I'm pretty sure even Windows Vista will keep your porn stash safe, if you log out of your account, and into a guest account for them.... all of 15 seconds. Just make sure you have to sign into your account and that your files are in your directory.
You probably also want to edit the bios so that it only starts from the harddrive, and that nothing in the bios can be changed without a password
Don't remember if XP Home enforces seperate directories.
Okay. Umm.. Who the fuck cares if students show up to class or not. At university we are old enough to decide if class is a waste of time or not. I skipped tons of classes during my undergrad degree and this enabled me to actually assignments that I wouldn't have otherwise had time for.
Japan isn't America. Apparently they care. Perhaps it's because universities have a limited number of spaces that they would prefer to give to successful students and truancy may correlate with success. It's been my observation that students who are truant a lot, even if successful and breeze by the first round of classes, tend to crash and burn later on as when they don't change their habits. Or it may be that some classes require a team effort and truant students disrupt that (but for whatever reason, the team is reluctant to report it.... or it counts against them anyway).
There could be a lot of reasons. Your experience doesn't mean it takes into account everything.
Anyway, this sounds like a technical solution to a human problem that will ultimately fail to a determined truant. Perhaps the teacher should enlist a trusted assistant and they work some system. Perhaps they should give out one ticket to each student with serial number at the end of each class as they walk out the door that will enable them to sign in on the "was here last time" sheet the next class. Then they just count tickets given out to signatures to ensure accuracy and that no one is cheating. Or something like that. Anyone without a ticket just signs a sheet indicating they were present that time but absent last time (and whatever preceding times).
If they want to get fancy technologically, I guess they could use several retina scanners (to avoid traffic jams, fingerprints scanners would be duped too easily these days) that allow you to sign in at the beginning and then out of each class at the end.
If they're saying it bought about the World Wide Web, aka the internet (to most nontechy people). I wouldn't say it wasn't inevitable without mosaic, but since it was first, it probably can be credited with making the computer a must-have device in the home, perhaps even superior to the TV in time to come. That surge also probably helped bring the computer prices down to what we have now instead of looking at $1500-2000 systems as midrange/economical, as well as allowing niches like netbooks and smartphones.
When decades of history pass, the memorable inventions that changed the world will personal computer (not strictly the PC as known today), then the WWW (via Mosaic), and I daresay wikipedia in chronological order.
There are a lot of other important apps, but none that touched so many lives directly and in a positive way.
I wouldn't say I necessarily believe it. The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
My parents don't know technology, but they know what DRM is. They went to a trip to Italy and bought some tourist DVD and whoever made the thing, stupidly or maliciously enforced region coding, and guess what? The DVD in english didn't play in an American DVD player.
They didn't bother to try to circumvent it, get a non-regioned DVD player, etcetera - they just don't buy DVDs on trips anymore. Who really lost out with that stupidity?
I think, ultimately, the content producers are screwing themselves. Only one copy needs to be cracked (and inevitably will) for it to be shared all over the internet, but in the meantime you screw over legions of PAYING customers to protect their "precious".
I usually just take the DVDs I buy and throw them on the hard drive because I can't stand the 10 second enforced FBI warning and all the previews they throw at me, sometimes without being able to skip. I can see why people pirate (other than the free aspect) when someone as a legitimate customer gets treated like a criminal and a dolt simultaneously.
I'm just surprised that Governments so readily lets themselves be at the mercy of a foreign corporation. At the least, they could mandate open formats for when the propietary solution is better but giving them a later option to move to something else.
IIRC, Chinese government smartly maintains it's own linux distro.
You will like it less when the guy down the street who wants your wife to leave you so he can continue his affair with her decides to test your home automation security.
Once she starts having the affair, wouldn't I want her to leave me? What am I missing here?
that there are really only two very clear style of languages, the C family and the Lisp family, with later languages like Java starting from a C basis but building towards functionalities found in Lisp.
I wonder what is beyond Lisp and other functional languages, though?
