If the music doesn't bring on a rage headache, you probably didn't play it. It's not only ridiculously difficult, but after you win it once, you are told it was all an illusion and are forced to go back through it again from the first level to officially win.
The current carrier lock on licensed bands is a terrible drain on the U.S. economy and stifling innovation to an absurd degree. If it weren't for the carrier attitudes, the U.S. would have a true mobile Internet, probably hundreds of thousands of additional jobs in mobile device and app development, and a plethora of devices and apps that would make the iPhone seem archaic. Google is finally a tech company financially large enough that it is getting hurt by essentially arch anti net neutrality in the mobile space and has the ability to take on the carriers. It's well worth the price for Google to open up a whole new unfettered medium for their services. I hope they go all out, win the auction, and bring true competition to the industry. They would benefit and so would everyone else.
I'm never one for government regulation, but in view of the very existence of these companies in this space being based on regulation (frequency band reservation), I wonder if we need new antitrust legislation for this, a situation that the original writers of antitrust law could not have readily envisioned or comprehended? It's sort of an inverse product tying and is definitely intended to decrease competition (for example, no one can offer a competing navigation product on this device even though it clearly has the capability).
Or perhaps we need to retroactively apply the Google points on open device access to existing as well as new bands? It can be done by Congress under the ethical directive of protecting the public commons. From a business standpoint, is a legitimate intervention when the existing leasholders of those commons are mismanaging it against the interest of overall economic activity and the public good.
Apple made a big strategic blunder in choosing Cingular/AT&T as an exclusive partner. If they had made a multi-band phone and sold it SIM-less, they could well have cracked the carrier market wide open. All the carriers would have scrambled to offer voice and data plans for it on launch because a subscriber is a subscriber in the end. Game theory would have led to one of the players 'cheating' on refusing to offer plans for a non-locked phone and as soon as the first one had cheated on the tacit collusion they currently engage in with all the other carriers, they would have all had to follow suit. Apple would have opened up the market for selling SIM-less phones and not constrained themselves to a very limited U.S. market.
What does this have to do with the devkit? If Apple had done this, they would have been able to officially open up the devkit and application developers would have created a legitimate cottage industry around it, making it into a extremely versatile mobile communicator. The iPhone would have been revolutionary (literally) rather than a overpriced, though flashy, paperweight for anyone but those foolish enough to sign a contract with Cingular/AT&T (I don't view the use of it just for wifi as really relevant since then it must simple be viewed as a PDA and not a general communications device, and there are far better PDA solutions out there).
The last hope for a healthy carrier market now lies with Google's attempt to force itself into the spectrum auction.
Given the high cost of education now, with education costs often comprising the vast majority of the municipal budget, especially for small towns, it is highly irresponsible for schools *not* to be considering and using as much free software as possible. If they are further going to drag parents into it, then it is doubly true as it becomes just another tax, unless companies are willing to provide free software to both schools and parents. Commercial software companies such as Microsoft have every right to a profit motive, but school districts also have a responsibility to use the least expensive recourse and there is no sustainable argument that commercial software is better than free software for education purposes at this point.
All these ideas seem to assume a heavy lander is necessary. Pack 4 of everything since you want backups anyway. Break up all the parts of the habitation module and such into separate small pieces that break up from each other just when the atmosphere is encountered so they land in roughly the same area using already proven landing mechanisms. Assemble them with the humans still in orbit using proven rovers, robotics, and UAV technology (and with local humans, minimal time delay). Make sure environmental controls and life support are all on line. Then send down the humans in a much smaller vehicle.
This story reads basically that some over zealous security researcher chased an incompetent malware script kiddie around for an app that compromised maybe 50 people. As far as accomplishment goes, this ranks up there with shooting fish in a barrel and apparently proves he can do Google searches.
I'm glad that there is a minimum damage level before law enforcement gets involved because this would be a tremendous waste of tax payer dollars to go after and then, given how totally out of whack the laws are in regards to this kind of thing because of Luddite terror of people with technical ability, we'd probably have to end up paying this moron's housing for five years and create another person with a criminal record who cannot get employed and thus gets even more benefits at our expense.
