This diagram might help. See the part marked LEO? That's where most larger bits of man-made debris are. The prime location for an SPS design would be in a geostationary orbit which is many thousands of miles above most space junk.
Hey look a front page story by Timothy that links to the Washington Times. With their powers combined they form Captain Troll Slashdot Post! I'm honestly surprised there was no mention of Natalie Portman or hot grits.
I don't know why you've been modded up for this as your first point is completely incorrect. Application windows in OSX are all top-level entities as far as the window server is concerned. Since document windows are all peers it is possible to drag and drop between two windows of two different applications. Document windows of different applications can also be layered independently. You can have a Finder window overlapped by a Safari window which itself has another Finder window on top. There's no requirement for all of an application's windows to share the same layer. Windows are also only constrained by the size of the screen, not a containing window owned by the application.
For starters it is trivial to embed an HTTP or mail server in a worm and is done all the time. They don't need to be full featured, simply functional enough to get their intended job done. As for the NAT issues the default usernames and passwords for popular routers is common knowledge. Given the number of LINKSYS and 2WIRE WiFi networks I can see from my apartment it's safe to say at least some of those people are still using those defaults. From there it's simply building the appropriate POST or GET request to modify the port forwarding settings. Besides opening connections for remote hosts a worm can simply listen for local connections and modify the hosts file to point paypal.com to localhost and then collect information that way.
Information harvesting worms do not need to be 100% effective to make their handlers money. If they get a few thousand PayPal accounts for every million machines they infect they can make a lot of money. Even if they don't get PayPal accounts or other information they can still be used for DDoS attacks and sending spam.
You're claiming QuickTime only supports H.264 video that is 30fps at 640x480. The movies on the page are 1080p, 720p, and 480p. It certainly doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about. Reality: 1, you: 0.
Good thing there is MPEG-4 ASP for the web which is supported by millions of cellphones, PMPs, and desktops. It doesn't take much CPU to play back and the quality is good enough but not great. On the other end there's H.264/AVC which is also supported by millions of cellphones, PMPs, and desktops.
And AMD has a substantial slice of the x86 market, definitely way bigger than VIA. Imagine what sort of creative management it takes for VIA to stay competitive.
If a company sells enough widgets to be profitable it doesn't matter if they're 90% or.01% of the widget market. If their revenues exceed their expenses they're making money. VIA and AMD don't have to dominate the CPU market to remain competitive or profitable. Whether or not they're actually profitable and competitive is what is important.
This is known as the "wet workshop" model. The original design of Skylab was a wet workshop. The second stage of the Saturn IB (S-IVB) was build with a larger than normal inspection hatch and some flooring/racks inside the hydrogen tank. The S-IVB stage burned normally until it was in a LEO and then vented the last of its fuel. A second mission was launched that fixed damage cause to the station by the first launch and loaded it with equipment.
The problem with making everything a wet workshop is the added fuel needed to get the appropriate stage into a stable orbit. Typically a disposable stage will not have enough fuel to get itself and the payload in orbit, just the payload. In order to have enough delta-v to get the stage and the payload into a stable orbit the payload will have to be smaller. Then you might end up with a nice habitable volume but at the cost of an extra astronaut to man said volume. Also fuel tanks tend to be optimized for carrying fuel while habitable modules tend to be optimized for people or equipment. If the Destiny or Columbus lab on the ISS had started life as fuel tanks they wouldn't have been able to carry a fraction of the components they did carry. It would have required another launch or two to fill them with equipment.
You have got to be joking. NASA's 2007 budget was $16.7B which was a teensy fraction of the 2007 federal budget. Of that the space operations portion of the budget was only $6.2B. Aeronautics research was $724M. NASA does not have an enormous budget nor do they spend all of that budget on manned space exploration. Canceling manned spaceflight and research would free up a scant $7B which wouldn't put a dent in the federal deficit. So for $7B that will end up getting spent in some other area we would put a bunch of engineers and technicians out of a job, potentially losing all of their domain knowledge similar to what happened with the abandonment of the Saturn/Apollo programs. Planting flags on the moon is of limited utility but it's not the only target in the solar system.
