The quality of my notes (and subsequent work) increased considerably when I started taking notes on a computer rather than on pen and paper. My handwriting was sufficiently unreadable that indices, subscripts, negation signs would all get lost all over the place. Not only that, my mind is less organised on paper than on a computer. Having organised notes would last as long as it took for the first correction or addendum to appear, at which point they'd degenerate into random pieces of text scrawled all over the place, equations inset in boxes in the corner of a page, seemingly random conclusions that were referencing something I'd yet to write. They would inevitably get abandoned later when I came to look over them and couldn't work out what I was talking about. In the end, I gave up writing hand written notes altogether. The structure provided by LaTeX, on the other hand, I found perfect for formalising notes, and those that I took in this way were usually perfectly coherent and detailed - in fact I believe a set of them is now in use by one of my previous lecturers as his set of notes. After a while, I was even able to replicate graphs and other diagrams (using the PGF/TikZ package) during lectures. I'm sure it's not the solution for everybody - I'd be very surprised if it were - but neither is pen and paper always the right answer.

LyX is a good starting point - I used it for a couple of years and it worked very well. By the end of that time I'd build up a sufficient collection of my own macros that I dropped LyX and went back to straight LaTeX. Either approach should work, the former takes less time up front.

I can't help but feel that this isn't so much about fairness and more about penalising Microsoft. When you look at Apple, which not only bundles the browser with the OS, but the hardware, and has it against the T&Cs that you can't install the OS on anything else, Microsoft's browser bundling really seems like a bit of a non-issue.

Yes, you're only theoretically blackmailable because people think it's relevant - but those people aren't necessarily your employers, they may be your family, friends or even yourself. This is the more important consideration here and the one you overlook. If I were a secret chocolate addict whose parents were vehemently anti-chocolate, then that makes my secret chocolate addiction relevant. If I just feel a bit guilty for stuffing my face, I'm hardly going to reveal state secrets because somebody threatens to expose the secret stash of Dairy Milk in my bottom desk drawer. Ultimately, yes, the solution is that people stop obsessing over sexuality, but that's not a problem that's going to disappear overnight, and it's not something localised to the employer. I wholeheartedly agree with you about refusing to answer such questions in general, but I can understand that with regard to some sensitive positions it does become relevant whether you're trying to hide these things, not because the employer is worried about your sexuality, but because they're worried that you are.

In the UK the position goes that your sexuality is fine so long as you're open about it. If you try to hide it, then it's potential blackmail material, but if everybody knows then it's not a problem. Charles Stross's book 'The Atrocity Archives' has the nice idea of a character who gets a day off each year to go to a gay pride rally, which he's required to do to keep his security clearance.

Fair point - I wandered off point somewhat there. Haven't found any numbers purely giving salary divided by sex, but the Fawcett society gives the numbers for certain top positions (% women) as: * 9% of directors of the UK's top 100 companies * 19% of MPs in parliament * 7% of top police officers * 23% of civil service top management * 9% of editors of national newspapers * 18% of trade union general secretaries or equivalent I'd tend to discount the MPs, given that they're elected, but the others are reasonably indicative. The workforce as a whole is now reasonably balanced in that regard.

Avoiding inflammatory language and couching what you say in veils isn't being non-inflammatory. Writing everything in a reasonable fashion doesn't mean you're being reasonable, it just means you're trying to give the impression of reason whilst getting away with posting the same tired old nonsense. The glass ceiling is not a product of women working less. I don't deny that there may be women who want to work less, just as there may well be men who feel the same. That doesn't explain how comparing across people in the same positions, doing the same jobs with the same hours, we still find a massive inequality in pay rates (an average of 17%, in the UK at least).

KDE 4.2 includes a vi command mode for Kate (and KWrite), which is nice for those of us who want to make every keypress count.