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Mr Jalopy posted a note on doing a search & replace of Adobe w/Apple and Flash w/closed. It reads rather well. Probably NOT what Steveo intended but if the turtleneck fits...

  I didn't read the article thoroughly enough before I posted the submission; there is more detail on the case on a link from within the story.

(It was not with the intention of gaining karma; my karma has been peaked out for years, ceased to care about it even before that)

  A note on Slashdot's submission/moderation system; I had moderator points before I posted the story, and apparently have moderator points within the story. The editors may have their reasons for allowing it, but I don't feel that it's a good idea to allow story submitters to have moderation points within a story they post. Just sayin'

  I did find this bit to perhaps be an indication of the judge's real feelings:

  He told Peter that he was a puzzle to him; that he thought he would enjoy having a pint with Peter (Peter told him he would buy; Adair said he would get the next round);

  It does sound like the judge would like to know a little more about his side of the story than what he could glean from the courtroom proceedings.

  Oh, and thanks for the minor editing Timothy, it does read better that way.

  SB

Do you seriously think Palin will be held responsible for anything?

She's a master at evading responsiblity. She even supposedly got her daughter off scot-free for $20K in damages to someone else's house during a party. See here and here.

As long as there is corrupt cronyism, the guilty can do whatever they want.

I already saw that. I wasn't impressed enough to even remember it. Considering that A) wasn't long ago that the Russian Ministry of Health was blaming swine flu on GMOs B) that the vast body of current evidence says GMOs are, in general, safe, C) we've been eating GMOs for years and there has never once been a single human health problem linked conclusively to GMOs, and D) they were, as usual, unable to find a causative agent or a chemical pathway for the creation of said agent for these problems (nope, just happens cause their genetically modified by man. A billion years of mutations and natural foreign viral DNA insertions is dandy, but insert one single gene in a lab and it's deadly. It can be done.), color me skeptical until I see more details (I can't find anything about their methodology of the line of GE soy they used) or preferably, someone a bit more high profile doing it.

Either way, one study vs the whole of science...it might be accurate for whatever line they used, it isn't impossible, but I'm doubtful. Here's a whole bunch of studies proving homeopathy works; do you, in light of the whole of scientific opinion, question those studies, all of them, and have skeptical suspicions, or do you accept that massively diluted stuff that's really just water is an effective way of treating disease? Same thing here. Ok, there' s yet another study 'proving' that GMOs are going to kill you. So what? That doesn't amount to jack, at least not yet, and the burden of proof rests on them to prove their findings to the world, not for someone to prove them wrong, and I'm not going to assume they're right until poo-pooed by various regulation agencies (like what happened with the French corn study). Remember the last time a big scare story broke? Bloke by the name of Andrew Wakefield had a study too, and tons of people believed it without waiting for the scientific community to confirm his findings. Remember how that one worked out?

I'm not trying to accuse you of crankery here by mentioning the homeopaths and the anti-vaxxers, but I point those out to draw the similarities between alternative medicine promoters & vaccine denialists and genetic engineering denialists, and to say that patient skepticism is a virtue.

Of course I can. There's a long list of spots where Sony used to refer to this feature at listed on the PlayedStation blog. The writing at Open Platform for PLAYSTATION 3 is certainly ad copy aimed at the market these are being sold to: people who do their research on-line. I don't believe the print or TV ads mentioned the feature, but Sony's on-line ad campaign, such as material on their web site and interviews done with the press, have plenty of spots where it was highlighted.

In case you've been under a rock for a month, here's a fine example.

http://hooptyrides.blogspot.com/2010/04/searching-and-replacing-jobs-flash.html

Replace "Adobe" with "Apple" and "Flash" with "closed."

Before:

Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

After:
Apple's closed products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Apple, and Apple has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Apple's closed products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Apple and available only from Apple. By almost any definition, closed is a closed system.

I find some of XKCD funny, but I probably find a higher percentage of XKCD Sucks funny.

I'm not a 100% sure if it will help you or it applies to 10.04, but you might want to try this: http://mynerditorium.blogspot.com/2009/11/having-ubuntu-910-wifi-problems.html

Method for spoofing an IP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_flood
Method for preventing original IP from connecting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_flood
Proof of concept code ARP + SYN: http://perl-code.blogspot.com/2008/04/arp-poison-syn-flood-with-random.html
Real life example of ARP spoofing on comprised servers: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6001

Not likely to be used for P2P, but in the realm of possibilities. I would not be surprised if all the content providers they found are just proxies, legit or pwned.

