I'd be surprised if a person could enjoy, or even sit still through, the final 2-3 episodes of Evangelion without being able to appreciate the comparitively minor viewer-abusiveness in FLCL.
Maybe your, uh, 'viewing director' skipped over them- some people tend to hit NGE ep 24 (which contains the show's second minute+ period of absolute motionlessness) and tell their friends "Ok, show's over folks. Gainax ran out of funds and couldn't complete it."
You didn't mention the reactions to Serial Experiments Lain and Escaflowne, two shows I perpetually recommend.
I'll assume by "Anime" you mean "Anime on US TV"... otherwise you're very far off. A show can only jump the shark if it was ever good to begin with. I love Anime, but have never been able to sit a single episode of the kinds of dubbing that gets broadcast around here. (Rare theatrical dub jobs, like recent Disney publications of Ghilbi, are OK).
And if you mean "Anime in general", or "Anime in the US", then marketplace-wise, the first is in trouble, and the second is still picking up speed. More and more Japanese producers are including projected US sales in their decision to create a show at all.
So, I wonder what this CN annoucement means for their funding of Big O season 2?
Oddly, if actually read the original comics, it turns out that Superman was superior to humans in all respects- not just strength, speed, and morality, but intelligence too. Usually the authors forgot to make him smart, otherwise there wouldn't even be the illusion that the villians were challenging him.
If you look just at the ability to create cool gizmos (supposedly one of Batman's strengths), you'll see that Superman has him beat there, too. For instance, Superman has created self-aware robots with the same durability and flying power as himself. When Batman tried the same stunt, robo-batman couldn't even climb down a ladder right. (Although it did manage to interrupt a few crimes, just by looking menacing. This was in the episode where Batman had 'the bends' from an unplanned scuba trip and couldn't leave his lair)
e-tailor? Sounds like a robot sewing your clothes, or maybe those Personal Area Networks that have cat5 and DC power running between your jacket pockets.
You could try the word "e-tailer", based on "retailer", but it's still a dumb pun.
The governments shouldn't need to create any new laws to tax internet sales, because they should already do so.
Performing an age old activity like sending packages through the mail in exchange for money transmitted by credit card should be equally taxable regardless of whether the customer places her order via phone, email, paper mail, http, fax, or the trusty old carrier pigeon.
We've seen it again and again- government regulators/lawmakers/busybodies get tricked into thinking that activities are somehow inherently different when computers and internet are involved. This gives us special laws to prohibit computer intrusion (we've had wire fraud statutes since 1910) and special patents for "carrying out traditional business XYZ, but over http".
I can understand the argument that to support budding e-commerce, you want to give them a temporary reprieve from some normal costs of business. But the expiration of such grace periods shouldn't be newsworthy, it should just be expected.
Much better than a PCMCIA card would be reading upgrades CDROM/CD-R! Then the system could be user-upgradable without adding any additional (rarely used) hardware to the player. (beyond flash-ram chips)
OTOH, some new players are coming with slots for flash ram from digital cameras.
Yes, but the fact that dates were ever stored as strings in the first place was itself a major design flaw. It led not only to memory wastage and Y2K itself, but also reduced interoperability of all kinds of computer databases, because they first had to parse out each other's nonstandard date formats before comparing data.
"accidentally released" is wrong, or prehaps whitewashing by RTM's friends. The release was fully intentional. What was accidental about it is that he hadn't realized that in addition to infecting virtually every UNIX system it found, it would also DOS them. The worm constantly tried to infect every available system, meaning that a system which was vulnerable would recieve many, MANY copies of the worm, exhausting its processing power.
RTM had been aware of the possiblilty, and implemented a fix- but he did it wrong. He'd created code so that a new worm, when first arriving at a host, could check if a previous instance of the worm had been there. If so, it could abort its infection process.
However, he was afraid that this would make vaccinating machines too easy (by sysops faking the "already infected" flag), so he created a 12.5% random chance that an incoming worm would ignored the fact that a machine was already compromised and infect it again. That probability had NO rational basis behind it, (in fact the whole idea of using randomizing like this is flawed), and served to postpone the shutdown of the internet by at most an hour.