Reminds of a day spent on a waterfront last year, when I observed that though pigeons and seagulls would frolic in the same stretch of promenade, they didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the other species. When I said to my friend, "Do you think birds can be racist?", she just looked at me funny.
What makes you think racism isn't something biological? It seems to me that it could possibly be a function that allowed species to diverge into different species by having the various "races" interact with each other less.
I'm not claiming a justification for racism, this is just something that struck me when watching a special on the Galapagos Islands and on those tiny things was this type of bird wherein, unique to it, were 6 different species (of basically the same bird) and I asked myself how that was possible to form without them constantly interbreeding?
The world isn't black and white. Just because Japanese society is at fault, doesn't mean Google is without fault.
Certainly, the discrimination of burakumin is a problem of the Japanese society, but as the summary already put it, Google (unwittingly) provides tool, which simplifies the practice of ostracism of burakumin by reviving the old ghettos maps on modern maps. The discrimination is largely based on where the people have lived and currently do live. So, publicising those maps is not helping them.
In an ideal world, the Japanese people would just stop the discrimination. But we don't live in a ideal world, and if the minority in question feels this short gap measure is necessary, I think it is sensible to comply. Or do you have a good idea, how to eradicate discrimination? The Nobel Price for Peace would be yours for sure.
Once google starts pulling information based on simple offensiveness, it will be at the whim of a lot of groups that want to gut it for their agendas.
Censorship doesn't work like that. It's not fair to a small minority of those with that ancestry but that's the price of freedom. In the long term, Japanese companies will be shooting themselves in the foot by pushing away talented workers on the basis of this and other idiocies, and give smaller businesses or competitors an advantage. In that way, over time, it can and probably will correct itself.
Giving OSS preferred treatment means that it doesn't win because it's better but just because it got an "unfair" advantage. You'll end up with the same prejudice that many "affirmative action" projects face, claiming that they only got this or that position because of that "unfair" advantage, not on their own merit.
I'm convinced that OSS can "win" on its own. And nobody will be able to claim that the sole reason was preference.
But Vancouver is doing the right thing by enforcing open standards. It just means anybody can play and lack of vendor lock-in and hence more competition. I wish the US Government went to Open Standards - as it is, a lot of departments there force you to use Microsoft Windows for various things, which is almost as ridiculous as forcing someone to drive a Ford in order to use a public parking spot.
Soda bottles are made fomr PET. BPA is found in hard plastics like PC (as specifically stated in the summary.) There is absolutely no Bisphenol A in your soda bottles. Congratulations, you've fallen into the same form of mass hysteria that leads people to censor games or the internet (a la Thailand) whenever a kid shoots someone/commits suicide.
I'm in the same boat as your parent comment, I only drink from glass or aluminum containers (not cans, more like the containers for bikes). I don't know why it should be ridiculed. I don't even trust the claims anymore - expensive and "unbreakable" polycarbonate drink glasses from Target broke in the dishwasher within weeks. Cost 4x more than the normal glass.
I'm not a chemistry expert, but to me glass has always been a simple, very inert substance which is easy to clean, with little to go wrong as long as you're not drinking from lead crystal. Unlike most plastic, glass doesn't really fade in the dishwasher or scratch using steel wool, and nothing happens when you put in the microwave for a long time. That basic inertness is apparent to everybody.
Plastics, otoh, are extremely varied already in the basic consumer space, there are still new things to learn from it all the time (obviously, as this study shows) and is just more complicated a topic.
I miss the days when soda came in a glass bottle...
On the other hand, in most 'developed' nations, those same taxes pay for people to protect you and your property. (If you disagree with this viewpoint, try living in a lawless state: then you'll find out why we used to live in castles, or their modern equivalent, gated communities).
What your OP is talking about is basically allodial title vs. limited allodial title or fee simple which is what most US practically has.
