Why do you need to "try out" a domain? Either you need it, or you don't - the only people "trying out" domains are squatters. I just say the minimum should be a 1yr registration (at $8+ like it is now). You need a lot of clicks on your ads to pay that off, it quickly becomes unprofitable.
This is a good idea in theory.. but how do you determine that someone is using them for a "legitimate reason" ?
Is advertising a legitimate reason? Sure, any rational person can see that the typosquatter sites are really just advertising sites, and no content. However, some of them have "search engines" (that just return advertising results..) and how can you argue that those are not legitimate, while google (also a search engine, also returns some paid results/advertising) is? If you mandate that sites have to have useful content, then they'll probably just start inserting blobs of random content, or news feeds, or something else that technically complies with the requirements. Why shut them down, but not, eg, MSN or Yahoo, which are both a bunch of ads crammed around some content?
Unfortunately I don't know how you solve the problem that way. In the end, the squatters will continue, making changes to their sites whenever you change the content requirements, and in the worst case, legitimate sites will be forced to make changes in order to comply (even though a legitimate site should never have to change, since they are legitimate).
Sure, go ahead. But you'll be wasting your time.. most companies don't spam.
I've been doing what the GP suggested for a long long time now (6 years probably?). I actually have a subdomain with a catch-all that goes to my main address. It's nice because I literally don't have to do anything. I just sign up with eg, slashdot@subdomain.mydomain.com. In the past 6 years, any time I've needed to sign up somewhere, I do it with of these addresses. I've gotten absolutely no "spam" to any of those addresses. That's right, none. The only thing I get are mails from the company themselves - promotions and newsletters and crap like that. If it annoys me enough, or they send it often enough, I click the remove link and all is well.
I'm of course not just signing up for any websites, I am still a bit selective about it. I only sign up when I need to.. eg, forum registrations, registering to be able to download something I need (though I hate that, so only do it if I absolutely have to).
The other side of this, is I've never posted my "main" email address on any website, I only use it for personal communication. And yet, I get a couple hundred spams per day to that address. When I first got my current main email address (which was probably, 5 years ago I guess..?), I got no spam. In fact, I was happily using it for a few months with no spam. Then someone sent me an online greeting card. In the couple months following, there was a huge increase in spam, and since then, it's just gone up. It's no mystery, if you go to those sites, their privacy policies specifically state "any email address or pesronal information you provide to us can be used by us for whatever we want" - which includes selling to other people.
Note, I think you really need to use a subdomain to do it properly. When I first started doing it, I was redirecting *@mydomain.com to my personal mailbox.. that lasted for one day. I was getting email to people who were previously using that domain, spam to everyone, etc. These days with spammers blindly mailing info@ sales@ etc on top of anything else they can, it's not worthwhile.
It's not even necessarily infringing. Case in point, open source. The authors of the work still hold the copyrights, but they've effectively granted a license to distribute it freely (GPL, BSD, etc).
Since this is straight from the Sqlite web page, take it with a grain of salt (but also realize they're not trying to sell anything, so don't really have any reason to lie).. but they claim a practical upper limit is 100GB (http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q10), and theoretically 2TB.
You may be first to market but if you do a really sloppy job of it, then word will spread and you can forget about getting big contracts in the future. One word: Microsoft.
You have to also remember though, that often the content generated dynmically is going to be of no use to a search engine, it will often be user-specific - there's obviously some reason it's being generated that way.
And if pages are designed using AJAX and dynamic rendering just for the sake of using AJAX and dynamic rendering.. well, they deserve what they get:)
I think the solution is just to issue everyone a metallic container, which slips over the card and covers the portion of it that contains the antenna. Maybe you could even design one that would reveal (through a clear front) the name and picture of the bearer, but cover the back of the card and keep it from being read. How about just use magnetic stripe cards? The only way to read it is to physically slide it through a reader.. if you have to 'open' your RFID card to get the reader to recoginize it, then it's just as simple to slide it through a reader on the wall, but probably much cheaper.
Yes, RFID is cool and all, but in a lot of ways people are using it as solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
They're starting to put it in credit cards, which just makes no sense to me at all. Instead of sliding it through a reader, you just 'tap' it on a pad? Ok, what's the difference, besides the fact that you're forcing merchants to buy new readers? I'm sure there's probably banks out there sticking RFID in bank cards, then advertising "hey, you don't need to swipe OR use a PIN anymore!"...
It's silly because the cost of a battery is more than the cost of running power to each desk. This includes the cost of a laptop (on batteries) over a desktop - if you're going to buy a laptop, you pay a premium for the fact that it's portable, and happens to require a battery to do so. Not to mention, even if you have batteries, you still have to charge them somehow.
And once you run power to every desk, you might as well run ethernet. The cost of a switch and the cable (and the fact that ethernet jacks are not on-board pretty much every motherboard) is still lower than a good quality access point and PCI wireless cards.
So basically you end up with a lab, which, of course, is not portable from classroom to classroom.
$ of Lab in every classroom > $ of laptops on a trolley from classroom-to-classroom > $ single lab shared by every classroom
And anyways, I agree with other posters here for the most part, learning computers is important, but you still have to learn the basics by hand/on paper first. If a generation of kids STARTS learning addition and subtraction using a calculator/computer, I can't imagine what they'll be like later in life, and later when doing real math.
Perhaps you mean, that your software understands "whiz-bang engineering interchange files" (which happen to be XML-based).. which was my point, there is a distinction.
..that XML will stop being a buzzword, and we will no longer see products with "XML support" as a feature point (supporting formats that USE XML is fine, but "XML" itself is a container format, it can describe literally ANYTHING..)
Try to run win XP and see if you can get along with it without root permissions for one day. The programmers concept for windows is just wrong! you can not require root privileges to run Acrobat Reader, Adobe Photoshop or who knows what I've been running at home with XP as a regular user for a few months now (mostly just as a test). I can get MOST things done, since you can do 'run as..' for almost everything in control panel, and every application. The problems start happening when the (3rd party) applications you're using assume you're administrator, and try to store their configuration files in their %programfiles% directory, and sadly, there are too many of those (come on, Windows 2000 was out 7 years ago!). To change folder permissions to get those to work, you have to switch to an admin user (at least fast user switching helps here) and then you can do it.
Someone recently taught me a trick, where you can use 'run as' on iexplore.exe and then type in a local URL, the window turns into a local filesystem explorer window with admin privledges.. but that seems like a pretty big hack really.
Windows firewall blocks any apps that accept inbound connections, so especially at first it can be pretty annoying, you keep having to run these applications.
That said, the way linux handles this is WAY nicer.
If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? Wouldn't it become successful by gathering resources when and where it can? Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us? You're forgetting that we've only been transmitting for a little over 100 years, and have been 'listening' or had the ability to MAYBE detect other planets transmitting for even less time than that. That's a pretty small time frame if you compare it to the age of the earth, let alone the galaxy. A civilization 100 LYs away is only JUST hearing our first experiments with broadcasting actual audio (and not morse code or something could easily look like noise).
Likewise, today, for us to hear someone else, there would have to have been someone broadcasting x years ago (depending on how many light years away), broadcasting sufficiently loudly that we would be able to hear them (and our receivers have to be sensitive enough to hear them), and broadcasting something we consider to be a signal and not noise.
In the US, you can vote for the president -- largely for how they handle matters of foreign policy and trade -- as distinct from how you elect representatives to parliament. In Australia, there is no distinction, and the Prime Minister is appointed by the party that has majority representation. Unless you happen to live in the Prime Minister's electorate, you can not vote for or against him. Canada has the same issue, but even if the would-be Prime Minister is not elected, there is the option that a junior member of that party will step down, and a by-election will be held in that riding to get the Prime Minister a seat in the House.
Manufacturers sell to the carriers, who then sell to the consumers (typically). If the carriers see voice recoginition and SMS as taking away revenue from voice calls, they probably aren't going to buy the phone. If they don't want to buy the phone, why does the manufacturer bother building them and putting in the R&D to get full domain voice recoginition working on a cell phone..
I agree, but at the same time, it does have a certain appeal. They manage it, google obviously has more IT resources than, well, pretty much any other company. So in theory, they could actually do a better job.
Of course, what happens if google or the service goes away? You lose everything. At least if you're paying for it, they have SOME kind of responsibility to you (the terms of service or contract you sign with them remain to be seen.. but hopefully they at least have some obligation to you).
It actually would make me feel better about using it for a business, as a paid service instead of a free one.
So what makes you think the cell phone companies have any interest in developing (or supporting on their networks) a phone that has voice recoginition for SMS? Remember, it's them you're paying to make those 'expensive' voice calls..
I wonder though, why anyone doesn't skip EVERY commercial if they have the ability and knowledge of how to do so. (ie don't start watching any show till like 22 minutes into the hour) That's basically what I do.. Since I set up my mythtv box, my TV viewing habits are totally different. I set it to record shows I care about (and automatically delete older shows), and when I get home, a bunch of new shows are recorded. I've never been one to let my life revolve around the TV anyways - the few shows I actually care about and that require actually watching in order (eg, 24, Lost), I've either downloaded or bought on DVD. I maybe watch "live tv" once a month, if that. Now if I feel like watching TV, I just pick the show and hit play. As a bonus, mythtv has probably flagged all the commercials by that point (it usually does a few minutes after the show ends).
If I didn't have the ability to download or use the PVR, I probably just wouldn't watch TV at all anymore, it's not worth adjusting my life to TV's schedule.
From the very first Mac OS X v10.0 (and even before in Mac OS 9) there has been a feature called Software Update. