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You seriously trust a website run by a guy who looks like this? He looks like he'd be more at home peddling CD's of his pan flute music at the local farmers market than spouting new age mumbo-jumbo and conspiracy theories on the interwebs.

Seriously! It's much safer to only trust people with a more orthodox appearance...

Which definition of "vectors" excludes straight lines? The gadget converts a raster image to drawing instructions; then executes the instructions with a pen. It's a plotter.

Nitpicky will-never-agree arguments about what this Lego printer/plotter is aside, I converted my Atari 1020 plotter into a "raster" printer by having it draw horizontal lines of varying length to represent runs of dots on each row, not unlike this one. It was *incredibly* slow though.

Not as cool as the Lego printer either.

it is only renewable if it is used in such a manor.

You're right, it takes a lot of timber to build one of those babies!

Of course, it matters what manner you use the timber; it's a renewable fuel if you burn it for heat or use it in a stirling engine (you could run an electric generator with a wood burning stirling engine), it's good for building manors and other, smaller dwellings, but if you're just burning forests down for farmland you're not a good steward of the land.

(Now watch, I'm sure I made an equally stupid mistake; feel free to ridicule me =)

Really? How about the Great Tenochtitlan which was a city before Paris was anything but a mound of mud?

Is that so? Funny, considering Paris already had a population of tens of thousands over a thousand years before Tenochtitlan was anything but a mount of mud, and had 250000 people around the time Aztecs started building their city in 1300's.

Here is a map of Paris a hundred years before Tenochtitlan was established. Feel free to hang it on the wall for your viewing pleasure.

A icon based on the talking head from the very first Mac commercial would do nicely. His speech, well, speaks for itself:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our unification of thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

.

While you go on debating about Genesis, let me remind you there are several other religions, some now extinct, each of which have their own wildly different interpretation of how the world came into being. What makes the Abrahamic religions' creation story any more valid than the others? Australian aborigines believe the world was dreamed into creation. Native American traditions believe in the Great Spirit who created everything. The Mayas and the ancient Egyptians have their own take on things, as did the Norse legends, the Greeks and the Romans.
Hinduism talks of cycles of creation or Yugas, each lasting billions of years, wherein the universe is destroyed and recreated every 8.1 billion years.
So what makes any one of these stories more valid than the other, and logically how can all of them be true?

Islam doesn't revoke any one's fundamental rights by asking them not to draw pictures of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), you can still draw whatever you want, just leave him alone.

You really need to grow the fuck up and realise that the only reason this draw muhammad competition exists is because muslims have been trying to censor western countries. Really, I don't understand how muslims can get offended over such ridiculous pictures.

Muslims the world over could have just laughed it off and focused your energies towards helping others and being a good examples. Instead you all fell for the bait and proved what de-evolved monkeys you really are.

Wow, so we are dealing with a real old school firebrand socialist here. How cute, I thought you guys went extinct back in the 80s. Your fantasy has only one problem, it does not correspond in any way to reality. Corporate taxes in those countries are not very high, in fact they are lower than in the USA:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/22917.html
http://alhambrainvestments.com/blog/2009/01/29/corporate-tax-rates-by-country-oecd/


The problem with heavy taxes on corporate profits is that pretty soon there will be no more profits to raid, no more investment in new business, no more innovation. Where do you think corporate profits go exactly? To pay for shareholders yachts? Tiny portion perhaps, but vast majority gets reinvested. You know, the "capital" in capitalism. Your ideological leaders actually know better than you, they know not to kill the golden goose of capitalism because there would be no more money for your precious welfare programs. That's why it is the individual income that is heavily taxed in those countries not corporate profits:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg/800px-Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg.png

But keep dreaming, comrade.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/OECD_Productivity_levels_2007.svg

Hmmm ok. *takes a look* nope. Just as bad as anything else.

Here, this is an example. The first font is good. The second is acceptable. The third is not. You see?

Hmmm ok. *takes a look* nope. Just as bad as anything else.

Here, this is an example. The first font is good. The second is acceptable. The third is not. You see?

Dilbert?

Yes I have. For comparison purchasing Sudafed has about the same requirements as buying a rifle or shotgun in Minnesota. In both cases the ask for you ID, swipe it, look at the picture while waiting for a printout which you have to sign after verifying your information. So obviously Sudafed is a dangerous as one of these. In both cases it the buyer is entered into a government database, is required to provide "valid" identification at time of purchase, and must be at least 18.