Nuclear is actually cost competitive with coal,

So the Wall Street Journal is wrong? Even they say "The only way to handicap the field in nuclear power's favor is to put a big price tag on emissions of carbon dioxide." If however emissions of carbon dioxide had a price tag then geothermal, solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources would be more competitive as well not just nuclear power. And if nuclear is so great then why does the industry need subsidies and gets loan guaranties?

and is the only green energy source that is.

Nuclear power is not clean, it is dirty from cradle to grave, oops there is no grave for nuclear waste. Ask the Navajo how clean uranium mining is. Or some First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, or any number of other indigenous peoples throughout the world.

It's also wrong that nuclear plants need to be these massive, expensive things. We've had portable nuclear generators since the '60s, and you can build out plants of various sizes from there all the way up to the mega installations.

Is that why Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant has costs overruns raising it's cost from 3 billion euros to more than 4.2 billion? Or seen it's operation delayed from 2009 to 2012 at the earliest? Since you didn't like the previous CATO article you probably won't like this one either but Nuclear Energy: Risky Business says "the industry in the early 1990s asked for-and got-exactly the sort of safety regulations, permit review process, and public comment regime now in place." Further, it says "Indeed, if government were the reason why investors were saying "no" to their loan applications, I would expect that industry officials would be the first to say so. But they do not."

Solar is currently 3x - 10x more expensive than coal.

Saying that's true now, I don't know, solar is constantly dropping in costs. And coal does not pay all of it's own costs. Like other energy sources coal is subsidized. Mountaintop removal probably the safest way to mine coal is very destructive and polluting.

The only reason it can be cost effective is because the government very very heavily subsidizes solar installations.

If ethanol subsidies, most of which go to corn and there are better feed stocks than corn, are removed from alternative energy subsidies coal comes in first place in the amount of subsidies it gets. The graph on the page linked to says alternative energy got $4.875 billion in 2007. Of that though $3 billion went to ethanol. Coal on the other hand is broken down into 2 categories. Refined coal, whatever that is, got $2.370 billion and coal got $932 million. Together coal got $3.302 billion whereas goethermal, solar, wind and other alternative sources got $1.9 billion excluding ethanol. I do see that it has nuclear as getting less than alternatives though, however I wonder how it breaks down for the different types? As that page asks, "which pig wears the most lipstick?"

Geothermal will never amount to more tha

Once we have mined our 8.2 billion tons of perfectly ordinary and unremarkable rock and dirt, we need to extract the nuclear fuel. This could be done by grinding, chemical treatment, pyroprocessing or whatever is most suitable for the particular minerals in question. We may get a reasonable estimate to the upper bounds of the energy required for this process by assuming the ore is completely melted. The power required to melt the same mass of silicon (the second most common element in Earth's crust after oxygen) is about 723 GW.y. It is likely that the whole separation process could be accomplished with less than 1TW.y of energy. This operation corresponds to an extraction and milling rate of 260 tonnes of crust each second.

What is the size of the resource? Let's assume that only the portion of continental crust currently under dry land is exploited for its uranium and thorium content, to a depth of roughly four kilometres (the deepest mine currently operating is the TauTona mine in Carletonville, South Africa at 3,900m, and the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia is 12,262m). This represents a reserve of 20 trillion tonnes of fertile and fissile fuel, capable of powering our 100TW civilisation for 200 million years. This is the span of time separating us from the dawn of the Jurassic Period, when the supercontinent Pangaea was starting to break apart into Laurasia and Gondwana. Dinosaurs were just beginning to make their mark on the world, and the allosaurus, stegosaurus and diplodocus were yet to evolve.

It will be a very long time before whoever comes after us in the far distant future will need to worry about mining ordinary crust. The science is clear: There is more than enough high grade uranium ore in the short term to allow us to transition to a completely nuclear-powered economy during this century, and a supply of fuel for the breeder reactors of the future so vast as to leave no doubt that nuclear power is completely sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word for far beyond the probable lifetime of our civilisation, and indeed, of our species.

Spam is a serious crime against humanity that has been with us for many decades

It will take a very long time to run out of nuclear fuel. There is hundreds (thousands?) of years of uranium in sea water:

URANIUM FROM SEAWATER

Not to mention that were have barely (as compared to oil or coal) started to seriously look for a mine the stuff.

