Why is it the majority of the population believes in the existance of God, a being with no scientific basis, but yet we can't just accept that it would be one of the biggest surprises in the history of humanity if we one day discover that we ARE, in fact, alone in the universe.
Because it is by no means a foregone conclusion that there is life elsewhere. Probable? Possibly, but we don't have much data to back it up. So far we know of only carbon based lifeforms, and we know of no planets outside the solar system even remotely likely to be able to sustain lifeforms like us. We don't have any data (as opposed to theories) that indicates that other types of lifeforms are even possible.
We don't even know if planets likely to harbour life will ever be found outside the solar system, or if our system is an aberration.
You say it's an overblown sense of how special we are, but that's not only it: IF there is only one planet with intelligent life in the universe, then if you are discussing the issue of whether or not there is life in the universe you will be on that planet.
In other words, the likelihood is 100% that in the case only one planet harbours intelligent life, and intelligent being will find itself on that planet.
So talking about the probabilities is meaningless: If the odds of life starting are high, then yes, the probability that we are alone is low. But we don't know that - we have never observed the evolution of life from precursors to life in any meaningful sense, and still do not understand the process very well.
And we certainly don't know if the conditions in which life arose on earth has ever existed anywhere else, nor if there are other conditions which are favorable enough for life to develop.
That is why finding life on Mars would be important - it would increase our number of data points from one to two, and possibly give us significantly better data on the range of conditions that life can survive in as well as the forms of life that exists.
You miss the point - if MS had been fighting fair all the time and had gotten to the market penetration they have by being the best, they would have no problem with OpenDocument. The reason they DO have a problem with OpenDocument is that they perfectly well know that a lot of their customers stick with them because they feel they need to, as they need to be able to handle documents from MS users.
The moment they face a competing spec which allows users to pick applications based on features and price instead of MS compatibility they will face a steady erosion of customers that find alternatives that work for them.
Look at any other monopoly that have been forced to open up to competition - many of them have remained strong players, but I can't name a single one that have been able to avoid a dramatic reduction in market share.
Just voted for you. But any thoughts on who else to vote for in the other categories? I'm sure lots of people would like to avoid voting for any pro-patent people in the other categories, or reward any other candidates that have been supportive of the anti-software patent movement.
For instance, Charlie McGreevy is nominated in the "Commissioner of the year" category, and as far as I remember he's one of the people that have tried hard to push the pro-patent agenda - but I have no idea if any of the other ones listed have stated an opinion either way.
Also, Michel Rocard is a candidate for MEP of the year, and since he helped push quite reasonable modification attempts to the directive he might be a good choice - do you think any of the other MEP's are better alternatives? And why?
For Stateman of the year, while I'm sure people have lots of other reasons to pick a candidate, which of these government do you consider the most receptive to the anti-patent agenda?
And are any of the "diplomat of the year" candidates known to support either side?
Any of the companies represented with Business leader of the year candidates known to be particularly for or against software patents?
Really? This is the text suggested by the FSF in the GPL howto:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Notice that this gives the licensee (i.e. the user) the choice of which GPL version to use. NOT the person issuing the license.
That is the form of the copyright notice using the GPL that I've seen on all GPL'd software I've looked at the notice for, except for the Linux kernel and the occasional other code that sometimes explicitly remove the option for the user to use a later version.
And then at some point they will need aid again. And again. And again. Focusing on giving short term relief instead of helping developent is damaging - in the long run far more people will die through that approach than by helping kickstart development so these countries standa a chance of getting away from depending on aid that often will not come in time.
Actually, you can get reasonable private coverage from a couple of hundred pounds a year. The thing is, the coverage of private health insurance in the UK is a testament to just how good the NHS is - most private insure in the UK except for the most expensive options that hardly anyone sign up to is based around using the NHS for most services (regular checkups etc.) and only covering specialist visits etc. where the NHS can't deliver quick enough or where there's gaps in coverage.
