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Given power to shut down the internet at will, the excuses for doing so will only continue to grow.

Exactly. It's like Patriot Act all over again. It saddens and terrifies me how we let legislators pass such things. Reminds me of something discussed recently on Sons of Anarchy: People mostly just want the freedom to be comfortable, but because freedom is not comfortable, they end up sacrificing their freedom.

Damages, on the other hand, is an excellent excuse to see Glenn Close and Rose Byrne in action. Legally flimsy, but cute nonetheless.

I hope that you also realize that modern coal mining has nothing to do with the hard, labor intensive work of yore. Coal mining these days is mostly about proper operation of machinery to slice off sheets of rock, process them, and then transport them to the surface for shipping.

You've got to be kidding. I know nothing about coal mining, but even the season premiere episode of "30 Days" proves your statement wrong. It was fascinating. He would simply shovel coal off the floor onto the conveyor belt all day long (the grunt work jobs that newbies get).

http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/30days/episodeguide.php#

I've always felt that Customs agents were considerably more frightening that real police. They can certainly do any number of things on a whim that a cop would never consider. Well, outside of The Shield anyhow.

There are more and more people, myself included, that wind up avoiding traveling to the U.S. From outside of your borders it looks as if I need to worry not just about routine customs abuse like having my car torn apart, but also being shipped to Syria for torture, and now having sensitive data pulled off of my laptop.

And again, in the present climate it can be hard to know what data Homeland Security might see as abridging "National Security" even if it's legal in my own country.

The tricky part is reading between the lines...

From TFA:

[Gates on "powerful ideas"]

If I knew medicine like I do computers, I would like to be able to control the [human] immune system, to fight against the onset of disease on a world level ... but I think the idea of the PC still would have topped that.

Translation: "Y'all better be glad I'm just screwing up your PC."

[Gates on how Live.com competes with Google]

Competition between our two companies will be good for the whole industry.

...until we leverage all the content out of Google with IP lawsuits.

[Gates on recent struggles with the EU]

We have worked out our differences. If they wanted us to leave out some of our components for some reason, we could have delivered a European version of Vista for them. But it turned out that wasn't necessary.

Interesting that there's no specific mention of what was modified to make the European Edition "unnecessary". It's obvious that Vista is still packing Windows Media Player (component in question) Is this IE/Netscape all over again)?

[Gates on the next 10 years]

We're on to another wave of innovation; we just need to make sure the United States continues to stay right up there in relation to the rest of the world.

This is after quoting all the "amazing stuff" that's coming with the Xbox360, Zune and voice recognition. Yes, World, be like the good ol' U.S. of A-holes! Cave-in to an oppression of content not seen since the book burnings of 1938 Germany!

[Gates on the delays of Vista]

Yes, it's later than we planned. But we want it to be right. It reminds me of when we released Windows 95 late that year, taking much longer than we planned.

...and we all know how "right" Windoze95 turned out to be. (...but it's got a killer version of MS-DOS!)

[Gates on the exposure of medical research furthered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]

I get a little upset with the media, which will cover a plane crash in India that killed 100 people, but it won't cover the fact that 1,000 times that many died in Africa today from malnutrition or disease.

Of course! That's why Billy has a problem with the media. ...or is it another reason?

If Gates did turn out to be a doctor, I'm sure he'd be a plastic surgeon. If he can't make you well, he can at least make you look good.

Anyone see this. Quite interesting I thought. Outsourced computer programmer goes to india to find an outsourced job.

http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/30days/m ain.html

My company is doing hefty outsourcing. My group used to be mostly in Canada/USA with a bit of other countries. Now we are more like an even split between Canada/India/China.

I used to find it wasteful just dealing Canada/USA when we spoke the same language and had close to the same time zone. Now it is just FUBAR. By the time upper management clues in, I think it will be beyond too late.

Splitting development of the same product up into different locations in the same country is not the brightest thing to do. Across international borders that still share the basics, still less bright, but throw in massive language/geographic/time zone divide and you are looking for disaster. But hey the books will look better this quarter...

Fans of The Shield will of course know that Juicy Fruit is the persuader of choice. Quoth Lt. Jon Kavanaugh "It's a fresh pack..."

Is it possible you mean the program "Oil Storm" shown here on FX in early June?

It was a fictional documentary about oil prices, America going to war to secure a source of oil, and the political response at home.