Floating sky cities, New York to Beijing in minutes, Earth to Mars in hours. That's the future of energy and transportation. Soon we'll have vehicles that can travel at tremendous speeds, negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. A new analysis of the causality of motion reveals that Aristotle was right to insist that motion is caused. As a result, we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles. Lots and lots of clean energy. Read Physics: The Problem with Motion if you're interested in the future of travel and energy production. Welcome to the 21st century.

If people would like to read the speech, and judge for themselves what he said there is an (unofficial) translation here http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2010/04/quote-of-month.html

The vatican tends to be quite slow translating the speeches, but there is an unofficial translation here: http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2010/04/quote-of-month.html

Aside from those two items, the Federal government originally had absolutely no say within the borders of each state.

President Washington showed just how much say the federal government had within the borders of Pennsylvania under the (then new) Constitution when he put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

In today's society that entire ideal has been twisted around to the situation where Federal law is becoming the only law and State legislatures are being relegated to position where they have no power at all.

Nonsense. Almost all criminal law still resides at the state level. Punch someone in the nose or steal their car or write them a fraudulent check, and you'll end up in a state court.

There's certainly a legitimate debate to be had about the balance of power in our federalist system, but simple-minded ideas about the states almost being sovereign nations under the Constitution, or about states having "no power at all" today, are not helpful to the discussion

The Constitution did NOT original set the country up this way.

The Framers envisioned an agrarian nation where only white male landowners had the vote, slaves counted as 3/5th of a person, and citizens had no protection against oppression by state governments.

If we don't live in the nation envisioned by slave-rapist Thomas Jefferson, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

The point remains semantic, because nothing in the state or federal law here suspends or abrogates the 4th Amendment. Seizure remains reasonable if somebody is breaking the law, the end. The point of the 4th Amendment is to prevent people from being seized for capricious, personal reasons outside of legal procedure.

Your 'other states don't have laws' argument is quite spurious. Somebody has to do it first. Slavery was abolished at the state level first, does that mean that the first state to abolish slavery must have been on some kind of shaky ground? You then go on to say that state law is subordinate to federal law, which is true, and federal law already requires aliens to have proof of legal presence and that it be available to federal agents. There is no priority conflict there. Enabling state agents to do the same thing with state authority if anything is precedented and justified by the federal law.

Funny you mention quotas, though the Emergency Quota Act was passed by a near-unanimous vote and can't be blamed exclusively on one party or the other, the hue and cry on early immigration controls came mainly from republicans organizing against democratic racism. How quickly that is forgotten:

"No more Chinese immigration, except for travel, education, and foreign commerce, and that even carefully guarded."
--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1880

"American civilization demands that against the immigration or importation of Mongolians to these shores our gates be closed."
--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1884

"We favor the continuance and strict enforcement of the Chinese exclusion law, and its application to the same classes of all Asiatic races."
--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1900

It's a poll of "Likely Voters", not a random sample of the population. According to the CNN 2008 exit poll of Arizona ( http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#AZP00p1 ), Latino's make up 16% of actual voters. Not only that, but Rasmussen is known in the industry to have a very tight likely voter screen that excludes minorities (My research is on this specifically, see http://stochasticdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010/02/rasmussen-polling-irregularities-first.html ). Working through the algebra, it becomes clear that it's very very unlikely that anywhere near a majority of Latinos support this bill.

FTA:

When you play an RPG, you want to experience a compelling and memorable storyline.

No. Common new-school mistake.

http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/

Don't forget that GM is still over 70% government owned.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/04/gm-repays-government-debt-its-still.html

Excellent analysis here: http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2010/04/henley-devore-file-dueling-briefs-in.html

One of my former professors is litigating this case. Although it seems like he has an uphill battle, I hope he succeeds.

Here's the actual speech, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the PBS article or the discussion thread.

Historically, whenever a journalist has been jailed for not ratting out a source, the cops have pulled all their stuff right off their desks

I remember that movie! Where the cop break's the reporter's fingers one-by-one, til he tells him the source? "I make the laws in this town, mister." Friggin' awesome! 1938, right? Caught it on UHF when I was a teen.

There is no legal exemption just because you happen to work for a media outlet.

