How usefully open-source can it be with a commercial library requirement?

Uh, actually I'm much more conservative than most of the Slashdot crowd and I'm not an Obama supporter. I did RTFA and I was agreeing with it - despite the administration's stated intent to increase granted requests under the FOIA by the mechanisms I described, it ain't happening (at least in the previous fiscal year). If you read carefully instead of freaking out when you see the word "Obama", you'll see that nothing in my statement that you quoted disagreed with the article. The changes proposed to the FOIA is one of the ONLY positive things I've seen so far from his administration and even that little something isn't working. I thought the previous policy was a little too closed minded and caused more trouble for FOIA officers and requesters.

I've done some work with federal agencies and how they process FOIA requests:

A request for information under the FOIA can be granted, partially denied, or denied. If the request is granted, the exact records requested are returned unedited. If the request is denied, one or more reasons (exceptions) must be stated from a list of allowed exemptions. If a request is partially denied, one or more exemptions must be stated and what the requester receives back will either be a subset of what was asked for or will be redacted to remove sensitive information. For example, PIA (personally identifiable information - like SSNs, birth dates, medical records, etc.) is an exemption and is grounds for a partial denial, but it usually only means that this information will be redacted from the requested records.

So if you are looking at statistics (annual FOIA reports are required by law from every government entity and the reports themselves are either published or available via FOIA request themselves), you need to know the total number of new requests, the total number of requests held over from the previous fiscal year, the number of requests granted, the number partially denied, and the number totally denied. There are also individual statistics for denials and partial denials broken down by exemptions. There isn't anything on the annual report about how many exemptions were applied to individual requests - that would just have to be averaged out.

The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it. The other thing that has been encouraged is pre-emptive release. For any request that is granted (no exemptions) there is no reason to not put that record on the agency's public web site to avoid processing any future requests for it. Or if there are certain types of records that can be released and that get requested often, go ahead and publish them. Theoretically this will reduce the number of FOIA requests processed, but I think it's probably too early to see a difference based on this policy.

Back in the early 80's, the Radio Shack store at the local mall had a fishbowl full of alligator clips marked "party favors" (roach clips).

I like Wolfram|Alpha's capabilities much better when I'm not fighting their "natural language" parsing. The simplest way to get "What time is it?" on W|A isn't to type that question, just do:

now

More impressively, Wolfram|Alpha can do this:

airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight

Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.

On the other hand, you can ask W|Q:

Phase of the moon on the day Elvis was born

and it will show and tell you (waxing crescent). Google would only do that if someone had written that down on a page somewhere with sufficient page rank to show up higher than semi-random occurrences of all of the words.

Of course, there is a simple answer to the Google vs. W|A controversy (and one that Wolfram should agree to) - license Google to provide a prominent link to W|A for search phrases that look like they might be appropriately solved by it.

There's a simple, unambiguous test anyone can apply to objectively determine whether a theory is scientific. That is: is the theory falsifiable? Does the theory make predictions that could potentially be proven wrong by evidence? Intelligent Design fails this test.

And so does every other scientific fact that has ever existed. Therefore, we might as well eliminate science from the K-12 curriculum. After all at one point in time it was a scientific fact that man could not fly. At one point in time, it was a scientific fact that man could not survive in space. You could go on and on with scientific facts that have been proven wrong. It is impossible to know what evidence might be discovered in the future that will prove any scientific fact to be false.

Intelligent Design is just as valid as it was. After all, Intelligent Design is based upon sound engineering principles. If you consider engineering to be a scientifically based area of study, then Intelligent Design is also a scientifically based area of study. The only real difference in engineering and ID is that ID makes the assumption that the principles were applied by a supreme being that can exceed the capabilities of mankind. Whereas engineering is performed by people with the same capabilities of those performing the analysis.

While I see your point, I disagree with your conclusion. You do need a working class, but that working class does not have to be poor (or doesn't have to be poor forever). In order for it to work at its best, you need a working class that is educated and dynamic (willing to change) because as markets, society, and technology evolves, it is always going to leave some people out of work. Automobile jobs replace horse related jobs, large scale agriculture means fewer small family farms, and so on. There is also nothing inherent in capitalism that requires a permanent class or wealth based stratification of society - there will always be young, inexperienced, and uneducated people starting out looking for work. They don't have to stay that way for the rest of their lives as long as equal opportunities are made available for them to advance, get educated, and make more money. When you look at poverty statistic in America, you see a snapshot in time. Yes, there is too much disparity in my opinion between the highs and the lows, but there is a distribution. When you compare snapshots from different time periods, you can compare the change in the number of people in poverty, middle class, or "rich" categories. What you don't see in this analysis is the movement of individuals between these categories. A majority of young people just starting out make very little money. Some work minimum wage jobs while attending college, for example. During that time, they are "poor". Ten years later, they may be upper middle class while another young person just starting out takes their old statistical position.

Studies that I have seen show that very few people in America stay in the same income and wealth categories through their whole lives. This is not true in many other countries in the world. In heavily socialized democracies, there are more people in the middle-classes, but there is less overall mobility and higher unemployment.

To be perfectly realistic, there will always be a certain percentage of human beings in a society which are going to stay poor due to lack of ability, health and mental problems, or, to be blunt, just plain laziness. We have a moral and ethical duty to protect them to a certain extent and to help them as much as they are able to be helped. There will also be a certain percentage of people who will overcome pretty much any normally bad circumstance and succeed. The rest of us should know that we have the opportunity and protection that we need to succeed (and yes, profit) is we use those opportunities and work hard.