Slashdot Mirror

found this entry at www.m-w.com which
is Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Main Entry: 1fuck
Pronunciation: 'f&k
Function: verb
Etymology: akin to Dutch fokken to breed (cattle), Swedish dialect fokka to copulate
Date: 1503
intransitive senses
1 usually obscene : COPULATE -- sometimes used in the present participle as a meaningless intensive
2 usually vulgar : MESS 3 -- used with with
transitive senses
1 usually obscene : to engage in coitus with -- sometimes used interjectionally with an object (as a personal or reflexive pronoun) to express anger, contempt, or disgust
2 usually vulgar : to deal with unfairly or harshly : CHEAT, SCREW

Its not like its completely slang here. I still think censorship is such a waste of time and money. And the excuse "its to protect kids". Whats it really protecting them from? Nothing.
They'll learn it at school or from the parents before they learn it from radio, television or the internet.

I must be a bit thick today, since I can't decide whether or not it would have been appropriate to enclose your comment in tags. But in case you were serious, a "lorry" is a large truck. Think "Mack" or "Peterbilt" - anything bigger than a pickup and with lots of wheels (the rubber parts of which are "tyres").

If you think "materialise" is weird, try this one - in America, we spell it "advertise," but in Britain, according to Merriam Webster, they spell it "advertize."

Go figure.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

I am very tired of people complaining that they are forced into using/upgradign to MS software and newer versions. If you dont want to, suck it, dont upgrade/use MS software, an accept the consequences.

To beg a question (or issue, etc.) is to avoid addressing it when it should be addressed, or to incorrectly assume the issue to have been properly addressed. For a more authoritative account, you can look up "beg" at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.

First, off topic: put your money where your sig is :-) (see sig below)

To the point, the following entry, stolen from Merriam-Webster, shows that the usage of the word "book" is nowhere near as limited as you suggest -- very many of the definitions have nothing to do with paper. Expanding usage to include something like an "online book" hardly seems a stretch.

That being said, I hate reading books online. Can't do it on the can, can't do it on the train, can't do it walking down the street, can't hold one finger in the index while you quick check to see if you got the right reference, can't flip through 100 pages to find the page on the left side that looked like what you remembered... I could go on, but the point is that it will be a long, long time before the user interface of an online book will compare favorably to that of a print book. IMHO, the only thing an online book has going for it is a text search feature.

Main Entry: 1 book
Pronunciation: 'buk
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English bOc; akin to Old High German buoh book, Gothic boka letter
Date: before 12th century
1 a : a set of written sheets of skin or paper or tablets of wood or ivory b : a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume c : a long written or printed literary composition d : a major division of a treatise or literary work e : a record of a business's financial transactions or financial condition -- often used in plural <the book s show a profit>
2 capitalized : BIBLE 1
3 : something that yields knowledge or understanding <the great book of nature> <her face was an open book>
4 a : the total available knowledge and experience that can be brought to bear on a task or problem <tried every trick in the book> <the book on him is that he can't hit a curveball> b : the standards or authority relevant in a situation <run by the book>
5 a : all the charges that can be made against an accused person <threw the book at him> b : a position from which one must answer for certain acts : ACCOUNT <bring criminals to book>
6 a : LIBRETTO b : the script of a play c : a book of arrangements for a musician or dance orchestra : musical repertory
7 : a packet of items bound together like a book <a book of stamps> <a book of matches>
8 a : BOOKMAKER b : the bets registered by a bookmaker; also : the business or activity of giving odds and taking bets
9 : the number of tricks a cardplayer or side must win before any trick can have scoring value
- bookful /'buk-"ful/ noun
- in one's book : in one's own opinion
- in one's good books : in favor with one
- one for the book : an act or occurrence worth noting
- on the books : on the records

__________________________________________________ ___

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Spelling by m-w.com.

According to a Merriam-Webster article on the subject, this usage dates back to the '50s. Here's another more concise description.

But thanks for the challenge, I'm bored too. Or more accurately, I'm avoiding doing some economically useful work because it is as boring as hell.

uuh... yeah.

1. Don't give your friends your email.

2. Get a new e-mail address and repeat 1.

3. install filters in your e-mail client

4. Or you could try something like what Mr. Huntley did.

I had a simillar problem but it was the same people over and over. eventually after many many e-mails begging them to stop they did. Though I doubt asking will work for you at this point.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

We (USians) do live in a democracy (as well as a republic). I refer you to M-W.com's definition. We live in a democracy because supreme power ultimately rests with the people. The fact that we exercise that power through elected representatives doesn't negate that.