And at the end of the day, it proves nothing. From a technical standpoint, someone could easily create an false identity like this, even the sign off part. The whole investigation trail is based off string comparisons. Whether it is "John" in Philadelphia or a really smart dog in Detroit, who knows?
Psychology Today is a pop-culture magazine not respected by any professional psychological association. It is essentially a tabloid and should be considered in the same class as the '10 ways to tell if your boyfriend thinks you are fat' magazines. If you want actual, scholarly articles on human nature, check out the many publications of the American Psychological Association.
I do not believe T-Mobile acts like this. I'm not surprised AT&T would have this problem, though. From what I could tell, their billing system was broken beyond belief and they had no clue how to fix it.
You do get charged for accessing your voice mail on the phone, I believe.
I had so many problems with cell phones companies messing up bills (particularly AT&T wireless), that I switched to prepaid plans entirely. You might think that you are getting a better deal on minutes with the subscription plans, but you are not once you factor in:
1. Overage at higher prices 2. Surplus in months you don't use all your canned minutes 3. A truly appalling set of extra 'fees' 4. Cell phone billing system unreliability 5. Not having to provide social security numbers - reduces identity theft chances and keeps your credit score from taking a hit because of the credit check and possible recording of the account as an open line of credit
I have no fiduciary interest in T-Mobile, but their prepaid plan works out nicely. Just drop $100 on 1000 minutes and they don't expire for a year. The only thing that can go wrong is they deduct more minutes than they should. You can control the risk by only keeping $100-$200 worth of minutes on the account. You prevent overage because it's their responsibility to check if you have minutes available before you are connected.
It is a tenuous claim that all the people who would download and view a movie for free would watch it if they had to pay for it. Technology has moved on and rendered static media copyable to some extent. If content producers are not able to create a price point and features that encourage users to buy direct instead of getting it through their social networks, then it's time to move on. A business created by an artificial construct (in this case, over-reaching copyright law) is no business at all - it's a government subsidy.
Even something that is putatively free incurs acquisition costs. It's up to the content producers to find a way to offer a mechanism and features where the acquisition costs of getting it directly from them are better in the whole than getting it through social sharing networks. In the case of movie studios, they are just going to have to either come up with new entertainment features or figure out how to make and distribute movies less expensively.
Whatever they do, laws that interfere with people's rights to share information should not be allowed in an attempt to save an industry refusing to adapt to technological change.
This smacks of blaming the chickens for being raided by the fox. What H1-B visas and other means of not hiring American citizens has done is essentially subsidize corporate training costs by doing away with the need to train entry level American workers. By using H1-B visas and other means to avoid having to hire and train entry-level citizens, corporations find themselves in a position of having trouble finding technical expertise willing to work for minimum wage because no one could get that expertise without any jobs on which to get them. Their shortsightedness has caught up with them.
Don't believe the propaganda, either. They are not having trouble finding technical expertise. They are having trouble finding people who will accept minimum wage for it. This would be one thing if their profit margins were tightly squeezed, but that Microsoft is complaining about this is rich indeed given the profit margins they already enjoy. If corporations in the U.S. want a robust and affordable labor pool, they should stop hiring foreign workers immediately, create good technology training programs, and start hiring American citizens for entry level technical positions. To assist them, the federal government should stop promulgating immigration policies that work against its own citizens and competitiveness.
In the article, the ant colonies have specialists. Scouts look for food sources, foragers wait for signals of food sources. Assuming that both start the day in the nest, environment cannot account fully for the variance resulting in this division of behavior.
You have a good point about individual variance expressed as random reaction to stimulus by any individual. However, that's where we deviate from discussing group intelligence to discussing the definition of individual differentiation. Obviously, two individuals are undeniably different in that they consist of different atoms and occupy different coordinates (interestingly, a limitation not logically shared by algorithms on a computer, unless you get into the actual storage of the representative bits in hardware). The question becomes what drives differentiated behavior. Randomness could explain this.