This was an especially bad blunder because it set a frightening example of what hackers could do. If RTM had used a 100% chance of non-reinfection, (and played his cards right from then on), he'd have been hailed as an innovative security analyst who'd prevented security-compromising violations of the Pentagon's systems. Instead he was tossed in prison for years.
The movie touches on that most first world countries have yearly gun murder rates below 200, whereas, the us has over 11,000.
Please, don't ever compare absolute numbers for things that should be measured per-capita. The US has a much greater population than the other first world nations.
Maybe you're just re-quoting a statistic Moore tossed out because it sounded exciting, but regardless of your stance on the issues, please don't propagate incomplete facts.
Oh, and what's the spoiler? How is it possible to spoil a documenary, anyway??
Deus Ex does not permit nonviolent solutions to problems. If you confuse nonlethal force with nonviolence, then you might think so, but there are places in the game's linear plot where you just have to kill people to advance. In several places the storyline designers have ignored your ability to apply sub-fatal force, creating plot holes.
The ship. Your mission is to blow up the ship, and there's about 50 people on it. They're all going to die. If you don't kill them, you can't progress in the game. I even tried clobbering people and carrying them away, but that gets ludicrous (and you can't really get them outside of the explosion radius anyhow).
The airport. Your mission is to kill an unarmed "terrorist" leader. I go in there, tranquilize him, and heft him over my shoulder for the march back to headquarters. Even after the slumbering criminal mastermind has been deposited on the desk of the UNATCO chief, they still don't notice that he's still alive, and gameplay proceeds as if you'd killed him.
"Bosses". There's a handful of cybernetic supervillians you've got to fight your way through. Its possible to defeat them in a manner that is technically nonviolent (overriding a computer code to power them off), but they still wind up dead.
Deus Ex is a still a great game, though. For any particular problem it has, there's really no way they could've done it better without impairing the fundamental gameplay.
Your list of prices goes $20, $40, $90, $100, $120...
The jump between $40 cable and $90 SDSL is a big one. If there was a $60 offering to fill that gap- something like enhanced cable modem service- it would satisfy most of the bandwidth hogging, amateur server operator customers.
A cheaper DSL serivce could hit that market also, but DSL in most places is still too unreliable to be a viable choice (going by my own experience in eastern Massachusetts, which I'm assuming has above-average rates of technology adoption) (and wireless is much too new and too slow)
Also, "average joes" do want high speed uploads- Kazaa & similar are popular even at low levels of technical proficiency. And if fast uploads were widely available for a few months, we'd see an explosive increase in personal use of VOIP and video-chat technologies. And they'd like to play high-speed games without subscribing to an additional 3rd party server. Video-chat especially is one of the telegenic applications that "broadband" providers (I'm targeting AT&T here) advertise in their televison ads, but then don't deliver in the service.
(getting more and more off the topic of your post, but back towards lofty/zany goals of the Tom Paine article...)
The claim that "average users only want to download, not upload" is mostly true today, but it doesn't have to be that way! The corporate purveyors of broadcast television and related mass-media don't want to see the democratization of content creation that will threaten their business models. (I should blather about mind-numbing glass-teat opiates of the masses, etc... you know the drill)
Copyright laws help them do this. With luck, Eldred will get the Sonny Bono act struck down. With a lot more luck, the legally identical 1956 extension will be revoked as well- suddenly we'd have a relevant public domain again! TV shows that people still remember, even things as recent as the original Star Wars movie would be freely tradable. Networks like Kazaa and Gnutella would get a cornucopia of legal materials to traffic in, and could grow and experiment in technological improvements and semi-centralized control, without fearing a government crackdown. Suddenly Joe Average has even better reasons to leave his computer uploading all weekend long.
Who knows, the new bounty of source materials, combined with increasingly easy-to-use authoring software might enable a new generation of multi-media authors. We saw that the Phantom Editor could improve on hollywood's technique. Maybe he could redo Star Wars Episode "4" the right way, this time, and step out of the shadows without fear of reprisal.
There currently are no good ways to store large quantities of power without incurring huge losses to heat or using very expensive storage media. Electricity is generated and used largely on-demand.
