It's announcements like these that cause me to ponder just how far behind we are in terms of software development progress.
Back in 1993 I had a whole suite of MS Flight Simulator programs. (different cities were packaged separately. To the best of my recollection, I had Chicago, New York, LA, and Paris). Obviously the game detail was limited, this was before 3D accelerators, but the buildings were still 3D and key locations had fairly accurate roads. I remember reading in more than one computer magazine that these flight simulators were just the beginning, in 5 years (1998) we'd have 3D maps of the whole world. Looking for directions would be a thing of the past, we'd all have programs that could visually tour every nook and cranny of every location in the world.
It's astounding that computers were set to have a virtual earth in 1998. It's 14 years after I read those articles and we're not even close. Google Earth, the closest representation of such a vision, is about 1% of the way towards it.
I'm also reminded of the rise of VRML/3DML back in 1996. There was a site run by Superscape (vwww.com the Virtual World Wide Web), with links to hundreds of 3D web sites. Deployment of the 3D web was imminent! I thought it was the wave of the future, it was just a matter of time and refinement. 11 years later, we've all but tossed VRML/X3D/3DML in the toilet. The progress those technologies have made is absolutely minimal, not what you'd expect as a result of over a decade of work.
So am I excited about a 3D search engine? Not really. I don't even see it happening in my lifetime, never mind the next few years.
As interesting as the sheer volume is, most of it is garbage. I'd rather have 50 terabytes of organized and accurate information than 500 exabytes of data that isn't organized, and even if it were, it's accuracy is questionable at best. In essence, even if you manage to find what you want, the correctness of that information is likely to be very low.
I've long said we are not in the information age, we are in the data age. The information age will be when we've successfully organized all this crap we're storing/transmitting.
I've seen dozens of posts where people say everyone is overreacting. I think a lot of those people are losing sight of the core of the issue.
This isn't a simple case of "He wasn't who he said he was." If it were just a matter of hiding his name, age, or location, that would be fine. It's a matter of falsifying credentials, namely, having a doctorate and being a tenured professor. People work years to achieve both of those, he just sits down at his computer and decides "I got those."
It's all part of this "Generation Me" syndrome. They think they deserve anything they desire, without working for it. Honorific titles, titles of achievement, tenure, knighthood, a million dollars, whatever, they deserve it because they're so fucking special. They were breastfed self-esteem, they jerk off to pictures of themselves, and they think the whole world should appreciate their blessed presence.
I have an AAS in Software Applications and Programming. I don't care what anyone says about my degree or where I went to school (ITT Tech), it doesn't matter, because I earned it, and that's more than this wanker can ever say for himself.
When Wikipedia/Wikimedia starts begging with an aggressive campaign for donations, people ought to keep this incident in mind. Perhaps more importantly, keep in mind Jimmy Wales response. It gives you a sense for the character of the people who will be managing the donation coffers.
Jimmy: So the money was spent to improve Wikipedia? Senior Staff: Yes. Jimmy: So what's with all the charges for movie tickets, popcorn, and new cars? Senior Staff: You knew we were a bunch of liars anyway and you said you were okay with it. It was my pseudonym who took donations, the real me spent it.
Interesting how 2005 is now being referred to as "the old days" and 13 months is referred to as "an eternity". Personally I would've gone with "not too long ago" or "just before last year's taxes were due."
Sorry, I've gained a bit of perspective. I wrote the preceding paragraph back in the golden days of typing, in the age prior to taking a sip of my Mt. Dew, but I'm no longer posting in the same world it was back then.
3% of a market with 800 million customers is still a nice chunk of change. Even if they only make $50 profit from each it's still about $1.25 billion. If Dell only captured a quarter of the available Linux market, that's still over $300 million. Again, that's assuming only $50 profit per customer.
It can also be considered that Linux desktop usage only currently has 3%-4% market penetration, but Dell introducing a serious product into the market is likely to increase that figure. Maybe reselling Macs would make more money, in which case that's another avenue they should consider.