Then again, it could also explain human cognition fully as well if no effort is made to interpret individual stimulus, only the aggregate of past and present stimulus and reaction, equivalent to that considered by an ant waiting for a pheromone drop. Innovation gets full explanation from random copying error and overlapping life spans. Be careful going down this route as it leads to unhappy places, though ironically, if true, you have no actual control over whether you go down this route or not. Some of you will, some of you will not, we just don't k now which of you for sure, and neither do you.
A Fire Upon The Deep novelizes the potential of sentient consisting of several physically individual members who do not have sentience as individuals, although this runs tangential to the plot.
Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules. Unfortunately, the wide range of problems to which we apply computers, generally by business demands, require rigorous certainty. We want to know exactly how many beans were shipped, not an estimate. Individual instances of an algorithm cooperating via simple rules inherently introduces uncertainty or reflects a very inefficient approach to solving a certain problem. This goes against the grain of classical training and thinking about computing.
Collective intelligence may also depend on all individuals having some level of variation, yet cooperating through simple rules. In this case, the emphasis goes to the protocol and not the algorithm. I believe that further research will find that some level of individual variation will become recognized as an essential element of perceived group intelligence, important to breaking recursive feedback loops and deadlocks. Unfortunately, attempts to emulate this in computing will run into the issue that group perceived intelligence may not be determined so much by design, but by fitness for a particular, narrow purpose, with truly remarkable group intelligence requiring many iterations exposed to actual operating conditions or good simulations thereof.
I will take the onshore guy who claims he can be 20x productive over 20 offshore resources any day of the week because, if he is passionate about technology and has the confidence to make that statement, which could be quickly determined, he is probably right. You probably come from the school of thought that a new resource can only add productivity to a project. In your line of thinking, even if they are not very good, they will at least marginally increase productivity. In reality, most developers are net negative to project productivity and the median developer falls below zero.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor. As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers and incurring the managerial overhead will generally result in less overall project productivity than where you started, especially when you consider long term costs.
Does anyone have definitive information on what HD formats Leopard will support? Last I checked. rumors swirled around support for one or the other or none. I use a Mac Mini as media center and if Leopard does not support the HD formats (and someone does not come out with an affordable combo, or at least HDDVD. drive), it does not sound like a very appealing upgrade for that use.
DirectX 10 Is The Difficulty
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As the article admits, there is no current way to get DirectX 10 onto XP. Though the article makes a good point that there are very few DirectX 10 games on the market, they will eventually come and diehard gamers will face a difficult choice. This could be MS's only workable strategy for general Vista adoption because, fundamentally, there is no reason that anyone would want to use Windows anymore aside from games (or because of mandated OS at employer, though that situation raises the question of why the CIO hasn't be fired for gross negligence in funds appropriations, especially for Vista, which doesn't run Office 2000 any better than XP).
On the other hand, maybe game developers will shy away from DirectX 10 because of the risk of losing a sizable market share. Diehard gamers could also prove finicky. Could this artificial attempt to tie DirectX10 with Vista to force upgrades result in a resurgence of OpenGL adoption in the gaming industry? One can only hope.
"... any further then getting over the supposed self destructive nature we have tended to show towards others of our race."
What if that destructive nature is crucial for our surviving in the galaxy if other, hostile civilizations exist? The penchant of humans for war that you see as a negative may also ultimately be a positive asset.
It's good someone battles for states' rights, even if it falls to the states themselves, because neither party supports states' right anymore. The Bush administration gained power by suing in federal court to block a state court's ruling on a state issue, thus losing for the Republicans at the national level all credibility in championing states' rights, which used to differentiate the Republicans strongly from Democrats. In their heedless and desperate grab for power both then and after 9/11, they lost their party identity.
