Nike could sell shoes at the same price and pay someone in the US OR in a 3rd world nation a VERY good wage to make said shoes.
Most people are NOT willing to pay more for a product that wasn't made with slave labour. If they were, the market would provide it. Just look at the success of walmart to realise that if it's cheaper, it will sell, regardless of how evil the corporation that sells it is. This is why legislation is needed. If the law said that any product sold in the US had to be made by people who had access to their basic human rights, a lot of these outwashes would disappear.
The free market is not the answer to all economic issues. It is inherently unstable. Over time a free market will evolve into an oligopoly (a few large businesses that have so much combined market power they can set price) or a monopoly. This is because scale effects make it more profitable to be big, so there is (in most markets) a constant drive to merge. So, government HAS to regulate the market.
Also, the reason for subsidies serving special interests is obvious. Politicians respond to those who yell loudest. If you don't like it, form your own special interest, and start pushing back. Campaign finance reform might help in the US, but in most EU countries campaign financing law is pretty strict, and politicians respond to special interests there too.
Once again, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement.
steal v.
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
If you're downloading from kazaa and the likes you're taking something that does not belong to you. Yes, the original copyright holders still have it, but that doesn't meant it's not your place to take.
Besides, whether it IS theft or not is irrelevant. It's morally wrong and illegal. Calling it different terms doesn't make it more excusable.
Why buy used, when you can buy new and still stick it to the man?
Almost all the music I buy comes from cd baby. They have a huge collection, and I can't imagine someone browsing their collection and not finding exactly their taste of music.
I think he meant no alternative... that'll make you famous. The only famous artists are artists who were once signed with a major, or are currently signed with a major. If you go indie, you'll never reach the kind of audience you can reach through the majors, because you're effectively banned from radio and TV, which are the two ways that shape how most people see the world.
And a lot of artists are in it to get heard, not to become rich. Fame gets you heard.
It's my fucking data, and I'll do what the fuck I like with it thank you very much.
This isn't to stop home users from accessing these formats. It's to stop open source developers from writing software that interoperates with these formats. If OOo implements these in a way that violates the patents, microsoft can have the distribution of OOo stopped in the US. Which is ultimately what they really want.
These are the machinations of a dying dinosaur. Protectionism NEVER works. Not in politics, not in economy, and definitely not in business. What MS is doing is stalling, and they know it. Eventually, they will crash and burn. It's not a matter of if, but of when, and they're trying to delay that when as long as possible.
Seperating salt water into Hydrogen, Oxygen, Salt, and extraneous junk is expensive.
Except that you can use renewable power to separate the hydrogen from water. First you distill the water to purify it, then you electrolyse it to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. It's really not a complicated process. All you need is electricity, which is what the majority of "clean" and renewable energy sources deliver.
The whole point of "the hydrogen economy" is abandoning oil and its costly and politically risky infrastructure (generate fuel where you need it, instead of shipping it in from dictatorships). Reusing the oil infrastructure to fuel hydrogen cars is pointless. You're wasting even more energy than you would be if you just burnt the oil directly.
Ofcourse, it's probably cost efficient for the specific case the military has in iraq, but for general use it's not a good strategy.
I swear, this seems like an onion article or a monty python sketch.
"We've had things put in place that counteract the things they talked about."
Yeah, those things that counteract things are just great. You can xyzzyfy the floobargs to make them do really cool things too.
There is no way to verify that the vote recorded inside the system is the same as the one cast by the voter.
Sounds like the wheel of fortune of election systems. Sadly, the regular electronic election systems (diebold anyone?) are no better. Without a paper trail it's impossible to guarantee accuracy in any way. Which is why I'll predict now that Bush is going to win the next presidential elections. Even if his cabinet has zero involvement with nudging the vote, the republican control over all currently deployed electronic election systems pretty much assures the next elections will not be fairly held. If it's possible to mess with a voting system, someone will.
"So what?" Who needs Realmedia? There's a new, open-source player? So what? It might be useful for viewing the decaying Real content still out there on the net, but why should we promote the continued use of this crap?
What cross-platform content format would you suggest then? WMV is not an option due to it being windows-only (there's a mac version, but it's been discontinued). Quicktime has no linux version (though you can get it to run through crossover, but performance in that case of horrible). All the other formats are either not available on all platforms, unsuitable for streaming, or too difficult to get running.