Of course, you swing to the extreme to counter about "if we had no taxes" which is no counterargument at all since he didn't argue for 0 taxes anywhere. I can have a $500,000 car in my $100,000 home, yet in most states that car will not cost me 1 penny more in non-excise taxes after I purchase it because I own it outright. Yet, if that situation is reversed and I have 500k home and a 100k car, I would get charged up the rear in taxes.
Would you argue I should pay more taxes on that car or if I kept 500k in the bank, that I should pay property taxes on either? Would you come out swining that taxes are good for us as an argument that I should start paying taxes on either of those things?
Your logic is incomplete and flawed.
In Germany, property taxes are low. I'm talking about paying maybe $75 on a house per year. Germany is not a low tax country, school revenue come from their high sales tax AFAIK which is okay but not ideal. However, I do know property/school taxes is a very screwed up thing a lot of times. Especially when I see the elderly lose houses they lived in for 40 years because they have no more income and can't afford it anymore.
In reality, Skynet wouldn't launch nukes. It would probably launch neutron bombs, less destruction that way, just as dead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
Although I'm not sure if skynet wouldn't just locate to another planet. What could it want with earth longterm? It certainly doesn't need a life bearing planet in the traditional sense.
I'm pretty sure they knew about all of this as soon as they knew who the judge was. It probably explains their behavior. Why care about the trail when you know it is going to be thrown out anyway.
To make it easier for the Joe and Jane Public to support your cause.
Too true. I remember a friend of mine doing tech support at this big company and he told me that some woman had run out of hard drive space so she started deleting things because she never used those files.
She started in the Windows directory.
It's always amusing to see how analogies, invented to make things easier for us humans, break down when we try to apply all the real life functions and possibilities in the counterpart. On a real filing cabinet, what she did was perfectly acceptable, the closest I can imagine would be akin to throwing away the instructions to said filing cabinet and the index sheet. Maybe not wise, but certainly no disaster.
What is the surprise? They don't have to follow the same rules as passwords (letters and at least 1 number, etc) that many sites enforce. Plus, if they don't let you make your own question, they pretty much stick to the same stupid, generic 5-8 questions they all have.
If someone was really wanted to go on a phishing expedition, they would open a site that requires registration, security questions, and all that, and then try the information on the webmail of the people who just registered. Probably would work phenomally as well.
If websites wanted to be truly secure, they would ask for a mailing address or at least a phone number to confirm resetting things (thinking of financial accounts, not stupid forums). They confirm the same inane, easily duplicable facts in real life, but at least they have to reach you at a confirmed safe location.
That's what bothers me more, that my browsing experiences hangs with one page. Perhaps every tabs should be it's own thread/process/whatever.
I don't know about alternatives to tabs, but whatever they come up with (like Google's Chromium), I'm pretty sure it will be still tabs but just an alternative presentation adding up to the same thing - even if becomes like the mulitple desktops Linuxes have. I don't think anyone wants to go to the pre-tab days of having 20 browser apps crowding out the other apps.
I wish they would concentrate on making the browser better at sorting information, an update to the dated bookmark concept, maybe with a profile that automatically transfers (if you want it too) to your other computers, making your experience more seamless. Or just being able to save a webpage as a PDF (take a hint from OS X) without using add-ons.
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 on some HP laptop again for the second time after installing 8.10 on it (the harddrive crashed and burned in between). Both times, I was pleasantly surprised that not only the sound worked, but also all the special fuction buttons controlling sound_up/down/mute out of the box (not to mention the others). Now, I hate to be like one of the obnoxious asshats out their that say it works for me, so I falsely presume it should work for everybody. But that goes the other way around, it does work for some people out-of-the-box (so far on most of my systems). There are definitely other things that don't work, but I've been lucky with hardware compatibility.
OTOH, I had installed WinXPs where the Operating System indicated 5 or 6 drivers missing. Usually, with my luck, the only ethernet was an add-on card one it didn't recognize, so the internet was available, and it didn't do a good job of searching the CD for the drivers - they were there, but Windows needed its hand held right up to the exact folder among hundreds or it would never find it on its own. Even with internet available, let's say the computer only had VGA resoluion availbale, Windows helpfully asks if it should search the internet for the driver and it almost always came back negative, being useless 99.999% of the time (to be fair, for the very first time on any piece of equipment for me, it caught the video card last week for a computer I was setting up, they must have improved their database or something).
