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Does CentOS or Fedora core work on these things?

Ubuntu has been a royal headache for me that makes me run to the Linux Haters blog; I was wondering if other people who have had issues with Ubuntu (here are the issues I have had) have had a better experience with Fedora/CentOS/whatever (I like RedHat distributsion more than Ubuntu; sudo is for wimps; real mean use "su").

- Sam

Does CentOS or Fedora core work on these things?

Ubuntu has been a royal headache for me that makes me run to the Linux Haters blog; I was wondering if other people who have had issues with Ubuntu (here are the issues I have had) have had a better experience with Fedora/CentOS/whatever (I like RedHat distributsion more than Ubuntu; sudo is for wimps; real mean use "su").

- Sam

If Nitro is just marketing speak for SFX (SquirrelFish Extreme) then Apple is guilty of the worst "up to" benchmark numbers crap possible:

http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-extreme-has-landed.html

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

"In particular, the version of V8 used here is the bleeding-edge branch, which is a bit faster than the version that shipped with Chrome."
"As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme is 36% faster than V8"

Your third sentence makes the statement that pretending [child abuse] does not exist is sad and ineffective, therefore unreasonable enforcment laws and a nanny is acceptable as long as it helps the children.

The BBC article did not link to the 'Children's Charities Coalition on Internet Safety' [sic], but I looked it up and read through the letters posted. From the 'Letter to Lord Carter':

'There is one issue which we see as being something of a hybrid, but among other things it certainly touches on the safety agenda. I refer to the misuse of file-sharing software.'

'Of course we have no interest in promoting or allowing copyright theft but we are just as concerned about the potential for a family to be plunged into a financial crisis when a rights-holder tries to collect their dues, the bill for which having arisen from the unknown/undiscovered activity of a child in the household. Some children will doubtless have fully understood the unlawful nature of their activity from the outset, and will simply have been skilful [sic] at disguising what they are doing from their parents.'

'Then there is the role of this type of software in providing access, as it frequently does, not only to copyright protected material, but also to a spread of other items found on participants' storage devices and hard drives. These other items may range from the plainly illegal e.g. child pornography, through to extreme violence or hard core pornography which falls short of being illegal but which is nonetheless highly age inappropriate, and much else between and besides.'

'In every other context, when we speak about online safety, it is commonly accepted that all participants and players in the digital space have a responsibility to do what they can to make the internet a safer place for everyone, but perhaps particularly for some of the most vulnerable elements in society such as children.'

SOURCE: http://chisuk.blogspot.com/

Reasonable enforcement laws is an oxymoron if I read one.

In the nineteenth century there was a battle to control political opinion through pamphlets. In the twentieth century, it was newspapers, television and radio. And in the the beginning of the twenty-first century there is a battle to control the internet and therefore your mind.

Do not be fooled into thinking that this is for the children.

1st, put /tmp on RAM

Is it really worth it? The Linux file I/O is pretty fast anyway and caches your I/O in RAM anyway. Has anyone benchmarked a system with /tmp in RAM and on disk? Is there a HOWTO for this?

I didn't find any actual benchmarks, but I did find a pretty good step-by-step guide:

http://opendevice.blogspot.com/2007/03/create-linux-ram-disk-to-use-with.html

But my guess is that you won't really see a worthwhile speed improvement for running typical desktop applications this way. (Now, a database server might be another thing entirely...)

2nd, use a modern filesystem and LVM so that you can extend/shrink your partitions dynamically.

I'll do that when the Ubuntu installer GUI makes it super-simple, and not before. I just want to set up my computers and use them. I'm typing this on a computer that is about seven years old, and I have never in that time wished I could conveniently resize a partition on it. Why should I jump through a whole bunch of hoops and figure out LVM? Where's the payoff for me?

And that goes double now that hard disks are so freaking huge. This old computer has only a 30 GB hard disk. A "small" hard disk these days is 250 GB. Just throw 30 GB to the / partition and have a /home with over 200 GB... I won't need to resize those partitions anytime soon.