Why is it that funny & relevant South Park references always get modded Offtopic. Obviously it is a joke. There is a funny mod for a reason. By themselves, jokes are never directly on-topic.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/35/South_Park's_Enola_Gay.jpg

I wasn't sure exactly what Natal was, so Wikipedia'd too, and that does mention the facial recognition. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Project_Natal

For facial recognition to be in a consumer product, it must be relatively cheap to implement. Therefore it either is already being used in other places (like how computerised numberplate reading was used on the UK-Ireland ferry links for years, before being rolled out throughout the UK), or will be soon. Can we look forward to shops automating the recognition of customers to advertise products they think they will want (or are addicted to!), based on past sales? Very Minority Report, if we're referencing contemporary culture.

As for can you turn Natal off? I dunno, if I had an Xbox, I wouldn't truly control it. Just like all Xbox owners.

Can you please point me to this hardware compatibility list that you checked when you were "doing your homework". Because from what I can tell PulseAudio doesn't have any sound card drivers. It is just a sound server that provides network transparency and better mixing capabilites as an additional layer on top of the kernel sound support. It always uses an underlying layer like ALSA or OSS to talk to the hardware, as seen in this module diagram. Here is a full list of the PulseAudio modules - note that there are no direct hardware sinks, only sinks to other sound systems and piping capability.

Wikipedia and TPB have SSL versions available as well:

English Wikipedia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page

The Pirate Bay: https://thepiratebay.org/

Still waiting on Slashdot to join the 21st century.

So, much of the content of Bee is not included in the online searchable archive. I wouldn't think that searching for "soviet nuclear" would turn up articles about KGB agitprop in America in any case.

In other words, you're still full of shit. And in a few more, I reiterate how unsurprising that is.

Thanks for the statistic that proves one of my points. The EPA was created under the Nixon administration and environmental activists really started to gain influence over policy in the 70s. By curtailing drilling both offshore and on government land, environmentalists have severely impacted domestic oil production.

On the basis of his theory, in a paper he presented to the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, Hubbert correctly predicted that production of oil from conventional sources would peak in the continental United States around 1965-1970. Hubbert further predicted a worldwide peak at "about half a century" from publication and approximately 12 gigabarrels (GB) a year in magnitude. In a 1976 TV interview Hubbert added that the actions of OPEC might flatten the global production curve but this would only delay the peak for perhaps 10 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory

Here's a link to his graph which correctly models peak oil production, which has everything to do with the relationship of extracting a finite resource from the earth and the technology available to complete the task, and nothing to do with the EPA. Is there some other government agency you wish to try to throw mud at? Maybe it would stick to secret Nazi propaganda or the Department of Education.

What, copponex, would be your alternative solution? Before you answer, be sure that your solution meets your own standard that it would cover 100% of America's petroleum consumption. Also, be sure that it is a practical solution that can be implemented with today's technology. Appeals to fantasy technologies of the future aren't useful suggestions.

That's what we've been talking about, isn't it? The fact that 3% of US landmass contains 70% of it's population means that high efficiency rail can drastically reduce our oil usage, along with regulating the energy efficiency of buildings and incentives for energy conservation. Investment in non-finite energy sources would probably cost far less than the trillions of dollars we spend trying to maintain hegemony over the Middle East.

For some reason you think it's a problem that can not be solved. People laughed at reaching the moon within a decade of 1960, and though it was achieved with a massive government investment in technology, you still believe that somehow the voiceless, faceless, careless and imaginary market will miraculously provide the answer for our current troubles. This is the same as a cult follower who thinks that God will take care of justice after we are all dead. It requires suicidal blind faith, and most importantly, a mechanism so you can absolve yourself of action because you're too much of a coward to face the truth or make any sacrifices in light of it.

What is the point you are trying to make by reprinting parts of it? Jimmy declared his intention to throw a bunch of tax money around. So what? He wasn't a dictator and neither he nor anyone else could or can create technical breakthroughs by force of will alone. There is no reason to believe that any individual, even the magnificent Jimmy C., could or can accurately predict which new energy technology lead will pan out.

If government investment in technology doesn't work, then why isn't our military the worst in the world? How did NASA achieve the goal of reaching the moon in 10 years? I do not think that is the case you are trying to make. It seems that as long as individuals strive "in the marketplace

Some places I know of has a traffic light countdown timer which is extremely useful. this, this and this are just a few examples.

