my question. There must be some interesting web-based software out there that people run on their own servers to help productivity. What do other slashdotters keep installed on their servers?