It appears the point completely missed you and apparently impaled an innocent bystander behind you. The XBox 360 has a long history which you're not properly accounting for. Before the 360 was the original XBox which did unexpectedly well especially considering the fierce competition of Sony and Nintendo. However before the XBox was Microsoft's work on the Dreamcast which did not do so well and sank Sega's hardware business. Before the Dreamcast was Microsoft's PC gaming division which only had a handful of real hits to its credit. Microsoft did what smaller companies could not do, fail repeatedly until they managed to get something working right. They were able to buy out game studios like Bungie and Rare in order to get some heavy hitting first party titles developed for their console. The XBox 360 is a good console because Microsoft has spent more than a decade struggling with a gaming business. XBox Live has a similar story, they bought out "The Village" which got rebranded Internet Gaming Zone which eventually became the MSN Gaming Zone and served as the conceptual basis for XBox Live. Again because of their size and money they could throw resources at a lackluster product and eventually make it stick. Other companies don't have that same luxury, look at Sega. Two successive market failures and it was lights out for their hardware division.
A black hat hacker doesn't need to do any QA testing of their exploit. If it doesn't work 50% of the time it is still considered a successful exploit. If a vendor's patch breaks something on customer machines even 10% of the time they'll get as much if not more flack than if they had waited to patch an exploit. This is worse if their fix is only half-ass in order to get it out in the wild and it only works against one particular exploit and doesn't fix that class of exploit. Embargo dates on exploits found by security researchers gives a vendor time to develop a fix and run it through their QA process. They can't simply release a patch and hope for the best like the black hats can. Thus disclosing vulnerabilities to everyone always puts the vendor and the customer at a disadvantage.
Wind turbines can be manufactured "green" since most of their construction materials are recyclable. They are also fairly easy to construct since they don't require any sort of exotic manufacturing processes. The DOE's website has a nice diagram of a modern wind turbines components. Modern turbines are highly efficient and when situated correctly pay for themselves very quickly. As you've seen turbines have gotten cheap enough that individual units have become suitable for people to buy themselves. Small scale turbines can generate enough power for a single household for a day. They're often set up in grid-tied setups where the turbine complements grid power to a home. You can also use them for entirely off-grid usage where they charge a battery bank which is used when the wind isn't blowing.
Advertising is most effective when it is relevant to the person seeing it. Web advertising was like magazine advertising for a long time. You offered got paid a very small amount of money for a unit of space for every visitor to your site, more if they clicked and ad and even more if they actually bought something. In order to get ads on your site you as the webmaster would fill out a form telling the advertisers what sort of content you typically posted. A video game website would say their content is about video games so advertisers would display ads relevant to people reading about video games.
What Google (and others) have done is take that process a step further and figure out automatically what ought to be relevant to each individual website visitor. If someone buys AdWords for an upcoming game and someone writes about that game on their website ads for that game will appear specifically on that article. The actual content of websites is now valuable to advertisers, not just the number of ad pixels on the screen. While video games might be relevant to the readers of Joystiq and an for a particular game shown to a Joystiq visitor reading an article about that game is super relevant. Someone can not only read about Super Deluxe Fun Time Solitaire but buy it right then and there.
Besides anonymous targeted advertising Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all have the ability to mine their millions of user account profiles to target ads specifically for individuals. Microsoft has linked up Passport accounts with their various MSN services, Hotmail, and XBox Live. MSN can thus correlate tons of online behavior and sell individual behavior to advertisers. They know what games people are playing on XBox Live, who their MSN Messenger and XBox Live friends are and what they're playing, things they've bought on MSN Shopping (or their affiliates) recently, and what their recent browsing behavior is (to sites with MSN advertising), and what sort of e-mail they're getting. With all of this they can make some pretty good guesses about what that person might buy in the immediate future. If they're browsing Joystiq and have been playing a lot of Halo 3 and were searching for Quake Wars reviews the next ad they might see is one for Quake Wars. Microsoft wants Yahoo because that's tens of millions of more user profiles to mine for advertising data.
