Wide Scope A philosophy blog that ranges over philosophy and other fun stuff.

Here ...

Here’s a good discussion about how eVoting should be done. Of particular interest, is the case made for using an open source software for the electronic voting machines. With closed-source, proprietary software a company has the perfect cover to pull some cloak-and-dagger stuff (e.g., insert a backdoor program that allows for the creator to manually change results, ...

Last week I wrote about the Open Office 3.0 note feature. If you have students submit papers electronically - OpenOffice 3.0 is a big improvement - because you can type notes and comments that appear in colored bubbles in the margins. The problem is that in OpenOffice 3.0 these comment bubbles appear outside the printable margin. ...

I had three hits today on my website from somebody googling “What Plargiarism is OK?” - Here is your answer…none. ...

Here’s the abstract of one of NPR’s Morning Edition stories this morning. Morning Edition, October 16, 2008 · A Nebraska state senator last year filed a lawsuit against God. Ernie Chambers sought an injunction against God because of widespread death and destruction. Judge Marlon Polk has thrown out the lawsuit. He says there’s no way ...

Here’s a reason for academics to be interested in OpenOffice 3.0 - It has a much improved notes feature. Recent version of MS Word enables users to include notes in the margins. I rely on that feature a lot to write up comments on papers from my colleagues or my students. MS Word always had a ...

There were two parts of the debate tonight where I honestly can’t figure out what McCain was thinking. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I’m saying that, as a matter of fact, I do not know what was going on in McCain’s head - and I’m genuinely curious to find out. Does McCain think ...

I’ve been going on and on about how wonderful I think the open source movement is, but not everyone is so enthusiastic. One of the biggest obstacles to the open source movement is whether or not there is a viable open source business model - How can you make money on software if you’re giving it ...

So, three things have happened that should have open source software enthusiasts excited. The new Ubuntu is coming out soon (OK, that’s not news - but I had to mention it) OpenOffice 3.0 was released yesterday. It was so popular the website crashed! Check out there website - they’re still running super-downgraded version to control for demand. The ...

Ubuntu’s newest version will be released at the end of October! That will also mark my 6 month of being almost entirely Windows free! I’ve decided to do my part in helping promote Ubuntu by posting their countdown on the blog here. I’m also posting a list of some of my favorite posts related to Ubuntu and ...