So I think the Linux community is doing a commendable job with the resources it has. Microsoft, otoh, by and large, rides on its marketshare, letting the manufacturers do all the work. But that's the way the world is, fair or unfair, and that's what linux has to work with until it to, if ever, reaches critical mass.
The future is web based. Endless bloat, inefficient javascript and the latency of accessing remote systems.
Most of the software I work(ed) with is still to get heavy duty tasks done are still very much on my computer. CAD, programming, mathematica-type programs... not that I want them all to be, just how it is with current internet pervasiveness and speed.
Why will people accept such a system? because a lot of people never learned to use a desktop, they learned how to use a web browser. Anything outside the web browser looks complicated to them.
I like using Google Apps because I don't have to worry about keeping files updated across multiple computers. I think Google is safer than carrying a tangle of USB sticks about. If the file is that important or secret, I stick it onto a computer that has absolutely no net access, no modem, and no ethernet connected to it, no wireless, etc.
There are more reasons to like net apps than just being clueless. Besides the aforementioned syncing problem with files, services like mint.com provide, say, an iPhone user a convenient look at their finances impossible with a regular desktop/notebook unless you're really regimented.
There is also the fact that web-based is the new way of making money from software. No piracy since its mostly server-side, lace it with ads and nobody complains about adware. Give it a few years and ads will no longer be served up by dedicated domains you can easily block.
That's a decent insight. However, I have no problem with people making money on software that way, as long as software patents don't block competition. What's more problematic with me is being at the whim of the software service provide at any moment to hold your data hostage and your account in their hands. I had enough experiences with ebay's arbitrariness to make me wary. That's why I do keep a backup of the google documents (and important emails too, as webmail is the essentially the same thing with the same pitfalls as any web hosted app, although more comfortable to many because it's been around a bit longer)
If client side desktop computing is to survive the interface has to become more iPhony. Ordinary folk love the touchy feeley colourful, childish looking animated interface of the iPhone so the future is in projects like Hildon. I personally hate the iPhone's interface but thats alright, if its Linux or BSD I'll just install a minimalist window manager which there should always be plenty of.
While the interface is important, I think many like the convenience and lack of carrying files around like I said earlier, and that will be hard to replicate for any desktop app.
The problem wasn't the controversy, it was that Konami buckled. Anytime a company gives signs of backing off, you'll have a bunch of groups charge in like pack animals to set their agenda. Jack Thompson has been trying it for years. He would have loved that type of weakness in companies. So Konami pretty much blew it.
You can't tell me beating up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto is better than a modern day war simulation. For every person saying "but that's someone's son" in regards to the war game, you could say "but it portraying someone's daughter in GTA"...
If recency were such a controversial thing, you couldn't have documentaries of events newer than 20 year old, let alone what is happening in the world today. The subject matter isn't all that different from any other game of its type, and I'm sure the soldiers in the "soldier groups" protesting the game have played their fair share FPS/GTA/Survival_Horror, so there probably is a fair bit of hypocrisy going about trying to make this or that topic sancrosanct and taboo.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't surprise me that "burned" DVD-R have a slightly different smell than a normal one, something that a dog can detect.
OTOH, I would think big time pirate would just professionally "press" a dvd rather than burning them? No clue.
I'm pretty sure even Windows Vista will keep your porn stash safe, if you log out of your account, and into a guest account for them.... all of 15 seconds. Just make sure you have to sign into your account and that your files are in your directory.
You probably also want to edit the bios so that it only starts from the harddrive, and that nothing in the bios can be changed without a password
Don't remember if XP Home enforces seperate directories.
(There's also the word "no" when people ask...)
