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Public option; abortion; environment.
[laziness indulged]

Like this:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&idim=state:06000&dl=en&hl=en&q=california+population+graph#ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=population&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=state&idim=state:06000:48000&hl=en&dl=en

or this:
http://www.bea.gov/regional/gdpmap/GDPMap.aspx

At current rates of population it doesn't look like TX will ever hit CA, and at economy it will be decades.

I'm not quite sure what your point is? I should also clarify it was a hope, doesn't mean it will happen.

http://www.google.com/search?q=tote&tbs=dfn:1

Is someone defensive and embarrased?

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=embarrassingly+parallel

With no age limits. That's it. Everything else flows from that.

Here is a post from today by me with lots of links to pages with more links as to why this makes sense and would eventually restructure the USA in a healthy, joyful, abundant, and more intrinsically/mutually secure way:
    http://groups.google.com/group/postscarcity/msg/cc6c635340b394e6

You lie, there is no such thing as a Lutheran liberal.

Also, did you go to one of the many hundreds of Lutheran schools in Texas?

And to your "undermine it from within" comment, what the hell have you liberals been doing for the past 40 years? Undermine it from within, seriously you are a liar and stupid and that makes for a punch you in the face combination. Name one, one Liberal that did one significant thing that made America better! SS and Medicare don't count because jackass I'd have donated to a private fund anyhow and it would be run a hell of a lot better than what your liberal asses came up with. Go watch Brazil then come back here and tell me that's what you really want.

Liberal Lutherans, hahahahhahaha!!!!

Some people such as "Soulja Boy" (a recording artist) and "Violet Blue" (the author of the linked ZDNet article) get special treatment and have not been suspended for using their pseudonyms on Google+

It turns out that Violet Blue is her real name (my mistake; sorry, Violet!). Reference: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/YnzXfbpe9Nj

That actually brings up another problem: people with real names that are unusual or creative who have to live in fear of Google employees mistakenly suspending their accounts!

This isn't about the language at all, this is strictly about VM at this point.

And my understanding is that, if Oracle's patents are valid, it is very hard to create a high-performance VM without trodding on them - one patent in particular is pretty much a patent for JIT-compiling bytecode.

So don't JIT it, compile to native code at application install time. This would likely improve the user experience anyway. I don't know about you, but I would happily accept a longer install time in return for a faster application start and snappier execution.

The link to the thread on Android SD protection did not work before so here it is for completeness.

So much for Google's blog post in February, "The freedom to be who you want to be..." which extolled the "great benefits" of pseudonymity. http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html

Other recent suspensions:

• * A guy who used a pseudonym on Google+ ("Thomas Monopoly") claims to have lost his entire account including "approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes all of my bookmarks, having used Google bookmarks my Docs account with shared documents and backups of inventory files my own personal calendar of doctors appointments, meetings, and various other dates collaborative calendars, of which I was the creator and of which several man hours were put into creating, community calendars my saved maps and travel history medical records and a variety of very important notes [and] My website, a blogger account for which I purchased the domain through Google and designed myself": http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/why-you-shouldnt-trust-google-or-any-cloud-service-with-your-data/13860
• * Daynah (a Senior Editor at Beatweek Magazine and a blogger at Cali Lewis' GeekBeat.TV) was suspended from Google+ on Saturday, presumably because her Google+ name was "Daynah .net" (she never shares her last name online due to privacy and safety concerns). I believe it was just her Google+ account that got suspended, not her e-mail or access to other services. Her profile is still suspended as of when I'm posting this.
• * I was suspended from Google+ on Friday, June 15th through Wednesday, June 20th, presumably because my Google+ name was "the JoshMeister" (which is how I'm known to almost all of my friends and followers online, on my podcasts which have been downloaded over a million times, including at my employment at MacTech Magazine as the Podcast Producer and Host). I tried changing my name to my first and last name with the JoshMeister in parenthesis after it, but that was also rejected, so ultimately I had to settle for using just my real first and last name. Unfortunately, my name is fairly common, and there are already several people with that name on Google+, making it significantly more difficult for people to find and recognize me or + mention me. I did not lose access to Google services other than Google+ and Google Buzz, although I did have to log in again to my e-mail and other services because Google claimed there had been "suspicious activity" (although I confirmed that nobody had accessed my account other than me). More of my story: https://plus.google.com/114936727752666468558/posts/5nHEHFsWCTx