Dell is not spending millions to train their employees for me. They are spending millions to train employees to provide service to me and potentially 25 million other Linux users.
All they are doing is defining the minimum time frame for me to give them money. If it takes them a year to build and support Linux systems, it'll be a minimum of 1 year before they get money from me. If it takes them 20 years, it'll be a minimum of 20 years before they get money from me. I'm sure they'll let me know when it is they would like some money.
What does your rant have to do with Dell needing time to shore up support venues for Linux? Dell hasn't said that "Sorry, Microsoft won't let us do it." They said it's just going to take time to build a solid chain of support.
As others have stated, if Microsoft were to try to implant Microsoft-specific routines into Linux code, it would then be covered under the GPL.
Furthermore, even a cursory analysis of changelogs or the use of diff tools could easily reveal the exact moment the offending code was integrated, and by whom.
If I invented something I would not be the first person to scream about protecting my invention. I don't believe in patents, I don't think ideas should be property. Many countries function well without giving people the right to stake their claim on aspects of the human thought process.
Any software I develop will be free software. I don't believe I was the first person to think of anything, and I don't deserve compensation for the ideas I come up with. I think making money by shouting "I thought of it first!" is dishonest, because there is no way to be certain, of the 6 billion people on the planet, who exactly thought of something first.
Laws governing "Intellectual Property" are broken. People don't file patents because their idea is valuable. They file patents because their idea is a trivial improvement on a similar idea and financially worthless unless given the exclusive right to use it. In order for an idea to be financially valuable on its own, it would have to be so revolutionary you wouldn't need a patent because no one would be able to understand it and copy it anyway. For example, if you were to plop down a food replicator at a tech convention, you wouldn't need a patent because no one in the whole place could even imagine the physics required to build one of those. Instead, patents are the legal of equivalent of "Infinity + 1".
Generally, 1-Click is just a concrete implementation on the concept of using stored data to perform an operation. How is saving the customer's CCN any different than saving any other piece of data? I've had companies keep my CCN on record before the internet was even around.
Patents are supported by average people because they're spoon-fed a number of myths. The urban legend about the guy who invented something but didn't get a patent so his boss/friend/wife/neighbor got rich from it. Second, patent supporters want people to believe that the good life, full of riches, women, and fast cars is only a patent away.
As we move more towards open-ended games, the idea of plot/sub-plot becomes completely arbitrary. If you think in terms of scenes, you load up a game and you're in 1941 Manhattan. What's the plot? The plot is whatever the player wants to get involved in. It could be a love story, a gangster simulation, a crime drama, a psychological thriller. or the story of a rookie baseball player trying to make it in the Yankees. The boundaries that constrain our games right now are quickly disappearing. It won't be very long before games are completely dynamic with no linear story or tree-like subplot systems. The problem is, if regulations like this are applied, our games are going to change faster than the law will keep up with them. Regulations like this set the stage for an atmosphere where games can't even be released because it takes years to review them for rating.
I agree. In the current generation of games, it's seldom possible to "review the entire content of a game". There's hardcore gamers who go through games multiple times and don't even see all the content for years because of subplots they didn't know how to activate, or some obscure combination of factors that unlocks other content. And what about patches that dramatically alter the game's content? Do we need a ratings panel to review every patch for every game?
Games like GTA, The Elder Scrolls series, and other dynamic world games would be virtually impossible to review without there being hundreds of ratings reviewers who collaborate to systematically make different choices than each other. And then there are player mods to consider. Games like Half-Life become an entirely different beast once a few mods start getting popular.
I think the biggest problem for the idea will be the games we see that become completely dynamic, where all game world content is generated differently every single time. It's like asking someone to play through entire content of Dungeons and Dragons (the tabletop game). Make sure you visit every city, plane, run every adventure module, etc. That shouldn't take any more than 6000 years.
I can imagine the good ol' senator shitting a brick after hearing how it's done. "What do you mean they can just make this crap up as they go along? It's not fair! I want it rated!"