Because FUD like that needs countering, repeatedly:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-May/047795.html

We are talking about a video codec which was *specifically designed* to avoid H.264-related patents. IMO, similarity makes it less likely for the patents to be infringed, because the choices are easy to compare.

The linked photo is of a prop plane used for the movie "Stealth". Sadly not a real aircraft, it does look like it'd be fast though!

The rig, and many other deepwater ones, are in international waters - if we nationalize/kick out all the American oil companies, there will still be Chinese, Venezuelan, etc who will drill without ANY oversight from the U.S.

Not true. The Deepwater Horizon:

The rig was last located 50 miles (80 km) off the southeast coast of Louisiana.

That means it was well within the limits of the USA's Exclusive Economic Zone, which goes up to 200 miles from a country's coast. No other countries have the right to exploit marine resources within this area. As you can see in these pictures, the EEZs of USA and Mexico cover most of the Mexican Gulf, which means there's no way China, Venezuela, Russia or even Switzerland will ever drill there.

The rig, and many other deepwater ones, are in international waters - if we nationalize/kick out all the American oil companies, there will still be Chinese, Venezuelan, etc who will drill without ANY oversight from the U.S.

Not true. The Deepwater Horizon:

The rig was last located 50 miles (80 km) off the southeast coast of Louisiana.

That means it was well within the limits of the USA's Exclusive Economic Zone, which goes up to 200 miles from a country's coast. No other countries have the right to exploit marine resources within this area. As you can see in these pictures, the EEZs of USA and Mexico cover most of the Mexican Gulf, which means there's no way China, Venezuela, Russia or even Switzerland will ever drill there.

Duh. This thing is happening in mainland China, PRC.

Shenzhen is here

Taiwan is here

Sorry, screwed the link

However wouldn't the state of its current existence outside of our lightcone be important if we were to say, mount a hypothetical expedition to a particular part of it at 99.99999% c, and hence would have to model where it is at the moment and where it will be when the expedition reaches it? So while not directly important it might be of indirect importance and thus impinge on our reality?

That's the other side of the lightcone, the events that _we_ can influence. See this picture:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/World_line.svg

What can influence us is the lower cone, what we can influence is the upper cone.

That the end of the hamster wheel as we know it.
Pity of all the effort, science and passion others put into it... So long to you, deep and hamster-wheel inspired phylosophy of life...

"Ike "Beats" Tina to Death".
Golden.
Best headline/photo/story combo of all times afaic: Newsweek, at the start of the Falklands war.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/7/7a/20081217142629!The_empire_strikes_back_newsweek.jpg
Classic on so many levels.

Source

The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web browser?

However, socially they are not

This is largely arguable, too. For most of the history of humankind, early marriage, and associated sexual life, was the norm. Juliet was meant to be a 13 year old. Indeed, in many cultures, having children at that time was quite common.

This has only changed in late 19th century, and there's good reasons to believe that it has nothing to do with changes in social development as such, and everything with Victorian morals taking over - a legacy which we still bear.

By the way, the "social maturity" also seems to be a weak argument just looking at how inconsistent age of consent laws are. If you have two countries, both from the same cultural tradition (Western, European), having age of consent differ by as much as 4-5 years (or >25% in relative measure), what does it tell about its accuracy either way? Can it be seriously claimed that, say, children in Germany or Italy mature faster socially than in U.S.?

On the English Wikipedia, this was an issue, and it was dealt with through Wikipedia's usual mechanisms. Someone ran a program to make a list of images actually used in Wikipedia. Others went down that list, and put most of those images through "deletion review". Each one was voted on; most of them were restored. Images that nobody asked to have restored remain deleted. Essentially all the historical images were restored. Some of the junkier stuff was voted off the island. That all took place within a few days, and wasn't particularly contentious. On Wikipedia, this is now a closed issue. On Commons, which is administered by different people, there's still a discussion going on.

Understand that you can upload images separately to Wikipedia or to the Wikimedia Commons. If you upload an image to Wikipedia, and it's not currently used in an article, it will be automatically deleted after a few weeks. So if others delete the image link in the article, and it stays deleted, after a while, the image file is deleted too. Commons, though, has a policy that "by custom the uploading of small numbers of images for use on a personal Commons user page is allowed." Some people try to use Commons as if it were Flickr, and if they don't overdo it, that's tolerated. A few people uploaded their porn collection. That seems to be the cause of the difficulty.

