The solicitation number linked to actually refers to the HITECH act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to quote health it.gov:

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act seeks to improve American health care delivery and patient care through an unprecedented investment in Health IT (HIT).

And it certainly sound like they've achieved an unprecedented investment at least.

I have to say, I agree with them that the best way to teach is often writing everything by hand on a whiteboard. Why? It's the best way to create interaction. Talking over a PowerPoint presentation is only slightly better than just giving people a book to read. Working out everything out by hand in the lecture lets the students see how you work through the problem, and, critically, they see you make mistakes. Spotting these mistakes and either correcting them for you, or seeing how you approach going back and correcting them, is one of the most important things for the students to learn. In their later careers its often more important than the actual content of the lecture itself.

So, yes, it's helpful if a course has a good website, and some simple CMS may be useful too, but it is absolutely critical that many of the lectures are still done by hand.

Not exactly a full credit, but he does at least get a mention in the very first paragraph of the Kickstarter page.

Comparing the cost of B-52's and B-2's isn't really fair, they were built with very different political requirements.

The B-52's were made with WW3 in mind, and the basic MAD mission would have been to send hundreds of bombers across the USSR in the hope that most of them would reach their target. During all-out nuclear war it wouldn't matter too much politically if 20-30% of the bombers didn't make it back home, as long as the others scored a hit.

The B-2, however, is designed with the assumption of a much higher survival rate, and no politically embarrassing lost/captured crews. This basically requires that you have a few very expensive aircraft, as opposed to lots of cheap ones.

In other words, the B-2 is much more expensive because it puts a much higher value on the lives of the crews.

This does seem like a bizarre reaction from the hacktivists. The Polish government is in the news because they're one the longest holdouts in signing up to ACTA. Surely one of the governments that signed up quickly and quietly, with the minimum of public discussion, is more worthy of our scorn.

I had one of those, it was really cool, even as a kid you could see it was designed better than most other toys. Thanks for the back story.

Since he said he has a 5GB file of secret banking industry documents to be released at a later date.

I'm not sure about Gnome, but KDE already works on non-X11 platforms (e.g. KDE 4.4 is available for Mac), and there's already an ongoing port of Qt to Wayland, so it shouldn't require a big effort from the KDE developers to support this move.

Well, in the case of Germany, first you allow a fascist party to rule for a few years, and then allow a communist puppet state to rule part of the country for 40 odd years after that. With that experience its very easy to convince people that personal privacy is an important issue.

If anything, these new laws are aimed directly at the later group. Just having been a member of the Stasi (east German secret police) was not a crime after reunification, and many of them later became private "security consultants". There's been a few high profile cases of them using their old techniques to help companies track employees.