Linux users are definitely consumers. Believing that having the basic functionality of operating your computer for free isn't about exiting the market as a consumer. It's along the lines of how you should be able to operate your television for free. You don't need cable, satellite, or any product separate from the equipment itself for your TV to function. You can buy a TV, watch DVDs, tapes, home videos, set it up as a security monitor, or use it just as speakers for an audio tape player, whatever you want to do with it.
Up until Linux, if you bought computer hardware, it was a dead box unless you also paid for an operating system, of which the only real choice was Windows. You couldn't use the hardware you had bought. You had a computer that couldn't compute anything. No matter how small your needs were, even if the only thing you ever needed to do was create plain text files, you had to pay $90+. With Windows XP Professional, it should burn any purchasing manager to think about paying $300 for a pinball game and another half dozen games, movie maker, media player, and various libraries and functions to support those applications, when the reason the computer is needed may not ever involve any of those. Whether or not those applications are needed you must pay for them. Enter Linux.
It's a misnomer that Linux users are cheapskates. Linux users will pay just as much cold, hard cash as the next guy for applications and products that fill his needs, they're just not willing to pay for peripheral garbage that has no value to them. As a Linux user, I've personally paid $4500 for an IDE/toolkit.
There are many Linux users who want to be consumers, and would gladly pay for things like 3D Studio Max, Photoshop CS2, etc. but those things aren't being offered to Linux users. Linux users are consumers lacking producers. We might have money but, for some reason, a lot of companies don't think a Linux user's money spends like the other kind, which is a shame because companies like Google have a lot of Linux money to throw around.
Basement-bound Linux users are no different, eventually they become purchasing managers, company owners, or hobbyists who build up some cash and want to spend it on something. If someone makes a decent offer, they'll fork over the cash just like anyone else.
I've established a bizarre equilibrium in my life. The amount of my money that gets funneled towards IT companies is directly proportionate to the degree that they support my platform (predominantly Linux/FireFox/AMD/ATI... note: ATI is really walking a fine line). If I visit a site and it doesn't work for me, none of my money seems to go in that direction. Of course this isn't to say that if a company's products work on my platform they are guaranteed to get my money, it's only to say if they don't work on my platform, they are guaranteed not to get it.
Amount Given To Walmart in the last 5 years: $0
Projection for the next 5 years: $0
Message to Walmart: "Good luck with that."
Alternate Message to Walmart: "Game over, better luck next time."
My understanding of random is obviously stronger than your understanding of it. You've claimed that if something happens more than once, it's not random. If you flip a coin twice, and both times it comes up heads, your claim is that it is the opposite of random. That is not so.
Just because a pattern happens more than once does not mean it is not random, it just means it is not unique.
I believe the Viral Marketing and Stealth Marketing trends will eventually lead us down the road to Informed Marketing. We'll reach a point where we no longer wish to be entertained or distracted by commercials, but rather, the commercials which give us the most accurate and detailed information about a product will be the most successful.
We're not there yet, and I think that has a lot to do with the newness of information technology. The vast majority of the internet world are like 3-year olds. They are testing the boundaries of the virtual world, learning how this works with that, feeling, walking, and speaking for the first time. I think these are going to be short-lived trends. Maybe 20 to 30 years, but in the long run, all of this is nothing more than a novelty of our current generation.
You are exactly right and it's the first thing that occurred to me when looking at the Slashdot blurb. If it does not involve Congress abridging the freedom of speech, it is not a "free speech" issue.
What makes someone think Youtube has some sort of obligation to publish any video they're given? At best, you can consider submitting a video a request for publication. If they turn you down, your "freedom of speech" has not been inhibited, you are still free to distribute the video in any other avenue. It is only when the government steps in and tells you that you cannot publish it that it becomes a "free" speech issue.
How would I know whether or not people put LEDs on a bomb? The only thing I know about bombs is from Hollywood, I imagine the same is true for the majority of the population. If things had turned out differently I could imagine exactly the opposite thing being said to someone:
"Why the hell didn't the idiot call the cops? With all those LEDs it was obviously a bomb."
