but because this guy was ignored by the GIMP developers (which are not really open-minded) he started "GIMPshop"
The purpose of GIMPshop was to "replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop". Well, Adobe just told you themselves that the Photoshop UI sucks. So, clearly, redesigning Gimp to be more Photoshop-like would not have been a good way of improving it.
I don't say that GIMP should orientate on Adobe Photoshop. But at least it should also do a complete redesign of the GUI.
Phrases like "a complete redesign" generally just indicate that people have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it; they are not helpful. In fact, I see no indication that the Gimp needs a "complete redesign". What it needs is dockable palettes and better multi-window handling. If you can identify other *specific* problem areas, please do so; but comments about "complete redesign" are bullshit.
I think what most Photoshop users don't like about the Gimp really is that the menu entries and shortcuts are so different from Photoshop so that they can't find anything. Well, tough. The Gimp menu structure is no worse than the Photoshop one, and Gimp users are used to it. At least the shortcuts are much easier to change on the Gimp than in Photoshop.
That has to be the hardest I've ever seen someone work to fit an anti-religion message into a post.
Don't worry. Since civil society has put an end to churches burning people at the stake, there is no need to be surreptitious about anti-religious messages.
Religion is irrational, it's immoral, and it's the single largest cause of human suffering.
I'm in favor for continuing SETI. However, I don't see much chance for success.
Why? Because if there are intelligent beings out there, it's hard to understand why they would, on the one hand, communicate by radio, and on the other hand not have colonized the entire galaxy by now.
Symbian say it's no good, Microsoft says it's no good, the Java lobby says it's no good. It looks to me like Android must be a winner if all these people declare their undying hate for it.
Logic dictates that governments would be less efficient in producing drugs (like they seem to be with everything else)
That's not "logic", that's "ideology". Logic dictates looking at the facts, and the facts show that the government is very efficient in delivering some things.
Logic dictates looking at the data, and the data shows clearly and unequivocally that governmental health care systems deliver better health outcomes with less money spent, both abroad and within the US.
Not that I support big drug companies or anything, but how are you coming up with that?
I didn't come up with that, various economists have. The rest of my article explains the logic; basically, the cost drug patents impose on the government are higher than the costs for developing the drugs fully through public funding.
Really? Well, the market seems to think that we need these drugs, doesn't it?
The market also seems to think that our kids need cocaine and air pollution, because that's what we would get a lot of without government regulation. What the market "thinks" is good for society isn't always good.
Huh? What are you suggesting? That pharmaceutical companies provide no drugs of non-trivial value to society?
Please read what I wrote; it was clear enough. Drug companies do make useful drugs (in addition to a lot of useless ones), but they don't do so in a way that gives us the best health outcomes per dollar spent.
What about the HIV cocktails like Isentress , Zidovudine ?
First of all, neither of those are "cocktails"; "HIV cocktails" are mixtures of different drugs that work synergistically.
Secondly, these drugs illustrate my point: both were developed based on extensive, publicly funded research. Zidovudine was developed in the 1960's with government funding, and its use in AIDS treatment was based on publicly funded research. Despite all that, a drug company was granted the patent on AIDS treatment. Furthermore, a large amount of HIV treatment in the US and abroad is paid for by governments, so that the cost of making this drug proprietary instead of generic to the public are enormous. That is, effectively, you and I are paying for giving the drug company a patent on a technology that was largely developed with public funding in the first place. Whether that is even ethical is one debate, but it is clearly not prudent fiscal policy.
I could go on and list a 100 more, but I think I have shown my point.
The market share figures for the US are different mostly because Palm and Blackberry still manage to hang on (they wouldn't stand a chance anywhere else) and because Microsoft is up to their usual monopolistic tricks with Windows Mobile.
In most markets, Linux competes only against Symbian. In the US, Linux should be able to grab Palm's and Blackberry's share easily, and eat substantially into Microsoft's market share, such as it is.
he is correct. Microsoft has a great share of the mobile market and their software is actually quite good nowadays. And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.
Microsoft's worldwide presence is a joke. In fact, Linux is already far more widely used worldwide than Microsoft, Palm, and RIM combined.
And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.
It's a press release for something that is going to be available in less than a week for developers, with a dozen industry heavyweights behind it. That's not just a press release.