Get the states mad enough and they can call a Constitutional Convention and effectively rewrite the Constitution to strip the federal government of power. Whether the federal government would allow this or use the military to prevent it (and whether the military would obey) becomes an interesting question after the events circa 1865, when the fundamental notion of states participating voluntarily in a union shattered, for better or for worse depending with high correlation on your latitude with respect to the Mason-Dixon line.
This is true and symptomatic of the whole mobile space. If you have experience in the mobile space, this will come as little surprise to you. All the carriers want to lock down and control every bit that flows on their networks so they can extract all the profit out of every bit. It's amazing that Apple has got as much enabled on the phone as it has.
This sort of thing is why mobile networking in the U.S. and many other countries is a total and unmitigated disaster. All of the networks have tried so hard to make sure they get all the profit potential out of the networks they have made it very unattractive for third party developers. As a result, the mobile networking space just rots waiting for a competitor or new form of getting data to mobile points that make the existing mobile networks obsolete (this is hard because of governmental regulation and selling of exclusive rights to frequency bands, so it is also a regulatory disaster). This is why all the services you hear prognosticators in Wired and other magazines rhapsodize about never materialize. It's also ironic in that the carriers would be making more money if they had opened up to the killer apps and therefore increased the overall demand for networking.
In short, through the regulatory processes and lack of fair trade enforcement, the U.S. has sold its mobile networking potential and commons into the hands of thieves, whose greed and hubris have essentially delayed progress in mobile networking for at least a decade. If I could make that statement in stronger terms, I would. The mobile space is essentially what happens when you have the complete antithesis of 'network neutrality' and, though network neutrality might not be a great regulatory strategy in the fixed-network space, the complete opposite of it is surely well-nigh catastrophic as can be seen from the mobile space.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who remembers the original NES Ghost and Goblins game needs to see this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLTQRJXzwP0
If the music doesn't bring on a rage headache, you probably didn't play it. It's not only ridiculously difficult, but after you win it once, you are told it was all an illusion and are forced to go back through it again from the first level to officially win.
"s/h/it"
You may want to reevaluate your approach to political correctness.
Wait, you have to put in your social security number to activate the phone? Are you serious?
The current carrier lock on licensed bands is a terrible drain on the U.S. economy and stifling innovation to an absurd degree. If it weren't for the carrier attitudes, the U.S. would have a true mobile Internet, probably hundreds of thousands of additional jobs in mobile device and app development, and a plethora of devices and apps that would make the iPhone seem archaic. Google is finally a tech company financially large enough that it is getting hurt by essentially arch anti net neutrality in the mobile space and has the ability to take on the carriers. It's well worth the price for Google to open up a whole new unfettered medium for their services. I hope they go all out, win the auction, and bring true competition to the industry. They would benefit and so would everyone else.
I'm never one for government regulation, but in view of the very existence of these companies in this space being based on regulation (frequency band reservation), I wonder if we need new antitrust legislation for this, a situation that the original writers of antitrust law could not have readily envisioned or comprehended? It's sort of an inverse product tying and is definitely intended to decrease competition (for example, no one can offer a competing navigation product on this device even though it clearly has the capability).
Or perhaps we need to retroactively apply the Google points on open device access to existing as well as new bands? It can be done by Congress under the ethical directive of protecting the public commons. From a business standpoint, is a legitimate intervention when the existing leasholders of those commons are mismanaging it against the interest of overall economic activity and the public good.
Apple made a big strategic blunder in choosing Cingular/AT&T as an exclusive partner. If they had made a multi-band phone and sold it SIM-less, they could well have cracked the carrier market wide open. All the carriers would have scrambled to offer voice and data plans for it on launch because a subscriber is a subscriber in the end. Game theory would have led to one of the players 'cheating' on refusing to offer plans for a non-locked phone and as soon as the first one had cheated on the tacit collusion they currently engage in with all the other carriers, they would have all had to follow suit. Apple would have opened up the market for selling SIM-less phones and not constrained themselves to a very limited U.S. market.