You can buy 10,000-20,000 incandescents, they just cost more:
http://www.bulbman.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3863
Japan isn't America. Apparently they care. Perhaps it's because universities have a limited number of spaces that they would prefer to give to successful students and truancy may correlate with success. It's been my observation that students who are truant a lot, even if successful and breeze by the first round of classes, tend to crash and burn later on as when they don't change their habits. Or it may be that some classes require a team effort and truant students disrupt that (but for whatever reason, the team is reluctant to report it.... or it counts against them anyway).
There could be a lot of reasons. Your experience doesn't mean it takes into account everything.
Anyway, this sounds like a technical solution to a human problem that will ultimately fail to a determined truant. Perhaps the teacher should enlist a trusted assistant and they work some system. Perhaps they should give out one ticket to each student with serial number at the end of each class as they walk out the door that will enable them to sign in on the "was here last time" sheet the next class. Then they just count tickets given out to signatures to ensure accuracy and that no one is cheating. Or something like that. Anyone without a ticket just signs a sheet indicating they were present that time but absent last time (and whatever preceding times).
If they want to get fancy technologically, I guess they could use several retina scanners (to avoid traffic jams, fingerprints scanners would be duped too easily these days) that allow you to sign in at the beginning and then out of each class at the end.
If they're saying it bought about the World Wide Web, aka the internet (to most nontechy people). I wouldn't say it wasn't inevitable without mosaic, but since it was first, it probably can be credited with making the computer a must-have device in the home, perhaps even superior to the TV in time to come. That surge also probably helped bring the computer prices down to what we have now instead of looking at $1500-2000 systems as midrange/economical, as well as allowing niches like netbooks and smartphones.
When decades of history pass, the memorable inventions that changed the world will personal computer (not strictly the PC as known today), then the WWW (via Mosaic), and I daresay wikipedia in chronological order.
There are a lot of other important apps, but none that touched so many lives directly and in a positive way.
My parents don't know technology, but they know what DRM is. They went to a trip to Italy and bought some tourist DVD and whoever made the thing, stupidly or maliciously enforced region coding, and guess what? The DVD in english didn't play in an American DVD player.
They didn't bother to try to circumvent it, get a non-regioned DVD player, etcetera - they just don't buy DVDs on trips anymore. Who really lost out with that stupidity?
I think, ultimately, the content producers are screwing themselves. Only one copy needs to be cracked (and inevitably will) for it to be shared all over the internet, but in the meantime you screw over legions of PAYING customers to protect their "precious".
I usually just take the DVDs I buy and throw them on the hard drive because I can't stand the 10 second enforced FBI warning and all the previews they throw at me, sometimes without being able to skip. I can see why people pirate (other than the free aspect) when someone as a legitimate customer gets treated like a criminal and a dolt simultaneously.
I'm just surprised that Governments so readily lets themselves be at the mercy of a foreign corporation. At the least, they could mandate open formats for when the propietary solution is better but giving them a later option to move to something else.
IIRC, Chinese government smartly maintains it's own linux distro.
Once she starts having the affair, wouldn't I want her to leave me? What am I missing here?
that there are really only two very clear style of languages, the C family and the Lisp family, with later languages like Java starting from a C basis but building towards functionalities found in Lisp.
I wonder what is beyond Lisp and other functional languages, though?
Was this used to protect from oxidation?
What makes you think racism isn't something biological? It seems to me that it could possibly be a function that allowed species to diverge into different species by having the various "races" interact with each other less.
I'm not claiming a justification for racism, this is just something that struck me when watching a special on the Galapagos Islands and on those tiny things was this type of bird wherein, unique to it, were 6 different species (of basically the same bird) and I asked myself how that was possible to form without them constantly interbreeding?
Once google starts pulling information based on simple offensiveness, it will be at the whim of a lot of groups that want to gut it for their agendas.
Censorship doesn't work like that. It's not fair to a small minority of those with that ancestry but that's the price of freedom. In the long term, Japanese companies will be shooting themselves in the foot by pushing away talented workers on the basis of this and other idiocies, and give smaller businesses or competitors an advantage. In that way, over time, it can and probably will correct itself.