No, he does not. Most of the components that make up Android are already in widespread use in mobile and embedded devices. Furthermore, the sources for Android will be released on 11/12.
Google has done a reasonable announcement for an about-to-be-released piece of software. That's not "vaporware".
Another, mind boggling observation is that there actually cell phone manufacturers using it.
What alternatives do they have? Palm isn't really multitasking, has a history of screwing their partners, and is dying. Windows Mobile is Microsoft's vehicle for world domination, not a system that attempts to address user needs or help phone manufacturers. Blackberry can't make up their mind on what to ship and isn't licensing. And Apple will license OS X Mobile when hell freezes over. Manufacturers ship the turd that is Symbian because they don't have a choice in the smart phone market.
Well, now they do have a choice: that's the point of Android. And if they have any brains whatsoever, they will go for it.
You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
I said "$50k per journal". And, no, of course there is no way that Nature could get by with $50k/per journal; that's because Nature spends a lot of money on things unrelated to the core function of a scientific journal: they are spending money on increasing their ranking and citation index, they are spending money on making things better for authors (at least the ones that are accepted), they finance a big staff of journalists, etc.
But those are really abuses of scientific publishing. Not only is it unnecessary for Nature's function as a scientific journal to do any of the other, expensive stuff, it artificially distorts the importance and reputation of the journal.
The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
Or, alternatively, the journals will simply have to focus on the essentials: reviewing and distributing, essentials that can be provided at minimal cost. If behemoths like Nature can't be financed that way, all the better. Nature is a fun and interesting journal, but people should pay for the "fun and interesting" part separately from the peer reviewed journal paper part.
I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more
So am I. If you need a "big staff" for publishing 10 articles a year, you are doing something wrong and deserve to go out of business.
Actually, the publishing is far more free-market than is telecom here. As I suggested earlier, gov should ONLY interfere if they were granted a monopoly. If they have no monopoly, then they should be free to do as they wish.
The journals are "free to do as they wish". But so is the government--it's just another participant in the free market. Since the government is paying for this research, the government has a right not to do business with these journals unless the journals publish in a way that the government wants its business partners to publish.
The war in Iraq hadn't really gone bad by the time of the 2004 election
The war in Iraq had gone bad the day it started, it only took people a while to figure that out.
Also, if you look at the approval numbers, until shortly before the election, Bush was in the dumps. He recovered only within weeks of the election and then fell off quickly again. This wasn't Bush support, it was some last minute PR wizardry.
America is a conservative country with conservative voters following a conservative agenda.
Bush is not a conservative. Conservatism is generally against foreign adventures, against foreign borrowing, against big government, and against government interference in private matters. Bush has engaged in multiple military adventures, has borrowed like no president before him, has increased government spending to unprecedented levels, and has been pushing government interference in religious and private matters.
Bush actually presents himself as a populist nationalist. But like many populist nationalists, he really hides corporatism and borderline corruption under that veneer.
I don't see where you get that from. The Amendment only talks about how often you can be elected to the office of president; it doesn't talk about any limits on how long you can become president.
I'd be surprised if you didn't see a Time Machine-like backup system for Gnome within the next few months. I also suspect that the Gnome developers will learn from the Time Machine implementation may be able to come up with a better underlying implementation.
Because reasonable governments don't go around interfering in free markets willy-nilly. The argument for open access scientific journals apparently is compelling to Congress. The argument for network neutrality apparently is not compelling to Congress yet.
One can argue about whether Congress is right or wrong, but they get to make the call on this; that's what we elect them for.
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious.
Well, and this legislation fixes that by forcing prestigious journals to either become open access or go out of business.
This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit,
Peer review, editing, and peer review management are handled by unpaid volunteers.
do layout
Even if the journal does all the typesetting, that is a trivial cost given the uniformity of layout and desktop publishing tools available.
maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks.
The "highly dynamic websites" are based on standard software packages that require about as much work to install and maintain as your average Wiki. Furthermore, that work is usually shared between dozens of journals for the same publisher, so the cost per journal is negligible.
If publishers need more than 1/2 admin position for a journal plus overhead, they are doing something wrong. We're talking a cost of maybe $50k/year.
what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,
Drug patents are an even better candidate for throwing out because the drug patent system isn't working.
