The recipe is simple: instead of buying photoshop/CS licenses, invest in development of Gimp (possibly in your "garage" by hiring a programmer). Let other people do the same for better effect.

Slashdot doesn't support utf-8? Oh man.

Is it open-source-like-in-free-software? If so, then its 95% of software I run on my machine. But if it may also mean anything with its source code open somewhere on the Net (e.g. github without a license or some other proprietary "you-use-the-code-only-this-way" stuff like unrar), then I must specifically say that these 95% consist of "free software as defined by the Gnu project" instead of just "open source". P.S. I call FLOSS ÂÐÑ-ÐÑOEнÐÐ ÑоÑÑ in my native language (Ukrainian), where ÂÐÑ-ÐÑOEнÐРmeans "free as in freedom" and ÂÑоÑÑ means "software". If I wanted to say "open source [software]" in Ukrainian, I'd need 4 words: "ÑоÑÑ Ð ÐÑ-ÐÐÑÐÑÐм ÐоÐом". It's fun that in English it takes less words to say this fancy "open source" thing than simply "free [as in freedom] software".

Fully agree with you. If I was provided with a LibreOffice (or Word) screen and told to take notes on it, it would have been a torture for me. But with Org-mode and a Dvorak keyboard I feel much more comfortable than with pen and paper. I also wrote my masters in Org-mode. The ability to use Git also helped me a lot to control how my text evolved.

I don't see any information on how the students were taking notes on their machines. Just "taking notes on laptops" may mean anything.

I wouldn't be able to take any notes in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. But in Org-mode I actually take notes more efficiently than I can do than on paper.

To me the greatest advantage of digital notes over pen and paper is that I can extend a topic when I acquire additional information on it (whereas on paper there's usually no physical space to do that), reorganize them by merging related notes into a single unit and also search through them.

Also, I type much faster than I write and I can shape and transform my notes very easily with Org-mode.

But actually I'd prefer if there was some collaborative note-taking going on instead of the huge duplication of work as it is now. Something like wiki-notes, where the purpose of taking notes would be not to recreate them each time but to make them better over time and update them.

I use Org all the time. I even wrote my masters in it (exported to LaTeX and PDF).

If you visit the page using Firefox with JavaScript disabled, they suggest you to download Google's Chrome, i.e. to give even more of your data to NSA. We should at least recommend Chromium (the open-source part of Chrome) in such cases instead of the binary distribution from Google.

Wouldn't it be less ambiguous to say they cracked the system instead of hacked it? When will we show our respect to the guys who call themselves hackers for creating free operating system kernels?

I'm sorry, I misused the term 'backend'. I meant their so-called 'manager' interface, i.e. the admin panel. It uses ExtJS.

I'm using Wordpress on a few personal blog-like projects but I think I'll stick at Drupal as my main platform, because my main requirement is flexibility and modularity. I'm currenly trying to build a blank html5boilerplate-based theme in drupal to see how it goes. And what do you use?

I was using MODx Revolution for around two years, and it has many good sides, about which you can read on their website, in the books they published and in their wiki. But there are also some issues that led me to seeking an alternative now. MODx developers, please take this as an attempt of constructive criticism (and sorry for my imperfect English).

• Too much is stored in the db, and that makes it very hard to work with git. Even with the 'static elements' functionallity one must have the actual 'element' in the database even if the code is stored in a file.
• Poor performance of the backend. The backend is implemented entirely on ExtJS and is slow. Despite it's ExtJS it still requires to reload the page too often.
• Very hard to develop own stuff on top of it. Just take a look at the tutorial on creating an extension (called 'extra'). I've developed different 'extras' to implement custom functionality in my projects, and I constantly had the feeling that they just made simple things much overcomplicated.
• Poor documentation. Just take a look on their API docs. For example, the documentation for the modX::addExtensionPackage() function just says: "Add an extension package to MODX", and no information on the arguments besides what types they are.
• Some serious problems in the core. For example, the widely used function modX::getChunk() has a performance bottleneck and can't be used in anything like, for instance, displaying a big list of products on a page, despite that this is exactly what it's for. If one instead reuses a same chunk object to iterate through a set of DB records (using $chunk->process()), the performance is dramatically increased. This issue has been reported on the forums, but didn't catch much attention (I can't even find the thread now.) The getChunk() function is widely used in some very important modx extensions, and yet the performance bottleneck doesn't seem to bother to the MODx community.

This isn't the full list. This is just some random (but major) inconveniences I can recall right now. To me, MODx is a great idea which for some reason wasn't implemented well.

France and Russia are very different states indeed, but it's interesting that Russian Wikipedia had a similar incident recently. The Russian Wikimedia received a request from the government to remove the 'Cannabis smoking' article from Russian Wikipedia (see google-translated version). The request in an ultimate manner states that if the article won't be removed during 24 hours then 'the hosting provider is obliged to limit access to such website' (haha, hosting provider from USA?) and if the hosting provider refuses to do that, then 'the IP address of the website will be listed in a database of addresses to whish ISP's will limit access'. The request PDF is here.

I agree. By (consciously) using the word "hacking" instead of "cracking" when refering to activity related to circumventing computer security we show our disrespect of those who contributed to the development of computing as we know it and who once asked us to differentiate the costructive "hacking" from the destructive "cracking". This is an example of constructive "cracking" though which is a special case.

If we rephrase your question into "Why do people obey when they get ordered to do bad things?" then this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo may explain some of the core problems with that (although it obviously shows much more extreme cases, sometimes even hard to watch.)