Umm, what's the difference between "generating on demand" and "storing power until needed"? The above poster wasn't suggesting some kind of big capacitor or chemical cell battery to hold the electricity until used- just reminding us that power companies can reduce their consumption of coal/uranium during periods of low demand.
They need to plan ahead 12-hour or so make those sorts of adjustments, so they can't instantly adjust the generators to moment-by-moment demand.
But with ISPs in the bandwidth industry, their window for adjusting costs is much larger- they can't just bring a generator offline to compensate for a lull in demand. Their investments are staff and capital equipment, whose costs come not from using them but just having them. If they prepare for 50 gig/sec (across all users), and customers only use 20, they're not saving any money.
The routers have already been bought, the staff on duty, the frames with the international carriers have been contracted. There's not much elasticity.
Not quite. Petroleum taxes are nearly the same as a tax on road usage, but they are not identical. (People use petroleum off road and on private tracks, and other people use alternative fuels while driving on public streets).
The statement "metering is too expensive" is true both for roads (and with today's ISP technology) bandwidth. In both cases, the provider levies a charge that approximates metered payment, but is not truely metered.
The complaint today is that most ISPs use an approximation that is much coarser than really nessecary, and that they could create more precise meters easily.
The costs of laying cable will not be a true factor in bandwidth prices for decades, if not a century. So much cable was laid from 1997-2001 that even at today's peak usage, 97% of all long-haul fibers are totally unused.
(Another fun statistic, gleaned from wsj.com, is that the fiber in Chicago has enough capacity to carry all of the internet traffic in the US)
And, upgrades in laser-modulation technology will allow future ISPs to multiply the bandwidth capacity of existing fiber many times, further pushing back the need to ever make more fibers.
Of course, there is cost in maintaining the routers on each end of the cable, but the hard work of digging ditches has been completed.
You get what you pay for, and if you aren't willing to pay more for a better service then you shouldn't expect it.
Your menu is better than average, but it only lists one possible cable modem offering- demonstrating that we don't really have the choice to pay for what we want. Many cable-modem users wouldn't mind spending an additional $20/month for a higher bandwidth cap and some unblocked ports- but the vendor has no intention of offering that kind of option. (To split cable-modem service into 2 levels would be admitting that their advertisments of "unlimited high speed internet" were in fact fraudlent)
From the point of view of computer terminolgy, and also heavy game players, Tetris is not a game at all. Both the Game Theory branch of mathematics and any big playing group will tell you that games are all about opposition- two competitors pitting their skills against each other using a set of rules. Pure tetris has only one player, and (like things called Solitare) isn't really a game.
(The mathematicians go even further, and only classify problems as a game if there is are no elements unknown to the players- so no facedown cards, and no rolling of dice)
Corporations like Microsoft and Apple have a long history of publishing UI guideline and then ignoring them in their own products.
I haven't read the Aqua guidelines, but Apple's OSX desktop has some major violations of accepted user interface principles in it. Particularly with the "Dock" (which maybe isn't technically part of Aqua, as some people install replacement taskbars).
The big theoretical error in the Dock is that icons in it can be 3 completely different things. Metaphorical consistency is totally broken. An icon in the dock may be a program you have installed and can start up, or it could be a document you have open now, or it could be a folder (or the trashcan).
Microsoft made the same mistake in Microsoft Windows 3.0(tm), where an icon was either not yet running program, or something executing currently. UI aficionados and Mac-heads rightly attacked them for this, and it was basically corrected in Microsoft Windows 95(tm), where icons began meaning files.
Now Apple's dock is making the same mistake Microsoft once did! Even worse, in some ways. The buttons I use to run commonly accessed programs shouldn't shrink and move based on the number of web-browser windows I have open- they should be independent and non-interfering.
It's perfectly logical, as long as your favorite language isn't semetic. In English and most languages, you write from top to bottom and from left to right. Thus in general, for any random window full of content, most of the stuff will be towards the upper left. So your mouse is normally going to be in that area, and controls will be easier to access if they're above or to the left of the window. That's why we have menus and toolbars on top of windows, and why its argued that scrollbars should be to the left.