LVM was probably valuable when hard disks were really small, but this ain't 1998.

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/ (David) vs http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-22elevateamericapr.mspx (Goliath).

I think that as well as more people turning to Open Source/Free Software alternatives that Microsoft are scared of people like Ken (from the HeliOS blog referenced above) and the power of word of mouth and community. When more and more people start using and recommending alternatives, Microsoft tries everything to disrupt and corrupt them.

See Netscape/IE, ISO/OOXML, Microsoft gatecrashing conferences and now this for examples.

I like the Ghandi quote: "First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then we win!"

real journalists will get fired if they don't check their sources and report the truth

How many "real journalists" got fired for reporting Iraq had WMDs?

Googling reporters fired almost every result on the first page is how "FOX News Investigative Reporters Fired For Telling The Truth". It was about two Fox reporters who investigated how cows injected with bovine growth hormone could affect the health of those who drank milk from those cows. The maker of the hormone used is Monsanto and Monsanto is a big advertizer on Fox. When the reporters did not change their story to fit Monsanto's demands they were fired.

Falcon

At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.

I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I sincerely hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are guys!). There was a balanced 2 minute comparison of Hyper-v, XenServer, and VMware over at the 360 blog here.

For the VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V fanboys (are there any Hyper-V fanboys yet?), calm down and take a tip from that blog:

"Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it."

I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not saying the users are dumb, it's that they point out the obvious. Like a bad UI, or a fiddly install process. Developers don't notice that - either they've been looking past those problems for months because they want to fix stuff under the hood, or they remember it when it was worse. If you stare at crap every day, you get used to it. The users have a fresh perspective, and they can point out it is crap.

And it's funny you should mention Linux package managers. My contention actually is that you need a manager who is not a developer or at least understands non developers to point this stuff out. And you need paid customers who can pressure the managers financially if that doesn't work by threatening not to buy stuff. Otherwise it's just a bunch of developers patting each other on the back and turning out something no one apart from them uses. Like the Suse package manager.

About 90% of the (Anonymous) commenters at MiniMSFT. - The notorious bitchy insider blog.

As expected in a company that size, at the lower levels one is expendable, and any higher up one's energy is entirely consumed with political survival.

This may help explain the quality of the product, management and strategy that we have been seeing for the last few years...

That the Internet can't ever replace newspapers and proper reporting. Smaller newspapers will fold (no pun intended) but larger ones will always exist. I remember one comment was "How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah?"

The guy who did Dear Raed was in Baghdad, not Fallujah, but his coverage of the Iraqi occupation in general was more accurate than pretty much anything found in the US.

How many bloggers are embedded in Falujah

Dunno if he was in Falujah or not.

The disruption that the Internet lowers the cost of having your voice heard to near zero. The newspaper's advantage isn't that they have reporters. The newspaper's advantage is that they have editors.

http://www.detroitblog.org/

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/

There's four right off my bat, all home runs. But you wouldn't care about financial news, as the closest thing you have to a married life is jerking off to teenagers getting it in the butt on redtube.

http://www.groklaw.net/ or perhaps http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ and for that matter, I know it's from the original sources, but how about: http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ . These are all investigative bloggers! zing!

There's always the initial, hysterical article about how Obama is doing something oh-so-terrible (e.g. killing net neutrality).

Perhaps the part that would have killed net neutrality was removed because so many complained.

Remember all those complains about the stimulus package being full of pork?

The stimulus package is pork.

Falcon

One unfortunate part of our legal system is that a behemoth can currently smother an opponent with money whether they're right or not.

That is quite true. The American Bar Association's Judges Journal -- the association's quarterly publication for the judges section -- asked me to write an article last year about how, because of the economic imbalance, the defendants did not have "equal access to justice" in the RIAA cases, entitled "Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless : Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations".

There are several reasons: 1) Gravity on Earth is high relative to these "non-terrestrial" surfaces. The CECE engine might not have the thrust/weight ratio to land on Earth. 2) Earth also has a thick atmosphere. That greatly reduces the throttling capability and you need to come up with a gimmick like thrust augmented nozzles to maintain nozzle efficiency (and ISP) in atmosphere. 3) There are other means of landing on Earth (eg, parachutes).

Did anyone notice that the lawyers who successfully argued for "freedom of speech" here are the same ones who are fighting so hard to prevent the televising of the SONY v. Tenenbaum RIAA case?

Even Microsoft uses Mac Minis. Don't knock the box because it comes from Apple.

http://thelazysci-fiauthor.blogspot.com/2007/07/observation-via-entangled-computers.html

but kind of different.

My frustration is with people thinking that Windows is more dominant only because it's what users are comfortable with or because of close file formats. No, I'm sorry, Linux is not ready for the desktop. It's getting closer; for the end user where we're at now is a lot better than in 1995 when FVWM was the main desktop.

But, still, the code seems to be in a perpetual state of being beta-quality. The quality of Linux is like a really early beta of Windows 95. A lot of programs don't work correctly or have issues with crashing. On a stock Ubuntu install.

I mean, if Gnome Baker is so much better than Brasero, than why does Ubuntu use Brasero instead of Gnome Baker? There really needs to be more quality control here.

I simple don't understand why Ubuntu is so popular. It's been a massive headache for me. I've mentioned a lot of my issues on my blog and one poster points out I might be better off with Mepis or Fedora Core.

I think I will give Fedora core a chance; the nice thing about Fedora core is every few years, RedHat takes this software and makes an ultra-stable version of it that's supported for seven years (thay last did this with Fedora Core 6 around 2006-2007 and should be making RHEL 6 from Fedora core 10 or 11 late this year or early next year), which can be freely downloaded as CentOS.

Right now, Gnome is the desktop of choice since KDE basically threw out all of their work in the KDE3->KDE4 transition. Hopefully, once Nokia LGPLs Qt we will see the KDE developers calm down and make something that's stable and supported for the long-term.

But, yes Ubuntu makes me want to run to the Linux hater's blog. Thankfully, it's easy for me to switch OSes; I do all of my real work in VMware virtual machines and it's a simple matter of backing up and restoring my virtual machines to a new OS, whether it be Linux or Windows.

My only issues with Linux are it being a desktop OS. It's an excellent server OS, especially if one uses RHEL or CentOS (Maybe CentOS 5.3 will work with all of my hardware, which would be nice since then I won't have to reinstall until early 2014)

Thanks for taking the time to reply to me and for the suggestion. I have just removed Brasero and installed Gnome Baker. We'll see if this works any better.

My frustration is with people thinking that Windows is more dominant only because it's what users are comfortable with or because of close file formats. No, I'm sorry, Linux is not ready for the desktop. It's getting closer; for the end user where we're at now is a lot better than in 1995 when FVWM was the main desktop.

But, still, the code seems to be in a perpetual state of being beta-quality. The quality of Linux is like a really early beta of Windows 95. A lot of programs don't work correctly or have issues with crashing. On a stock Ubuntu install.

I mean, if Gnome Baker is so much better than Brasero, than why does Ubuntu use Brasero instead of Gnome Baker? There really needs to be more quality control here.

I simple don't understand why Ubuntu is so popular. It's been a massive headache for me. I've mentioned a lot of my issues on my blog and one poster points out I might be better off with Mepis or Fedora Core.

I think I will give Fedora core a chance; the nice thing about Fedora core is every few years, RedHat takes this software and makes an ultra-stable version of it that's supported for seven years (thay last did this with Fedora Core 6 around 2006-2007 and should be making RHEL 6 from Fedora core 10 or 11 late this year or early next year), which can be freely downloaded as CentOS.