Complicating this is a system which automatically moves images that have been on the English Wikipedia for a while to Commons, changes the links to point to the copy on Commons, and deletes the copy on Wikipedia. This is intended to make images available to all the other language versions of Wikipedia, rather than having a separate copy for each language version. The assumption has been that nothing that went through that move would ever be deleted from Commons. When some images moved via that process were deleted, many Wikipedia editors were very bothered. Automatic movement of images to Commons was shut down for a while. There isn't a way to determine if an image on Commons is used on any wiki (there's a way for each wiki, but no global backlink search.). So automatically separating single-user personal stuff from images used in real articles is not currently implemented. I suspect that will be fixed.

On the governance side, it was pointed out that Wales isn't the head of the Wikimedia foundation any more. He's just a member of the board of directors. If he wanted to do this through the board, he can call a board meeting and try to get them to pass a resolution to change policy. He didn't take that route. As others pointed out, if anybody else did what Wales did, they'd be blocked. The general consensus is that Wales was out of line. Wales gave up some privileges, and the issue isn't even active in the dispute resolution system.

All in all, this was well handled. Wikipedia has had far worse disputes.

The real power that Jimmy Wales had was the power of the purse strings. He originally was the one that paid the bills and hired the staff, all of that coming from his own pocketbook.

Unfortunately for Wales, that era has passed by long ago and there is no way that a single person, even somebody with funds on the order of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, could keep the Wikimedia Foundation going. Jimmy Wales certainly is no Bill Gates in terms of fiscal resources.

The real issue now is what residual authority that Jimmy Wales really has within the community, and how pissed off that community has become over this issue. It is notable that the community has "voted" with a 4:1 ratio to have the "founder" flag removed from the account of Jimmy Wales at this point too. If he decides to use this authority again in any meaningful way, I am quite certain that will be the end of his involvement with the Wikimedia Foundation in general.

For myself, I hope that he does continue within the community and that no matter what is going to happen from this point forward that his opinion will certainly carry substantial weight. The problem is that he now has to participate in the projects as a normal user and participant, and can't make unilateral decisions in a god-king role. If he wants to see something like porn removed, he needs to work with the community debate process to see that it happens. That is perhaps a bit tough for him to give up, but it will also be healthier for the Wikimedia projects in general. He certainly bit off more than he could chew by taking on the Commons community.

Let's not forget that Sanger's report to the FBI accompanied his annoucement of a competeing service. There was nothing altruistic or righteous in that self-serving move

Where does it say that? The only link is to a deletion page on Wikipedia

Sanger's Message to the FBI.

The other "child porn" was woodcuts, drawings etc. of adolescents/children. None of it is particularly erotic, all of it was of historical interest. It's still there, in the Pedaphilia category on Wikimedia Commons (the most NSFW bit is the "Pedaphilia" title and the URL).

I saw a similar woodcut in a history textbook at school when I was 14. I can remember the teacher reading out the associated court transcript, including the statement from a young girl who'd been raped by the owner of the factory she worked at. It was significant because it was around the time children's rights were improving in the industrial revolution.

I picked a bite-size bug at random from the first page of results for PHP bugs: Bug 17497 - Add oasis opendocument and oo.o legacy document to mime.types.
The bug was created a year ago and has some activity on it, including a patch. Looking at that history though, it's not clear whether the problem has been fixed nor what action is now required. The actual fix is seemingly simple, but no-one can agree on the exact form the simple fix should take. I wouldn't say that's a great introduction for a newbie to the project.

Any engineer is free to make a 30 second correction telling me why I'm wrong here...

I'm an engineer. Underwater nuclear explosions have been done before. As a matter of fact, some of the first nuclear tests after WWII were done underwater. Look here

Notice how the water rises as an almost perfect vertical cylinder (and lifting ships vertically). That will not cause a tidal wave.

There are numerous reasons why a nuclear blast would *not* be a solution for this oil leak, but the danger of tidal waves is not one of them.

This is the real test for any music typesetting system...

TFA was sorely lacking in actual statistics stating how many Americans actually have four year college degrees and I didn't see any posted in the comments yet, so here goes. This chart Educational Attainment of the Population 25 Years And Over By Age: 1947 to 2003 seems to show that approximately 25% of the population has at least a Bachelor's Degree. You may think that the number is skewed by the older generation being less educated, but the chart also shows that the number is still under 30% for people ages 25-29. I would hardly say that this means that there are too many college graduates in the US.