Right now, a big part of drug development is already publicly funded. Furthermore, the government pays a huge amount of money for those patented drugs. If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug.
And that's assuming that the drugs that are being developed are actually useful. In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Drugs that provide symptomatic relief for common, non-fatal illnesses are profitable. They become even more profitable if they are simply minor variations on well-known drugs (i.e., provide little additional benefit). Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances, or that go for risky and small patient populations are not profitable, but those are the drugs that we actually need.
So, I have been using Symbian phones for several years now. I think they are the best phones on the market(*): there is lots of useful built-in functionality, lots of add-ons, the multitasking works, they have good browsers, and are generally quite powerful.
But the fact that they are "the best" also indicates in what poor shape the mobile OS market is: Symbian is hard to develop for, it's sluggish, it has a dozen different and incompatible user interface versions, networking configuration is a mess, even simple operations require expensive and flaky shareware add-ons, there's no command line.
The worst part is, though, that Symbian's problems just don't get fixed. Symbian right now is where Palm was a few years ago: they have a large market share, but they are so arrogant that they don't see how troubled their OS actually is.
As for Google's experience, it appears that they hired a number of people from other mobile software companies, and in addition, Google has plenty of experience developing mobile applications for Blackberry, Java, Symbian, and iPhone. I suspect, overall, Google probably has many more man-years experience with mobile development than Symbian's entire staff.
(*) Internally, iPhone is actually better, with its UNIX-like kernel and real window system, but the fact that it limits what you can install and do makes it overall less useful than Symbian.
That's just two stories below the one about US warrantless E-mail surveillance, together with a gag order banning the Plaintiff ISP from even discussing the case.
Maybe Congress should get its own house in order before complaining about China. From China's perspective, the Chinese "democracy activists" are also "terrorists".
Yeah, Intel really killed off the programming languages. It's too bad stuff like C++, Scheme, OCaml, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Objective C never got invented. In your world.
Actually, except for Ruby, all of those got developed on non-Intel machines, long before the Pentium. None of them are particularly innovative.
But that's not even the point. The fact that Intel killed off other processors meant that we got stuck with processors optimized for C and C++, and that has led to a permanent division between supposedly "fast languages" like C and supposedly "slow languages" like Smalltalk or OCaml.
And we'll never have parallel processing. Dual core chips will never happen! In your world.
In the 1980's, people were using parallel machines with thousands of processors. There were numerous parallel programming languages and architectures. "Dual core" or "quad core" is laughable as a parallel programming platform.
It appears you got your B.S. in 2004. It's not surprising that, given that you basically grew up in a Wintel world, you simply don't know any better, but that's still no excuse for your ignorance.
(It also looks like you're now working for Intel as a "relationship manager", which makes it even less surprising that you defend Intel.)
HTC, one of the partners, makes a ton of great phone hardware, currently held back by the crappy Windows Mobile software it's running; I'd expect that a lot of that hardware will run Android in the future.
For the past 3 days I've been trying to modify and mess with my Motorola V3M Razor and it's a glitchy hell to try and do. Any phone that's more open than the current phone Nazis keep them is fine with me.
You simply bought a bad phone. If you want an extensible or modifiable phone, you can already get a Palm, Nokia, or Windows Mobile GSM phone; those are quite extensible. The advantage of Android over those existing systems is that it's probably easier to program because it gives you a full set of desktop APIs.
Guess what? Communism doesn't work. See also: The Tragedy of the Commons.
You are misinterpreting what that means. The "Tragedy of the Commons" doesn't say that privatization solves everything, it is simply an observation about utilization of common resources, regardless of why they are common. The primary policy consequence of the "Tragedy of the Commons" is, if anything, that things that are by their very nature "common" (air, water, public health, etc.) need more government regulation to ensure fair utilization.
You should perhaps also look up "Tragedy of the Anti-Commons", which is what we have right now with respect to cars.
Slashdot Mirror
but because this guy was ignored by the GIMP developers (which are not really open-minded) he started "GIMPshop"
The purpose of GIMPshop was to "replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop". Well, Adobe just told you themselves that the Photoshop UI sucks. So, clearly, redesigning Gimp to be more Photoshop-like would not have been a good way of improving it.