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Heh. The irony is it turned out I got it wrong. It's cataclysmic. After reading your post, I just had to make sure...

Kevin Fox

Me: I'll have some more informative conent on the front page please.

/.: Would you like some anti-Microsoft BIAS with that?

Me: No thanks. Just the content please.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=e-mail

Then I remembered the thing that really peeved me and made me want to fling four-letter constructions at the "reporter" was his misuse of 'nonplussed .' I don't know why, but it really annoyed me. This isn't a flame or a troll as much as it is a confession. To wit:

And for now, in public at least, AOL seems nonplussed by Nullsoft's antics. "Nobody's slapped their hand yet."

[pedantry] Nonplussed does NOT mean unimpressed. It means perplexed... boggled... rendered speechless. [/pedantry]

I think the problem I have is, how do people like this get jobs writing stories for places like the AP? For chrissake, this is a 10th-grade vocabulary word. A journalist should at least have the same basic command of the English language as a High School senior! It really represents the deterioration of the news media in general: at first it was the idea of news as entertainment, then we had tabloid style coverage, next was sensational scare tactics and tease trailers on TV, then when the internet got anyone with a phone and a keyboard involved, regard for accuracy and truth went out the window, even at the New York Friggin Times. Now on top of it all we have to deal with uneducated writers and reporters?

Aaaargh!

I'm nonplussed!

I work at a publication that bases its style on Webster's CollegiateDictionary, which -- funny enough -- does have it as "E-mail." Take a look at the entry at Merriam-Webster OnLine.
While editors may regard Webster as the final authority, I don't necessarily, especially on words like this (surely it was used before 1982?), but for the sake of consistency, an authority like this can be helpful.

The same could be said to you :) "Free" is an interesting word with a lot of meanings (15 for the adjective, according to M-W).

"F ree" is such a great word at causing cognitive dissonance among people :) If Blender comes at no cost, then it is still free, even if it has restrictions. Likewise, if it cost money, but had no restrictions, it would still be free.

Dear God in Heaven, I love english.

And this from a man who doesn't know the difference between slander and libel

And this from a man who doesn't know the difference between slander and libel

Main Entry: fascism Pronunciation: 'fa-"shi-z&m also 'fa-"si- Function: noun Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces Date: 1921 1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition 2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control - fascist /-shist also -sist/ noun or adjective, often capitalized - fascistic /fa-'shis-tik also -'sis-/ adjective, often capitalized - fascistically /-ti-k(&-)lE/ adverb, often capitalized

This first example is becoming cliche, but stick with me a moment: In Japan, acts of violence and depravity are commonplace in anime and manga, and are accepted... yadda yadda. And their people commit one of the lowest rates of real violence in the world.

Contrast that with Germany, where entertainment that depicts violence committed by one human against another is verboten. Command and Conquer had to be retouched and its manual rewritten to depict its soldiers as robots, not people. Even then, it was sold only to adults. Forget about playing Panzer General. And God Forbid you even link to a web page that mentions Nazis in anything but a contemptful light. This is a reaction to their Fascist era, a time when elected German leaders executed 6 million minority citizens.

So yes. It is cultural. IANASociologist, so I won't get all Jungian and speculate about archetypes and cultural personality, but each society has to find what works -- and what doesn't -- for them. And in every society except stagnant, isolated ones, it's an ongoing search.

Now I'm going to use a word that will make a lot of you want to invoke Godwin's Law. But I'm not using that word in the sense in which Godwin usually encountered it. I'm going to use it in it's original sense. It's important that we, as informed citizens, be able to talk about this word, and know what it really means.

Get out your dictionary and look up the first definition of fascism - it's not about goosestepping and stiffarm saluting and gassing minorities. It's about efficiency. Fascism is the principle that any order, any rule, any law, is justified if it means the state will benefit: be more efficient, run smoother, be safer. Beginning to sound familiar? It should.

Because that's exactly what a lot of legislators have aimed for lately, without regard for individual liberty: anti-smoking laws, censorship of violence in media, drug wars, gun control, three strikes mandatory sentencing. Even worse, if it hasn't been effective at safety and efficiency, it's been successfully sold as such.

And it's not only state-oriented fascism, it's corporate-oriented fascism. Washington legislators are more than happy to exchan ge votes for the contributions of major corporations in order that they may run more efficiently. Laws are continually passed "for the good of the people" when they are really just good for business. To hell with the constitution, there's a buck to be made.

It's scary how the children of men who fought against fascism in WW2 are so willing to embrace it. It's scary how easily we've forgotten. Too many liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike are willing to sacrifice our liberties for safety and efficiency. My grandfather, a WW2 B-29 pilot, is probably pounding the walls of his coffin in frustration.

But that's the dark corners of the big picture. We still have defenders of the liberties endowed upon us by the constitution: From the EFF to the NRA. The entire state of Nevada and most of Texas. From PETA and Greenpeace to Larry Flynt. The Libertarian Party and even Nader. Anyone who argues for the rights of anything other than big business and "what's best for the country."

We aren't going to wind up like modern Germany. There's an equilibrium somewhere between libertarian anarchy and fascism, and we're seeking it. There are too many of us who paid attention in high school Civics class and know what's in the bill of rights. There are too many of us who own guns and know how to use them properly... and accurately. There are too many of us who entertain ourselves simulating small unit combat and tactics...

So you see, in the end, FPS and RTS games are one of the weapons in our arsenal against bad government. They fit right in alongside free press and the right to bear arms. No wonder they're being condemned by government. I suggest that these games -- weapon and combat simulators, really -- should be protected under the second amendment, as well as the first.

And your processor would be the equivalent of a 1.1 Ghz machine overclocked to 5.19 Nhz (1 Nhz = 1 nonillion hz [american] (1 quintillion hz british)(For those that don't know the number system that high, that is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hz) (See here if you want to know more about the names of numbers).

The question to ask is: Will it run Quake?

hack-er, noun

1. one that hacks
2. a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity <a tennis hacker>
3. an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4. a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

(From the defintion at Merrian-Webster.)

So, a "hacker" is one who "hacks" (more on that later) or someone who is unskilled at a specific activity. Well that does sound like some "hackers" I know, that doesn't sound like something I'd go around calling myself!

Moving on to "hack:"

hack verb, transitive:

1. a) to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful blows
   b) to cut or shape by or as if by crude or ruthless strokes <hacking out new election districts>
   c) ANNOY, VEX -- often used with off
2. to clear or make by or as if by cutting away vegetation <hacked his way through the brush>
3. a) to manage successfully <just couldn't hack the new job>
   b) TOLERATE <I can't hack all this noise>

1. a) to make chopping strokes or blows <hacked at the weeds>; also : to make cuts as if by chopping <hacking away at the work force>
   b) to play inexpert golf
2. to cough in a short dry manner
3. LOAF -- usually used with around
4. a) to write computer programs for enjoyment
   b) to gain access to a computer illegally

Again, minus the computer entries, it seems that being a hacker means that you're either unskilled at something or are doing things basically in a brute and unsophisticated way. Not something I'd like to be aquainted with.

It's interesting to see that the dictionary contains both meanings of the word "hacker" but not surprising - words may have many meanings, and it's the job of a dictionary to list them all.

Actually, what'd I'd really like to know is how "hacker" picked up the computer related meanings. Seems natural now, but "hack" is a fairly old word, originating from the 14th century. It doesn't seem like something that someone would want to self-label themselves with, but given that a lot of people around here call themselves "geeks" I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Of course, none of us geeks actually bites the heads off chickens, but I'd love to know how chicken-head-biter moved to mean intellectual loser. (Or, from m-w.com again, "[one] who is disapproved of.") Interestingly enough, the word geek was most likely derived from a German word for "fool."

Actually, "spelt" is perfectly correct and current English, outside of the United States - along with "tyre," "colour," and "homogenise." Have a look at Merriam Webster's Dictionary site.

Those darn Americans. But the United States is so big! How can it NOT be the entire universe?

OK, assuming the problem of "typosquatting" is a real one that needs to be dealt with, how would you create an enforcable rule?

For example, if I owned frito.com and you owned fritto.com, a perfectly legitimate word (maybe a chef's site, for example), is that a violation?

How would you quantify this in a way NSI and others could enforce? It seems like any solution would require subjective review by a committee, and that means that it would be political, capricious, and subject to manipulation like the WTO.

Personally, I think the internet advertising market will change in coming years, and just serving up a banner won't make you the 5 cents a click that people claim to receive now. This will make running a "typosquatting" site less lucrative. I also see no difference between "typosquatting" and perfume knockoffs, rolex watch knockoffs, kit cars, and other sorts of ways of leeching off a major brand name. It's a healthy part of how capitalism works.

The only big problem I see is intentional deceit, such as the recent problem with bank of america where someone was trying to deceive people into sending in personal info. We have existing fraud laws to cover that.