But Vancouver is doing the right thing by enforcing open standards. It just means anybody can play and lack of vendor lock-in and hence more competition. I wish the US Government went to Open Standards - as it is, a lot of departments there force you to use Microsoft Windows for various things, which is almost as ridiculous as forcing someone to drive a Ford in order to use a public parking spot.
I'm in the same boat as your parent comment, I only drink from glass or aluminum containers (not cans, more like the containers for bikes). I don't know why it should be ridiculed. I don't even trust the claims anymore - expensive and "unbreakable" polycarbonate drink glasses from Target broke in the dishwasher within weeks. Cost 4x more than the normal glass.
I'm not a chemistry expert, but to me glass has always been a simple, very inert substance which is easy to clean, with little to go wrong as long as you're not drinking from lead crystal. Unlike most plastic, glass doesn't really fade in the dishwasher or scratch using steel wool, and nothing happens when you put in the microwave for a long time. That basic inertness is apparent to everybody.
Plastics, otoh, are extremely varied already in the basic consumer space, there are still new things to learn from it all the time (obviously, as this study shows) and is just more complicated a topic.
I miss the days when soda came in a glass bottle...
What your OP is talking about is basically allodial title vs. limited allodial title or fee simple which is what most US practically has.
Of course, you swing to the extreme to counter about "if we had no taxes" which is no counterargument at all since he didn't argue for 0 taxes anywhere. I can have a $500,000 car in my $100,000 home, yet in most states that car will not cost me 1 penny more in non-excise taxes after I purchase it because I own it outright. Yet, if that situation is reversed and I have 500k home and a 100k car, I would get charged up the rear in taxes.
Would you argue I should pay more taxes on that car or if I kept 500k in the bank, that I should pay property taxes on either? Would you come out swining that taxes are good for us as an argument that I should start paying taxes on either of those things?
Your logic is incomplete and flawed.
In Germany, property taxes are low. I'm talking about paying maybe $75 on a house per year. Germany is not a low tax country, school revenue come from their high sales tax AFAIK which is okay but not ideal. However, I do know property/school taxes is a very screwed up thing a lot of times. Especially when I see the elderly lose houses they lived in for 40 years because they have no more income and can't afford it anymore.
I prefer all taxes to be excise, personally, and I support this:
http://www.apttax.com/
In reality, Skynet wouldn't launch nukes. It would probably launch neutron bombs, less destruction that way, just as dead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
Although I'm not sure if skynet wouldn't just locate to another planet. What could it want with earth longterm? It certainly doesn't need a life bearing planet in the traditional sense.
If, by open, do you mean in the same fashion as goatse? If it's anything like it's parent OS, I'll have to agree;)
To make it easier for the Joe and Jane Public to support your cause.
It's always amusing to see how analogies, invented to make things easier for us humans, break down when we try to apply all the real life functions and possibilities in the counterpart. On a real filing cabinet, what she did was perfectly acceptable, the closest I can imagine would be akin to throwing away the instructions to said filing cabinet and the index sheet. Maybe not wise, but certainly no disaster.
#0099CC
What is the surprise? They don't have to follow the same rules as passwords (letters and at least 1 number, etc) that many sites enforce. Plus, if they don't let you make your own question, they pretty much stick to the same stupid, generic 5-8 questions they all have.
If someone was really wanted to go on a phishing expedition, they would open a site that requires registration, security questions, and all that, and then try the information on the webmail of the people who just registered. Probably would work phenomally as well.
If websites wanted to be truly secure, they would ask for a mailing address or at least a phone number to confirm resetting things (thinking of financial accounts, not stupid forums). They confirm the same inane, easily duplicable facts in real life, but at least they have to reach you at a confirmed safe location.
That's what bothers me more, that my browsing experiences hangs with one page. Perhaps every tabs should be it's own thread/process/whatever.