I don't say that GIMP should orientate on Adobe Photoshop. But at least it should also do a complete redesign of the GUI.
Phrases like "a complete redesign" generally just indicate that people have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it; they are not helpful. In fact, I see no indication that the Gimp needs a "complete redesign". What it needs is dockable palettes and better multi-window handling. If you can identify other *specific* problem areas, please do so; but comments about "complete redesign" are bullshit.
I think what most Photoshop users don't like about the Gimp really is that the menu entries and shortcuts are so different from Photoshop so that they can't find anything. Well, tough. The Gimp menu structure is no worse than the Photoshop one, and Gimp users are used to it. At least the shortcuts are much easier to change on the Gimp than in Photoshop.
That has to be the hardest I've ever seen someone work to fit an anti-religion message into a post.
Don't worry. Since civil society has put an end to churches burning people at the stake, there is no need to be surreptitious about anti-religious messages.
Religion is irrational, it's immoral, and it's the single largest cause of human suffering.
Clear enough for ya'?
I'm in favor for continuing SETI. However, I don't see much chance for success.
Why? Because if there are intelligent beings out there, it's hard to understand why they would, on the one hand, communicate by radio, and on the other hand not have colonized the entire galaxy by now.
Symbian say it's no good, Microsoft says it's no good, the Java lobby says it's no good. It looks to me like Android must be a winner if all these people declare their undying hate for it.
Logic dictates that governments would be less efficient in producing drugs (like they seem to be with everything else)
That's not "logic", that's "ideology". Logic dictates looking at the facts, and the facts show that the government is very efficient in delivering some things.
Logic dictates looking at the data, and the data shows clearly and unequivocally that governmental health care systems deliver better health outcomes with less money spent, both abroad and within the US.
Not that I support big drug companies or anything, but how are you coming up with that?
I didn't come up with that, various economists have. The rest of my article explains the logic; basically, the cost drug patents impose on the government are higher than the costs for developing the drugs fully through public funding.
Really? Well, the market seems to think that we need these drugs, doesn't it?
The market also seems to think that our kids need cocaine and air pollution, because that's what we would get a lot of without government regulation. What the market "thinks" is good for society isn't always good.
Huh? What are you suggesting? That pharmaceutical companies provide no drugs of non-trivial value to society?
Please read what I wrote; it was clear enough. Drug companies do make useful drugs (in addition to a lot of useless ones), but they don't do so in a way that gives us the best health outcomes per dollar spent.
What about the HIV cocktails like Isentress , Zidovudine ?
First of all, neither of those are "cocktails"; "HIV cocktails" are mixtures of different drugs that work synergistically.
Secondly, these drugs illustrate my point: both were developed based on extensive, publicly funded research. Zidovudine was developed in the 1960's with government funding, and its use in AIDS treatment was based on publicly funded research. Despite all that, a drug company was granted the patent on AIDS treatment. Furthermore, a large amount of HIV treatment in the US and abroad is paid for by governments, so that the cost of making this drug proprietary instead of generic to the public are enormous. That is, effectively, you and I are paying for giving the drug company a patent on a technology that was largely developed with public funding in the first place. Whether that is even ethical is one debate, but it is clearly not prudent fiscal policy.
I could go on and list a 100 more, but I think I have shown my point.
No, you have actually shown my point.
Worldwide market share for smart phone operating systems is about 70% Symbian, 20% Linux, and single digits for Palm, Microsoft, and Blackberry.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/images/shareworld2006.jpg
The market share figures for the US are different mostly because Palm and Blackberry still manage to hang on (they wouldn't stand a chance anywhere else) and because Microsoft is up to their usual monopolistic tricks with Windows Mobile.
In most markets, Linux competes only against Symbian. In the US, Linux should be able to grab Palm's and Blackberry's share easily, and eat substantially into Microsoft's market share, such as it is.
he is correct. Microsoft has a great share of the mobile market and their software is actually quite good nowadays. And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.
Have a look at the market share figures:
http://x.msmobiles.com/portal/images/other/symbian-market-share.jpg
Microsoft's worldwide presence is a joke. In fact, Linux is already far more widely used worldwide than Microsoft, Palm, and RIM combined.