Like it or not, in the real world, rm is the ONLY format that will easily play on all the major platforms.
Maybe if ogg theora or ogg tarkin ever get off the ground that will change, but given how ogg vorbis is still a niche player, despite it being a clearly superior and completely open/free format that has been out for quite a while, this seems incredibly unlikely.
With winex and a plethora of linux ports, linux has better gaming support than the mac. You never hear people say "oh, macs are nice, but they're just not desktop machines." Using lack of games as excuse for claiming linux isn't ready for the desktop is just that, an excuse, and a poor one at it.
I agree about the driver thing, in specific situations. If you buy new hardware with linux preinstalled, like most businesses would, this is just not an issue. For home users though, this is a problem. Having said that, I run linux on ALL my home machines, and haven't had any significant hardware problems that I didn't have in windows as well (scanner that has no driver, but I can't get it to work in anything newer than w98 either).
Just suppose that 20 years from now, laser drills are cutting exploration and production costs of natural gas by huge margins, enabling North American companies to burn the stuff to crack the oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain more oil than Saudi Arabia) and tell OPEC to go fuck themselves. North American energy independence.
For how long? Switching to reusable energy sources is the only long term plan for north american energy independance.
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Unlikely. We're talking about solar panels here, which can be made and deployed orders of magnitude cheaper on the earth's surface. It's not like the moon has a monopoly on sunlight.
But you're right. All that rocketry stuff was just pork for Bell Labs and Raytheon.
Rockets are indeed dead-end r&d. There's no way to get rockets to be cheap enough to do any of the stuff people have fantasized about for decades, like space mining, or launching colonies. The only feasible approach towards the next generation of space exploration is to develop a new way of getting out of the gravity well, like the quite reasonable but underfunded concept of space elevators, or (on the more fantastic end of things) some kind of anti-grav.
We're not doing ANYTHING today that wasn't being done in the 60's and 70's. We were launching huge spaceships to other planets to do scientific research then too. Space research simply has brought us less benefit than the same amount of money would have brought us had it been spent earthside. Note that I'm not advocating abandoning space, just that things like a moonbase offer no real benefits over committing that money otherwise. If government was run like a business, moonbases would get no money. There's no scientific benefit to be gained, and no profit either. All that can be found on the moon is glory.
Additionally, it would be interesting to know how many real life security exploits were a result of poor encryption. Most of the security hacks I've seen exploit programming bugs, or are the result of social engineering. A theoretically secure encryption algorithm does not guarantee that it will be implemented or used correctly.
The problem is supply and demand. People demand a fix-all security program, install it once, and your security is guaranteed. That is, ofcourse, impossible. But that doesn't stop other people from pretending to supply it, and making lots of money from their fantasy.
The closest stars are 4 lightyears away (even less? I forget). If you could build something that could deliver the ridiculously high energy requirements of getting to light speed and back again you could travel there in a matter of years. Also, remember that this would be earth time. For the people making the journey it would be a matter of weeks or months (as distance shortens as you go faster due to relativity). So, we could even send people to places hundreds of lightyears away (and have it only take a few months or years for them), provided we let them travel close enough to lightspeed. Ofcourse, the use of this for humans might be limited, but we've already sent probes on missions that take decades (which is too long to get any political payoff out of it), so maybe missions that don't arrive until 200 earth years have passed would find funding.
There's also the matter of communicating your findings back to earth, but there are a number of theorized ways on doing faster than light communication (read: instantaneous regardless of distance), as a result of research in quantum physics, so it's not quite impossible.
You've also got to take into account that at those distances you have to send entire colonies. It's not feasible to send people and have them come back (they would have nothing to come back to since all their relatives and friends would have died long before they returned). Once we colonize a planet 100 light years from here, it's just a matter of time before they colonize a planet 100 lightyears from them (200 from us), and so on. Couple that with instantaneous comms, and you have the beginnings of a galaxy-wide empire (provided we don't run into aliens along the way and start a war with them).
It's really not such a far-fetched idea. We're just not likely to see it in our lifetimes.
When viewed as a method of compensating injured parties, the U.S. tort system is highly inefficient, returning less than 50 cents on the dollar to people it is designed to help and returning only 22 cents to compensate for actual economic loss.
So, yes, indeed. Everybody in the US but you has a lawyer, and they're all driving the american economy into the ground.
I'm curious? Did he legally acquire that domain name? I was under the assumption minors couldn't enter contracts, and if I'm not mistaken renting a domain name is done by agreeing to a contract.