Force of history has moved scrollbars to the right side, though, because other motivations trumped speed of access. Maybe because having more space between scrollbars and content looks less cluttered. Maybe because menus & buttons already owned the top/left edges of the window, so scrollbars got pushed to the bottom/right. Whatever the reason, it was a mistake. Vertical scrolling is important enough that it should be on the more accessible left.
This problem is particularly annoying if you're using one of the now-common tiled tree|details views, like found in Microsoft Explorer(tm), Microsoft VisualStudio(tm), or Konqueror (some modes).
In the case of VisualStudio, you'll have a list of files on the left, and the contents of the currently selected file on the right. But if you're browsing around, you often want to open up a file and start scrolling up and down within it. But to reach the rightside scroll bar, you have to pass all the way over the content before you can scroll. A leftside bar would be much more convenient (of course, people with mouse wheels can just use that instead- but if you're gonna do that, you may as well remove the whole scrollbar)
My company has sold the government the same code many times over. The government already owns it, but they've got hundreds of thousands of employees. With security clearances and separation of powers, a single federal procurer needing a problem solved can't even begin to list the pieces of government-owned code that might be helpful. Chances are he'll recreate the original purchasing search until he wanders smack into the vendor who wrote it the first time around.
And even if they are aware of owning code suitable for a task, the source code delivery is still probably too hard for them to figure out how to use. "Will it still compile? Is it y2k compliant? Does it boot on a Pentium4?" Without the competency to answer those questions on their own, they're forced to return to the original vendor with the checkbook open.
However, if the code wasn't only locked in a Pentagon vault, but also up on http://www.dod.gov/downloads, then maybe some other members of industry would gain some experience with the code. Then, the next time the government needs a tiny modification, reconfiguration, or simple reinstallation of a software product, they'll be a little be of competition for who gets the job!
The reverse question is more interesting. The fact is, Netscape was always theoretically a commerical product, but it was distributed free to students and researchers specifically to prevent a GPL'd web browser from being created
Marc Andressen knew how easy it was for a few college students to write an http client (he'd done it himself). And if at any point a pair of half-decent CS undergrads had found themselves unable to download a free graphical webbrowser, they'd have written their own inside of a weekend.
Naturally a chain of enhancements would follow, and maybe endorsement by w3c.org as the "reference" http client implementation, and the saleability of the Netscape Navigator product would melt away.
You say they were "disallowed". How so? Is it that you can trust these sneaky spooks to obey the laws of their own country?
Or maybe the new breed of Software Lobbyist was upset that the government could start to shut off the dollar faucet by pursuing cheaper economic models for creating computer programs?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be surprised if a person could enjoy, or even sit still through, the final 2-3 episodes of Evangelion without being able to appreciate the comparitively minor viewer-abusiveness in FLCL.
Maybe your, uh, 'viewing director' skipped over them- some people tend to hit NGE ep 24 (which contains the show's second minute+ period of absolute motionlessness) and tell their friends "Ok, show's over folks. Gainax ran out of funds and couldn't complete it."
You didn't mention the reactions to Serial Experiments Lain and Escaflowne, two shows I perpetually recommend.
I'll assume by "Anime" you mean "Anime on US TV"... otherwise you're very far off. A show can only jump the shark if it was ever good to begin with. I love Anime, but have never been able to sit a single episode of the kinds of dubbing that gets broadcast around here. (Rare theatrical dub jobs, like recent Disney publications of Ghilbi, are OK).
And if you mean "Anime in general", or "Anime in the US", then marketplace-wise, the first is in trouble, and the second is still picking up speed. More and more Japanese producers are including projected US sales in their decision to create a show at all.
So, I wonder what this CN annoucement means for their funding of Big O season 2?
Hear hear. The name "Adult Swim" (kids out of the pool) never really fit, since besides Cowboy Bebop all the listed shows are for children.
(Maybe they're marginally more mature than the programming American kids get, but not by much. Gundam is still an extra-long toy ad)
Oddly, if actually read the original comics, it turns out that Superman was superior to humans in all respects- not just strength, speed, and morality, but intelligence too. Usually the authors forgot to make him smart, otherwise there wouldn't even be the illusion that the villians were challenging him.