As for your salary numbers, though, you are far off - last I checked average salary was more like 25k GBP.
--I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates;
Uh. Yeah. MOST people I see on the London transport network try their best to avoid any eye contact with anyone, and seeing police in London is so common that they're hardly worthy any extra notice.
--two other men entered the station at about the same time as me;
Uhuh. Because that is really unusual at Southwark during the evening rush... For those unfamiliar with it, Southwark is the closest tube station to Waterloo East, and thus a significant interchange point along one of the main rail lines in/out of central London as well as being in the middle of an area with a significant number of large office buildings.
--I am wearing a jacket "too warm for the season";
Except that it was a cold day...
--I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times;
Ok, so carrying a bulky rucksack a week after the failed attacks on the 21st was perhaps asking for some extra attention - and the way I understood it he wouldn't have complained if they'd let him go when having checked out his rucksack. But keeping it with him at all times? Anyone travelling regularly into London can more or less recite the security warnings that go out over the speakers at every damn tube and rail station every few minutes telling us in a few different wordings to keep our belongings with us at all times to avoid uneccesary security alerts or they might get removed or destroyed by the security services... Whenever I have a rucksack or suitcase with me, I hold on to it at all times - I'd rather not have my laptop blown up, thank you very much.
--I looked at people coming on the platform;
Hey, one of my favorite pastimes when waiting for a train. Waiting is boring. Looking around you is a fairly natural way of making time pass.
--I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket.
Seriously... That just describes about half the travellers on my route to work.
But we agree that the rest of what he went through was ridiculous. Makes me wonder why I've never been stopped considering I've carried bulky rucksacks with me to/from work several times a week, but I guess being blonde and blue eyes they don't think I'm capable of doing anything bad.
For the non-UK people here: On the UK transport network, there's typically security announcements every few minutes specifically telling you not to leave any items unattended or they may cause a security alert and be removed or destroyed.
All through July and August the warnings in London at least have been significantly more frequent and tougher in language many places, and you can see people looking around for the owner of any bag or similar that isn't being held on to - the only people I ever see on my way to/from work that more than a feet or two away from their luggage are obvious tourists.
For one, by spitting out XML you can specify an XSL stylesheet or a CSS file and make it possible for browser to render contents directly - including when the user has javascript turned off. It's a great way to allow the site to gracefully degrade. Add to that an argument to your scripts to let the server side do the XSL processing and pass back HTML and you can trivially build lots of fancy AJAX functionality but have the site gracefully degrade for clients that can't or won't handle either javascript or XSL.
You can also trivially make the API used for your AJAX interface available as an API for non-browser based applications to interface with your site - something that JSON isn't well suited for (I have lots of tools that can do stuff with XML in all the programming languages I know, I don't have any for JSON)
But when I've made a decision about some piece of nonsense that I've already filtered from my world, like, say, neo-Nazi propaganda, I can safely say that never seeing it again in no way limits my social health or narrows my views in detrimental ways.
Now, imagine everyone does this. Imagine trying to change society for the better, and being completely unable to, because only people that already agree with you will ever hear what you are saying.
Imagine people discussing how to make the world better only with people they agree with, endlessly debating why everything is just wrong and how nobody understands (because they aren't listening) and how your only way of making change is doing it yourself.
Are you sure? Movie critics have not really thrown society over the cliff or dissolved the cohesion like a giant bottle of Billy May's newest wonder solvent. Many of us probably have a couple of movie or book critics we might pay particular attention to, and if they give a movie or book a good review, we'd be more likely to see the movie or buy the book...
But that is exactly the point. Increasingly we self select our way into groups that think the same as us, to the exclusion of those who don't.
If you watch a mainstream news channel or read a mainstream newspaper, then even if there is a bias (that does contribute to polarising people in the sam way this article is about, but to a much lower degree) we are still exposed to some level of variation.