If someone else bought it for him (he couldn't have had a visa card as a minor, so did he pay it with dad's card?), then would it be legally that person's property? In that case, could Mike be forced to hand over something that doesn't belong to him?
I'm not seeing anything in those pictures that jumps out at me as something artificially created. Care to point out EXACTLY what it is you think you're seeing? To me those are just a bunch of craters and dunes. Both of which make a lot of sense given the martian climate/atmosphere.
The thing is, the larger the surface you cover, the more likely it gets you see something unusual. And we've pretty much photographed the entire surface of mars, so...
just jog down to the shops and back to get some milk
Ofcourse, the thing is, if you actually DID do the smart thing and jog down to the shops to buy milk, people would laugh at you. They would say "haha. look at that guy running and buying milk. he's so healthy. hahahaha."
There's something deeply wrong with a society that works like that.
The good news is that you don't need to leave your home to get exercise, nor do you have to buy expensive machinery. Start doing daily bicycle crunches, back extensions (if you do stomach exercises you've got to do back exercises too) and push-ups. Do the maximum you can without hurting yourself, do some other exercise or take a break for 5 minutes, then do as much as you can again. Don't forget to breathe while you do these exercises (they call it aerobic exercise for a reason). Add some cycling for the legs and some free-weight weightlifting for the arms (um, so, ok, there's some expense there) and you've pretty much cornered the concept of exercising. After a while of doing this you WILL see the difference, and you'll be happy with it. Doesn't take more than 15 minutes a day. Everyone has 15 minutes. If you're lazy, you can even do it only once every two or three days. You'll still get results, only slower. Works for me anyway. But then IANAFT (I am not a fitness trainer).
The latest version I've downloaded uses my default browser.
I have firebird as the default, and msn 6.1 still uses IE whenever I click on the hotmail "new messages" link (but uses firebird for links in instant messages). Hotmail opens perfectly fine in firebird as well, so why they changed the one but not the other escapes me completely.
Don't assume everyone is like you. I'm a firebird user (on windows and linux), and I love the fact that it's trimmed down and I can pick and choose functionality by installing extensions. Besides, in time all extensions will install into the profile dir, which will mean you can install them as a regular user just once, and from then on every version update of firebird will reuse them (a large chunk of extensions already support this behaviour).
First of all, firebird 0.8 will have a "nice installer".
Secondly, what's so great about chatzilla? I always thought it was woefully underfeatured next to the standalone irc clients.
And finally, the standalone composer is going to be called nvu, it's being developed by composer developer daniel glazman and paid for by lindows (see, lindows can do something good after all). Be patient, it will come, and it will rock (nvu is going to have lots of cool new features: integrated css design and editing, visual table editing, better support for fonts and text sizes,...).
That's an english r. Over here in Belgium we have a rolling r (tongue at the roof of your mouth about 1.5 cm behind your teeth, as if you're saying l, and having it vibrate by blowing air over it, VERY difficult for someone who didn't learn it as a child). Then there's the french r, with the back of the tongue vibrating against the back of your mouth's roof. Anyway, my point is, the interpretation of what is an r depends HEAVILY on where you live, so I wouldn't make assumptions on what the japanese think an r sounds like.
Why doesn't Lucas just admit the obvious. He's pissed star trek got so many crappy sequels past the hollywood honchos that he's sworn to get at least one more past them.
I was taking him seriously until he mentioned he used netscape 4 as his main browser. This can not be anything other than a troll (hmmm, moderation system must be working if they're submitting stories now). I run mozilla firebird, reasonably fast, on a pII/233. It's faster than netscape 4 on the same hardware.
The reality is netscape 4's engine was too broken to be fixed. The lacking DOM and CSS support in NS4 was not because they didn't want to add it, but because they couldn't add it. The engine HAD to be rewritten, and ofcourse, one thing led to another, and it was deemed wise to rewrite pretty much the whole thing. Which imho was a good decision, because firebird beats ANY other browser easily.
Slashdot Mirror
You sum up the inherent problem very nicely:
Nike could sell shoes at the same price and pay someone in the US OR in a 3rd world nation a VERY good wage to make said shoes.
Most people are NOT willing to pay more for a product that wasn't made with slave labour. If they were, the market would provide it. Just look at the success of walmart to realise that if it's cheaper, it will sell, regardless of how evil the corporation that sells it is. This is why legislation is needed. If the law said that any product sold in the US had to be made by people who had access to their basic human rights, a lot of these outwashes would disappear.