Lists of suspensions:

• * Robert Scoble (linking to Skud's link below) inadvertently began compiling a public list of suspended Google+ accounts here, along with some good discussion of the topic and links to other lists: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/YnzXfbpe9Nj
• * Skud is compiling a private list of suspended Google+ accounts here: http://is.gd/nonplussed (redirects to Google Docs form)

Examples of Google's double standard and inconsistency:

• * Some people such as "Soulja Boy" (a recording artist) and "Violet Blue" (the author of the linked ZDNet article) get special treatment and have not been suspended for using their pseudonyms on Google+
• * "Die Ennomane" (die means "the" in German) was suspended but then was allowed to keep the pseudonym after German media coverage
• * Google has turned a blind ey

So much for Google's blog post in February, "The freedom to be who you want to be..." which extolled the "great benefits" of pseudonymity. http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html

Other recent suspensions:

• * A guy who used a pseudonym on Google+ ("Thomas Monopoly") claims to have lost his entire account including "approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes all of my bookmarks, having used Google bookmarks my Docs account with shared documents and backups of inventory files my own personal calendar of doctors appointments, meetings, and various other dates collaborative calendars, of which I was the creator and of which several man hours were put into creating, community calendars my saved maps and travel history medical records and a variety of very important notes [and] My website, a blogger account for which I purchased the domain through Google and designed myself": http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/why-you-shouldnt-trust-google-or-any-cloud-service-with-your-data/13860
• * Daynah (a Senior Editor at Beatweek Magazine and a blogger at Cali Lewis' GeekBeat.TV) was suspended from Google+ on Saturday, presumably because her Google+ name was "Daynah .net" (she never shares her last name online due to privacy and safety concerns). I believe it was just her Google+ account that got suspended, not her e-mail or access to other services. Her profile is still suspended as of when I'm posting this.
• * I was suspended from Google+ on Friday, June 15th through Wednesday, June 20th, presumably because my Google+ name was "the JoshMeister" (which is how I'm known to almost all of my friends and followers online, on my podcasts which have been downloaded over a million times, including at my employment at MacTech Magazine as the Podcast Producer and Host). I tried changing my name to my first and last name with the JoshMeister in parenthesis after it, but that was also rejected, so ultimately I had to settle for using just my real first and last name. Unfortunately, my name is fairly common, and there are already several people with that name on Google+, making it significantly more difficult for people to find and recognize me or + mention me. I did not lose access to Google services other than Google+ and Google Buzz, although I did have to log in again to my e-mail and other services because Google claimed there had been "suspicious activity" (although I confirmed that nobody had accessed my account other than me). More of my story: https://plus.google.com/114936727752666468558/posts/5nHEHFsWCTx

Lists of suspensions:

• * Robert Scoble (linking to Skud's link below) inadvertently began compiling a public list of suspended Google+ accounts here, along with some good discussion of the topic and links to other lists: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/YnzXfbpe9Nj
• * Skud is compiling a private list of suspended Google+ accounts here: http://is.gd/nonplussed (redirects to Google Docs form)

Examples of Google's double standard and inconsistency:

• * Some people such as "Soulja Boy" (a recording artist) and "Violet Blue" (the author of the linked ZDNet article) get special treatment and have not been suspended for using their pseudonyms on Google+
• * "Die Ennomane" (die means "the" in German) was suspended but then was allowed to keep the pseudonym after German media coverage
• * Google has turned a blind ey

Given that a certificate is effectively just a very very long structured password, what stops me pinching the cert off the phone and using that to sign into the relevant service? A certificate doesn't solve the problem, it just changes the terminology slightly. It's still bits and bytes stored on the phone that can be used as a secret to access a service as a user.

If you want a device-specific password, Google already support that for their services through their two-factor authentication with application specific passwords.

You seem to have your definitions confused. The whole world doesn't use your arbitrary distinctions. I have never ever heard the Shanghai maglev called anything but the maglev. Bullet train, by contrast, is in wide use to describe the dongche.