The UI is not simply the visual theme used. The UI encompasses the layout structure of control widgets, the wording of copy text, the behavior of control widgets. It's alright for two different applications to look slightly different as long as they behave consistently. In the Mac OS image you posted each of those apps has a different visual style but follow the same interface guidelines (for the most part). The menus for these apps are always at the top of the screen, menu items like "Help" and the application name always behave the same way and the rest of the menus are laid out similarly between all applications. Keyboard shortcuts for actions with similar behaviors are all consistent, Cmd + C copies and Cmd + V pastes in all of those applications. Common UI controls also behave similarly e.g. the back and forward buttons in Finder and System Preferences look the same and are the same control and perform the same sort of behavior. Even with Windows being the UI nightmare that it is there is at least a marginal amount of consistency. UI consistency is what drops the learning curve of any specific application down to a reasonable level. If the File menu opens documents and Cmd + C copies you don't have to relearn how to do those things in an unfamiliar application.
This is where the UIs shipping with Linux distros tend to fall down. Not enough attention is paid to overall consistency of behavior so two applications with similar functionality might have wildly different behavior. Applications with different behavior means a lot mental gear shifting is required for the user. This is makes for a very hostile user environment. It doesn't matter if buttons in two apps look slightly different as long as they share their behavior. The UIs of many common FOSS apps have improved immensely over the past decade but that of distros less so. Things like checking for keyboard shortcut consistency are tedious and unglamorous. No one gets on the cover of Linux Journal for checking all of the shipping apps in a distro's default configuration to make sure their shortcut keys are consistent or they don't egregiously break the desktop environment's UI guidelines.
Making cryptographic algorithms public will not eliminate encryption-based DRM. Encryption isn't secure because the algorithm is unavailable it is secure because it relies on the inherent difficulty of inverting the functions used to transform the data. With any worthwhile encryption system all the source code would give you is assurance that you wouldn't be able to break it in any reasonable span of time.
You're right to say copyright isn't the issue but you're wrong to say DRM is the issue. DRM is also not the problem. What is broken is the infrastructure of the whole system. Copyright gives a temporary monopoly to the creator of some artistic work. That original creator then signs over those rights to a corporation and then they are recognized as the creator of the work. Because corporations can outlive individuals restrictions like "life of creator + 50 years" are meaningless. Said corporations also have enough money to fund legislation that locks public access to their copyrights and guarantees permanent monopoly over their copyrighted holdings. Laws like the DMCA and Berne Convention weren't bought and paid for by individual artists interested in protecting their copyrights but instead by incredibly wealthy corporations ensuring their control over their holdings. Vast amounts of our modern culture is locked in the vaults of corporations and will never fall into the public domain as long as those corporations have any say in the matter. They will never give up what is effectively free money.
As of the 1.1.3 firmware userspace apps no longer run as root. It's also absurd to think forthcoming changes in the 2.0 firmware won't lock this access model down any more. As per the documentation, apps will be run in sandboxes which can and will control the sort of access they have to resources.
From a young age I've never really had much trouble reading a map. Apparently this is a rare and magical gift.
I don't understand the fetish for turn-by-turn GPS directions. I guess it's because I can read maps and have a sense of direction. Last night I looked up my friend's address on my iPhone. I used the map to figure out where to get off the freeway and what side streets I needed to use to get there. The Google Maps location finder is pretty accurate in the cities I've tried it in and at least let me know where I am. Since I don't need to give those coordinates to a cruise missile I'm fine with knowing an approximation.
The iPod was only $399 when it was released in October of 2001. While they initially only worked with Macs support for Windows was added in July of 2002 through MusicMatch Jukebox. The flash based players of the time were only slightly cheaper than the iPod's initial $399 price and held an order of magnitude fewer songs. It's a bit of revisionist history to suggest that the iPod didn't gain a lot of attention right out of the box. The iPod sold more than a quarter million units in its first year and nabbed about 7.1% of the PMP market after only six months. That's 0% to 7% in six months. To suggest the iPod wasn't a big deal is kind of silly. I know you're trolling but try to sound believable.