I know! Stupid reporters ain't got no rights, and it serves 'em right - who do they think they are, challenging the all-powerful gubbermint?!

disclaimer: sitting in a newspaper office right now

Me too! Just for fun, let's burn the printing presses! Then we'll set fire to the Reichstag! (Psst! Pass me the bourbon)

"because the screeners KNOW that they've never pulled a guilty person out of line."

This story and of course this one also, and this one would indicate that at least some people that could legitimately be considered a threat were in fact detained.

Not a stellar record, perhaps, but not failure. And not a record of no actual denials of credible suspects. Imperfect? Yup. Better than nothing? Yup.

False positives are inevitable if we are just using names. I suspect that there will be a change in the system, though in most cases it is the nature of counter-terrorism that all you get is a name. Images might compromise sources, and fingerprints are usually not going to be available.

There is quite a bit of advice on how to get off of a no-fly list. One way NOT to get removed, it would seem, is to be elected to the U.S. Senate... Or get hired as an Air Marshal. feh.

National Security Adviser Jones: Jews Are Greedy Merchants

As the National Security Adviser, General James Jones is not known as a friend of the Jewish State. It was Jones who put together the team of Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski to meet with the President and advise him to impose a solution on Israel.

Earlier this week we may have gotten some insight into why Jones is not a fan of the Jewish Homeland. He was giving the key note speech at a Washington Institute For Near East Policy and started it out with a "Joke" that borders on anti-Semitic, teaching the crown that Jews are just greedy merchants in the same vein as Shakespeare's Shylock:

A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn't have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he's back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: "Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant."

According to the Jewish Forward

After the speech, two participants suggested, in private conversations with the Forward, that Jones' joke might have been inappropriate. After all, making jokes about greedy Jewish merchants can be seen at times as insensitive.

A prominent think-tank source who attended the event said the joke was "wrong in so many levels" and that it "demonstrated a lack of sensitivity." The source also asked: "Can you imagine him telling a black joke at an event of African Americans?"

Was the Joke Anti-Semitic? Well, the White House must have thought so. The White House transcript sent to reporters after the event conveniently began a couple of minutes into the speech. The video of the event posted on the Washington Institute Web site started right after the Joke, you can even hear the end of the laughter.

Its interesting that the same President that see racism in the legitimate actions of the Cambridge Police and the State of Arizona, hides the anti-Semitic prose of its National Security Adviser.

Very important notice. Eu Curto Orkut

i like this notice because it's really...

Como para fazer, sem que os russos nos forneceu uma prova positiva durante a Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Eles voaram primeiro e fomos ao encontro deles, porque nós tivemos uma pontaria melhor. Nosso pessoal usou um handheld HP 48 para os cálculos e seu relógio foi alimentado pelos sinais do relógio atômico do National Bureau of Standards. Quando chegamos lá, vimos que eles estavam usando, respectivamente, réguas, lápis e papel, e um cronômetro. Mas o nosso ter a melhor tecnologia não impedi-los de chegar lá. E a sua tecnologia que menor não impedi-los com êxito vários participantes no gato-e-rato práticas encontro que se seguiu ao primeiro.

Good!!

They already have turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone!

Android on iPhone

One example can't be extended to all of 'em, logic fail. Please try again.

Try climateaudit.org or http://bishophill.squarespace.com/ in general.

Neither is in the pay of anyone, and have links to many, many more like themselves that are merely studying the science. This issue is big and important enough that it should be able to stand up in the full light of day.

Or talk to Judith Curry, one of the few climate scientists that are willing to point out the flaws in the current process, e.g. here: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/04/squeaky-clean.html?showComment=1271462868897#c1343322932444511542

Canadian nuclear plants emit 40 times more tritium every day when functioning normally than the Vermont Yankee leak emitted in a year:
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-much-tritium-leaked-from-vermont.html

A 1 GW(e) natural gas turbine will emit about 9 curies/year,* which is 20 times the rate of radiation from the VT Yankee leak at its highest.

Oh, and natural gas "fracking" produces toxic and radioactive wastewater. This article from last summer discusses EPA tests that found nasties from the fracturing fluid in domestic well water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemicals-found-in-drinking-water-from-natural-gas-drilling
New York State is doing fracking in something called Marcellus shale. This article from last fall says that surface wastewater from these sites was found to contain Ra-226 in concentrations "thousands of times" the limit for drinking water:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=marcellus-shale-natural-gas-drilling-radioactive-wastewater
This page
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/oilandgas.html
says, "more than 18 billion barrels of waste fluids from oil and gas production are generated annually in the United States".