If you pick your newspaper because of a specific movie critic you'll likely see information not tailored to you in other sections, and the othe way around. You see a filtered view of the world, but not all of it filtered the same way all the time.
But if my only source of information are sites that show me information from people exactly like me, and only read news sources that show me information preferred by people exactly like me, and so on, then I would be increasingly isolating myself from other ideas.
Whether or not this will turn into an actual problem, or just cause the growth of more niche subcultures (because the "recruitment" is now instantly world wide) is an open question.
Thats great and all when you can do it in small groups, and for longer range planning. But my experience with classes - both as a student when I was a kid and teaching a few courses a few years ago - is that during a lecture you'll have little guidance on whether you're moving too fast or too slow. If you ask questions, there'll always be students that's hanging behind that do their best to conceal it because they don't want to seem stupid, and students that are ahead and just get bored and disinterested.
You'll also not have much of a chance of genuinely assessing how the group of students as a whole are handling the material.
I was the kind of student who'd never ever ask questions, who'd never volunteer answers, and who'd in general just try my best to get the teacher to ignore me because I usually found classes boring.
In a setting like that, having the chance of asking quick control questions that everyone can answer and seeing the results from a whole class in seconds without putting anyone on the spot can be quite helpful... Instead of asking and getting answers from 3-4 people and not knowing whether they're an anomaly or not, you immediately know exactly how many got what you're going through and how many don't...
It helps you tailor your presentation at a much more granular level - being able to skip material everyone understands, or repeat material lots of students have problems with.
With proper use, at the end of it you may end up having more time to spend on interacting with the individual students.
And, as an extra benefit, you'll already have a pretty good record of what they have problems with, that could replace a lot of quizes etc.
I can certainly see teacher abusing them, but I wouldn't discount them so quickly.
That's actually not only the case for Opera. Firefox and IE behaves the same way at least on Windows. The reason for that is pretty simple: What is the most frequent action for a user that clicks on the address bar? To type an entirely new address. While a user may have to devote extra thought to that the first time they click intending to modify the URL instead of typing a new one, most users will quickly be used to it and it will be more natural even if it is slightly different than most other text fields.
So it's not as consistent as some would like it. But the visual cues quickly makes it clear, and I'll take efficiency (for the user) over consistency when the two are at odds - after all the main goal of a consistent user interface IS efficiency. Consistency is pointless when it hinders an interface that allows users to be more efficient.
Bzzzt. Wrong. I hope for your sake that nobody takes you seriously. Local law governs what is legally copyrighted, however to my knowledge no country has copyright laws where the origin of the product mattered.
Most countries you're ever likely to visit are additionally signatories to the Bern convention on copyright, which specifically requires these countries to mutually recognise and enforce eachothers copyrights.
As a result any work copyrighted in the US is equally protected in Europe and most other parts of the world and vice versa.
As a result, if someone in Sweden did the same thing, while the US government can't do a thing - which is about the only thing you got right -, the Swedish government could. And depending on what you'd do with the content you'd be liable for anything from damages to massive fines and possibly imprisonment.
And no, this is certainly not a contract issue, but a copyright issue. Depending on what you'd do with the copyrighted work, you might be lucky ad only be risk a civil trial or you may have a full fledged criminal case on your hands.
(IANAL, but it doesn't stop me from knowing more about law than the poster I just replied to...)
That's not enough. I don't even have the flash plugin installed on my Linux box at home and it still ends up eating every page of memory it can get it's grubby paws on... After a few days Firefox typically consumes half a gig of memory or more and I end up having to kill it because my system starts trashing.
1st: You need serious Iron for this.
Either up to a few hundred beefed rack pc's (depends on how the mean usage of those 1 million accounts is) for load balancing, admin, fault tolerance, data and automation or some uber-special sun server solution for this. PCs are probably better. Scaling/maintaining is cheaper in the end.
You can easily do this with 10-20 relatively low end servers, few (4-5 of them perhaps) either talking to a SAN box or to some reasonably low end RAID's. Probably significantly less if he's willing to spend some time optimizing the system properly.