I don't know about alternatives to tabs, but whatever they come up with (like Google's Chromium), I'm pretty sure it will be still tabs but just an alternative presentation adding up to the same thing - even if becomes like the mulitple desktops Linuxes have. I don't think anyone wants to go to the pre-tab days of having 20 browser apps crowding out the other apps.
I wish they would concentrate on making the browser better at sorting information, an update to the dated bookmark concept, maybe with a profile that automatically transfers (if you want it too) to your other computers, making your experience more seamless. Or just being able to save a webpage as a PDF (take a hint from OS X) without using add-ons.
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 on some HP laptop again for the second time after installing 8.10 on it (the harddrive crashed and burned in between). Both times, I was pleasantly surprised that not only the sound worked, but also all the special fuction buttons controlling sound_up/down/mute out of the box (not to mention the others). Now, I hate to be like one of the obnoxious asshats out their that say it works for me, so I falsely presume it should work for everybody. But that goes the other way around, it does work for some people out-of-the-box (so far on most of my systems). There are definitely other things that don't work, but I've been lucky with hardware compatibility.
OTOH, I had installed WinXPs where the Operating System indicated 5 or 6 drivers missing. Usually, with my luck, the only ethernet was an add-on card one it didn't recognize, so the internet was available, and it didn't do a good job of searching the CD for the drivers - they were there, but Windows needed its hand held right up to the exact folder among hundreds or it would never find it on its own. Even with internet available, let's say the computer only had VGA resoluion availbale, Windows helpfully asks if it should search the internet for the driver and it almost always came back negative, being useless 99.999% of the time (to be fair, for the very first time on any piece of equipment for me, it caught the video card last week for a computer I was setting up, they must have improved their database or something).
So I think the Linux community is doing a commendable job with the resources it has. Microsoft, otoh, by and large, rides on its marketshare, letting the manufacturers do all the work. But that's the way the world is, fair or unfair, and that's what linux has to work with until it to, if ever, reaches critical mass.
Most of the software I work(ed) with is still to get heavy duty tasks done are still very much on my computer. CAD, programming, mathematica-type programs... not that I want them all to be, just how it is with current internet pervasiveness and speed.
I like using Google Apps because I don't have to worry about keeping files updated across multiple computers. I think Google is safer than carrying a tangle of USB sticks about. If the file is that important or secret, I stick it onto a computer that has absolutely no net access, no modem, and no ethernet connected to it, no wireless, etc.
There are more reasons to like net apps than just being clueless. Besides the aforementioned syncing problem with files, services like mint.com provide, say, an iPhone user a convenient look at their finances impossible with a regular desktop/notebook unless you're really regimented.
That's a decent insight. However, I have no problem with people making money on software that way, as long as software patents don't block competition. What's more problematic with me is being at the whim of the software service provide at any moment to hold your data hostage and your account in their hands. I had enough experiences with ebay's arbitrariness to make me wary. That's why I do keep a backup of the google documents (and important emails too, as webmail is the essentially the same thing with the same pitfalls as any web hosted app, although more comfortable to many because it's been around a bit longer)
While the interface is important, I think many like the convenience and lack of carrying files around like I said earlier, and that will be hard to replicate for any desktop app.
The problem wasn't the controversy, it was that Konami buckled. Anytime a company gives signs of backing off, you'll have a bunch of groups charge in like pack animals to set their agenda. Jack Thompson has been trying it for years. He would have loved that type of weakness in companies. So Konami pretty much blew it.
You can't tell me beating up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto is better than a modern day war simulation. For every person saying "but that's someone's son" in regards to the war game, you could say "but it portraying someone's daughter in GTA"...
If recency were such a controversial thing, you couldn't have documentaries of events newer than 20 year old, let alone what is happening in the world today. The subject matter isn't all that different from any other game of its type, and I'm sure the soldiers in the "soldier groups" protesting the game have played their fair share FPS/GTA/Survival_Horror, so there probably is a fair bit of hypocrisy going about trying to make this or that topic sancrosanct and taboo.