If you look just at the ability to create cool gizmos (supposedly one of Batman's strengths), you'll see that Superman has him beat there, too. For instance, Superman has created self-aware robots with the same durability and flying power as himself. When Batman tried the same stunt, robo-batman couldn't even climb down a ladder right. (Although it did manage to interrupt a few crimes, just by looking menacing. This was in the episode where Batman had 'the bends' from an unplanned scuba trip and couldn't leave his lair)
Oh? What about Batman vs Predator, or Aliens vs Superman?
Both of those have already been officially published! BvP,
AvS
e-tailor? Sounds like a robot sewing your clothes, or maybe those Personal Area Networks that have cat5 and DC power running between your jacket pockets.
You could try the word "e-tailer", based on "retailer", but it's still a dumb pun.
The governments shouldn't need to create any new laws to tax internet sales, because they should already do so.
Performing an age old activity like sending packages through the mail in exchange for money transmitted by credit card should be equally taxable regardless of whether the customer places her order via phone, email, paper mail, http, fax, or the trusty old carrier pigeon.
We've seen it again and again- government regulators/lawmakers/busybodies get tricked into thinking that activities are somehow inherently different when computers and internet are involved. This gives us special laws to prohibit computer intrusion (we've had wire fraud statutes since 1910) and special patents for "carrying out traditional business XYZ, but over http".
I can understand the argument that to support budding e-commerce, you want to give them a temporary reprieve from some normal costs of business. But the expiration of such grace periods shouldn't be newsworthy, it should just be expected.
Its about time this happened.
Much better than a PCMCIA card would be reading upgrades CDROM/CD-R! Then the system could be user-upgradable without adding any additional (rarely used) hardware to the player. (beyond flash-ram chips)
OTOH, some new players are coming with slots for flash ram from digital cameras.
Evidently he thinks Enterprise's only redeeming quality is the opportunity to watch that actress strip down in the decontamination chamber every week.
Yes, but the fact that dates were ever stored as strings in the first place was itself a major design flaw. It led not only to memory wastage and Y2K itself, but also reduced interoperability of all kinds of computer databases, because they first had to parse out each other's nonstandard date formats before comparing data.
"accidentally released" is wrong, or prehaps whitewashing by RTM's friends. The release was fully intentional. What was accidental about it is that he hadn't realized that in addition to infecting virtually every UNIX system it found, it would also DOS them. The worm constantly tried to infect every available system, meaning that a system which was vulnerable would recieve many, MANY copies of the worm, exhausting its processing power.
RTM had been aware of the possiblilty, and implemented a fix- but he did it wrong. He'd created code so that a new worm, when first arriving at a host, could check if a previous instance of the worm had been there. If so, it could abort its infection process.
However, he was afraid that this would make vaccinating machines too easy (by sysops faking the "already infected" flag), so he created a 12.5% random chance that an incoming worm would ignored the fact that a machine was already compromised and infect it again. That probability had NO rational basis behind it, (in fact the whole idea of using randomizing like this is flawed), and served to postpone the shutdown of the internet by at most an hour.
This was an especially bad blunder because it set a frightening example of what hackers could do. If RTM had used a 100% chance of non-reinfection, (and played his cards right from then on), he'd have been hailed as an innovative security analyst who'd prevented security-compromising violations of the Pentagon's systems. Instead he was tossed in prison for years.
The movie touches on that most first world countries have yearly gun murder rates below 200, whereas, the us has over 11,000.
Please, don't ever compare absolute numbers for things that should be measured per-capita. The US has a much greater population than the other first world nations.
Maybe you're just re-quoting a statistic Moore tossed out because it sounded exciting, but regardless of your stance on the issues, please don't propagate incomplete facts.
Oh, and what's the spoiler? How is it possible to spoil a documenary, anyway??
Deus Ex is a still a great game, though. For any particular problem it has, there's really no way they could've done it better without impairing the fundamental gameplay.
Your list of prices goes $20, $40, $90, $100, $120...
The jump between $40 cable and $90 SDSL is a big one. If there was a $60 offering to fill that gap- something like enhanced cable modem service- it would satisfy most of the bandwidth hogging, amateur server operator customers.