You seem to have your definitions confused. The whole world doesn't use your arbitrary distinctions. I have never ever heard the Shanghai maglev called anything but the maglev. Bullet train, by contrast, is in wide use to describe the dongche.

1. Konami code activates developer mode (i.e., root or jailbroken). No muss, no fuss.

2. The "card" metaphor to represent running apps. Slide to switch, throw away to kill.

3. It's Linux, and mostly open source. (Shares that with Android.)
3b. Not M$, not Apple, for people that care (shares that with Android).

4. Apps are in HTML/Javascript. Easy. Or C++ (harder but faster to run)

5. Touch to move stuff between Pre and TouchPad.

6. Looks nice. Fonts, layout, icons, etc.

7. The homebrew community

Cool, that's verbatim.. You can find that statement under the official Google Terms of Service. An amazing piece of contract art that few have ever read..

Indeed, my mileage does vary, I enjoy not having to put in a driver disk to install a printer. My printer experience on Linux lately has been that you plug in the USB cable to whatever printer, new or old, and it prints. And you can generally expect printing to continue to work properly even after many years of system updates. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule, I just haven't hit any recently. And Windows PCs are hardly immune from printer problems.

I would believe any similar example. Except for printing.

I've had to use CUPS in a deeper level (google tea4cups) and it's HORRENDOUS. It's absurdly overengineered (except when it's missing a feature), extremely fragile and to be fair, even when the situation is 100% 'blue sky' it sucks (even when using it as a regular user).

Windows printing is miles ahead, I'm not joking unfortunately. That is, except for 100Mb "printer drivers" from stupid vendors (almost all of them)

It's a situation where the Tea Party has been trying for the last 50 or more years to overthrow the government under various names like the American Liberty League, or the John Birch Society. They now are forming militias controlled by industrialists like the Koch Bro's which was a similar tactic to the one they used in the attempted coup of FDR during the infamous business plot.

And of course that resulted in COINTELPRO.

Gmail's user interface is fine if you check your e-mail address only from computers permanently connected to the Internet. But if you like to use e-mail while on the road, and you don't pay a luxury price for mobile broadband, then you have what's called an "intermittent connection to the Internet", and you need a way to read e-mail while offline. According to this page, Gmail's offline support wasn't working with Chrome, IE 9, or Firefox 5 two months ago.

I wonder if we should start to worry for Pussypopptimus Prime? It would be sad to see her go! She is, as she says, "the ALPHA and OMEGA in this crazy ass thing called life" after all. Her about page: https://plus.google.com/112816236983095089898/about

(originally found by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing)

Though I don't have G+ or Adsense etc, after reading this, Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life (http://consumerist.com/2011/07/google-deletes-last-7-years-of-users-digital-life-shrugs.html), I've started taking gmail, gdocs backups.

Gmail : http://www.gmail-backup.com/
Google Docs: http://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/downloads/list

Though the ideal solution would be to have your own domain. I got mine, a .me from Namecheap for $7.49 just a few weeks ago and using it with free Windows Live (http://domains.live.com/) for email (and you can have 500 emails, 25GB Skydrive, 5GB synced storage etc), which I can change anytime I want by changing MX records at Namecheap.

I've already posted this link in a comment in another thread, but let me repeat this - it's one of the patents in question:

http://www.google.com/patents/about/6910205_Interpreting_functions_utilizing.html?id=U-4UAAAAEBAJ

What is claimed is:
1. In a computer system, a method for increasing the execution speed of virtual machine instructions at runtime, the method comprising:

receiving a first virtual machine instruction;
generating, at runtime, a new virtual machine instruction that represents or references one or more native instructions that can be executed instead of said first virtual machine instruction; and
executing said new virtual machine instruction instead of said first virtual machine instruction.
...
8. In a computer system, a method for increasing the execution speed of virtual machine instructions, the method comprising:

inputting virtual machine instructions for a function;
compiling a portion of the function into at least one native machine instruction so that the function includes both virtual and native machine instruction;
representing said at least one native machine instruction with a new virtual machine instruction that is executed after the compiling of the fuction.