Two things:
The free market is not the answer to all economic issues. It is inherently unstable. Over time a free market will evolve into an oligopoly (a few large businesses that have so much combined market power they can set price) or a monopoly. This is because scale effects make it more profitable to be big, so there is (in most markets) a constant drive to merge. So, government HAS to regulate the market.
Also, the reason for subsidies serving special interests is obvious. Politicians respond to those who yell loudest. If you don't like it, form your own special interest, and start pushing back. Campaign finance reform might help in the US, but in most EU countries campaign financing law is pretty strict, and politicians respond to special interests there too.
Cows in the EU get a subsidy equivilent to $250 per year from the EU. There are a billion people in the world that subsist on less than $200 a year.
Except the EU has been cutting farming subsidies, while the US has been raising them. And even more poignantly:
FARM SUBSIDY PER COW
EU: $803
USA: $1,057
JAPAN: $2,555
The EU's no angel, but then none of the post-industrial nations are.
Once again, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement.
steal v.
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
If you're downloading from kazaa and the likes you're taking something that does not belong to you. Yes, the original copyright holders still have it, but that doesn't meant it's not your place to take.
Besides, whether it IS theft or not is irrelevant. It's morally wrong and illegal. Calling it different terms doesn't make it more excusable.
Why buy used, when you can buy new and still stick it to the man?
Almost all the music I buy comes from cd baby. They have a huge collection, and I can't imagine someone browsing their collection and not finding exactly their taste of music.
They're cheaper too.
I think he meant no alternative ... that'll make you famous. The only famous artists are artists who were once signed with a major, or are currently signed with a major. If you go indie, you'll never reach the kind of audience you can reach through the majors, because you're effectively banned from radio and TV, which are the two ways that shape how most people see the world.
And a lot of artists are in it to get heard, not to become rich. Fame gets you heard.
It's my fucking data, and I'll do what the fuck I like with it thank you very much.
This isn't to stop home users from accessing these formats. It's to stop open source developers from writing software that interoperates with these formats. If OOo implements these in a way that violates the patents, microsoft can have the distribution of OOo stopped in the US. Which is ultimately what they really want.
These are the machinations of a dying dinosaur. Protectionism NEVER works. Not in politics, not in economy, and definitely not in business. What MS is doing is stalling, and they know it. Eventually, they will crash and burn. It's not a matter of if, but of when, and they're trying to delay that when as long as possible.
Seperating salt water into Hydrogen, Oxygen, Salt, and extraneous junk is expensive.
Except that you can use renewable power to separate the hydrogen from water. First you distill the water to purify it, then you electrolyse it to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. It's really not a complicated process. All you need is electricity, which is what the majority of "clean" and renewable energy sources deliver.
The whole point of "the hydrogen economy" is abandoning oil and its costly and politically risky infrastructure (generate fuel where you need it, instead of shipping it in from dictatorships). Reusing the oil infrastructure to fuel hydrogen cars is pointless. You're wasting even more energy than you would be if you just burnt the oil directly.
Ofcourse, it's probably cost efficient for the specific case the military has in iraq, but for general use it's not a good strategy.
I swear, this seems like an onion article or a monty python sketch.
"We've had things put in place that counteract the things they talked about."
Yeah, those things that counteract things are just great. You can xyzzyfy the floobargs to make them do really cool things too.
There is no way to verify that the vote recorded inside the system is the same as the one cast by the voter.
Sounds like the wheel of fortune of election systems. Sadly, the regular electronic election systems (diebold anyone?) are no better. Without a paper trail it's impossible to guarantee accuracy in any way. Which is why I'll predict now that Bush is going to win the next presidential elections. Even if his cabinet has zero involvement with nudging the vote, the republican control over all currently deployed electronic election systems pretty much assures the next elections will not be fairly held. If it's possible to mess with a voting system, someone will.
"So what?" Who needs Realmedia? There's a new, open-source player? So what? It might be useful for viewing the decaying Real content still out there on the net, but why should we promote the continued use of this crap?
What cross-platform content format would you suggest then? WMV is not an option due to it being windows-only (there's a mac version, but it's been discontinued). Quicktime has no linux version (though you can get it to run through crossover, but performance in that case of horrible). All the other formats are either not available on all platforms, unsuitable for streaming, or too difficult to get running.
Like it or not, in the real world, rm is the ONLY format that will easily play on all the major platforms.
Maybe if ogg theora or ogg tarkin ever get off the ground that will change, but given how ogg vorbis is still a niche player, despite it being a clearly superior and completely open/free format that has been out for quite a while, this seems incredibly unlikely.
With winex and a plethora of linux ports, linux has better gaming support than the mac. You never hear people say "oh, macs are nice, but they're just not desktop machines." Using lack of games as excuse for claiming linux isn't ready for the desktop is just that, an excuse, and a poor one at it.
I agree about the driver thing, in specific situations. If you buy new hardware with linux preinstalled, like most businesses would, this is just not an issue. For home users though, this is a problem. Having said that, I run linux on ALL my home machines, and haven't had any significant hardware problems that I didn't have in windows as well (scanner that has no driver, but I can't get it to work in anything newer than w98 either).
Just suppose that 20 years from now, laser drills are cutting exploration and production costs of natural gas by huge margins, enabling North American companies to burn the stuff to crack the oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain more oil than Saudi Arabia) and tell OPEC to go fuck themselves. North American energy independence.
For how long? Switching to reusable energy sources is the only long term plan for north american energy independance.
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Unlikely. We're talking about solar panels here, which can be made and deployed orders of magnitude cheaper on the earth's surface. It's not like the moon has a monopoly on sunlight.
But you're right. All that rocketry stuff was just pork for Bell Labs and Raytheon.
Rockets are indeed dead-end r&d. There's no way to get rockets to be cheap enough to do any of the stuff people have fantasized about for decades, like space mining, or launching colonies. The only feasible approach towards the next generation of space exploration is to develop a new way of getting out of the gravity well, like the quite reasonable but underfunded concept of space elevators, or (on the more fantastic end of things) some kind of anti-grav.
We're not doing ANYTHING today that wasn't being done in the 60's and 70's. We were launching huge spaceships to other planets to do scientific research then too. Space research simply has brought us less benefit than the same amount of money would have brought us had it been spent earthside. Note that I'm not advocating abandoning space, just that things like a moonbase offer no real benefits over committing that money otherwise. If government was run like a business, moonbases would get no money. There's no scientific benefit to be gained, and no profit either. All that can be found on the moon is glory.
Additionally, it would be interesting to know how many real life security exploits were a result of poor encryption. Most of the security hacks I've seen exploit programming bugs, or are the result of social engineering. A theoretically secure encryption algorithm does not guarantee that it will be implemented or used correctly.
The problem is supply and demand. People demand a fix-all security program, install it once, and your security is guaranteed. That is, ofcourse, impossible. But that doesn't stop other people from pretending to supply it, and making lots of money from their fantasy.
The closest stars are 4 lightyears away (even less? I forget). If you could build something that could deliver the ridiculously high energy requirements of getting to light speed and back again you could travel there in a matter of years. Also, remember that this would be earth time. For the people making the journey it would be a matter of weeks or months (as distance shortens as you go faster due to relativity). So, we could even send people to places hundreds of lightyears away (and have it only take a few months or years for them), provided we let them travel close enough to lightspeed. Ofcourse, the use of this for humans might be limited, but we've already sent probes on missions that take decades (which is too long to get any political payoff out of it), so maybe missions that don't arrive until 200 earth years have passed would find funding.
There's also the matter of communicating your findings back to earth, but there are a number of theorized ways on doing faster than light communication (read: instantaneous regardless of distance), as a result of research in quantum physics, so it's not quite impossible.
You've also got to take into account that at those distances you have to send entire colonies. It's not feasible to send people and have them come back (they would have nothing to come back to since all their relatives and friends would have died long before they returned). Once we colonize a planet 100 light years from here, it's just a matter of time before they colonize a planet 100 lightyears from them (200 from us), and so on. Couple that with instantaneous comms, and you have the beginnings of a galaxy-wide empire (provided we don't run into aliens along the way and start a war with them).
It's really not such a far-fetched idea. We're just not likely to see it in our lifetimes.
Interestingly, tort lawsuits (where you claim damages) now are the equivalent of a 5% tax on income.
From the article:
When viewed as a method of compensating injured parties, the U.S. tort system is highly inefficient, returning less than 50 cents on the dollar to people it is designed to help and returning only 22 cents to compensate for actual economic loss.