What does this have to do with the devkit? If Apple had done this, they would have been able to officially open up the devkit and application developers would have created a legitimate cottage industry around it, making it into a extremely versatile mobile communicator. The iPhone would have been revolutionary (literally) rather than a overpriced, though flashy, paperweight for anyone but those foolish enough to sign a contract with Cingular/AT&T (I don't view the use of it just for wifi as really relevant since then it must simple be viewed as a PDA and not a general communications device, and there are far better PDA solutions out there).
The last hope for a healthy carrier market now lies with Google's attempt to force itself into the spectrum auction.
Given the high cost of education now, with education costs often comprising the vast majority of the municipal budget, especially for small towns, it is highly irresponsible for schools *not* to be considering and using as much free software as possible. If they are further going to drag parents into it, then it is doubly true as it becomes just another tax, unless companies are willing to provide free software to both schools and parents. Commercial software companies such as Microsoft have every right to a profit motive, but school districts also have a responsibility to use the least expensive recourse and there is no sustainable argument that commercial software is better than free software for education purposes at this point.
Trees claim prior art. News at 11.
All these ideas seem to assume a heavy lander is necessary. Pack 4 of everything since you want backups anyway. Break up all the parts of the habitation module and such into separate small pieces that break up from each other just when the atmosphere is encountered so they land in roughly the same area using already proven landing mechanisms. Assemble them with the humans still in orbit using proven rovers, robotics, and UAV technology (and with local humans, minimal time delay). Make sure environmental controls and life support are all on line. Then send down the humans in a much smaller vehicle.
Don't miss.
This story reads basically that some over zealous security researcher chased an incompetent malware script kiddie around for an app that compromised maybe 50 people. As far as accomplishment goes, this ranks up there with shooting fish in a barrel and apparently proves he can do Google searches.
I'm glad that there is a minimum damage level before law enforcement gets involved because this would be a tremendous waste of tax payer dollars to go after and then, given how totally out of whack the laws are in regards to this kind of thing because of Luddite terror of people with technical ability, we'd probably have to end up paying this moron's housing for five years and create another person with a criminal record who cannot get employed and thus gets even more benefits at our expense.
And at the end of the day, it proves nothing. From a technical standpoint, someone could easily create an false identity like this, even the sign off part. The whole investigation trail is based off string comparisons. Whether it is "John" in Philadelphia or a really smart dog in Detroit, who knows?
Psychology Today is a pop-culture magazine not respected by any professional psychological association. It is essentially a tabloid and should be considered in the same class as the '10 ways to tell if your boyfriend thinks you are fat' magazines. If you want actual, scholarly articles on human nature, check out the many publications of the American Psychological Association.
Linking to Psychology Today is embarrassing.
I do not believe T-Mobile acts like this. I'm not surprised AT&T would have this problem, though. From what I could tell, their billing system was broken beyond belief and they had no clue how to fix it.
You do get charged for accessing your voice mail on the phone, I believe.
I had so many problems with cell phones companies messing up bills (particularly AT&T wireless), that I switched to prepaid plans entirely. You might think that you are getting a better deal on minutes with the subscription plans, but you are not once you factor in:
1. Overage at higher prices
2. Surplus in months you don't use all your canned minutes
3. A truly appalling set of extra 'fees'
4. Cell phone billing system unreliability
5. Not having to provide social security numbers - reduces identity theft chances and keeps your credit score from taking a hit because of the credit check and possible recording of the account as an open line of credit
I have no fiduciary interest in T-Mobile, but their prepaid plan works out nicely. Just drop $100 on 1000 minutes and they don't expire for a year. The only thing that can go wrong is they deduct more minutes than they should. You can control the risk by only keeping $100-$200 worth of minutes on the account. You prevent overage because it's their responsibility to check if you have minutes available before you are connected.
It is a tenuous claim that all the people who would download and view a movie for free would watch it if they had to pay for it. Technology has moved on and rendered static media copyable to some extent. If content producers are not able to create a price point and features that encourage users to buy direct instead of getting it through their social networks, then it's time to move on. A business created by an artificial construct (in this case, over-reaching copyright law) is no business at all - it's a government subsidy.