It goes on to detail the claims, but altogether this describes the standard way of making a JIT-compiling bytecode VM: replacing bytecode with native code prefixed by a single "native JMP to following" bytecode pseudo-op. Other claims also add the ability to store the original bytecode elsewhere, such that it can be recompiled differently later (e.g. when additional classes are loaded later invalidating assumptions such as inferred virtualness of methods).

It's not the only patent, of course, but I suspect it's the one that is hardest to sidestep.

Of course, Google aren't releasing numbers. However, Skud is gathering data at the suspended accounts list.

Lady Ada's account was restored yesterday. https://plus.google.com/108772200278976934119/posts

This isn't about the language at all, this is strictly about VM at this point.

And my understanding is that, if Oracle's patents are valid, it is very hard to create a high-performance VM without trodding on them - one patent in particular is pretty much a patent for JIT-compiling bytecode.

Patent reform

With added benefit of not having to pee.

Well there are two enormous jets of material that are light years long coming out of both sides of a quasar. http://www.google.com/search?q=quasar&tbm=isch

One might say it is leaking from both ends so to speak...

Look at CEF: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

It lets you self-host a HTML widget(s) and works on Win32, OSX and Linux. Its a wrapper around the Chromium browser, I use it in the Steam client for showing web pages in our thick app.

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4298e48e35b7efc0?hl=en
"Now, there are probably lots of ways you could do this [grow cell cultures as agricultural liquids like orange juice] that you know more about that I. But here is what I envision for home use (as opposed to big industrial use).
    You have two versions. One is for outdoors, and is a big machine you set up in you yard with a glass top that has photosynthesizing algae that either produce the liquids directly or produce something that feeds another culture specific to a plant or animal derived culture specific to what you want to make. You need to add water, but for extra nutrients, you also add ground up rock dust (Smari could sell everyone some from Iceland :-) or you add seawater.
    For indoor use, you replace your home furnace with these things as presumably they would give off heat if indoors you lit them with artificial lamps or if they consumed oil or natural gas (bio-derived elsewhere) as feedstocks. Again, you add water and rock dust (or seawater). So, you have year-round indoor agricultural liquid production at very low cost.
    (I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding. :-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
    This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "

A week ago I sent something to GE about this idea for their ecomagination challenge --even though I missed getting the idea into their contest, I wanted people to know about it. But it is not listed here yet (if ever):
http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=home

That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense?

This was a few years ago, and TBH it wasn't the polish of the desktop environment itself that pushed me. It was the fact that (at the time at least) it didn't take very much work to turn yourself into a corner case that was poorly supported and even more poorly tested. Multi-monitor support was dire, if I bought a modern inkjet printer I'd typically have to wait 6-12 months for it to get good support (which is a PITA when your average inkjet is only on the market for 12 months or so). There was no single event that pushed me, it was more a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of thing that eventually led to me saying "Enough! If I'm going to battle with a desktop OS, I'm going to be paid for it!"

YMMV and all that.

Indeed, my mileage does vary, I enjoy not having to put in a driver disk to install a printer. My printer experience on Linux lately has been that you plug in the USB cable to whatever printer, new or old, and it prints. And you can generally expect printing to continue to work properly even after many years of system updates. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule, I just haven't hit any recently. And Windows PCs are hardly immune from printer problems.

Wow. Just wow. Is this the low that Slashdot has sunk to?
 
Hey fucktard. If you're not sure why not Google it and stop looking like an ass?

http://www.google.com/search?q=3d+young+children

do you work for a 3D company or something?

what is the source of your emotional, factless animosity to logic and reason?

I wouldn't say it's viral, but it's not good publicity. And there are more stories of "spam masters" at Google + suspending/deleting accounts without accountability. Here's a post on Google + about "Skud" (who WORKED at Google) who lost her account because she used her nickname instead of her Christian name. And Google knew her by that nickname; she's been keynote at conferences and introduced as her nickname —links provided so you can see her story and G+ users' reactions to Skud being deep-sixed by G+ spam masters. (She's on twitter too: @skud)

Note, people are asking Cutts for more of an explanation about Dylan than "I looked into it", and Cutts is ignoring them (or repeating the party line that he looked into it). But Dylan isn't shutting up about it. If nothing else, that's terrible PR. Cutts should either work it out with Dylan in private so that Dylan stops talking about it, or say what the TOS violation is. Because people really don't give a shit about "Dylan"; they want to know it won't happen to them.