Assuming the print collection of the Library of Congress is 10TB it's about 0.000002LoC/s. Oddly, Google's converter doesn't seem to want to accept LoC as a data measurement. I think Comcast is finally catching up to a station wagon full of tapes.
How would 64bit userland performance issues not be issues in kernel space? Besides a 32bit kernel offers backwards compatibility with existing drivers. Having to go through and make the lot of them 64bit clean would be a massive undertaking. That is a lot of time and effort for little to no benefit to end users or Apple themselves. Leopard 32bit kernel is about being pragmatic, not supporting a short-lived architecture.
As for your non-suggestion of using NetBurst or AMD chips, get with the program. The NetBurst Pentiums were an abomination and everyone knows it. They also would have never fit into the iMac enclosure without a dorm fridge heat exchanger sitting on the floor behind it. Neither would they have been suitable for use in the MacBook Pro which would have meant Pentium Ms (Dothans) which are, you guessed it, 32bit chips. Going with AMD wouldn't have offered much over using NetBurst chips. The Athlon 64s of the time had TDPs between 80-110W and even the mobile variants had TDPs of 35W, a bit more than the Yonah's 31W.
Running in 64bit mode on x86 processors provides a marginal performance benefit over 32bit mode and even then only in a handful of applications. Most of the time a 64bit binary just increases memory pressure since all of the pointers and thus data structures end up taking up a lot more room. There's also more data to be shuffled over the busses and into and out of CPU caches. For many applications running 64bit won't improve performance and stands a good chance of actually decreasing it. Leopard's current model of offering quad fat frameworks is really the path of least resistance. Older frameworks like Carbon and QuickTime don't need to be completely overhauled to be 64bit clean and developers not interested in shipping 64bit binaries don't have to bother with updating the entirety of their codebase to make them 64bit clean.
Intel also didn't have any 64bit Core* chips available when the first Intel Macs were released. At the very least Apple would have waited until the Xeon 5100 based Mac Pro shipped to release an Intel Mac had they waited for 64bit chips. That would have meant the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac would have been pushed back until last fall rather than shipping in the first part of 2006. I think the extra year of sales of Intel Macs did more good than waiting until Intel had 64bit Core* chips available.
Your friends must be illiterate as iTunes asks if you want to resync your library with the one of the new computer. You can tell it not to and it will be in manual song management mode. From there you can drop all of the songs you want onto the iPod. It's not rocket surgery.
It doesn't matter what we'll be using to communicate in a thousand years. If we have some sort of quantum entanglement devices that doesn't affect SETI programs. The universe being what it is there's only so many effective ways to get a signal across a galaxy and actually have someone find and decode it on the other end. Smoke signals, carrier pigeon, and pony express are right out for interstellar communication. From there the next big step is radio communication. This happens to be really useful for a lot of reasons, the barrier of entry for listening in to transmissions is very low, there's lots of interesting natural sources of radio emissions in the universe which means civilizations will be on the lookout for them anyways, and they're economical to transmit.
A sub-etha communicator in wide use by alien civilizations might be an effective technology but the barrier of entry is pretty high. There also might not be any particularly interesting sub-etha-wave emissions in the universe that are worth turning an ear skyward for. So even if an advanced civilization has sub-etha-wave communicators they're not likely to be using them to broadcast Tandoori chicken recipes across the galaxy in hopes other civilizations will pick them up since only a handful of civilizations might even have sub-etha receivers. Building an AM radio receiver is trivial however.
Your comment about listening for ETI for a millisecond is not far off. The Fermi paradox is an interesting thought puzzle but realistically we've only been listening for ETIs for a few decades with a handful of antennas with next to no funding at all. It's entirely possible we've missed out on a large number of signals from ETIs simply because we're looking in the wrong part of the spectrum or haven't been listening at the right time. Finding our galactic neighbors is and will continue to be really challenging. We might not find evidense of them within our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children and their children and maybe even their children. Space is mindbogglingly large so finding something specific in it takes a lot of looking and patience.