No, I'm not joking. I can see what it is, and it's obvious to me, but I'm already familiar with the show and character, so my perception is skewed. But I can understand how to anyone not familiar it just appears to be an amorphous configuration of LEDs.
"...the morons who thought that an LED cartoon character giving the finger could be a bomb."
It only looks like an LED cartoon character if you're actually familiar with the character. Otherwise it just looks like a panel of randomly placed LEDs. I believe the people who mistakenly thought it could be a bomb did so with the most earnest of intentions. It would be like throwing round red capsules that explode in a puff of smoke into subway tunnels, then being surprised that no one understands it's a pokemon marketing ploy.
Linux still has a good opportunity for the desktop market.
Microsoft will make another Windows operating system. The money is there, and so long as the money is there, Microsoft will be too.
Internet applications aren't going to take over just yet. Not as long as there's still a good number of people on dial-up (without even the option of broadband). And those of us who do have broadband have fairly shoddy connections, at least as far as running internet-direct applications would be concerned. Networking implies two-way communication, but thus far the majority of us are sold one-way connections (high download capacity, low upload capacity) which makes latency a huge issue. When you consider things the idea of all your data and applications being completely reliant on the availability of your network connection, anyone who's ever experienced even a couple hours of downtime will be slow to make that adoption.
I think we have the technology to build a completely internet-based operating system, but the requirements for it to function efficiently are not spread widely enough for it to be viable. It's like having a really awesome, solar-powered car, that can do 300mph on the road, but there's only one road in the world that it works on. No one would buy the car no matter how nice, they'll just stick with their old beat up 1984 chevy; It might be inferior by all technical specifications, but the roads you can drive it on are everywhere. Similarly, the number of people with a residential connection that has the quality required to use a completely internet-based operating system are so few and far between, it wouldn't matter how slick of an internet application you make, it's little more than a novelty for the curious.
Slashdot Mirror
It's announcements like these that cause me to ponder just how far behind we are in terms of software development progress.
Back in 1993 I had a whole suite of MS Flight Simulator programs. (different cities were packaged separately. To the best of my recollection, I had Chicago, New York, LA, and Paris). Obviously the game detail was limited, this was before 3D accelerators, but the buildings were still 3D and key locations had fairly accurate roads. I remember reading in more than one computer magazine that these flight simulators were just the beginning, in 5 years (1998) we'd have 3D maps of the whole world. Looking for directions would be a thing of the past, we'd all have programs that could visually tour every nook and cranny of every location in the world.
It's astounding that computers were set to have a virtual earth in 1998. It's 14 years after I read those articles and we're not even close. Google Earth, the closest representation of such a vision, is about 1% of the way towards it.
I'm also reminded of the rise of VRML/3DML back in 1996. There was a site run by Superscape (vwww.com the Virtual World Wide Web), with links to hundreds of 3D web sites. Deployment of the 3D web was imminent! I thought it was the wave of the future, it was just a matter of time and refinement. 11 years later, we've all but tossed VRML/X3D/3DML in the toilet. The progress those technologies have made is absolutely minimal, not what you'd expect as a result of over a decade of work.
So am I excited about a 3D search engine? Not really. I don't even see it happening in my lifetime, never mind the next few years.
As interesting as the sheer volume is, most of it is garbage. I'd rather have 50 terabytes of organized and accurate information than 500 exabytes of data that isn't organized, and even if it were, it's accuracy is questionable at best. In essence, even if you manage to find what you want, the correctness of that information is likely to be very low.
I've long said we are not in the information age, we are in the data age. The information age will be when we've successfully organized all this crap we're storing/transmitting.
I've seen dozens of posts where people say everyone is overreacting. I think a lot of those people are losing sight of the core of the issue.
This isn't a simple case of "He wasn't who he said he was." If it were just a matter of hiding his name, age, or location, that would be fine. It's a matter of falsifying credentials, namely, having a doctorate and being a tenured professor. People work years to achieve both of those, he just sits down at his computer and decides "I got those."