Right now, Gnome is the desktop of choice since KDE basically threw out all of their work in the KDE3->KDE4 transition. Hopefully, once Nokia LGPLs Qt we will see the KDE developers calm down and make something that's stable and supported for the long-term.

But, yes Ubuntu makes me want to run to the Linux hater's blog. Thankfully, it's easy for me to switch OSes; I do all of my real work in VMware virtual machines and it's a simple matter of backing up and restoring my virtual machines to a new OS, whether it be Linux or Windows.

My only issues with Linux are it being a desktop OS. It's an excellent server OS, especially if one uses RHEL or CentOS (Maybe CentOS 5.3 will work with all of my hardware, which would be nice since then I won't have to reinstall until early 2014)

Thanks for taking the time to reply to me and for the suggestion. I have just removed Brasero and installed Gnome Baker. We'll see if this works any better.

But they strongly implied, if not stated out right, that the amount of ice would be significantly less in 2008. Turned out they were completely wrong.

Are we reading the same article? In my version it says:

Drobot predicts a 59% chance of a new record minimum this year

As it happens, 2008 was the second lowest on record, despite a strong rebound during the winter months.

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/02/brrrr-disappearing-arctic-ice-is-back.html

Tim.

That Parallel Computing: Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed article is somewhat confused over the definition of a CPU. They suggest that the CPU and GPU (plus other systems) would be replaced with a single chip that does everything. Doesn't that effectively fit the definition of a unit that processes information centrally (aka CPU)? Sure, the architecture may change, but it is still a CPU.

Huang must have read this blog article Heralding the Impending Death of the CPU. Which is cool but Huang apparently declined to read this other article Parallel Computing: Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed, for obvious reasons.

Huang must have read this blog article Heralding the Impending Death of the CPU. Which is cool but Huang apparently declined to read this other article Parallel Computing: Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed, for obvious reasons.

Lots more info here: http://excavatrix.blogspot.com/

At night, there's a small red light in the sky. On that light lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it.

Anyone interested in the Mars Exploration Rovers' mission should check out Mars And Me, the unofficial diary of a Mars rover driver. Scott Maxwell is blogging his daily work at JPL exactly five years later. A very interesting and well-written look at the day-to-day operations of a truly amazing scientific expedition.

I hate to break it to everyone, the Russians did a moon rover that lasted just as long using 60's Russian technology. One rover traveled 23 miles, or at least 2 years.

Why is this better? This was performed in the 60's way before Mars was a glint in NASA eyes...

http://itssamsview.blogspot.com/2006/02/successful-russian-moon-rovers-35.html

Hit someone while drunk driving? well since you're rich you're obviously more valuable to society, lets stack the odds in your favor so you don't go to jail!

This (scroll down to July 25) is a story about a famous footballer in the UK receiving a caution for something which would result in a normal person going to jail.

The case never even appeared before a judge, because the UK police are now trusted to do what used to be judiciary work themselves.

This reply may too become unwieldy, so thanks for your patience.

I didn't quite follow your second sentence. Are you implying that libertarian ideas are what got us the companies who are "too big to fail," or are you just saying that that's the way it is and that epic failure must always be nationalized?

What I'm saying is that institutions that are "too big to fail" will naturally arise without draconian (and undesirable) controls. It's the dark side of economies of scale. When these institutions run into trouble, which they inevitably will, it is in societies interests not to let them fail - because they can literally take society down with them. Therefore, libertarianism can only exist on the boom side of the cycle, and will always yield to nationalization on the bust side. In this way, libertarian and free-market ideals serve to privatize wealth and nationalize debt. Failing the nationalization of debt the middle class evaporates almost overnight, the lower class is cast into abject poverty, and the wealthy become every wealthier off the backs of the peasants in a neo-feudal system. Just take a look at some of the chicago school experiments in latin america to see what I mean.