Hardly radical. Power stations have done it for years, some other food processing factories have used the heat to warm up greenhouses to grow tomatoes.

A radical idea would be putting data centers in a cooler climate so they can be cooled more with ambient temperatures.

For example like Google's Hamina data center? http://www.google.com/datacenter/hamina/

Does GM have any real-life experience with a diesel powerplant in passenger car that is positive?

This is what I think of when I think of GM and Diesel engines:

http://books.google.com/books?id=tOIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=GM+diesel+delta+88&source=bl&ots=-ibHbCl1Kr&sig=v_Z1TqGku7AweZHgtLbXnlkuUmg&hl=en&ei=i8wqTtAOyvXSAYjphIAL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=GM%20diesel%20delta%2088&f=false

(Sorry for the long link).

To summarize, GM's diesel's from the 80's were a disaster.

I'm not having this problem. I went to https://www.google.com/news/advanced_news_search and set my 'source location' to 'Canada' and then 'Poland' using Polish search terms and I'm getting Polish results for those locations.

It works fine for me?

You are fortunate that this didn't happen. Apple has been notorious for their exploding and self-combusting batteries throughout their laptop and iPod product line ever since the PowerBook 5300.

Strange that he could log in to write this:

https://plus.google.com/114035521237052233054/posts

what's worse is that with the "circles" bs, google builds a profile of you that only google can see.

https://plus.google.com/settings/exportdata. If you don't have an account, that is where you can download your profile, contacts, circles, pictures, and stream content in open formats for use with any (or no) service.

It wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm curious whether this is a custom-for-Apple microcontroller/firmware, or one of the several off-the-shelf battery authentication ICs currently on the market. Firmware on a battery is not entirely suprising - charge management, capacity counting, authentication and various safety checks can be cheaply integrated that way, and a little serial bootloader onboard for emergency bugfixes is a "why-not" feature. In the case of authentication, some manufacturers are now using cryptographic hashes (one such chip has hardware SHA-1 built in) to function similarly to the lockout chips on Lexmark ink cartridges. The gadget can refuse to operate from aftermarket / "unauthorized" batteries, ensuring (depending who's telling it) user safety or vendor lock-in / planned obsolescence. Viable hacks for these give some promise that some lazy vendors' battery packs can be replaced usefully beyond the manufacturer's designated product lifespan :-)

"Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc."

I got slapped down a decade ago for comparing issues related to copyright to slavery, but I still feel it is a problem that is becoming related to slavery, as a system of control and now justification for imprisonment (copyright infringement used to be mostly only a civil, not a criminal, offense a couple decades ago).
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/df4b4363d544f766/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en#1e499c6db59117a2

A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state...

Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?

A decade ago I suggested that in the same way people in the 1960s would have laughed at the idea of a million people in prison in the USA for non-violent drug offenses, which is what we have now, so too we may see the same with copyright soon enough, unless our ideology changes. Hard to believe it was possible then, but we still seem to be going that way. Where do we want to be in ten more years?

A related satire I sent to the US DOJ years ago when they asked for comments:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

Lawrence Lessig made a similar point in his book "Code" in the first chapter, "Code Is Law".

The Angband people are only jealous that NetHack is better at grinding even though this is the main game feature activity of Angband.

Just read this easily followable grinding guide for raising the perfect pudding in NetHack. ;-)

This will make your life easier by a hundred fold: https://code.google.com/p/dwarftherapist/

Go here and start posting to twitter and facebook from Google+

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbgcgahdbgbdenffckohanhobdcnkoip

Not only am I using a Dell, but my battery exploded.

Don't worry, Apple laptop batteries do that too.

I'm already on my second Apple laptop battery after the first one bulged to the point it no longer fit within the laptop case. Thankfully I'm using the "old" MacBook: the one where you can replace the battery and hard drive on it, both things you can't do with the new ones.