Slashdot Mirror
This diagram might help. See the part marked LEO? That's where most larger bits of man-made debris are. The prime location for an SPS design would be in a geostationary orbit which is many thousands of miles above most space junk.
Hey look a front page story by Timothy that links to the Washington Times. With their powers combined they form Captain Troll Slashdot Post! I'm honestly surprised there was no mention of Natalie Portman or hot grits.
I don't know why you've been modded up for this as your first point is completely incorrect. Application windows in OSX are all top-level entities as far as the window server is concerned. Since document windows are all peers it is possible to drag and drop between two windows of two different applications. Document windows of different applications can also be layered independently. You can have a Finder window overlapped by a Safari window which itself has another Finder window on top. There's no requirement for all of an application's windows to share the same layer. Windows are also only constrained by the size of the screen, not a containing window owned by the application.
For starters it is trivial to embed an HTTP or mail server in a worm and is done all the time. They don't need to be full featured, simply functional enough to get their intended job done. As for the NAT issues the default usernames and passwords for popular routers is common knowledge. Given the number of LINKSYS and 2WIRE WiFi networks I can see from my apartment it's safe to say at least some of those people are still using those defaults. From there it's simply building the appropriate POST or GET request to modify the port forwarding settings. Besides opening connections for remote hosts a worm can simply listen for local connections and modify the hosts file to point paypal.com to localhost and then collect information that way.
Information harvesting worms do not need to be 100% effective to make their handlers money. If they get a few thousand PayPal accounts for every million machines they infect they can make a lot of money. Even if they don't get PayPal accounts or other information they can still be used for DDoS attacks and sending spam.
You're claiming QuickTime only supports H.264 video that is 30fps at 640x480. The movies on the page are 1080p, 720p, and 480p. It certainly doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about. Reality: 1, you: 0.
Good thing there is MPEG-4 ASP for the web which is supported by millions of cellphones, PMPs, and desktops. It doesn't take much CPU to play back and the quality is good enough but not great. On the other end there's H.264/AVC which is also supported by millions of cellphones, PMPs, and desktops.
If a company sells enough widgets to be profitable it doesn't matter if they're 90% or .01% of the widget market. If their revenues exceed their expenses they're making money. VIA and AMD don't have to dominate the CPU market to remain competitive or profitable. Whether or not they're actually profitable and competitive is what is important.
This is known as the "wet workshop" model. The original design of Skylab was a wet workshop. The second stage of the Saturn IB (S-IVB) was build with a larger than normal inspection hatch and some flooring/racks inside the hydrogen tank. The S-IVB stage burned normally until it was in a LEO and then vented the last of its fuel. A second mission was launched that fixed damage cause to the station by the first launch and loaded it with equipment.
The problem with making everything a wet workshop is the added fuel needed to get the appropriate stage into a stable orbit. Typically a disposable stage will not have enough fuel to get itself and the payload in orbit, just the payload. In order to have enough delta-v to get the stage and the payload into a stable orbit the payload will have to be smaller. Then you might end up with a nice habitable volume but at the cost of an extra astronaut to man said volume. Also fuel tanks tend to be optimized for carrying fuel while habitable modules tend to be optimized for people or equipment. If the Destiny or Columbus lab on the ISS had started life as fuel tanks they wouldn't have been able to carry a fraction of the components they did carry. It would have required another launch or two to fill them with equipment.
You have got to be joking. NASA's 2007 budget was $16.7B which was a teensy fraction of the 2007 federal budget. Of that the space operations portion of the budget was only $6.2B. Aeronautics research was $724M. NASA does not have an enormous budget nor do they spend all of that budget on manned space exploration. Canceling manned spaceflight and research would free up a scant $7B which wouldn't put a dent in the federal deficit. So for $7B that will end up getting spent in some other area we would put a bunch of engineers and technicians out of a job, potentially losing all of their domain knowledge similar to what happened with the abandonment of the Saturn/Apollo programs. Planting flags on the moon is of limited utility but it's not the only target in the solar system.