So, yes, indeed. Everybody in the US but you has a lawyer, and they're all driving the american economy into the ground.
I'm curious? Did he legally acquire that domain name? I was under the assumption minors couldn't enter contracts, and if I'm not mistaken renting a domain name is done by agreeing to a contract.
If someone else bought it for him (he couldn't have had a visa card as a minor, so did he pay it with dad's card?), then would it be legally that person's property? In that case, could Mike be forced to hand over something that doesn't belong to him?
Ofcourse, IANAL.
I'm not seeing anything in those pictures that jumps out at me as something artificially created. Care to point out EXACTLY what it is you think you're seeing? To me those are just a bunch of craters and dunes. Both of which make a lot of sense given the martian climate/atmosphere.
The thing is, the larger the surface you cover, the more likely it gets you see something unusual. And we've pretty much photographed the entire surface of mars, so...
I knew that Mozilla overbloated (kitchen sink anyone?)
Kitchen sink indeed.
just jog down to the shops and back to get some milk
Ofcourse, the thing is, if you actually DID do the smart thing and jog down to the shops to buy milk, people would laugh at you. They would say "haha. look at that guy running and buying milk. he's so healthy. hahahaha."
There's something deeply wrong with a society that works like that.
The good news is that you don't need to leave your home to get exercise, nor do you have to buy expensive machinery. Start doing daily bicycle crunches, back extensions (if you do stomach exercises you've got to do back exercises too) and push-ups. Do the maximum you can without hurting yourself, do some other exercise or take a break for 5 minutes, then do as much as you can again. Don't forget to breathe while you do these exercises (they call it aerobic exercise for a reason). Add some cycling for the legs and some free-weight weightlifting for the arms (um, so, ok, there's some expense there) and you've pretty much cornered the concept of exercising. After a while of doing this you WILL see the difference, and you'll be happy with it. Doesn't take more than 15 minutes a day. Everyone has 15 minutes. If you're lazy, you can even do it only once every two or three days. You'll still get results, only slower. Works for me anyway. But then IANAFT (I am not a fitness trainer).
The latest version I've downloaded uses my default browser.
I have firebird as the default, and msn 6.1 still uses IE whenever I click on the hotmail "new messages" link (but uses firebird for links in instant messages). Hotmail opens perfectly fine in firebird as well, so why they changed the one but not the other escapes me completely.
Don't assume everyone is like you. I'm a firebird user (on windows and linux), and I love the fact that it's trimmed down and I can pick and choose functionality by installing extensions. Besides, in time all extensions will install into the profile dir, which will mean you can install them as a regular user just once, and from then on every version update of firebird will reuse them (a large chunk of extensions already support this behaviour).
First of all, firebird 0.8 will have a "nice installer".
...).
Secondly, what's so great about chatzilla? I always thought it was woefully underfeatured next to the standalone irc clients.
And finally, the standalone composer is going to be called nvu, it's being developed by composer developer daniel glazman and paid for by lindows (see, lindows can do something good after all). Be patient, it will come, and it will rock (nvu is going to have lots of cool new features: integrated css design and editing, visual table editing, better support for fonts and text sizes,
That's an english r. Over here in Belgium we have a rolling r (tongue at the roof of your mouth about 1.5 cm behind your teeth, as if you're saying l, and having it vibrate by blowing air over it, VERY difficult for someone who didn't learn it as a child). Then there's the french r, with the back of the tongue vibrating against the back of your mouth's roof. Anyway, my point is, the interpretation of what is an r depends HEAVILY on where you live, so I wouldn't make assumptions on what the japanese think an r sounds like.
Why doesn't Lucas just admit the obvious. He's pissed star trek got so many crappy sequels past the hollywood honchos that he's sworn to get at least one more past them.
I was taking him seriously until he mentioned he used netscape 4 as his main browser. This can not be anything other than a troll (hmmm, moderation system must be working if they're submitting stories now). I run mozilla firebird, reasonably fast, on a pII/233. It's faster than netscape 4 on the same hardware.
The reality is netscape 4's engine was too broken to be fixed. The lacking DOM and CSS support in NS4 was not because they didn't want to add it, but because they couldn't add it. The engine HAD to be rewritten, and ofcourse, one thing led to another, and it was deemed wise to rewrite pretty much the whole thing. Which imho was a good decision, because firebird beats ANY other browser easily.