Even something that is putatively free incurs acquisition costs. It's up to the content producers to find a way to offer a mechanism and features where the acquisition costs of getting it directly from them are better in the whole than getting it through social sharing networks. In the case of movie studios, they are just going to have to either come up with new entertainment features or figure out how to make and distribute movies less expensively.
Whatever they do, laws that interfere with people's rights to share information should not be allowed in an attempt to save an industry refusing to adapt to technological change.
It should not be illegal to bring a camcorder into a movie theater.
It should be legal for the theater owner to throw someone out for bringing a camcorder into their movie theater.
Recording the movie with a camcorder should not be illegal.
Showing the recording of the movie to friends without an exchange of money or physical property should not be illegal.
Showing recordings of the movie to anyone for money or physical property to should be illegal.
This is the way copyright law needs to go.
This smacks of blaming the chickens for being raided by the fox. What H1-B visas and other means of not hiring American citizens has done is essentially subsidize corporate training costs by doing away with the need to train entry level American workers. By using H1-B visas and other means to avoid having to hire and train entry-level citizens, corporations find themselves in a position of having trouble finding technical expertise willing to work for minimum wage because no one could get that expertise without any jobs on which to get them. Their shortsightedness has caught up with them.
Don't believe the propaganda, either. They are not having trouble finding technical expertise. They are having trouble finding people who will accept minimum wage for it. This would be one thing if their profit margins were tightly squeezed, but that Microsoft is complaining about this is rich indeed given the profit margins they already enjoy. If corporations in the U.S. want a robust and affordable labor pool, they should stop hiring foreign workers immediately, create good technology training programs, and start hiring American citizens for entry level technical positions. To assist them, the federal government should stop promulgating immigration policies that work against its own citizens and competitiveness.
That's because, in addition to poorly defined algorithmic flexibility, JavaScript has a high level of environmental variance.
In the article, the ant colonies have specialists. Scouts look for food sources, foragers wait for signals of food sources. Assuming that both start the day in the nest, environment cannot account fully for the variance resulting in this division of behavior.
You have a good point about individual variance expressed as random reaction to stimulus by any individual. However, that's where we deviate from discussing group intelligence to discussing the definition of individual differentiation. Obviously, two individuals are undeniably different in that they consist of different atoms and occupy different coordinates (interestingly, a limitation not logically shared by algorithms on a computer, unless you get into the actual storage of the representative bits in hardware). The question becomes what drives differentiated behavior. Randomness could explain this.
Then again, it could also explain human cognition fully as well if no effort is made to interpret individual stimulus, only the aggregate of past and present stimulus and reaction, equivalent to that considered by an ant waiting for a pheromone drop. Innovation gets full explanation from random copying error and overlapping life spans. Be careful going down this route as it leads to unhappy places, though ironically, if true, you have no actual control over whether you go down this route or not. Some of you will, some of you will not, we just don't k now which of you for sure, and neither do you.
A Fire Upon The Deep novelizes the potential of sentient consisting of several physically individual members who do not have sentience as individuals, although this runs tangential to the plot.
Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules. Unfortunately, the wide range of problems to which we apply computers, generally by business demands, require rigorous certainty. We want to know exactly how many beans were shipped, not an estimate. Individual instances of an algorithm cooperating via simple rules inherently introduces uncertainty or reflects a very inefficient approach to solving a certain problem. This goes against the grain of classical training and thinking about computing.
Collective intelligence may also depend on all individuals having some level of variation, yet cooperating through simple rules. In this case, the emphasis goes to the protocol and not the algorithm. I believe that further research will find that some level of individual variation will become recognized as an essential element of perceived group intelligence, important to breaking recursive feedback loops and deadlocks. Unfortunately, attempts to emulate this in computing will run into the issue that group perceived intelligence may not be determined so much by design, but by fitness for a particular, narrow purpose, with truly remarkable group intelligence requiring many iterations exposed to actual operating conditions or good simulations thereof.