It appears the point completely missed you and apparently impaled an innocent bystander behind you. The XBox 360 has a long history which you're not properly accounting for. Before the 360 was the original XBox which did unexpectedly well especially considering the fierce competition of Sony and Nintendo. However before the XBox was Microsoft's work on the Dreamcast which did not do so well and sank Sega's hardware business. Before the Dreamcast was Microsoft's PC gaming division which only had a handful of real hits to its credit. Microsoft did what smaller companies could not do, fail repeatedly until they managed to get something working right. They were able to buy out game studios like Bungie and Rare in order to get some heavy hitting first party titles developed for their console. The XBox 360 is a good console because Microsoft has spent more than a decade struggling with a gaming business. XBox Live has a similar story, they bought out "The Village" which got rebranded Internet Gaming Zone which eventually became the MSN Gaming Zone and served as the conceptual basis for XBox Live. Again because of their size and money they could throw resources at a lackluster product and eventually make it stick. Other companies don't have that same luxury, look at Sega. Two successive market failures and it was lights out for their hardware division.
A black hat hacker doesn't need to do any QA testing of their exploit. If it doesn't work 50% of the time it is still considered a successful exploit. If a vendor's patch breaks something on customer machines even 10% of the time they'll get as much if not more flack than if they had waited to patch an exploit. This is worse if their fix is only half-ass in order to get it out in the wild and it only works against one particular exploit and doesn't fix that class of exploit. Embargo dates on exploits found by security researchers gives a vendor time to develop a fix and run it through their QA process. They can't simply release a patch and hope for the best like the black hats can. Thus disclosing vulnerabilities to everyone always puts the vendor and the customer at a disadvantage.
Now they're 6 and 14.
Wind turbines can be manufactured "green" since most of their construction materials are recyclable. They are also fairly easy to construct since they don't require any sort of exotic manufacturing processes. The DOE's website has a nice diagram of a modern wind turbines components. Modern turbines are highly efficient and when situated correctly pay for themselves very quickly. As you've seen turbines have gotten cheap enough that individual units have become suitable for people to buy themselves. Small scale turbines can generate enough power for a single household for a day. They're often set up in grid-tied setups where the turbine complements grid power to a home. You can also use them for entirely off-grid usage where they charge a battery bank which is used when the wind isn't blowing.
Advertising is most effective when it is relevant to the person seeing it. Web advertising was like magazine advertising for a long time. You offered got paid a very small amount of money for a unit of space for every visitor to your site, more if they clicked and ad and even more if they actually bought something. In order to get ads on your site you as the webmaster would fill out a form telling the advertisers what sort of content you typically posted. A video game website would say their content is about video games so advertisers would display ads relevant to people reading about video games.
What Google (and others) have done is take that process a step further and figure out automatically what ought to be relevant to each individual website visitor. If someone buys AdWords for an upcoming game and someone writes about that game on their website ads for that game will appear specifically on that article. The actual content of websites is now valuable to advertisers, not just the number of ad pixels on the screen. While video games might be relevant to the readers of Joystiq and an for a particular game shown to a Joystiq visitor reading an article about that game is super relevant. Someone can not only read about Super Deluxe Fun Time Solitaire but buy it right then and there.
Besides anonymous targeted advertising Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all have the ability to mine their millions of user account profiles to target ads specifically for individuals. Microsoft has linked up Passport accounts with their various MSN services, Hotmail, and XBox Live. MSN can thus correlate tons of online behavior and sell individual behavior to advertisers. They know what games people are playing on XBox Live, who their MSN Messenger and XBox Live friends are and what they're playing, things they've bought on MSN Shopping (or their affiliates) recently, and what their recent browsing behavior is (to sites with MSN advertising), and what sort of e-mail they're getting. With all of this they can make some pretty good guesses about what that person might buy in the immediate future. If they're browsing Joystiq and have been playing a lot of Halo 3 and were searching for Quake Wars reviews the next ad they might see is one for Quake Wars. Microsoft wants Yahoo because that's tens of millions of more user profiles to mine for advertising data.