A cheaper DSL serivce could hit that market also, but DSL in most places is still too unreliable to be a viable choice (going by my own experience in eastern Massachusetts, which I'm assuming has above-average rates of technology adoption) (and wireless is much too new and too slow)
Also, "average joes" do want high speed uploads- Kazaa & similar are popular even at low levels of technical proficiency. And if fast uploads were widely available for a few months, we'd see an explosive increase in personal use of VOIP and video-chat technologies. And they'd like to play high-speed games without subscribing to an additional 3rd party server. Video-chat especially is one of the telegenic applications that "broadband" providers (I'm targeting AT&T here) advertise in their televison ads, but then don't deliver in the service.
(getting more and more off the topic of your post, but back towards lofty/zany goals of the Tom Paine article...)
The claim that "average users only want to download, not upload" is mostly true today, but it doesn't have to be that way! The corporate purveyors of broadcast television and related mass-media don't want to see the democratization of content creation that will threaten their business models. (I should blather about mind-numbing glass-teat opiates of the masses, etc... you know the drill)
Copyright laws help them do this. With luck, Eldred will get the Sonny Bono act struck down. With a lot more luck, the legally identical 1956 extension will be revoked as well- suddenly we'd have a relevant public domain again! TV shows that people still remember, even things as recent as the original Star Wars movie would be freely tradable. Networks like Kazaa and Gnutella would get a cornucopia of legal materials to traffic in, and could grow and experiment in technological improvements and semi-centralized control, without fearing a government crackdown. Suddenly Joe Average has even better reasons to leave his computer uploading all weekend long.
Who knows, the new bounty of source materials, combined with increasingly easy-to-use authoring software might enable a new generation of multi-media authors. We saw that the Phantom Editor could improve on hollywood's technique. Maybe he could redo Star Wars Episode "4" the right way, this time, and step out of the shadows without fear of reprisal.
There currently are no good ways to store large quantities of power without incurring huge losses to heat or using very expensive storage media. Electricity is generated and used largely on-demand.
Umm, what's the difference between "generating on demand" and "storing power until needed"? The above poster wasn't suggesting some kind of big capacitor or chemical cell battery to hold the electricity until used- just reminding us that power companies can reduce their consumption of coal/uranium during periods of low demand.
They need to plan ahead 12-hour or so make those sorts of adjustments, so they can't instantly adjust the generators to moment-by-moment demand.
But with ISPs in the bandwidth industry, their window for adjusting costs is much larger- they can't just bring a generator offline to compensate for a lull in demand. Their investments are staff and capital equipment, whose costs come not from using them but just having them. If they prepare for 50 gig/sec (across all users), and customers only use 20, they're not saving any money.
The routers have already been bought, the staff on duty, the frames with the international carriers have been contracted. There's not much elasticity.
Not quite. Petroleum taxes are nearly the same as a tax on road usage, but they are not identical. (People use petroleum off road and on private tracks, and other people use alternative fuels while driving on public streets).
The statement "metering is too expensive" is true both for roads (and with today's ISP technology) bandwidth. In both cases, the provider levies a charge that approximates metered payment, but is not truely metered.
The complaint today is that most ISPs use an approximation that is much coarser than really nessecary, and that they could create more precise meters easily.
The costs of laying cable will not be a true factor in bandwidth prices for decades, if not a century. So much cable was laid from 1997-2001 that even at today's peak usage, 97% of all long-haul fibers are totally unused.
(Another fun statistic, gleaned from wsj.com, is that the fiber in Chicago has enough capacity to carry all of the internet traffic in the US)
And, upgrades in laser-modulation technology will allow future ISPs to multiply the bandwidth capacity of existing fiber many times, further pushing back the need to ever make more fibers.
Of course, there is cost in maintaining the routers on each end of the cable, but the hard work of digging ditches has been completed.
You get what you pay for, and if you aren't willing to pay more for a better service then you shouldn't expect it.
Your menu is better than average, but it only lists one possible cable modem offering- demonstrating that we don't really have the choice to pay for what we want. Many cable-modem users wouldn't mind spending an additional $20/month for a higher bandwidth cap and some unblocked ports- but the vendor has no intention of offering that kind of option. (To split cable-modem service into 2 levels would be admitting that their advertisments of "unlimited high speed internet" were in fact fraudlent)
From the point of view of computer terminolgy, and also heavy game players, Tetris is not a game at all. Both the Game Theory branch of mathematics and any big playing group will tell you that games are all about opposition- two competitors pitting their skills against each other using a set of rules. Pure tetris has only one player, and (like things called Solitare) isn't really a game.