And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.
It's a press release for something that is going to be available in less than a week for developers, with a dozen industry heavyweights behind it. That's not just a press release.
but currently Mr Ballmer does have a point.
No, he does not. Most of the components that make up Android are already in widespread use in mobile and embedded devices. Furthermore, the sources for Android will be released on 11/12.
Google has done a reasonable announcement for an about-to-be-released piece of software. That's not "vaporware".
Another, mind boggling observation is that there actually cell phone manufacturers using it.
What alternatives do they have? Palm isn't really multitasking, has a history of screwing their partners, and is dying. Windows Mobile is Microsoft's vehicle for world domination, not a system that attempts to address user needs or help phone manufacturers. Blackberry can't make up their mind on what to ship and isn't licensing. And Apple will license OS X Mobile when hell freezes over. Manufacturers ship the turd that is Symbian because they don't have a choice in the smart phone market.
Well, now they do have a choice: that's the point of Android. And if they have any brains whatsoever, they will go for it.
You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
I said "$50k per journal". And, no, of course there is no way that Nature could get by with $50k/per journal; that's because Nature spends a lot of money on things unrelated to the core function of a scientific journal: they are spending money on increasing their ranking and citation index, they are spending money on making things better for authors (at least the ones that are accepted), they finance a big staff of journalists, etc.
But those are really abuses of scientific publishing. Not only is it unnecessary for Nature's function as a scientific journal to do any of the other, expensive stuff, it artificially distorts the importance and reputation of the journal.
The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
Or, alternatively, the journals will simply have to focus on the essentials: reviewing and distributing, essentials that can be provided at minimal cost. If behemoths like Nature can't be financed that way, all the better. Nature is a fun and interesting journal, but people should pay for the "fun and interesting" part separately from the peer reviewed journal paper part.
I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more
So am I. If you need a "big staff" for publishing 10 articles a year, you are doing something wrong and deserve to go out of business.
Actually, the publishing is far more free-market than is telecom here. As I suggested earlier, gov should ONLY interfere if they were granted a monopoly. If they have no monopoly, then they should be free to do as they wish.
The journals are "free to do as they wish". But so is the government--it's just another participant in the free market. Since the government is paying for this research, the government has a right not to do business with these journals unless the journals publish in a way that the government wants its business partners to publish.
The war in Iraq hadn't really gone bad by the time of the 2004 election
The war in Iraq had gone bad the day it started, it only took people a while to figure that out.
Also, if you look at the approval numbers, until shortly before the election, Bush was in the dumps. He recovered only within weeks of the election and then fell off quickly again. This wasn't Bush support, it was some last minute PR wizardry.
America is a conservative country with conservative voters following a conservative agenda.
Bush is not a conservative. Conservatism is generally against foreign adventures, against foreign borrowing, against big government, and against government interference in private matters. Bush has engaged in multiple military adventures, has borrowed like no president before him, has increased government spending to unprecedented levels, and has been pushing government interference in religious and private matters.
Bush actually presents himself as a populist nationalist. But like many populist nationalists, he really hides corporatism and borderline corruption under that veneer.
I don't see where you get that from. The Amendment only talks about how often you can be elected to the office of president; it doesn't talk about any limits on how long you can become president.
I'd be surprised if you didn't see a Time Machine-like backup system for Gnome within the next few months. I also suspect that the Gnome developers will learn from the Time Machine implementation may be able to come up with a better underlying implementation.
when why not require network neutrality
Because reasonable governments don't go around interfering in free markets willy-nilly. The argument for open access scientific journals apparently is compelling to Congress. The argument for network neutrality apparently is not compelling to Congress yet.
One can argue about whether Congress is right or wrong, but they get to make the call on this; that's what we elect them for.
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious.
Well, and this legislation fixes that by forcing prestigious journals to either become open access or go out of business.
This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit,
Peer review, editing, and peer review management are handled by unpaid volunteers.
do layout
Even if the journal does all the typesetting, that is a trivial cost given the uniformity of layout and desktop publishing tools available.
maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks.
The "highly dynamic websites" are based on standard software packages that require about as much work to install and maintain as your average Wiki. Furthermore, that work is usually shared between dozens of journals for the same publisher, so the cost per journal is negligible.