Offical Site: http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/oilstorm /main.html

• http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/oilstorm /main.html
• http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Issues/2005/DR070905 .html
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461695/

"If you didn't see the movie (when it aired in mid-June), here it is in a nutshell: a category four hurricane destroys a vital pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico...panic sweeps of the nation...speculation drives the price of crude higher and higher...U.S. government turns to Saudi Arabia for oil...Saudi extremists commit terrorist attacks, killing 300 American oil workers...America sends troops to Saudi Arabia...still major lines at gas stations...Americans begin to turn against each other...the U.S. government decides to turn to Russia for oil...the Russians help in return for an investment in the upgrade of their pipelines...oil falls from it's high of $153 a barrel down to around $77...and all is right with the world."

He should have called Morgan Spurlock and offered to try it for 30 days. Would have made for an entertaining episode.

I like the idea of IPTV, but not in the way that it is being used in this article. I'd really like the concepts of networks and channels to pretty much go away, leaving only studios and ISPs.

As it stands now, studios have to beg and plead networks to carry their programming, and a lot of times, they have to compromise their artistic creativity to pander to the networks' need to sell advertising to sponsors and meet stupid FCC anti-obscenity standards. Consumers have to pick through hundreds of hours of worthless drivel to find a very few priceless gems.

With IPTV, we could completely cut out the middlemen. We watch and pay for exactly what we want to watch and pay for, tv studios get to make exactly what they want to make, and everyone's happy. Well, everyone except the former network executives, who are used to telling us what we're supposed to like to watch and screwing creative people for the sake of petty power.

The quote is from The Shield (warning: link has heavy use of flash) which is (sadly) one of the best shows on television right now.

While Vic Mackey is the main character, the quote was actually said by Claudette Wyms; a black detective who is justifying the excessiveness of Vic to the police captain.

I would actually say that this is on-topic simply for the fact that FX is, of course, FOX which is a member of the MPAA and "The Shield" is about cops going above the law.

If I had a kid, I'd MAKE him watch The Shield on FX.

Good thing I don't have one, I guess.

Also, I did a neighbor search and "Mona Lisa" turned-up. I know the people who live at the address and they are an elderly retired couple. The husband started a company and his daughter now runs it. I did some more searches on the family and at least the daughter turned up, but with a bogus address. Both had maximum contributions. This seems fishy. Shouldn't real names and addresses be used? If this is wrong, how do you report things like this?

Who needs banks? Since you'll work for them, they'll just keep an account for you at the company store, which will be always just slightly negative in balance.

Who needs a company store? After Fox's presidential candidate wins the election, he'll have little choice but to appoint Murdoch's board to cabinet level seats. Once that happens, all this FCC nonsense will finally be swept under the rug (since it will be disbanded), and from then on Fox will be known as America 1. Hell, you'll have high-speed connections on everything to America 1 and more importantly, all your purchases and taxes will be automagically withdrawn from your America 1 account. Double-plus good I say!
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I typically despise any animations or plugins, and I prefer Lynx to any other browser. However, Opera's nice for looking at userfriendly every day. What's annoying, though, is that I have to enable javascript just to view some sites. This is useless. Offhand, Mail.com... there's absolutely no need to make links with javascript. As other people have said, keeping things simple is best. If you have no content, then you're just wasting bandwidth anyway, and no amount of cutsey pictures will disguise the fact. There is only ONE site that I've ever seen that makes *perfect* use of flash/gif animations, and that's How Stuff Works. Check out their article on lock picking, or Programming In C. Compare useful stuff like that to frivolous garbage, shown here: FX Networks. The world will be a far better place when we can simply euthanize Frontpage users.

Actually, Fox's FX channel has long been broadcasting re-runs of the show. It's nice to see the old episodes again, episodes which stretched our imaginations and turned me into a fan.

Actually, Fox's FX channel has long been broadcasting re-runs of the show. It's nice to see the old episodes again, episodes which stretched our imaginations and turned me into a fan.

I've messed with programming languages for 15+ years, and built and ran a lot of these kinds of benchmarks on a lot of different languages. I think it's only fair to put in the obvious caveat for the less experienced: These benchmarks are too small to reflect most issues of performance and ease of use that arise in real programming. In other words, the languages that are performing best in these comparisons are the best languages for writing tiny benchmarks in, and that's all you can tell.

(To be fair, I only could see the benchmark titles, since the site is still slashdotted and I don't have the patience to chase through the Google cache. But I recognize most of the titles: there's apparently nothing there that hasn't been used as a toy benchmark for a long time.)

Note that this is a fundamental dilemma of benchmarking. Nobody is going to implement the same large yet ``generic'' program multiple ways on a large variety of languages just for comparison purposes. Even if they do, they will inevitably slight those languages with which they are less familiar, or lucky. Instead, they try to somehow infer ``What would that be like?'' from little examples. (I should know: I do this myself all the time.)

The redeeming feature of this particular benchmark extravaganza is that it may expose a lot of people to a lot of cool languages and styles they've never heard of before. For that it is to be commended.