Since the LaTeX won't work on ARM point has already been addressed, let me just point out http://www.scribtex.com/ an excellent online LaTeX system. I believe it runs the full TeXLive 2009 distribution, so not the very latest packages, but it has XeTeX and most of the other modern amenities.

Boldly split infinitives that no man has split before.

Correct. But some will, and the availability of mainstream games (obviously all of this is assuming Steam brings some games with it) will make it more attractive. At least for me. And I have a hard time believing there aren't others. That's all I was trying to say.

With secure boot enabled by default on most/all new desktops, distros will either need to have you disable it (difficult for novices, and some may be reluctant to do it), or have the appropriate software and keys. I'm not saying it's a huge thing, but I do think it makes viable mainstream distros slightly harder to produce. If not, why the uproar about the change?

Rumour has it that the decision to finally port Steam to Linux was in part motivated by Microsoft's bold and exciting decision to release Windows Phone as a desktop operating system. With mainstream games being one of the last things keeping me from running Linux full-time, this may be the Year of the Linux Desktop... at least for me, and I'm guessing there are others like me.

This may not be a popular idea on Slashdot, but Windows 8's secure boot requirement may also help Linux: by making it a little more difficult to produce a functioning distro, it could have the effect of culling the distribution to a smaller number, with more developers focused on each. Choice is great and all, but I think the sheer variety in Linux can be a bit dizzying to newcomers.

I just tried to find my own phone number based on searches on my email address. Even when I made it unrealistically easy by also including my name and/or a few digits of the correct number, no luck. It didn't work with two random friends I selected either. Sure, I didn't conduct a scientific study and try hundreds of times... but a quick empirical check suggests that the poster from Google may be right, or at least that his/her statement wasn't "retarded".

FTFY

Outstanding. The thing is, admirable men though they were in many ways, the founding fathers are dead. Have been for about two hundred years now. So there are good technical reasons why they aren't in charge of current policy. Sure, we could try to run our country based on competing interpretations of their surviving writings. But that's not politics, it's religion.

Wow, that actually sounds really nice. I never gave Lotus a second thought as I just assumed it was moribund legacy software... Open source office software so far has been usable for years (I've used OO.o/LO for at least some real work since it first became available), but it hasn't innovated as much as FOSS has with browsers, etc. Ironic that it's IBM which took a somewhat new direction with the vintage UI.

Is it? I was under the impression that this would be a general-use emergency system, not a higher-level thing; after all, most of the federal departments, the military, etc., already have fairly extensive private networks where high-level secret communication is concerned. Maybe I'm completely off-base. If it isn't a general-use network with lots of people on the ground having access, then using custom American equipment is more practical, and is definitely the option to pursue I'd say.

This is a good point actually. Inasmuch as any FOSS project besides Firefox & Linux has name recognition, OO.o has it. Personally I've disliked the name ever since the .org became an official part of it... I understand the reason, but it still makes it sound like some flash in the pan .com-bubble-era project. Anyway, the point is that OO.o has a foot in the enterprise door, whereas LibreOffice could seem like a new and radical thing to people who aren't familiar with the context.

I work in an emergency room, so I come in contact with a lot of emergency workers -- medical, police, fire dept., even FBI and other federal depts in some cases. Their radios, computers, cellphones, etc., are almost always just generic equipment like everyone else, and for most of the brands I know they're manufactured in China.

I'm sure at a very high level there is custom-made American equipment, but by and large the electronics which make modern emergency response practical are made in China.

I didn't mean to imply that they were mutually exclusive.

The story in this article is that the US government is trying to exercise some more control over the new network's infrastructure, for reasons of national security. My point is that even if we assume the national security threat is real, the logical attack vector for the Chinese would be the devices (which are almost impossible for the government to control without draconian measures) rather than the infrastructure (which is already subject to significant government regulation).

If there is a credible threat (which again I think is somewhat dubious), the only real solution is to end the reliance on foreign-manufactured devices.

Even if we assume they're both tainted with devious Chinese spyware (and I'm not sure that China would want to harm such a huge and valuable debtor, by the way) which of these sounds like a bigger threat:

1. A large Chinese-built wireless network which the government can monitor or shut down with relative ease.

2. A vast semi-regulated sea of Chinese-built devices of all kinds flowing into the US, too many to be effectively controlled or destroyed, many of them used by emergency and government workers.

Come on, people. Maybe China is a threat to us and maybe it isn't, but if there's a problem, at least attack it in a logical way.

Debian got a reputation for archaism mostly due to the incredibly long-lived 3.x series (2002-2007 I believe), but since then they've been on a two-year release cycle. That sounds crazy to some in the Linux world, but it's comparable to release cycles for Windows and some of the surviving Unixes, and for the same reason: stability. You get a very consistent, reliable base OS plus security updates when needed, and newer software is available via back-ports or the universal Unix package system: source code.

Windows and proprietary Unixes do it to match slow enterprise IT cycles. I think Debian does it partially for the same reason (there are plenty of Debian servers out there), and partially because as the basis for so many distros, careless changes to Debian have potential to screw up about half the Linux world. Yes, those other distros are doing their own QA and packaging mostly, but still you can understand why they'd be conservative about getting you the latest bits.

Re: sid/unstable, it's definitely prone to breakage. But it tends to get fixes much faster than testing or stable, and the few days' delay probably isn't an insurmountable problem since you're not running it on production servers or anything. If you are, that isn't Debian's problem. I've used sid on desktop systems many times and never noticed a single glitch.