Which makes me think that somehow I might be staying away from the new "sealed" MacBooks with the unreplaceable batteries, especially because searching for "bulging battery" brings up nothing but horror stories about Apple batteries. Apparently they've had this problem for over five years and have never bothered fixing it.

Sanitation: Like the government garbage strikes in NYC, where trash piled up for weeks? A private company would get the trash picked up (unless prevented from doing so by "labor laws").

Medicine: Government has run up the costs, and slowed the pace of innovation. When rich Canadians need surgery they leave their socialized system for the semi-socialized US system.

Education: Like in Atlanta, where the government schools cheat to get money? The more control government has gained over education, the worse it has become. Or the fact that almost half of all US high school graduates are functionally illiterate.

Wine: I have no idea what that has to do with government.

Public Order: Wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Panama, the Baltics. That's just a sample of the US's "public order" this century. If we look at the last century, we can add the Holocaust, the Soviet purges, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Mao's cleansing, and countless other atrocities. Cops commit more murders in the US than they prevent, and as in the cases of Jose Guerena or John T. Williams, they get away with it. I refrain from murder, rape, and theft because it's wrong, not because it's illegal. And the vast majority of the population does as well.

Irrigation: All the irrigation systems I know of are private. But I don't claim any level of expertise in the field.

Roads: High quality roads, indeed! A private firm would see a bridge (or a road) as an asset to be maintained, in order to reduce the risk of lawsuits, and maintain revenue. To government it's an expense with nothing new and shiny to show the voters.

Fresh water: That would be fairly difficult to do in private industry...at least the way we do it now. But it's not done at the federal level. The farther control of something gets from the people, the worse it seems to get.

Public Health: Is having idiots scream that we're all going to die from the bird flu, or the swine flu, or the flying pigs flu a good thing?

Other than those things, government is responsible for hundreds of millions of murders, stealing wealth from its owners and diverting it to those with political connections (particularly banks and military contractors), and generally slowing the progress of our society.

While granted terror attacks in Norway are probably pretty rare

Actually, nothing like this has happened in Norway since WWII, and AFAIK no known terror attacks whatsoever has been perpetrated on Norwegian soil in modern times. That might be the reason it's made the news worldwide, I'm still not sure why this is on Slashdot.

On a side note I work at the University of Oslo, I heard the blast clearly from my office (believed it was thunder at the time). An hour prior to the explosion I suggested to colleagues leaving early and having a beer at this pub, now I'm happy they declined... While I'm very conscious that this shall not influence my everyday life in any way in the future, it *is* a strong reminder that even our peaceful country is vulnerable.

Don't we already have one?

The nerdily-named Computer Emergency Response Team
http://www.cert.org/

Why do I imagine post-doc geeks wearing black sitting around in a darkened room in a "situation room" with huge screens looking at live monitoring logs?

And also asking each other, "Doctor, do you concur?"

Uh, well, morally?

I'd go the other way. Even if Google didn't have a legal obligation to pay Sun, I'd say that morally it would have been the right thing to do.

I mean come on, we're not talking about a 2-man garage startup being crushed by Sun Microsystems.

The overage sketch is Sun creates Java, nurtures the Java ecosystem, including the millions of developers who are automatically Android developers now, and Google comes along and doesn't feel like sending any money Sun's way.

So they do some acrobatics and pretend there's no Java in Android.

Google's responsible for twisting the knife into Sun: Before Android, Java MIDP was considered somewhat necessary for a phone (to run mobile Java apps). Android cemented the death of mobile Java apps, which was unfortunate, because a lot of those things worked on a huge number of platforms. Anyway, that resulted in revenue loss for Sun.

Oracle is definitely justified in asking for money. But not billions. Best scenario: Google pays at least $100 mil, maybe double that for a worldwide license, including for Android licensees.

This is why my visits to /. have gone from multiple times per day to maybe once a week.

An anonymous reader?@! For reals?

And then this anonhole writes: > The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources.

Oh, because it's not like you can burn disk image onto physical media or anything like that.

Not that IT professionals are that capable anyway.

And writes this: > Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server.

And this is utter FUD as well. It's well known the EULA explicitly allows this.

This mouth breathing OP should be deleted.

Here,here