Alright, it's some of the more wing-nutty libertarians who propose privatization of justice, but they do exist, I'm not going to bother telling you why it's a bad idea - just know there are people who advocate private police forces that protect and serve by contract, complete with a bounty system. It's crazy I tell you.

As for the libertarianism and the environment... The problem is that one individual, and certainly one company can do orders of magnitude more damage than their life is worth. Let's say I own union carbide and I accidentally poison your village killing everyone. Oops, time to file for bankruptcy. You can even liquidate the shareholder and executives assets and throw them in prison for the rest of your life, and not even come close to being able to repair the damage to property - to say nothing of the loss of life. And even that example is localized - what do you do when a company decides it's worth the risk of being caught pumping tons of CFCs into the atmosphere because it saves them a couple cents per widget - you will never be able to repair the damage. That's why we have the superfund now. Again, libertarianism is all about privatizing profit, and nationalizing downside damage.

About the follies of the banking industry over the past 5+ years. You're wrong that no one was calling for regulation, you're wrong that no one thought 40:1 leveraging was a bad idea, and you're wrong that no one saw the impending collapse. The main stream media sure didn't tell you about it, and the (anti-regulation) government sure wasn't listening, but the dissent was there. Warren Buffet's private wealth was all in treasury bonds before the collapse - because he saw it coming. Paul Krugman warned about the property value collapse in his previous book (even if he got some of the details wrong). Bernie Madoff was investigated - the SEC just abdicated their responsibility. Financial wonks new what was going to happen in September in January Plenty of people saw this coming, and if we had actual accountants checking actual books for the last eight years, perhaps we could have softened the blow.

You're generalizing

You're right I was. The problem stands that no one should be running for president of the united states, who thinks the position is incapable of action. If libertarians and republicans want to run for congress, governor, or state assembly, more power to them, they can try to reduce executive powers from there. What we absolutely cannot afford is to have power concentrated in the executive branch that is not used for ideological reasons. In a larger sense, the problem with the libertarian, states rights agenda

the Justice Department has to support the laws as written before the courts

Yes but every member of the Justice Department, and indeed every attorney, takes an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Not a particular provision, or interpretation of a provision, of the Copyright Act. I.e., while we are bound to protect and defend "the law", the chief "law" we are bound to protect and defend is the Constitution of the United States. The United States Supreme Court has held that punitive damages which exceed by more than nine times the actual damages are presumptively unconstitutional. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the Northern District of California, and the Eastern District of New York have held that statutory damages may well be subject to the same principle. No cases have held to the contrary. And two excellent law review articles have argued forcefully that the statutory damages scheme of the Copyright Act, providing for MINIMUM damages of $750 per infringement, is in fact unconstitutional as applied to the micropayment p2p file sharing cases -- i.e. if each 99-cent song file creates a $750 to $150,000 liability.

Indeed the RIAA's damages theory is not even consistent with basic tenets of copyright law, of long standing, that statutory damage awards are required to bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages sustained.

So the DOJ should stay far away from defending this nonsense. They have much more important things to do than to ensure that college students be exposed to damages which even the courts recognize are ludicrous. See, e.g., the last 3 or 4 pages of Judge Davis's decision in Capitol v. Thomas.

the Justice Department has to support the laws as written before the courts

Yes but every member of the Justice Department, and indeed every attorney, takes an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Not a particular provision, or interpretation of a provision, of the Copyright Act. I.e., while we are bound to protect and defend "the law", the chief "law" we are bound to protect and defend is the Constitution of the United States. The United States Supreme Court has held that punitive damages which exceed by more than nine times the actual damages are presumptively unconstitutional. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the Northern District of California, and the Eastern District of New York have held that statutory damages may well be subject to the same principle. No cases have held to the contrary. And two excellent law review articles have argued forcefully that the statutory damages scheme of the Copyright Act, providing for MINIMUM damages of $750 per infringement, is in fact unconstitutional as applied to the micropayment p2p file sharing cases -- i.e. if each 99-cent song file creates a $750 to $150,000 liability.

