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So what nuclear weapons do is basically force you, as a leader, to draw the line at how far you are willing to take a conflict, and who you're willing to fight against.

Tell that to John F. Kennedy's ghost. He came damned close to pressing the button.

He just decided that for him that line was pretty far. It also serves as a good lesson for what can happen as you near that line

So what nuclear weapons do is basically force you, as a leader, to draw the line at how far you are willing to take a conflict, and who you're willing to fight against.

Tell that to John F. Kennedy's ghost. He came damned close to pressing the button.

The question for me is should it be illegal to create a domain with a similar name to an active domain and setup an email server with similar names? I don't see anything wrong with this. There could legitimately be two companies with similar names. If the companies received each other's emails, would a crime or tort have been committed?

This seems to me to be one of those cases where the wrong laws are being applied. He used legitimate tools to further a criminal enterprise. In my opinion, he should be charged for extortion, unjust enrichment, or conversion, http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Conversion_(law), but not for illegally intercepting communications.

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/KDND#Death_of_a_contestant_in_KDND_radio_contest

Yeah! Similarly, my government-run power is always going out, and my government-run water supply never works! No... wait... that's not true at all.

You must not have lived in California back when the power was privitized:

The California electricity crisis (also known as the Western U.S. Energy Crisis) of 2000 and 2001 resulted from the gaming of a partially deregulated California energy system by energy companies such as Enron and Reliant Energy. Due to price controls, public utility companies were paying more for electricity than they were allowed to charge customers, forcing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric and the public bailout of Southern California Edison. This led to a shortage in energy and therefore, blackouts. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months. Price instability and spikes lasted from May 2000 to September 2001.

Industries that can totally screw you over if they stop working (utilities such as power and water) are traditionally under government control because we know the free market ideas of supply and demand do not work for these situations.

Electronic communications infrastructures in the US are many years behind those in other industrialized areas precisely because those areas (Japan and the EU) treated e-communication as a utility and we left our communications infrastructure to the "wisdom" of the free market.

Just to be clear, I agree with P and disagree with GP. The California energy crisis was caused by the privitisation of part of the electric system. ENRON, et al., screwed over people and businesses in California in order to make a few more bucks for themselves. Unfettered Capitalism is just as bad as unfettered Communism. Put starkly: Communism assumes greed does not exist while Capitalism assumes greed is a virtue. What is needed is a system that allows for human greed but that does not elevate it to a virtue. Or as John Kenneth Galbraith once said:

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

The grandparent is correct

This could be true and MS could still loose. What no on this thread has got is that netbooks are very popular, the price is heading to £100 (roughly $200). Where is the room for Microsofts profit? can they still charge $50 to $25 per machine?
There has been a lot of talk of Moores law and how its effectively stopped (or slowed) in terms of speed, it is still in effect in memory size however. Are we going to see devices that can do what computers do but are much more mobile (such as the iPhone/Google phone) I think Apple sees it that way the company was called "Apple Computer, Inc." for its first 30 years, but dropped the word "Computer" on January 9, 2007[6] to reflect the company's ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market What's Microsoft like in the consumer electronics market? Can they beat Linux for flexibility (being able to support different architectures, being put on low powered devices). Can they beat Linux for price competitiveness? For high-end expensive systems can they be more alluring than Apple.
I am not saying Microsoft is dead and finished there not, but are they as competitive as they once were.

Your point would be fair if the Kyoto treaty was actually being met by member nations. Most every nation is improving but they are falling far short of their goals which is the stated reason why the U.S. didn't get involved because they knew the standards were too high and could not be reasonably met without serious compromises to profitability.

Your first statement is incorrect, see http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Image:Kyoto36-2005.png

And if that was why the US didn't get involved, where is the alternative Washington treaty with realistic goals?

That also said, cars in the U.S. have stricter regulations than in Europe in terms of emissions which is why all the people with truly fast cars have to import them. Of course America has a lot more cars so that is probably why you feel the way you do about our output.

Are you saying that each individual car in the US pollute less than cars in Europe? From a fuel-efficiency stand point this article would disagree: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17344368/ In fact, on average, your cars burn twice the fuel per mile. So you would need to have some pretty fantastic emissions standards to compensate for this.

Still, BSD is *nix, see http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Unix-like, but tnx for the info