The UI is not simply the visual theme used. The UI encompasses the layout structure of control widgets, the wording of copy text, the behavior of control widgets. It's alright for two different applications to look slightly different as long as they behave consistently. In the Mac OS image you posted each of those apps has a different visual style but follow the same interface guidelines (for the most part). The menus for these apps are always at the top of the screen, menu items like "Help" and the application name always behave the same way and the rest of the menus are laid out similarly between all applications. Keyboard shortcuts for actions with similar behaviors are all consistent, Cmd + C copies and Cmd + V pastes in all of those applications. Common UI controls also behave similarly e.g. the back and forward buttons in Finder and System Preferences look the same and are the same control and perform the same sort of behavior. Even with Windows being the UI nightmare that it is there is at least a marginal amount of consistency. UI consistency is what drops the learning curve of any specific application down to a reasonable level. If the File menu opens documents and Cmd + C copies you don't have to relearn how to do those things in an unfamiliar application.
This is where the UIs shipping with Linux distros tend to fall down. Not enough attention is paid to overall consistency of behavior so two applications with similar functionality might have wildly different behavior. Applications with different behavior means a lot mental gear shifting is required for the user. This is makes for a very hostile user environment. It doesn't matter if buttons in two apps look slightly different as long as they share their behavior. The UIs of many common FOSS apps have improved immensely over the past decade but that of distros less so. Things like checking for keyboard shortcut consistency are tedious and unglamorous. No one gets on the cover of Linux Journal for checking all of the shipping apps in a distro's default configuration to make sure their shortcut keys are consistent or they don't egregiously break the desktop environment's UI guidelines.
Making cryptographic algorithms public will not eliminate encryption-based DRM. Encryption isn't secure because the algorithm is unavailable it is secure because it relies on the inherent difficulty of inverting the functions used to transform the data. With any worthwhile encryption system all the source code would give you is assurance that you wouldn't be able to break it in any reasonable span of time.
You're right to say copyright isn't the issue but you're wrong to say DRM is the issue. DRM is also not the problem. What is broken is the infrastructure of the whole system. Copyright gives a temporary monopoly to the creator of some artistic work. That original creator then signs over those rights to a corporation and then they are recognized as the creator of the work. Because corporations can outlive individuals restrictions like "life of creator + 50 years" are meaningless. Said corporations also have enough money to fund legislation that locks public access to their copyrights and guarantees permanent monopoly over their copyrighted holdings. Laws like the DMCA and Berne Convention weren't bought and paid for by individual artists interested in protecting their copyrights but instead by incredibly wealthy corporations ensuring their control over their holdings. Vast amounts of our modern culture is locked in the vaults of corporations and will never fall into the public domain as long as those corporations have any say in the matter. They will never give up what is effectively free money.
As of the 1.1.3 firmware userspace apps no longer run as root. It's also absurd to think forthcoming changes in the 2.0 firmware won't lock this access model down any more. As per the documentation, apps will be run in sandboxes which can and will control the sort of access they have to resources.
From a young age I've never really had much trouble reading a map. Apparently this is a rare and magical gift.
I don't understand the fetish for turn-by-turn GPS directions. I guess it's because I can read maps and have a sense of direction. Last night I looked up my friend's address on my iPhone. I used the map to figure out where to get off the freeway and what side streets I needed to use to get there. The Google Maps location finder is pretty accurate in the cities I've tried it in and at least let me know where I am. Since I don't need to give those coordinates to a cruise missile I'm fine with knowing an approximation.
The iPod was only $399 when it was released in October of 2001. While they initially only worked with Macs support for Windows was added in July of 2002 through MusicMatch Jukebox. The flash based players of the time were only slightly cheaper than the iPod's initial $399 price and held an order of magnitude fewer songs. It's a bit of revisionist history to suggest that the iPod didn't gain a lot of attention right out of the box. The iPod sold more than a quarter million units in its first year and nabbed about 7.1% of the PMP market after only six months. That's 0% to 7% in six months. To suggest the iPod wasn't a big deal is kind of silly. I know you're trolling but try to sound believable.