1 million accounts is small these days. I've worked on a mail system that at one point had around 300.000 active user accounts on a webmail solution run off of a single 5 year old quad CPU backend with four 5 year old 1U rack mounted servers and a single 4U SCSI RAID box, with significant capacity to spare.
It was scaled up dramatically after that to handle massive growth, and this was in the days when a few MB of storage was what was normal for mail storage, so the storage would need to be bigger today, but you'd be hard pressed to find servers for sale today as slow as the stuff we were running at the time.
The other thing to keep in mind is that IO needs have NOT scaled up to match the storage sizes, as e-mail access patterns are very focused on new messages and summary data (that any decent system will keep in indexes or cache files), which means that you can work with significantly lower end RAID/SAN systems today than what was needed when we did our system 5 years ago.
IMAP would increase IO bandwidth needs quite a bit over a properly optimised non-IMAP based webmail system, but again, you'd be hard pressed to find anything as slow as what we were running on back then.
1m mailboxes isn't much, and doesn't require a big complex system. Been there done that, and learned a lot (both about what to do and not to do) in the process, but the short story is that it isn't particularly hard.
The main challenge when I was doing it 5 years ago (I designed and wrote most of the prototype of a free webmail system, and managed the development team that completed it) was lack of good open source webmail solutions and lack of scalable mail storage systems, and hardware limitations.
Today there's a huge number of GOOD IMAP based webmail packages, such as IMP, and mail storage isn't much of a problem anymore - you can get a couple of TB of storage relatively cheaply.
Today, if I was going to do this in a corporate setting, I'd buy 3-4 small cheap servers to process inbound/outbound mail, 2-3 reasonably high powered machines with good IO capacity and RAID5 to split the users mail storage, POP/IMAP access over (IO is more or less the ONLY thing that really matters - whenever you need to make a choice, always choose higher IO capacity over almost anything else), 2 machines for an LDAP directory of which server the user is on, 2-3 cheap servers to run the web frontend on.
All in all for that kind of scale, if your total cost pans out to more than 20-30 cents per user in hardware these days you're doing something very,very wrong (and you can manage for MUCH less depending on usage patterns of your users and how much time you're willing to spend on tweaking the software).
Even if they turned out to be lying or if the document in and of itself isn't legally binding, they'd still get nowhere as most places they'd be prevented from getting any relief under the doctrine of promissory estoppel.
Essentially, if someone promises you that you can do something without being sued by them or acts in a way that give you good reason to believe they will not sue, and you rely on that promise or act, courts in most jurisdictions (particularly common law based jurisdictions like the US) will normally refuse to accept their claims even if you did technically violate the rights they promised not to enforce.
The strength of that defence will of wary depending on how the promise was made (i.e. how clearly it was stated and how reasonable it would be to rely on it), but in this case they've issued a press release, put up a document stating in legal terms what they are offering, and gotten it plastered all over the news.
Getting a court to ignore a defendant claiming promissory estoppel in a case like that would be near impossible.
I think you've just demonstrated why this functionality isn't exposed very well. Most people don't care. From looking at people using their desktops, my impression is that there's a very small minority that neatly organises their windows. The rest either leave their windows in a mess and usually keep most of them minimised, or maximise most of them (my preference - I keep a few virtual screens dedicated to various main tasks and alt tab between related apps on the same screen, with very few exceptions).
It's one of those "nice to have" functions because some people really like it, but it doesn't belong in the UI and shouldn't take up space on menu's etc. because it's a niche function (just waiting to get flamed now...)
Re:KDE Zealots: A vocal minority of a dying DE
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 1
I use Gnome and certainly prefer it over KDE, but by your logic we should all be running Windows. After all it's what most people use, right, so it must be absolutely fantastic?