-Carl

* Radioactivity of fossil gas. This abstract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/3/259.abstract
gives 200 Bq/m^3. It doesn't say where they measured, but given context of the paper I'll assume it was at the consumer end of the line, at STP. I don't know if gas used at electrical plants is any fresher, but I'll assume it's no more stale. Pure methane has an energy content of 55.5 kJ/g and a density of 667 g/m^3, or about 5 Wh(e)/L from a 50%-efficient combined-cycle plant. So about 40Bq/Wh, or 1 nanoCurie per Wh, or 9 Curies/GW-yr.

It makes alot of the pain go away:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

Swap to flash does work. It allows you to increase swappiness, and push unused stuff to flash, but use RAM for file cache. I've done some experiments with USB flash on my laptp, and it's heaps better in terms of responsiveness now. No HDD thrashing when ram gets tight. http://dazsbraindump.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-put-your-linux-swap-on-usb-stick.html

Note how he's never claimed he has a working PUP update for existing consoles, just that he will make one.

From geohot's ps3 blog: "This can be installed without having to open up your PS3, just by restoring a custom generated PUP file, but only from 3.15 or previous."

Geohot does like the spotlight, and he has a severe lack of modesty, but he doesn't exactly lack skill (although he is prone to overestimating them). He's pretty good, and once he claims he has something working, and he's just waiting to clean it up before releasing (as in this case), he's telling the truth. When he claims he will get something working, he doesn't always come through, as the task is sometimes harder than he originally anticipated.

Basically, put up or shut up. Until you can do what he can't, he's still smarter than you, and you have no grounds to criticize him.

Many dedicated hackers don't get enough sunlight, which can cause vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D defiency, now widespread in the USA, is a seriously deadly situation, which can cause depression, schizophrenia (Hans Reiser?), cancer, heart disease, autism, and other things. Almost all indoor professionals in the USA should probably be taking 5000 IU D3 in gelcaps daily (except days when they get a lot of sun) as well as eat right to get the other co-nutrients needed for vitamin D to work optimally (a very tiny fraction of people may have health issues that contraindicated vitamin D supplementation). See:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
RMS, I hope you read this; I'd miss you if you were not around.

The US RDA for vitamin D was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy brain, healthy heart, healthy immune system, or healthy weight. It is probably more than ten times too low. The toxicity worries for vitamin D have also been overblown, epsecially if you supplement with D3 (not D2). All this is according to Dr. John Cannell, M.D., of the Vitamin D Council website:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
A blood test is the only way to know for sure on your vitamin D levels.
    http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

Not all games are the same, and this study's participants were using certain popular console products. I don't think this research result surprises anyone, and it's not applicable to the brain game genre. It's been mentioned, but the N-back is backed by some research. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back) There are games for it, and they're nothing like the brain games in this study. I'm a brain game developer, and I've made some different games using the same memory principle of the N-back at http://workingmemoryworkout.blogspot.com/ Consumers really have to trust their own judgement, because as far as I know there's no good consumer reports for brain games. For anyone in need of a great brain game resource, see http://www.ludism.org/mentat/BrainTrainingGames.

7 seat moped + Bitchin minivan + sub + jet = yes

and if that doesn't make sense to you then you are sadly mistaken.

It's important to pull Islam's chain. Frequently. Some branches of Islam has a tendency to go off in total nutcase directions, especially in countries where Islam has a big role in government. Even some Moslems think so. Most of the Islamic countries are dysfunctional. Islamic educational systems are a joke; they provide brainwashing, not an education. It's not a money issue; most doctorates issued in Saudi Arabia are in "Islamic Studies".

Religions with no sense of humor are vulnerable to ridicule. South Park is fighting the good fight, and, even though I'm not a Fox News fan, I applaud Fox News for backing them up. We give too much respect to religion. Sometimes, religious practices need a good belly-laugh.

The Catholic Church used to have that kind of power. That was a long time ago. Centuries ago they lost their temporal power, and recently, they've lost their moral authority. There are calls for the Pope to resign over child abuse coverups, people calling for his arrest if he visits Britain, and a group working to deny the Vatican diplomatic recognition. (The US didn't recognize the Vatican until the Reagan administration - Reagan needed Catholic votes.) At this point, nobody is afraid of the Catholic church, except maybe little boys being molested. Islam needs to be taken down a few notches like that.

