In general, social science isn't very scientific. People generally just argue for what they believe, and use multi-syllabic words and some math occassionally to back up their arguments. "Mean" people tend to engender cults of personality. Cults of personality tend to focus on pleasing the leader rather than gettinf accurate reports through. As such, they can rarely organize enough accuracy to produce quality technical items. They can still 'succeed' on an uneven enough playing field. At the moment the playing field is massively tilted to make bets made by big players appear to be good ones at least until they get to the 'greatest fool' , currently the New York Stock Exchange. This process periodically corrects itself. It started to in 2008, but the Bush Administration replaced the helium in the bubble with more bubbles full of hydrogen. Maybe we can get up the cliff before they explode, maybe we can't.
U.S. Software productivity falls 200% as legions of the technically illiterate conspire to make it look like they are doing work they can't actually do.
This has pretty pictures. I built a command line version:
for i in `seq 16`; do echo -ne '\007' && sleep 30 && echo -ne '\007' && sleep 1 && echo -ne '\007' && sleep 10; done
one might argue that by not protecting the user's personal data by default, when how to protect such information is quite well known, the vendor and market maker is clearly the liable party
The idea of Wayland growing and becoming a more usable platform sound terrific. The troubling part about this is ubuntu's history of doing what's good for ubuntu.
I would concur with Xichekolas with respect to both Ender's Game and the Economist. Also, The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century (Paperback) is excellent.