This is just a quick update to yesterday's post. According to Ars Technica,

Last Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution ahead of a forthcoming summit between Europe and the United States. It included a section on "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names."

That provision was added at the urging of the civil liberties organization European Digital Rights (EDRi). In a presentation to the Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee, EDRi's Joe McNamee noted that "the United States has, up until recently, never sought to exploit its theoretical jurisdiction over the companies and infrastructure that are at the core of the Internet."

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I've posted twice now about the Protect IP Act, or SOPA (the former is the Senate version, the latter is the House version), which is the latest attempt on the part of big media companies to put a stranglehold on the Internet.

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Having spent enough time using all three of the major OS's to have a decent understanding of their flaws, it's easy to explain why I use Linux whenever I have a choice: its flaws are much easier to manage.

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The New York Times, which is certainly a bastion of the liberal arts types if anywhere is, has been running a debate about law school that is similar to the one about college in general that I discussed in my post a couple of weeks ago on the two cultures.

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In the interest of keeping the record honest following my last post, it's only fair to report that I have now been pleasantly surprised.

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Today I had one of those experiences that make you wonder how anything ever gets accomplished in our society.

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I recently came across two articles talking about whether a traditional college education is really worth it any more, and they awakened a pet peeve of mine.

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The answer can be summed up in one sentence:

Not every data structure is a list.

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This is the first of what will no doubt be many dispatches from the "what's up with that?" department.

There was much rejoicing by many at the news yesterday that New York has passed a law permitting same sex marriage. This post is not about that issue, though I will say that I support such laws; "equal protection" is supposed to mean what it says, and if the state is going to provide special benefits to people who make life commitments to each other, it has no business saying that some couples can get them and some can't. But that's for another post someday.

While watching coverage of the event on CNN, one item struck me: it will be 30 days before any same-sex couple can actually apply for a marriage license under the new law.

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It's a well-known custom for Linux users to rant about some aspect of their OS. Unlike the Mac community, which gushes about how wonderful their OS is, or the Windows community, whose writings about their OS often read like soldiers' letters home from a war zone, we Linux types view ranting as a force for change. Or at least, as an explanation of why we personally no longer use the festering pile of dung we are ranting about.

The particular festering pile under the microscope in this post is KDE 4.

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