Assuming the print collection of the Library of Congress is 10TB it's about 0.000002LoC/s. Oddly, Google's converter doesn't seem to want to accept LoC as a data measurement. I think Comcast is finally catching up to a station wagon full of tapes.
How would 64bit userland performance issues not be issues in kernel space? Besides a 32bit kernel offers backwards compatibility with existing drivers. Having to go through and make the lot of them 64bit clean would be a massive undertaking. That is a lot of time and effort for little to no benefit to end users or Apple themselves. Leopard 32bit kernel is about being pragmatic, not supporting a short-lived architecture.
As for your non-suggestion of using NetBurst or AMD chips, get with the program. The NetBurst Pentiums were an abomination and everyone knows it. They also would have never fit into the iMac enclosure without a dorm fridge heat exchanger sitting on the floor behind it. Neither would they have been suitable for use in the MacBook Pro which would have meant Pentium Ms (Dothans) which are, you guessed it, 32bit chips. Going with AMD wouldn't have offered much over using NetBurst chips. The Athlon 64s of the time had TDPs between 80-110W and even the mobile variants had TDPs of 35W, a bit more than the Yonah's 31W.
Running in 64bit mode on x86 processors provides a marginal performance benefit over 32bit mode and even then only in a handful of applications. Most of the time a 64bit binary just increases memory pressure since all of the pointers and thus data structures end up taking up a lot more room. There's also more data to be shuffled over the busses and into and out of CPU caches. For many applications running 64bit won't improve performance and stands a good chance of actually decreasing it. Leopard's current model of offering quad fat frameworks is really the path of least resistance. Older frameworks like Carbon and QuickTime don't need to be completely overhauled to be 64bit clean and developers not interested in shipping 64bit binaries don't have to bother with updating the entirety of their codebase to make them 64bit clean.
Intel also didn't have any 64bit Core* chips available when the first Intel Macs were released. At the very least Apple would have waited until the Xeon 5100 based Mac Pro shipped to release an Intel Mac had they waited for 64bit chips. That would have meant the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac would have been pushed back until last fall rather than shipping in the first part of 2006. I think the extra year of sales of Intel Macs did more good than waiting until Intel had 64bit Core* chips available.
Yaoi Hitler raping a kitten?
Your friends must be illiterate as iTunes asks if you want to resync your library with the one of the new computer. You can tell it not to and it will be in manual song management mode. From there you can drop all of the songs you want onto the iPod. It's not rocket surgery.
It doesn't matter what we'll be using to communicate in a thousand years. If we have some sort of quantum entanglement devices that doesn't affect SETI programs. The universe being what it is there's only so many effective ways to get a signal across a galaxy and actually have someone find and decode it on the other end. Smoke signals, carrier pigeon, and pony express are right out for interstellar communication. From there the next big step is radio communication. This happens to be really useful for a lot of reasons, the barrier of entry for listening in to transmissions is very low, there's lots of interesting natural sources of radio emissions in the universe which means civilizations will be on the lookout for them anyways, and they're economical to transmit.
A sub-etha communicator in wide use by alien civilizations might be an effective technology but the barrier of entry is pretty high. There also might not be any particularly interesting sub-etha-wave emissions in the universe that are worth turning an ear skyward for. So even if an advanced civilization has sub-etha-wave communicators they're not likely to be using them to broadcast Tandoori chicken recipes across the galaxy in hopes other civilizations will pick them up since only a handful of civilizations might even have sub-etha receivers. Building an AM radio receiver is trivial however.
Your comment about listening for ETI for a millisecond is not far off. The Fermi paradox is an interesting thought puzzle but realistically we've only been listening for ETIs for a few decades with a handful of antennas with next to no funding at all. It's entirely possible we've missed out on a large number of signals from ETIs simply because we're looking in the wrong part of the spectrum or haven't been listening at the right time. Finding our galactic neighbors is and will continue to be really challenging. We might not find evidense of them within our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children and their children and maybe even their children. Space is mindbogglingly large so finding something specific in it takes a lot of looking and patience.