Or perhaps it's more of a question of how many other things that play into what distro's people decide to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it is by no means a foregone conclusion that there is life elsewhere. Probable? Possibly, but we don't have much data to back it up. So far we know of only carbon based lifeforms, and we know of no planets outside the solar system even remotely likely to be able to sustain lifeforms like us. We don't have any data (as opposed to theories) that indicates that other types of lifeforms are even possible.
We don't even know if planets likely to harbour life will ever be found outside the solar system, or if our system is an aberration.
You say it's an overblown sense of how special we are, but that's not only it: IF there is only one planet with intelligent life in the universe, then if you are discussing the issue of whether or not there is life in the universe you will be on that planet.
In other words, the likelihood is 100% that in the case only one planet harbours intelligent life, and intelligent being will find itself on that planet.
So talking about the probabilities is meaningless: If the odds of life starting are high, then yes, the probability that we are alone is low. But we don't know that - we have never observed the evolution of life from precursors to life in any meaningful sense, and still do not understand the process very well.
And we certainly don't know if the conditions in which life arose on earth has ever existed anywhere else, nor if there are other conditions which are favorable enough for life to develop.
That is why finding life on Mars would be important - it would increase our number of data points from one to two, and possibly give us significantly better data on the range of conditions that life can survive in as well as the forms of life that exists.
And if they'd set out to "milk the whole Linux thing" wouldn't they have included a Linux distribution or to instead?
They are responding to customer demand, nothing more, nothing less. That's how they stay in business and make money.
The moment they face a competing spec which allows users to pick applications based on features and price instead of MS compatibility they will face a steady erosion of customers that find alternatives that work for them.
Look at any other monopoly that have been forced to open up to competition - many of them have remained strong players, but I can't name a single one that have been able to avoid a dramatic reduction in market share.
Yay :) I hit the mark quite well with in all categories then, and managed to avoid the bad guys...
For instance, Charlie McGreevy is nominated in the "Commissioner of the year" category, and as far as I remember he's one of the people that have tried hard to push the pro-patent agenda - but I have no idea if any of the other ones listed have stated an opinion either way.
Also, Michel Rocard is a candidate for MEP of the year, and since he helped push quite reasonable modification attempts to the directive he might be a good choice - do you think any of the other MEP's are better alternatives? And why?
For Stateman of the year, while I'm sure people have lots of other reasons to pick a candidate, which of these government do you consider the most receptive to the anti-patent agenda?
And are any of the "diplomat of the year" candidates known to support either side?
Any of the companies represented with Business leader of the year candidates known to be particularly for or against software patents?
Vidar
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Notice that this gives the licensee (i.e. the user) the choice of which GPL version to use. NOT the person issuing the license.
That is the form of the copyright notice using the GPL that I've seen on all GPL'd software I've looked at the notice for, except for the Linux kernel and the occasional other code that sometimes explicitly remove the option for the user to use a later version.
And then at some point they will need aid again. And again. And again. Focusing on giving short term relief instead of helping developent is damaging - in the long run far more people will die through that approach than by helping kickstart development so these countries standa a chance of getting away from depending on aid that often will not come in time.
As for your salary numbers, though, you are far off - last I checked average salary was more like 25k GBP.
Uh. Yeah. MOST people I see on the London transport network try their best to avoid any eye contact with anyone, and seeing police in London is so common that they're hardly worthy any extra notice.
--two other men entered the station at about the same time as me;
Uhuh. Because that is really unusual at Southwark during the evening rush... For those unfamiliar with it, Southwark is the closest tube station to Waterloo East, and thus a significant interchange point along one of the main rail lines in/out of central London as well as being in the middle of an area with a significant number of large office buildings.
--I am wearing a jacket "too warm for the season";
Except that it was a cold day...