I will take the onshore guy who claims he can be 20x productive over 20 offshore resources any day of the week because, if he is passionate about technology and has the confidence to make that statement, which could be quickly determined, he is probably right. You probably come from the school of thought that a new resource can only add productivity to a project. In your line of thinking, even if they are not very good, they will at least marginally increase productivity. In reality, most developers are net negative to project productivity and the median developer falls below zero.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor. As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers and incurring the managerial overhead will generally result in less overall project productivity than where you started, especially when you consider long term costs.
Does anyone have definitive information on what HD formats Leopard will support? Last I checked. rumors swirled around support for one or the other or none. I use a Mac Mini as media center and if Leopard does not support the HD formats (and someone does not come out with an affordable combo, or at least HDDVD. drive), it does not sound like a very appealing upgrade for that use.
As the article admits, there is no current way to get DirectX 10 onto XP. Though the article makes a good point that there are very few DirectX 10 games on the market, they will eventually come and diehard gamers will face a difficult choice. This could be MS's only workable strategy for general Vista adoption because, fundamentally, there is no reason that anyone would want to use Windows anymore aside from games (or because of mandated OS at employer, though that situation raises the question of why the CIO hasn't be fired for gross negligence in funds appropriations, especially for Vista, which doesn't run Office 2000 any better than XP).
On the other hand, maybe game developers will shy away from DirectX 10 because of the risk of losing a sizable market share. Diehard gamers could also prove finicky. Could this artificial attempt to tie DirectX10 with Vista to force upgrades result in a resurgence of OpenGL adoption in the gaming industry? One can only hope.
"... any further then getting over the supposed self destructive nature we have tended to show towards others of our race."
What if that destructive nature is crucial for our surviving in the galaxy if other, hostile civilizations exist? The penchant of humans for war that you see as a negative may also ultimately be a positive asset.
It's good someone battles for states' rights, even if it falls to the states themselves, because neither party supports states' right anymore. The Bush administration gained power by suing in federal court to block a state court's ruling on a state issue, thus losing for the Republicans at the national level all credibility in championing states' rights, which used to differentiate the Republicans strongly from Democrats. In their heedless and desperate grab for power both then and after 9/11, they lost their party identity.
Get the states mad enough and they can call a Constitutional Convention and effectively rewrite the Constitution to strip the federal government of power. Whether the federal government would allow this or use the military to prevent it (and whether the military would obey) becomes an interesting question after the events circa 1865, when the fundamental notion of states participating voluntarily in a union shattered, for better or for worse depending with high correlation on your latitude with respect to the Mason-Dixon line.
This is true and symptomatic of the whole mobile space. If you have experience in the mobile space, this will come as little surprise to you. All the carriers want to lock down and control every bit that flows on their networks so they can extract all the profit out of every bit. It's amazing that Apple has got as much enabled on the phone as it has.
This sort of thing is why mobile networking in the U.S. and many other countries is a total and unmitigated disaster. All of the networks have tried so hard to make sure they get all the profit potential out of the networks they have made it very unattractive for third party developers. As a result, the mobile networking space just rots waiting for a competitor or new form of getting data to mobile points that make the existing mobile networks obsolete (this is hard because of governmental regulation and selling of exclusive rights to frequency bands, so it is also a regulatory disaster). This is why all the services you hear prognosticators in Wired and other magazines rhapsodize about never materialize. It's also ironic in that the carriers would be making more money if they had opened up to the killer apps and therefore increased the overall demand for networking.
In short, through the regulatory processes and lack of fair trade enforcement, the U.S. has sold its mobile networking potential and commons into the hands of thieves, whose greed and hubris have essentially delayed progress in mobile networking for at least a decade. If I could make that statement in stronger terms, I would. The mobile space is essentially what happens when you have the complete antithesis of 'network neutrality' and, though network neutrality might not be a great regulatory strategy in the fixed-network space, the complete opposite of it is surely well-nigh catastrophic as can be seen from the mobile space.