Indeed the RIAA's damages theory is not even consistent with basic tenets of copyright law, of long standing, that statutory damage awards are required to bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages sustained.

So the DOJ should stay far away from defending this nonsense. They have much more important things to do than to ensure that college students be exposed to damages which even the courts recognize are ludicrous. See, e.g., the last 3 or 4 pages of Judge Davis's decision in Capitol v. Thomas.

What you want might soon be available: http://bariumtitanate.blogspot.com/

...seeking from 2,200 to 450,000 times the amount of actual damages...

I've only seen up to 8000, anything over 9000 would just be ridiculous.

:)

But seriously, the actual damages are around 35 cents per download. (70 cent wholesale price minus ~35 cents expenses=35 cents lost profits). The now discarded Jammie Thomas verdict was 23,000 times the actual damages (9250 per song file).

Interestingly, when the record companies are defendants they sing a different tune, complaining that even 10 times the actual damages is unconstitutional.

She was in Forbes magazine months ago (unless I get Forbes and Wired confused). Nope, google confirms it was Forbes and it was Aug. of 2008.

Yea I find this both scary and REALLY cool. To read more about these technologies, read this blog post of links to similar stories.

You'll need to watch Freeman's Mind if you want that.

I checked your comment history and you don't seem to be a troll.
Thus, I up-modded you.

Regarding your argument: I also used to have no problems with Vista: it didn't crash and I had no complaints either (I read lots of people criticizing it but I had no complaints).

Then, I installed Mirror's Edge (last game I will buy from EA, ever) and took two hours to get it running (it got stuck at splash screen), then I needed to restart the game every one hour or so as it either crashed, or it crawled at a snail's pace (5FPS or so).

I ranted about it for a bit, then installed XP over Vista and all of a sudden Mirror's Edge had no problems whatsoever. Also, my windows partition is much faster.

I guess you just didn't hit the right walls with Vista ... yet.

VMware EULA, which expressly forbids the publishing of comparative benchmarking information about their software vs other virtualization products, stinks. Its 2009 and we are still having these kinds of problems with vendors, thought I was back in 1970 again talking to IBM for a moment...

Theres another take on this over at the 360 blog here.

That blog makes the point that it is impossible to do proper modeling, performance mgmt, or capacity planning, without such information in the public domain.

AG

Theres an interesting read over at the 360 blog here., which covers the debate/fight between these 3 giants quite nicely.

AG

Of course the whole problem with all this is we do not have a good definition for "life" or "intelligence".

For "intelligence", what do you think about this one?

Intelligence: is the capacity to generate new information consistent with information previously assimilated or generated.

You can find an explanation about here.

http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2009/02/ballistic-missile-submarines-in-deep.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/

Just so everyone knows, Google Notebook lost all my notebooks one day after it was end-of-lifed. See here: http://www.google-problems.blogspot.com/ I could live with this, but they don't answer my calls ...

I agree wholeheartedly, though I am tempted to say [citation needed] on the 50% figure.

Well, you'd be right to ask for [citation needed], per the source I finally found, it's more like 22%, only the worst toll roads bust 50%.

Still, compare it to the gasoline tax - Toll roads cost $22 per $100 collected. On average, gas taxes for the whole USA cost only $0.88 for that $100.

Some other links -
$82M revenue, $19M costs, 23%
$169.5M, $48.8M toll and administrion, 29%
Same data as in first source

With that great of a difference in efficiency, it's cheaper for me, in the long run, to accept some inequality in charges because the 'unfair' gasoline system is so much more efficient that the 'fair' toll system is more expensive.

The only other fair usage fee for road use that I can think of would be an "odometer tax": pay for your road use according to your odometer reading, just like you pay for your electricity use by your electric meter reading. But that would be much more expensive to collect, and easy for people to avoid.