--I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times;
Ok, so carrying a bulky rucksack a week after the failed attacks on the 21st was perhaps asking for some extra attention - and the way I understood it he wouldn't have complained if they'd let him go when having checked out his rucksack. But keeping it with him at all times? Anyone travelling regularly into London can more or less recite the security warnings that go out over the speakers at every damn tube and rail station every few minutes telling us in a few different wordings to keep our belongings with us at all times to avoid uneccesary security alerts or they might get removed or destroyed by the security services... Whenever I have a rucksack or suitcase with me, I hold on to it at all times - I'd rather not have my laptop blown up, thank you very much.
--I looked at people coming on the platform;
Hey, one of my favorite pastimes when waiting for a train. Waiting is boring. Looking around you is a fairly natural way of making time pass.
--I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket.
Seriously... That just describes about half the travellers on my route to work.
But we agree that the rest of what he went through was ridiculous. Makes me wonder why I've never been stopped considering I've carried bulky rucksacks with me to/from work several times a week, but I guess being blonde and blue eyes they don't think I'm capable of doing anything bad.
All through July and August the warnings in London at least have been significantly more frequent and tougher in language many places, and you can see people looking around for the owner of any bag or similar that isn't being held on to - the only people I ever see on my way to/from work that more than a feet or two away from their luggage are obvious tourists.
You can also trivially make the API used for your AJAX interface available as an API for non-browser based applications to interface with your site - something that JSON isn't well suited for (I have lots of tools that can do stuff with XML in all the programming languages I know, I don't have any for JSON)
Now, imagine everyone does this. Imagine trying to change society for the better, and being completely unable to, because only people that already agree with you will ever hear what you are saying.
Imagine people discussing how to make the world better only with people they agree with, endlessly debating why everything is just wrong and how nobody understands (because they aren't listening) and how your only way of making change is doing it yourself.
That's how many extremist movements were born.
But that is exactly the point. Increasingly we self select our way into groups that think the same as us, to the exclusion of those who don't.
If you watch a mainstream news channel or read a mainstream newspaper, then even if there is a bias (that does contribute to polarising people in the sam way this article is about, but to a much lower degree) we are still exposed to some level of variation.
If you pick your newspaper because of a specific movie critic you'll likely see information not tailored to you in other sections, and the othe way around. You see a filtered view of the world, but not all of it filtered the same way all the time.
But if my only source of information are sites that show me information from people exactly like me, and only read news sources that show me information preferred by people exactly like me, and so on, then I would be increasingly isolating myself from other ideas.
Whether or not this will turn into an actual problem, or just cause the growth of more niche subcultures (because the "recruitment" is now instantly world wide) is an open question.
You'll also not have much of a chance of genuinely assessing how the group of students as a whole are handling the material.
I was the kind of student who'd never ever ask questions, who'd never volunteer answers, and who'd in general just try my best to get the teacher to ignore me because I usually found classes boring.
In a setting like that, having the chance of asking quick control questions that everyone can answer and seeing the results from a whole class in seconds without putting anyone on the spot can be quite helpful... Instead of asking and getting answers from 3-4 people and not knowing whether they're an anomaly or not, you immediately know exactly how many got what you're going through and how many don't...
It helps you tailor your presentation at a much more granular level - being able to skip material everyone understands, or repeat material lots of students have problems with.
With proper use, at the end of it you may end up having more time to spend on interacting with the individual students.
And, as an extra benefit, you'll already have a pretty good record of what they have problems with, that could replace a lot of quizes etc.
I can certainly see teacher abusing them, but I wouldn't discount them so quickly.
So it's not as consistent as some would like it. But the visual cues quickly makes it clear, and I'll take efficiency (for the user) over consistency when the two are at odds - after all the main goal of a consistent user interface IS efficiency. Consistency is pointless when it hinders an interface that allows users to be more efficient.
Database system != application server. Besides, the Oracle RBMS has been available for Linux since '98.
So exactly when did Illinois get transplanted to Australia?
Haven't you noticed that special taste your burgers and fries sometimes get? :)
Most countries you're ever likely to visit are additionally signatories to the Bern convention on copyright, which specifically requires these countries to mutually recognise and enforce eachothers copyrights.
