I'm a big fan of Tolkien's works; I've even read and enjoyed large portions of the History of Middle Earth volumes, including his fascinating Lost Tales, early drafts of stories that later became parts of the Silmarillion, and some of the long poems. But I have found that some of them, such as The Silmarillion itself, and now The Children of Hurin, really benefit a lot from an audio presentation rather than just reading. I tried to get into The Silmarillion several times, but the text never really engaged me; my eyes would start to just slide down the page without absorbing anything. That is, until I listened to Martin Shaw's unabridged reading. It really comes to life; it is no longer like reading the phone book in Elvish. The same thing applies to The Children of Hurin. There is a great unabridged reading by Christopher Lee.

These readings don't make good background sound while working; they need your concentration. I'm a notorious multi-tasker and sometimes I think I've lost the ability to focus on one thing at a time, unless it is code. But they would be great for a long commute or to listen to on your iPod at the gym.

I've been using the ATI packages for over two years now (first on Debian, now on Ubuntu) without any major problems (at least due to the installation procedure).

Of course if you overwrite a file installed from the package you'll have to reinstall the generated ATI files (using that oh-so-complex 'dpkg -i' command). This is no different than installing the nVidia drivers from the nVidia package.

"it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results."

Um... Mr. Bear... Just who do you think has been responsible for vote tampering under previous methods for counting votes ???

Elections officials and their state & county government underlings are the only people with access needed to tinker with vote counts under ANY scheme of balloting present or past. Katherine Harris for example in her elections oversight capacity as Florida Secretary of State was an "elections official." We're supposed to take the word of such people implicitly, and not to question their stewardship over elections to avoid the possibility of that they might take offence? To spare their feelings? The vanity of elections officials is more important than the integrity of democratic elections...wow, who knew?

Mr. Bear doth protest a bit too much over the good name of elections officials. While most poll workers are well intentioned citizens just trying to make their democracy work, some like Chief Justice William Rehnquist have a history of intimidating minority voters and trying to keep them from voting. But even the bad apples among poll workers are out of the loop when it comes to truly systematic, large scale election fraud. Only elections officials can do that. Lumping elections officials who can and sometimes have rigged elections with poll workers, who with a few exceptions are truly public spirited people without any prospect of determining electoral outcomes, is a deliberate trick Bear uses to confuse the issue. The issue though isn't to make a thorogh accounting of who's trustable and who isn't.

The point of any improved system of balloting would be to remove as far as possible ANY reliance upon trust in fallible humans. An improved system would replace blind faith in the word of individuals in power individuals who have a stake in the outcome, and who work out of sight, with visible, unalterable and repeatable processes. And likewise, an improved system would remove reliance and trust as far as possible in any processes where the votes are "handled" out of sight. What a computer does to data on a CPU is as far out of sight as it is possible to get. By contrast, a mechanical system is hard and timeconsuming to change (the key to integrity is the proper collection and custody of the paper ballots, but that is something that is fully visible and thus monitor-able) A fully computerized system on the other hand, can be changed in order to fudge the results, then changed back invisibly in the blink of an eye. Hardcore forensics would be required to even get a sense that something untowards might have happened.

E-balloting as offered by Diebold, ES&S and others, therefore, is the greatest invitation to rigged elections since the invention of standing armies. In that sense, voting technology can be said to be some making scientific progress.I'd rather scratch my candidate's name on rock with a nail than toss my vote into the ether with e-balloting.

Why not dual boot or even triple boot OS 9, OS X, and a PPC Linux like Yellow Dog. use the systems for similar task for a day in each OS. Then see what feels slow, and when doing what kind of tasks.