(The mathematicians go even further, and only classify problems as a game if there is are no elements unknown to the players- so no facedown cards, and no rolling of dice)
Corporations like Microsoft and Apple have a long history of publishing UI guideline and then ignoring them in their own products.
I haven't read the Aqua guidelines, but Apple's OSX desktop has some major violations of accepted user interface principles in it. Particularly with the "Dock" (which maybe isn't technically part of Aqua, as some people install replacement taskbars).
The big theoretical error in the Dock is that icons in it can be 3 completely different things. Metaphorical consistency is totally broken. An icon in the dock may be a program you have installed and can start up, or it could be a document you have open now, or it could be a folder (or the trashcan).
Microsoft made the same mistake in Microsoft Windows 3.0(tm), where an icon was either not yet running program, or something executing currently. UI aficionados and Mac-heads rightly attacked them for this, and it was basically corrected in Microsoft Windows 95(tm), where icons began meaning files.
Now Apple's dock is making the same mistake Microsoft once did! Even worse, in some ways. The buttons I use to run commonly accessed programs shouldn't shrink and move based on the number of web-browser windows I have open- they should be independent and non-interfering.
It's perfectly logical, as long as your favorite language isn't semetic. In English and most languages, you write from top to bottom and from left to right. Thus in general, for any random window full of content, most of the stuff will be towards the upper left. So your mouse is normally going to be in that area, and controls will be easier to access if they're above or to the left of the window. That's why we have menus and toolbars on top of windows, and why its argued that scrollbars should be to the left.
Force of history has moved scrollbars to the right side, though, because other motivations trumped speed of access. Maybe because having more space between scrollbars and content looks less cluttered. Maybe because menus & buttons already owned the top/left edges of the window, so scrollbars got pushed to the bottom/right. Whatever the reason, it was a mistake. Vertical scrolling is important enough that it should be on the more accessible left.
This problem is particularly annoying if you're using one of the now-common tiled tree|details views, like found in Microsoft Explorer(tm), Microsoft VisualStudio(tm), or Konqueror (some modes).
In the case of VisualStudio, you'll have a list of files on the left, and the contents of the currently selected file on the right. But if you're browsing around, you often want to open up a file and start scrolling up and down within it. But to reach the rightside scroll bar, you have to pass all the way over the content before you can scroll. A leftside bar would be much more convenient (of course, people with mouse wheels can just use that instead- but if you're gonna do that, you may as well remove the whole scrollbar)
What kind of person finishes paperwork on September 11, 2001? Must be some kind of traitor!
(So don't worry, the PATRIOT act will take care of the jokers at PANIP)
And even if they are aware of owning code suitable for a task, the source code delivery is still probably too hard for them to figure out how to use. "Will it still compile? Is it y2k compliant? Does it boot on a Pentium4?" Without the competency to answer those questions on their own, they're forced to return to the original vendor with the checkbook open.
However, if the code wasn't only locked in a Pentagon vault, but also up on http://www.dod.gov/downloads, then maybe some other members of industry would gain some experience with the code. Then, the next time the government needs a tiny modification, reconfiguration, or simple reinstallation of a software product, they'll be a little be of competition for who gets the job!
Marc Andressen knew how easy it was for a few college students to write an http client (he'd done it himself). And if at any point a pair of half-decent CS undergrads had found themselves unable to download a free graphical webbrowser, they'd have written their own inside of a weekend.
Naturally a chain of enhancements would follow, and maybe endorsement by w3c.org as the "reference" http client implementation, and the saleability of the Netscape Navigator product would melt away.
So when the NSA (a government agency, I think) contributed to a well known GPL project, they were breaking the law or something?
You say they were "disallowed". How so? Is it that you can trust these sneaky spooks to obey the laws of their own country?
Or maybe the new breed of Software Lobbyist was upset that the government could start to shut off the dollar faucet by pursuing cheaper economic models for creating computer programs?