As a result any work copyrighted in the US is equally protected in Europe and most other parts of the world and vice versa.
As a result, if someone in Sweden did the same thing, while the US government can't do a thing - which is about the only thing you got right -, the Swedish government could. And depending on what you'd do with the content you'd be liable for anything from damages to massive fines and possibly imprisonment.
And no, this is certainly not a contract issue, but a copyright issue. Depending on what you'd do with the copyrighted work, you might be lucky ad only be risk a civil trial or you may have a full fledged criminal case on your hands.
(IANAL, but it doesn't stop me from knowing more about law than the poster I just replied to...)
That's not enough. I don't even have the flash plugin installed on my Linux box at home and it still ends up eating every page of memory it can get it's grubby paws on... After a few days Firefox typically consumes half a gig of memory or more and I end up having to kill it because my system starts trashing.
You can easily do this with 10-20 relatively low end servers, few (4-5 of them perhaps) either talking to a SAN box or to some reasonably low end RAID's. Probably significantly less if he's willing to spend some time optimizing the system properly.
1 million accounts is small these days. I've worked on a mail system that at one point had around 300.000 active user accounts on a webmail solution run off of a single 5 year old quad CPU backend with four 5 year old 1U rack mounted servers and a single 4U SCSI RAID box, with significant capacity to spare.
It was scaled up dramatically after that to handle massive growth, and this was in the days when a few MB of storage was what was normal for mail storage, so the storage would need to be bigger today, but you'd be hard pressed to find servers for sale today as slow as the stuff we were running at the time.
The other thing to keep in mind is that IO needs have NOT scaled up to match the storage sizes, as e-mail access patterns are very focused on new messages and summary data (that any decent system will keep in indexes or cache files), which means that you can work with significantly lower end RAID/SAN systems today than what was needed when we did our system 5 years ago.
IMAP would increase IO bandwidth needs quite a bit over a properly optimised non-IMAP based webmail system, but again, you'd be hard pressed to find anything as slow as what we were running on back then.
The main challenge when I was doing it 5 years ago (I designed and wrote most of the prototype of a free webmail system, and managed the development team that completed it) was lack of good open source webmail solutions and lack of scalable mail storage systems, and hardware limitations.
Today there's a huge number of GOOD IMAP based webmail packages, such as IMP, and mail storage isn't much of a problem anymore - you can get a couple of TB of storage relatively cheaply.
Today, if I was going to do this in a corporate setting, I'd buy 3-4 small cheap servers to process inbound/outbound mail, 2-3 reasonably high powered machines with good IO capacity and RAID5 to split the users mail storage, POP/IMAP access over (IO is more or less the ONLY thing that really matters - whenever you need to make a choice, always choose higher IO capacity over almost anything else), 2 machines for an LDAP directory of which server the user is on, 2-3 cheap servers to run the web frontend on.
All in all for that kind of scale, if your total cost pans out to more than 20-30 cents per user in hardware these days you're doing something very,very wrong (and you can manage for MUCH less depending on usage patterns of your users and how much time you're willing to spend on tweaking the software).
Essentially, if someone promises you that you can do something without being sued by them or acts in a way that give you good reason to believe they will not sue, and you rely on that promise or act, courts in most jurisdictions (particularly common law based jurisdictions like the US) will normally refuse to accept their claims even if you did technically violate the rights they promised not to enforce.
The strength of that defence will of wary depending on how the promise was made (i.e. how clearly it was stated and how reasonable it would be to rely on it), but in this case they've issued a press release, put up a document stating in legal terms what they are offering, and gotten it plastered all over the news.
Getting a court to ignore a defendant claiming promissory estoppel in a case like that would be near impossible.
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
It's one of those "nice to have" functions because some people really like it, but it doesn't belong in the UI and shouldn't take up space on menu's etc. because it's a niche function (just waiting to get flamed now...)
Or perhaps it's more of a question of how many other things that play into what distro's people decide to use.