That'd be great except that you, as the coffee shop owner, do NOT own that road. That road belongs to the taxpayers.

And the taxpayers have decided through their representatives in city council that the owners of local small businesses have the entitlement to use the taxpayers' resources to deter people from parking like a dick. Small business owners pay good property tax money for this entitlement.

>>Also, in case you haven't noticed, Japan doesn't have room for 500 million more people.

Exactly. You might also notice that their population will go down by 60% in the next century unless something is done. You're right, the Ponzi scheme design for social systems IS a trap, and needs to be tweaked. That number just gives you a sense of scale of what we're talking about.

>>They barely have room for the ones they have now.

You've never been to Japan, then? Tokyo is ridiculous, but most of the country is, well, not Tokyo.

>>How many people do you have living with you, anyway? If you don't have at least a dozen people sharing your home, I think it's a little hypocritical for you to be supporting a greatly increased population.

Who said I was for a greatly increased population? I said that the real crisis is the population decrease, but that doesn't mean I want to see a Malthusian trap take place. Merely that the concerns about the Malthusian Trap are basically the results of an echo chamber in the environmental movement lasting from the 1960s.

The population of the earth is projected to peak in 2060, and then enter a decline after that. But if you listen to Greens on the issue, you'd think we were running out of food and such, when the per-capita food production has actually been rising, even with all the population growth we've had in the last 50 years.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Food_production_per_capita_1961-2005.png

The population is NOT calculated from the birth rate and the death rate. It's calculated by something called a "census". The census counts the number of people living within the nation's borders at any particular point in time. Where the people came from isn't a factor. The math is even easier than you think, since it's just a simple count, resulting in a single number (rather than a rate).

Similarly, the rate of change can't be calculated from the birth and death rates alone, since the immigration and emigration rates are a big factor. Looking at the record of censuses over the years shows the actual rate of change of the population.

Why do you keep trying to exclude immigration?

I'm really trying not to call you ignorant, Grishnakh, because that was the name of my favorite D&D character of all time, but it's tough.

You use birth and death rates to calculate the replacement rate (there's similar measures with different names) instead of using a census because you need to know how your population will do if you, say, shut off all immigration. There's a real crisis around the world, where pretty much all 1st world countries are in population decline, with only immigration propping them up.

I could tell you more, but I can see you're just not going to believe me. This is a common problem with people that have been fed lies all their life. They have a tremendous ability to blindfold themselves to facts.

Start reading here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

And pay especial attention to this graph:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/TFR_vs_PPP_2009.svg

Notice that nearly every wealthy country is below the replacement rate for population growth.

Negative population growth is as real a worry as positive growth.

Good lord. That thing was a space dildo? I'd hate to see the giant, planet devouring vagina it went in. Wait, we did see it, didn't we? Kirk flew a starship right up it.

http://bit.ly/9AvjLc:

The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web

Alternate theory: you're a total fucking idiot.

As percent of GDP? What about as percent of total expenditure? Or percent of income generated by the state itself (taxes)?

Doesn't seem like such a low number then.

http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7a/U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png

Especially considering a very large percent of that slice of the pie is actually spent on foreign invasion instead of just keeping up a military for protection.

Not true. India did have paper voting. The fraud happened before the vote count. Criminals would simply "capture" polling booths and stuff the ballot boxes.

How do the new voting machines help in this regard?

• In the past they captured the booth, stuffed it, returned it and nobody noticed or corrupt officials used the stuffed ballots anyway.
• Now instead they have to capture the voting machine, stuff it by pressing the right two buttons as shown on the video, and return it so that nobody notice it was missing or so that corrupt officials use the hacked results anyway.

Sorry, I fail to see the difference.

Here's a better solution:

• Use transparent ballot boxes . That way it's obvious if they are stuffed before the start of the election.
• Have volunteers count the votes right at the polling place. Do not ever move the ballot boxes around before counting them.

Is... is that a Doctor Who reference?

[...] vote for the party you like a lot instead of the party you like a little, the party you don't like at all wins.

This isn't a significant risk unless the voter resides in a swing state.

See also: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Vote_pairing

Yeah, that one Jimbo Wales didn't wheel-war over, presumably because he didn't notice. He did with some of the paintings. It appears that some of the images have also been oversighted

They have a new story in which they congratulate themselves over getting Jimbo to act on their behest. Jimbo basically admits he planned this as PR stunt to remove the pressure from him: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057896.html Mike Godwin seems to agree to that strategy: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057936.html