Wikipedia is a real life Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Its organizational structure may be a bit chaotic and perhaps not as democratic as some think it should be, but in a couple thousand years it will probably be pretty difficult to make your way around the galaxy without it.

Regardless, all nonprofit organizations become "corporate bureaucracies" after a while once they start employing people. Once people make a career out of a nonprofit they will do whatever they can to sustain it because they want to stay employed. Mother's Against Drunk Driving is a good example of a nonprofit that persisted even after its original goals were attained because the people who ran the charity needed it to continue out of self interest. At least Wikipedia is a group whose work can never truly be finished.

I find it hard to believe that you have such a busy schedule that you can't take five minutes to download and fiddle around with a piece of free software yet you have plenty of time to post regularly on slashdot.

Furthermore, if it takes you more than an hour to figure out how to complete basic tasks in a word processor that uses UI metaphors that have been around since the eighties then I suspect your lack of free time comes not from your hyper productivity but from your inefficiency.

Sorry to be a bit snide, but you did just refer to me as a kid and a fanatic, on top of insinuating that I lead an unproductive lifestyle, so I guess it's par for the course.

I understand why you're hesitant to try it out and see for yourself, being such a costly program and all.

I'm pretty sure prosecutors are allowed to do pretty much anything. ianal either, but I've read quite a bit about how few restrictions there are on prosecutorial misconduct. Attorney General is one of the offices of government which has no sufficient checks or balances. As far as I know there's no law against an AG using their prosecutorial power in a biased, selective, or abusive manner. Prosecutorial discretion is one of the greatest injustices in America but it's not an issue most people know or care about so it's not something politicians often bring up.

http://popehat.com/2013/06/26/...

http://popehat.com/2015/05/29/...

http://popehat.com/2008/07/16/...

http://popehat.com/2008/05/28/...

The short term isn't short term for the individual who is out of work and whose skills have become anachronistic.

Also, I question your assertion that technology never decreases jobs. I live in the rust belt and around here you don't have to look far to see jobs lost to automation. A lot of factories are making a comeback around here but they employ about 10% of what they used to, despite producing more goods. When there's a surplus of labor, as there is in the rust belt, labor becomes a cheap commodity. No person wants to be treated as a cheap commodity. An economic system that treats huge swaths of its population as cheap commodities isn't one I find to be particularly appealing. Justifying it with some Star Trek type of dream of unlimited goods and terraformed planets butts against the realities of limited resources and technological limitations.

Accusing anyone of being a luddite for not being a gung-ho supporter of the capitalist machine that tramples over so many in its pursuit of goods produced for the upper echelons of society is just silly. Things are more nuanced than that. The pursuit of a distributive justice system that benefits all members of society isn't incongruous with technological progress.

Decent journalism? You know you're on slashdot, right?

It sounds like you work for Microsoft. I'm not accusing you of being a shill or anything, your post just sounds like it was written by a marketing department attempting to sell Office to the /. crowd.

There was a time when I had to fire up Office because of various formatting quirks or whatever, especially when it came to Excel, but it's been a long time since that's happened. If you believe that LibreOffice isn't good enough for 99% of users out there then I doubt you've used it recently. Using the Gimp/Photoshop comparison is ridiculous (even though I use Gimp for all my photo manipulation needs; I'm not a photographer or graphic artist but I do occasionally need/want to create images or manipulate pictures).

When it comes down to it text editors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs have hit their ceiling when it comes to desired features. They're like Vise-Grips. There was a time when you had to get the name brand ones because nothing else worked as well. Now you can find knock-offs that do the same thing. A couple x-mases ago someone gave me a set of these Kobalt things that were supposed to be like Vise-Grips but easier to use and fancier. They were a pain in the ass and I never use them. That's what Microsoft did when they rolled out their ribbon interface and this 365 crap. They tried to put bells and whistles on something that didn't need them (for the sake of continuing the upgrade cycle) and made an inferior product. LibreOffice doesn't just work as well as MS Office, it works better.

How unfortunate. I'm sorry.

He didn't say that they, must be of a higher quality. He said that it's a possibility that shouldn't be ignored. You can't just assume it's not true.

Personally, I think the problem is that we try to use science to evaluate things it's ill-suited to do. "How gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work" is not a subject that's best examined using the scientific method. If one wants to come to a real understanding of this issue I would suggest asking a bunch of PhDs, both male and female, to write essays about it from a purely subjective point of view, and put those essays into a collection. It would certainly be much more enlightening than survey data and whatever various statistics were compiled in an effort to make a scientific study out of the whole thing.

I love science. It's great method for discovering truth. But I hate it when people try to apply science to social issues.

What outstanding interface designs?

I've known people who have had their car searched because a dog allegedly signaled that there were drugs in the car when there were not. They looked like stoners (long hair and tie-dyed shirts) so the cops probably thought the odds were good they would find something. When they didn't they just blamed the dog and said something along the lines of, "well, you were probably smoking pot in this vehicle at some point, and that's probably what the dog smelled."

The dog is just an excuse to violate your rights.

The difference is that Apple is an American company and Indiana is in America. Also, Fiorina demonstrates extremely poor logic: She says it's hypocritical for Apple to do business with China while criticizing an Indiana law. It would only be hypocritical if they were refusing to do business with Indiana but not China. I'm sure if you asked Tim Cook about several of China's policies he would criticize them. It's not surprising nor hypocritical that he chooses to publicly criticize Indiana rather than China, however, because it's in America and he has quite a bit of lobbying power here.

I'm amazed that Fiorina thinks she could be a viable candidate. She ran HP into the ground with horrible decisions. That's all any opponent needs to point out about her.

I can see a fair amount of criticism leveled against American cars but to say they ought to learn from Toyota or Honda is just laughable. A Camry? Really?

If American automobile manufacturers want to take some hints from their foreign competitors I'd hope they do so from the Germans rather than the Japanese. Your comment about seat position and control layout make me think you're short -- Japanese cars tend to be more comfortable for short people compared to American and European cars. Regarding steering and suspension, I don't think you know much about steering and suspension if you think a Camry is ideal.

Most American cars are rubbish, I agree with that. But so are most Japanese cars.

Hate to respond to myself but I forgot one tidbit: If you don't have some boot manager software like rEFIt installed, hold the option key while your Mac starts up. This will allow you to select your Linux disc/drive when you go to install it and after it's installed it will allow you to select your Linux partition. By default it just boots OS X.