This seems strange. His employer uses GNU Linux, open source software and has built an entire business on it. So, in retrospect, who was right?

@kiba, pjscott is correct. But what makes countries rich is not laws. It's natural resources. Either having them, or having control over them, even if they are in another country. Give it some thought. Apply the idea to some sample countries. You might revise your thesis.

Form of government might be a red herring. Corruption and injustice might be tied to people and culture, not simply to form of government. Think about it.

Here's a shell function. Pipe the scribd html page into it and, voila!, out pops .jpg urls for each page of the PDF document. Feed them to curl or whatever you program you use. Open them with your browser or your image viewer. Pipe them to ghostscript, remake the PDF to your own specs. Whatever. But for the love of God, stay away from scribd.com That site is an annoyance and I doubt it will ever improve.

scrib(){ sed -n ' s,http://html.scribd.com,\

&,g; s,http://html[1-9].scribdassets.com,\

&,g; s,assets,,; s,pages,images,; s,jsonp,jpg, ; s,html[1-9].scribd.com,html.scribd.com,; s,pageParams.contentUrl = \",,; s,\";,,; s,<img class=\".orig=\",,; s,\"/>,,; /^$/d;

/html.scribd.com.images.*jpg/p; ' |sed '/http/!d'; }

suggestion: you could make that more useful by dumping it into a gist and including a comment block on how to set it up in an rc file