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.

Yes, turning hard drives into clocks can be fun... :-)

http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/

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.

Yeah... when the US made alcohol illegal in the 1920s all the drinkers just moved to Canada. It certianly didn't suddenly make a large percentage of the population criminals, divert tons of resources and money to enforce it, and of course it didn't make the mob rich.

I think you need to move out of your neighborhood into a nice gated community that doesn't allow those pesky lower class people in.

For the record, I don't drink.

http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/ :-)

A series of novels by John Ringo and Travis Taylor is what happens when you get a geek who (co)writes a novel.

It's filled with rednecks with big guns and tough marines who spend their time between blowing up alien monsters discussing the finer points of quantum mechanics.

It's sort of like reading a WWII novel while attending a college physics class and the two people behind you are talking about last nights Babylong 5 episode.

(Not that I ever had that happen to me...)

The "3 casts" is actually "3 bounces" in the article. It has nothing to do with anti-aliasing or shadows.

They are talking about how many surfaces a single ray can refract through or reflect off of.

With no bounces, you get no reflections.

With one bounce, you can see the reflection of the room in a mirror.

With two bounces, you can see the room reflected in a chrome sphere viewed in a mirror.

With three bounces, you can see a tiny reflection of the mirror on the surface of the chrome sphere that is seen through the reflection of the mirror.

With four bounces.. well you get the idea.

Three is good enough so you would have to look REAL close to notice the limited reflections unless you loaded up CHROME_WORLD.WAD on your server.

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.