If publishers need more than 1/2 admin position for a journal plus overhead, they are doing something wrong. We're talking a cost of maybe $50k/year.
what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,
Drug patents are an even better candidate for throwing out because the drug patent system isn't working.
Right now, a big part of drug development is already publicly funded. Furthermore, the government pays a huge amount of money for those patented drugs. If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug.
And that's assuming that the drugs that are being developed are actually useful. In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Drugs that provide symptomatic relief for common, non-fatal illnesses are profitable. They become even more profitable if they are simply minor variations on well-known drugs (i.e., provide little additional benefit). Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances, or that go for risky and small patient populations are not profitable, but those are the drugs that we actually need.
So, I have been using Symbian phones for several years now. I think they are the best phones on the market(*): there is lots of useful built-in functionality, lots of add-ons, the multitasking works, they have good browsers, and are generally quite powerful.
But the fact that they are "the best" also indicates in what poor shape the mobile OS market is: Symbian is hard to develop for, it's sluggish, it has a dozen different and incompatible user interface versions, networking configuration is a mess, even simple operations require expensive and flaky shareware add-ons, there's no command line.
The worst part is, though, that Symbian's problems just don't get fixed. Symbian right now is where Palm was a few years ago: they have a large market share, but they are so arrogant that they don't see how troubled their OS actually is.
As for Google's experience, it appears that they hired a number of people from other mobile software companies, and in addition, Google has plenty of experience developing mobile applications for Blackberry, Java, Symbian, and iPhone. I suspect, overall, Google probably has many more man-years experience with mobile development than Symbian's entire staff.
(*) Internally, iPhone is actually better, with its UNIX-like kernel and real window system, but the fact that it limits what you can install and do makes it overall less useful than Symbian.
Europe has a whole gaggle of Mini Me's taking Bush's place. Or do you really want to argue that people like Berlusconi are any better?
That's just two stories below the one about US warrantless E-mail surveillance, together with a gag order banning the Plaintiff ISP from even discussing the case.
Maybe Congress should get its own house in order before complaining about China. From China's perspective, the Chinese "democracy activists" are also "terrorists".
Yeah, Intel really killed off the programming languages. It's too bad stuff like C++, Scheme, OCaml, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Objective C never got invented. In your world.
Actually, except for Ruby, all of those got developed on non-Intel machines, long before the Pentium. None of them are particularly innovative.
But that's not even the point. The fact that Intel killed off other processors meant that we got stuck with processors optimized for C and C++, and that has led to a permanent division between supposedly "fast languages" like C and supposedly "slow languages" like Smalltalk or OCaml.
And we'll never have parallel processing. Dual core chips will never happen! In your world.
In the 1980's, people were using parallel machines with thousands of processors. There were numerous parallel programming languages and architectures. "Dual core" or "quad core" is laughable as a parallel programming platform.
It appears you got your B.S. in 2004. It's not surprising that, given that you basically grew up in a Wintel world, you simply don't know any better, but that's still no excuse for your ignorance.
(It also looks like you're now working for Intel as a "relationship manager", which makes it even less surprising that you defend Intel.)
HTC, one of the partners, makes a ton of great phone hardware, currently held back by the crappy Windows Mobile software it's running; I'd expect that a lot of that hardware will run Android in the future.
For the past 3 days I've been trying to modify and mess with my Motorola V3M Razor and it's a glitchy hell to try and do. Any phone that's more open than the current phone Nazis keep them is fine with me.
You simply bought a bad phone. If you want an extensible or modifiable phone, you can already get a Palm, Nokia, or Windows Mobile GSM phone; those are quite extensible. The advantage of Android over those existing systems is that it's probably easier to program because it gives you a full set of desktop APIs.
Guess what? Communism doesn't work. See also: The Tragedy of the Commons.
You are misinterpreting what that means. The "Tragedy of the Commons" doesn't say that privatization solves everything, it is simply an observation about utilization of common resources, regardless of why they are common. The primary policy consequence of the "Tragedy of the Commons" is, if anything, that things that are by their very nature "common" (air, water, public health, etc.) need more government regulation to ensure fair utilization.
You should perhaps also look up "Tragedy of the Anti-Commons", which is what we have right now with respect to cars.