It's all part of this "Generation Me" syndrome. They think they deserve anything they desire, without working for it. Honorific titles, titles of achievement, tenure, knighthood, a million dollars, whatever, they deserve it because they're so fucking special. They were breastfed self-esteem, they jerk off to pictures of themselves, and they think the whole world should appreciate their blessed presence.
I have an AAS in Software Applications and Programming. I don't care what anyone says about my degree or where I went to school (ITT Tech), it doesn't matter, because I earned it, and that's more than this wanker can ever say for himself.
When Wikipedia/Wikimedia starts begging with an aggressive campaign for donations, people ought to keep this incident in mind. Perhaps more importantly, keep in mind Jimmy Wales response. It gives you a sense for the character of the people who will be managing the donation coffers.
Jimmy: So the money was spent to improve Wikipedia?
Senior Staff: Yes.
Jimmy: So what's with all the charges for movie tickets, popcorn, and new cars?
Senior Staff: You knew we were a bunch of liars anyway and you said you were okay with it. It was my pseudonym who took donations, the real me spent it.
Interesting how 2005 is now being referred to as "the old days" and 13 months is referred to as "an eternity". Personally I would've gone with "not too long ago" or "just before last year's taxes were due."
Sorry, I've gained a bit of perspective. I wrote the preceding paragraph back in the golden days of typing, in the age prior to taking a sip of my Mt. Dew, but I'm no longer posting in the same world it was back then.
3% of a market with 800 million customers is still a nice chunk of change. Even if they only make $50 profit from each it's still about $1.25 billion. If Dell only captured a quarter of the available Linux market, that's still over $300 million. Again, that's assuming only $50 profit per customer.
It can also be considered that Linux desktop usage only currently has 3%-4% market penetration, but Dell introducing a serious product into the market is likely to increase that figure. Maybe reselling Macs would make more money, in which case that's another avenue they should consider.
Dell is not spending millions to train their employees for me. They are spending millions to train employees to provide service to me and potentially 25 million other Linux users.
All they are doing is defining the minimum time frame for me to give them money. If it takes them a year to build and support Linux systems, it'll be a minimum of 1 year before they get money from me. If it takes them 20 years, it'll be a minimum of 20 years before they get money from me. I'm sure they'll let me know when it is they would like some money.
What does your rant have to do with Dell needing time to shore up support venues for Linux? Dell hasn't said that "Sorry, Microsoft won't let us do it." They said it's just going to take time to build a solid chain of support.
As others have stated, if Microsoft were to try to implant Microsoft-specific routines into Linux code, it would then be covered under the GPL.
Furthermore, even a cursory analysis of changelogs or the use of diff tools could easily reveal the exact moment the offending code was integrated, and by whom.If I invented something I would not be the first person to scream about protecting my invention. I don't believe in patents, I don't think ideas should be property. Many countries function well without giving people the right to stake their claim on aspects of the human thought process.
Any software I develop will be free software. I don't believe I was the first person to think of anything, and I don't deserve compensation for the ideas I come up with. I think making money by shouting "I thought of it first!" is dishonest, because there is no way to be certain, of the 6 billion people on the planet, who exactly thought of something first.
Laws governing "Intellectual Property" are broken. People don't file patents because their idea is valuable. They file patents because their idea is a trivial improvement on a similar idea and financially worthless unless given the exclusive right to use it. In order for an idea to be financially valuable on its own, it would have to be so revolutionary you wouldn't need a patent because no one would be able to understand it and copy it anyway. For example, if you were to plop down a food replicator at a tech convention, you wouldn't need a patent because no one in the whole place could even imagine the physics required to build one of those. Instead, patents are the legal of equivalent of "Infinity + 1".
Generally, 1-Click is just a concrete implementation on the concept of using stored data to perform an operation. How is saving the customer's CCN any different than saving any other piece of data? I've had companies keep my CCN on record before the internet was even around.
Patents are supported by average people because they're spoon-fed a number of myths. The urban legend about the guy who invented something but didn't get a patent so his boss/friend/wife/neighbor got rich from it. Second, patent supporters want people to believe that the good life, full of riches, women, and fast cars is only a patent away.