It also doesn't necessarily cover the 'driving a heavy vehicle' or 'driving like an ass' tax gasoline taxes tend to impose - both tending to increase road maintenance costs.

If, however, plug-in hybrids ever become a significant fraction of the cars on the road, then there will have to be a "gasoline tax" equivalent on electricity!

I said elsewhere that I see a good chance that electric vehicles will end up being pretty much restricted to urban usage - at that point you treat the roads like schools, parks, etc... Basically, fund them through real estate taxes - In general property owners are responsible to pay for the general maintenance on the roads fronting their property and an appropriate percentage of the feeders. Basically, the city gets an appropriate amount of fuel taxes for the estimated driving via taxed fuel in the city; it's up to them to make up the difference as they see fit. This will likely end up being a substantial subsidy of electric(or plug-ins that the owner manages to keep mostly electric) vehicles; but I can live with that - powered by whatever non-polluting systems that come up, they're very clean. Air quality is a substantial concern in cities, and IC Engines still produce localized pollution even if they're running ethanol/biodiesel/whatever. If that's excessive, then you back it up with an odo tax.

Sure there is. http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

There are even better designs than the UHF loop. I built one of these, and it works great, even without a reflector. Extremely easy to build too. Something even better and a little more complex would be the Grey Hoverman.

Arlen Specter said as much to the press, you can hear the audio here. A lot of Republicans wanted the stimulus to pass, but were afraid to have their "fingerprints" on the legislation. The Republicans are simply to cowardly to face down the Club for Growth and Dear Leader Comrade Rush.

The bill is the biggest single tax cut in history and the Republicans still wouldn't vote for it. This is a party run by people who mail tire gauges and silly putty and bricks to their enemies and getting good soundbites on the news when they should be writing good laws. A party completely obsessed with appearances and run by media celebrities.

...every economist that I've read says that ironically, that massive layoffs are the beginning of the end of an economic downturn, and that it appears as though things will be back into shape around the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, and none of their arguments are contingent upon a stimulus package. In fact, none mention it.

I don't know where you're getting your news, but most economists I've been reading (Krugman, Reich, Roubini, Galbraith, Taleb, etc.) say we're at the beginning, not the end, of a massive downturn. That the stimulus is not only necessary but nowhere near big enough to fill the demand gap created by this crisis. We need about 2 trillion in direct, massive government spending. We're getting only 800 billion (so far), of which a huge proportion is political garbage like tax cuts which are not very effective, AMT stuff which will not create jobs, etc.

Note that these are the same economists who long warned this crisis was coming. We ignore them at our peril.

Wow, the OP asks for examples of applications that encourage innovation. There are over two hundred responses and none appear to actually answer the question.

Take a look at the Why Not? idea exchange. This one is most probably the best fit for stimulating ideas but is the least appropriate for corporate use.

The first of the challenge based innovation sites was most probably Innocentive. Please excuse the shameless self promotion but do take a look at Cogenuity (currently in beta) which does a better job than Innocentive at combining challenge based collective intelligence with social networking.

• Cogenuity has different types of challenges. The promoter can be the judge, anyone can be judge, or a select few (chosen by the promoter) can be the judge.
• In some challenges, there is only one winner who gets the entire purse.
• There are also challenges where there can be multiple winners who share the purse.
• Teams can be formed to work on solutions to challenges.
• Solutions are highly collaborative with support for document sharing, etc.
• Both teams and challenges have discussion areas (i.e. forum topics).
• There is also support for message in-box, blogging, and micro-blogging.

I have blogged about Cogenuity and about these and other problem solving applications elsewhere.

Good luck with your search!

Android Market is soon going to be rolling out support for paid applications in much the same way as the App Store.

Correction: Android Market gained support for paid applications yesterday, although at the moment, it is restricted to developers from the USA and UK, and consumers from the USA, with more countries to follow.