There's surprising similarity between the nuttier branches of the major Western religions. Extreme-right Christian groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, and militant Islamic mullahs have more in common than any of them do with the rest of the world. They're all into oppressing women, ODing on prayer, dumbing down education, and whining for Government subsidies. (Their leaders also seem to be old guys with beards wearing black, looking like ZZ Top). Laughing at them can only help.

I agree that throwing old hardware all over the room is excessive, but some of us "collect" these old machines. I collect them for a mixture of history and as a way to remind myself "Don't do THAT again!" I even write about them and their history: http://codeslave9000.blogspot.com/ for anyone interested in following along at home. Parts is parts, but keeping old machines in running order is much more challenging and rewarding.

Lovable stuff. I'm still hunting for a 1970's Payphone from Entel (The phone company at the time in Argentina).

They were fucking amazing, this is what they looked like:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EbEIPrrCAnI/SMp_6IqeRlI/AAAAAAAAAYg/lOe9ImQ8Jjw/s320/tel+publico+entel.jpg

They came in a variety of colors. Fucking amazing!

The link to that story about AllParadox is here for anyone who is smart enough to require them for a bold claim like that.

You can find other, independent corroboration of that from some poor sod who commented about it years ago, from someone who was briefly given moderation powers on Groklaw, and more recent examples on Jay Maynard's website which has some active discussions about how it's going down right now, with respect to those who don't think IBM was justified in how it intimidated TurboHercules SAS.

I've seen it personally, but you don't have to take my word for it. Their idea of "trolls" over there is anyone who disagrees too often. I think that anyone has been around Groklaw for long enough should remember how respected AllParadox was. She calls people who bring up this stuff "PJ moderates trolls" just so you know. Because nobody can think that sneaky moderation systems that don't show you when your post has been deleted, or silently editing people's comments are bad without being paid to think that by SCO, Microsoft or Satan.

Python has been around for nearly 20 years and yet people seem to be continuously "discovering" it. I'd say it has withstood the test of time.

There are games with voxels that allows you to destroy pratically anything.

You mean like USB ports,

With an adapter: http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/01/27/apple-has-a-solution-for-the-ipads-missing-sd-card-slot-and-usb-port-adapters/

the ability to create and run your own software,

as others have mentioned - dev cert

the ability to chose your own OS,

This is limited to your time and effort. It's possible to run another OS on it - it's just that no one's done enough work to make it worthwhile for anyone but a tinkerer... Here's Linux on an iPhone from 2008: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2008/11/linux-on-iphone.html

the freedom to download software from anywhere you chose,

Jailbreak

Flash support,

This has been beated to death - I have nothing new to add.

the ability to export and import files at will, etc.?

Again - easy with jailbreak - openssh and a myriad of other options

Such as creating software? Such as installing software that Apple has not approved?

What about this: http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/02/apple-yanks-5000-iphone-sex-apps.html

I don't think that's necessarily a conclusive argument. I can draw a beautiful picture on page 874 of my personal copy of the federal tax code, but that doesn't make the tax code art.

It does if Art Spiegelman does it ;^)

I agree. In addition to OpenStreetMap and Geonames, a few other ones poped up in the geospatial community. OpenAddresses.org - with already 11+ addresses stored while it was launched less than a month ago, OpenAerialMap.org - which "rebooted" late last year, and OpenTopography.org too. There's other similar projects out there - the point being: there are several good starting points.

Also interesting is this OpenStreetMap VS Google MapMaker wrap-up - licensing terms being, once again, an information sharing showstopper.

Seriously.

Only on /. does a reference to the Packer's 'Cheese-heads' require a link to photographic proof that you aren't joking...

Some of us aren't aware of every aspect of American culture, and appreciated the link ;-).

Maybe you don't know about cheese rolling.

Oh, yeah, they have a pretty good football team from their city Green Bay. The team's fans are called "cheese-heads," and attend games wearing giant wedges of cheese as hats.

Seriously.

Only on /. does a reference to the Packer's 'Cheese-heads' require a link to photographic proof that you aren't joking...

Wisconsin is the state synonomous with cheese. Nothing else, really. Just cheese. Everything they do, seemingly, is cheese-related. Oh, yeah, they have a pretty good football team from their city Green Bay. The team's fans are called "cheese-heads," and attend games wearing giant wedges of cheese as hats.

Seriously.