"Is it really that hard to understand?"
Patronizing rhetoric does not often persuade people to join your cause.That'll learn ya.
As we move more towards open-ended games, the idea of plot/sub-plot becomes completely arbitrary. If you think in terms of scenes, you load up a game and you're in 1941 Manhattan. What's the plot? The plot is whatever the player wants to get involved in. It could be a love story, a gangster simulation, a crime drama, a psychological thriller. or the story of a rookie baseball player trying to make it in the Yankees. The boundaries that constrain our games right now are quickly disappearing. It won't be very long before games are completely dynamic with no linear story or tree-like subplot systems. The problem is, if regulations like this are applied, our games are going to change faster than the law will keep up with them. Regulations like this set the stage for an atmosphere where games can't even be released because it takes years to review them for rating.
I agree. In the current generation of games, it's seldom possible to "review the entire content of a game". There's hardcore gamers who go through games multiple times and don't even see all the content for years because of subplots they didn't know how to activate, or some obscure combination of factors that unlocks other content. And what about patches that dramatically alter the game's content? Do we need a ratings panel to review every patch for every game?
Games like GTA, The Elder Scrolls series, and other dynamic world games would be virtually impossible to review without there being hundreds of ratings reviewers who collaborate to systematically make different choices than each other. And then there are player mods to consider. Games like Half-Life become an entirely different beast once a few mods start getting popular.
I think the biggest problem for the idea will be the games we see that become completely dynamic, where all game world content is generated differently every single time. It's like asking someone to play through entire content of Dungeons and Dragons (the tabletop game). Make sure you visit every city, plane, run every adventure module, etc. That shouldn't take any more than 6000 years.
I can imagine the good ol' senator shitting a brick after hearing how it's done. "What do you mean they can just make this crap up as they go along? It's not fair! I want it rated!"
Linux users are definitely consumers. Believing that having the basic functionality of operating your computer for free isn't about exiting the market as a consumer. It's along the lines of how you should be able to operate your television for free. You don't need cable, satellite, or any product separate from the equipment itself for your TV to function. You can buy a TV, watch DVDs, tapes, home videos, set it up as a security monitor, or use it just as speakers for an audio tape player, whatever you want to do with it.
Up until Linux, if you bought computer hardware, it was a dead box unless you also paid for an operating system, of which the only real choice was Windows. You couldn't use the hardware you had bought. You had a computer that couldn't compute anything. No matter how small your needs were, even if the only thing you ever needed to do was create plain text files, you had to pay $90+. With Windows XP Professional, it should burn any purchasing manager to think about paying $300 for a pinball game and another half dozen games, movie maker, media player, and various libraries and functions to support those applications, when the reason the computer is needed may not ever involve any of those. Whether or not those applications are needed you must pay for them. Enter Linux.
It's a misnomer that Linux users are cheapskates. Linux users will pay just as much cold, hard cash as the next guy for applications and products that fill his needs, they're just not willing to pay for peripheral garbage that has no value to them. As a Linux user, I've personally paid $4500 for an IDE/toolkit.
There are many Linux users who want to be consumers, and would gladly pay for things like 3D Studio Max, Photoshop CS2, etc. but those things aren't being offered to Linux users. Linux users are consumers lacking producers. We might have money but, for some reason, a lot of companies don't think a Linux user's money spends like the other kind, which is a shame because companies like Google have a lot of Linux money to throw around.
Basement-bound Linux users are no different, eventually they become purchasing managers, company owners, or hobbyists who build up some cash and want to spend it on something. If someone makes a decent offer, they'll fork over the cash just like anyone else.
I've established a bizarre equilibrium in my life. The amount of my money that gets funneled towards IT companies is directly proportionate to the degree that they support my platform (predominantly Linux/FireFox/AMD/ATI... note: ATI is really walking a fine line). If I visit a site and it doesn't work for me, none of my money seems to go in that direction. Of course this isn't to say that if a company's products work on my platform they are guaranteed to get my money, it's only to say if they don't work on my platform, they are guaranteed not to get it.
Amount Given To Walmart in the last 5 years: $0
Projection for the next 5 years: $0
Message to Walmart: "Good luck with that."
Alternate Message to Walmart: "Game over, better luck next time."
My understanding of random is obviously stronger than your understanding of it. You've claimed that if something happens more than once, it's not random. If you flip a coin twice, and both times it comes up heads, your claim is that it is the opposite of random. That is not so.
Just because a pattern happens more than once does not mean it is not random, it just means it is not unique.
I believe the Viral Marketing and Stealth Marketing trends will eventually lead us down the road to Informed Marketing. We'll reach a point where we no longer wish to be entertained or distracted by commercials, but rather, the commercials which give us the most accurate and detailed information about a product will be the most successful.
We're not there yet, and I think that has a lot to do with the newness of information technology. The vast majority of the internet world are like 3-year olds. They are testing the boundaries of the virtual world, learning how this works with that, feeling, walking, and speaking for the first time. I think these are going to be short-lived trends. Maybe 20 to 30 years, but in the long run, all of this is nothing more than a novelty of our current generation.
You are exactly right and it's the first thing that occurred to me when looking at the Slashdot blurb. If it does not involve Congress abridging the freedom of speech, it is not a "free speech" issue.
What makes someone think Youtube has some sort of obligation to publish any video they're given? At best, you can consider submitting a video a request for publication. If they turn you down, your "freedom of speech" has not been inhibited, you are still free to distribute the video in any other avenue. It is only when the government steps in and tells you that you cannot publish it that it becomes a "free" speech issue.
How would I know whether or not people put LEDs on a bomb? The only thing I know about bombs is from Hollywood, I imagine the same is true for the majority of the population. If things had turned out differently I could imagine exactly the opposite thing being said to someone:
"Why the hell didn't the idiot call the cops? With all those LEDs it was obviously a bomb."
One could argue that anyone who understands the "sad state of affairs" the United States is in would be idiotic to perpetrate such a campaign.
Why would the public (the ones reporting sightings) be bomb experts?
No, I'm not joking. I can see what it is, and it's obvious to me, but I'm already familiar with the show and character, so my perception is skewed. But I can understand how to anyone not familiar it just appears to be an amorphous configuration of LEDs.
"...the morons who thought that an LED cartoon character giving the finger could be a bomb."
It only looks like an LED cartoon character if you're actually familiar with the character. Otherwise it just looks like a panel of randomly placed LEDs. I believe the people who mistakenly thought it could be a bomb did so with the most earnest of intentions. It would be like throwing round red capsules that explode in a puff of smoke into subway tunnels, then being surprised that no one understands it's a pokemon marketing ploy.
Linux still has a good opportunity for the desktop market.
Microsoft will make another Windows operating system. The money is there, and so long as the money is there, Microsoft will be too.
Internet applications aren't going to take over just yet. Not as long as there's still a good number of people on dial-up (without even the option of broadband). And those of us who do have broadband have fairly shoddy connections, at least as far as running internet-direct applications would be concerned. Networking implies two-way communication, but thus far the majority of us are sold one-way connections (high download capacity, low upload capacity) which makes latency a huge issue. When you consider things the idea of all your data and applications being completely reliant on the availability of your network connection, anyone who's ever experienced even a couple hours of downtime will be slow to make that adoption.
I think we have the technology to build a completely internet-based operating system, but the requirements for it to function efficiently are not spread widely enough for it to be viable. It's like having a really awesome, solar-powered car, that can do 300mph on the road, but there's only one road in the world that it works on. No one would buy the car no matter how nice, they'll just stick with their old beat up 1984 chevy; It might be inferior by all technical specifications, but the roads you can drive it on are everywhere. Similarly, the number of people with a residential connection that has the quality required to use a completely internet-based operating system are so few and far between, it wouldn't matter how slick of an internet application you make, it's little more than a novelty for the curious.