So, unless someone is trying to trick you into thinking that they are really bankofamerica.com or slashdot.org, I don't have a problem with "typosquatting".

its late, and i have no spell check nor dictionary handy.

Merriam-Webster Online
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!

Your sarcasm suggests that you thought he meant 'card'. You should probably look up the word next time to avoid embarrassing yourself.

Hamish

The property interest a tenant has comes from a contract, hence "contractual". Contractual interests are sometimes property interests, but neither are property. Note that some contracts allow the contract itself to be property...

From www.m-w.com:

Main Entry: property
Pronunciation: 'prä-p&r-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle English proprete, from Middle French propreté, from Latin proprietat-, proprietas, from proprius own
Date: 14th century
1 a : a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing b : an effect that an object has on another object or on the senses c : VIRTUE 3 d : an attribute common to all members of a class
2 a : something owned or possessed; specifically : a piece of real estate b : the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing : OWNERSHIP c : something to which a person or business has a legal title d : one (as a performer) under contract whose work is especially valuable
3 : an article or object used in a play or motion picture except painted scenery and costumes
synonym see QUALITY
- propertyless /-l&s/ adjective
- propertylessness /-n&s/ noun

The property interest a tenant has comes from a contract, hence "contractual". Contractual interests are sometimes property interests, but neither are property. Note that some contracts allow the contract itself to be property...

From www.m-w.com:

Main Entry: property
Pronunciation: 'prä-p&r-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle English proprete, from Middle French propreté, from Latin proprietat-, proprietas, from proprius own
Date: 14th century
1 a : a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing b : an effect that an object has on another object or on the senses c : VIRTUE 3 d : an attribute common to all members of a class
2 a : something owned or possessed; specifically : a piece of real estate b : the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing : OWNERSHIP c : something to which a person or business has a legal title d : one (as a performer) under contract whose work is especially valuable
3 : an article or object used in a play or motion picture except painted scenery and costumes
synonym see QUALITY
- propertyless /-l&s/ adjective
- propertylessness /-n&s/ noun

The property interest a tenant has comes from a contract, hence "contractual". Contractual interests are sometimes property interests, but neither are property. Note that some contracts allow the contract itself to be property...

From www.m-w.com:

Main Entry: property
Pronunciation: 'prä-p&r-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle English proprete, from Middle French propreté, from Latin proprietat-, proprietas, from proprius own
Date: 14th century
1 a : a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing b : an effect that an object has on another object or on the senses c : VIRTUE 3 d : an attribute common to all members of a class
2 a : something owned or possessed; specifically : a piece of real estate b : the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing : OWNERSHIP c : something to which a person or business has a legal title d : one (as a performer) under contract whose work is especially valuable
3 : an article or object used in a play or motion picture except painted scenery and costumes
synonym see QUALITY
- propertyless /-l&s/ adjective
- propertylessness /-n&s/ noun

"it's spelled snotty"

Nope. It's spelled snooty. Look it up. I guess a Cornell education can't teach you everything ;-)

And another thing mister troll. It is in fact pretentious and elitist to say that all other colleges are "shit". You should be ashamed of yourself for putting down everyone else in this country that doesn't have the financial backing of mommy and daddy that you did. Deeply ashamed.

I did not pick the wrong person to call a troll. I think I picked the exact right person.

Uh... Back to our friends at M-W:

Main Entry: cannot
Pronunciation: 'ka-(")nät; k&-'nät, ka-'
Date: 15th century
: can not
- cannot but or cannot help but also cannot help : to be unable to do otherwise than

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BTW, the annotated explanation of the license contains the erroneous assertion that licence is a verb and license is a noun.

On the other hand, Merriam-Webster specifically mentions automation (meaning, an automaton), and doesn't mention remote control. Pocket Oxford doesn't mention remote control and also wants it to look like a human. Dictionaries differ, none of them is gospel, and very few of them are written by robotics experts. And there's more than one way to shoot off your mouth. ;)

More importantly, your definition is too broad - by that standard your VCR is a robot when you tell it to play, rewind and eject a tape. If we extend "complex actions" to include solid-state devices, so are a lot of other things with no ability to run even the simplest program.

The popular definition of robots makes them automatons. Many people will also agree with Oxford that they ought to be human-seeming, though that's changed in the last fifteen years since most people have seen a car-building robot. The remote-control devices in this game show aren't much different from the video representations in an arcade game where you select your player's abilities from a menu and then whack on your opponent with the punch and kick buttons. That doesn't mean it won't be entertaining to watch, though, and it'll probably be popular among the subsection of the teen male crowd that's too proud to watch actual human wrestling.

Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:

Taranto
tarantella
tarantula
tarantism

BTW, did you note that the Brittanica article said that the music was a tarantella, not the dance.

Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:

Taranto
tarantella
tarantula
tarantism

BTW, did you note that the Brittanica article said that the music was a tarantella, not the dance.

Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:

Taranto
tarantella
tarantula
tarantism

BTW, did you note that the Brittanica article said that the music was a tarantella, not the dance.

Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:

Taranto
tarantella
tarantula
tarantism

BTW, did you note that the Brittanica article said that the music was a tarantella, not the dance.

Merriam-Webster told me that purple is a mollusk.
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If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

America writes "color" but the Queen's English is "colour". This is true of a lot of words with an -or ending. I'm not sure why the Colonials decided to be unique on that point, it often causes rancour among the uninformed.

We can credit (or blame) Noah Webster with this, along with "center"/"centre" and "plough"/"plow". He also suggested "tung" and "wimmen", but those didn't catch on. His reasoning was that the old spellings were "artificial and needlessly confusing".

There's a brief history on the Merriam-Webster site.

Actually, that's actually "American" not English. 1E15 turns out to be quadrillion in America, and confusingly enough, one-thousand billion in the British system. You can learn FMTYNTK about the names of big numbers courtesy of Merriam-Webster.

Actually, that's actually "American" not English. 1E15 turns out to be quadrillion in America, and confusingly enough, one-thousand billion in the British system. You can learn FMTYNTK about the names of big numbers courtesy of Merriam-Webster.

I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.

To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn't--by all rights--even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.

Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work. Some of the ideas Miguel de Icaza outlined in his Let's Make Unix Not Suck talk/paper are a good starting place. The universal presence of an ORB, lots of small tools cooperating via the ORB interactively, are all good kicks in the pants of the Unix mindset. But, fundamentally, that's nothing more than what Redmond is doing with COM*, etc. There's more work to be done. There's ripping out the filesystem as a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, and replacing it with a dynamic semantic network, allowing information storage and retrieval (don't confuse data and information). There's moving away from skins and into real, powerful, direct-manipulation user interfaces. For those of you that remember OS/2 and IBM's System Object Model, there was some very, very powerful technology underneath all of that! Hell, you still can't reliably drag a document over top of the printer and have it "do the right thing" in Windows or Linux like you could in OS/2. And that was CORBA all over the place, too, so there was plenty of room for those services to make their way out over the network.

Don't even get me started on package management and installation management, or system administration. Suffice it to say that very little of our technology is designed to help us achieve our goals. It's a lot of work, but this community has boundless energy, and the opportunity and environment to do things that are truly revolutionary. We revolutionized the development model, now let's revolutionize the technology.

I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.

To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn't--by all rights--even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.

Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work. Some of the ideas Miguel de Icaza outlined in his Let's Make Unix Not Suck talk/paper are a good starting place. The universal presence of an ORB, lots of small tools cooperating via the ORB interactively, are all good kicks in the pants of the Unix mindset. But, fundamentally, that's nothing more than what Redmond is doing with COM*, etc. There's more work to be done. There's ripping out the filesystem as a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, and replacing it with a dynamic semantic network, allowing information storage and retrieval (don't confuse data and information). There's moving away from skins and into real, powerful, direct-manipulation user interfaces. For those of you that remember OS/2 and IBM's System Object Model, there was some very, very powerful technology underneath all of that! Hell, you still can't reliably drag a document over top of the printer and have it "do the right thing" in Windows or Linux like you could in OS/2. And that was CORBA all over the place, too, so there was plenty of room for those services to make their way out over the network.

Don't even get me started on package management and installation management, or system administration. Suffice it to say that very little of our technology is designed to help us achieve our goals. It's a lot of work, but this community has boundless energy, and the opportunity and environment to do things that are truly revolutionary. We revolutionized the development model, now let's revolutionize the technology.

The US is the place where all the best technology comes from.

Aren't you forgetting Japan?

US leads the world in .. well, everything

Including murder, shootings, and most other crimes.

countries like Germany and London

Maybe if you weren't so isolationist you would realise that London is a town and not a country.

I refer you to: Mirriam Webster Dictionary

Main Entry: loosen
Pronunciation: 'lü-s&n
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): loosened; loosening /'lüs-ni[ng], 'lü-s&n-i[ng]/
Date: 14th century
transitive senses
1 : to release from restraint
2 : to make looser
3 : to relieve (the bowels) of constipation
4 : to cause or permit to become less strict -- often used with up
intransitive senses : to become loose or looser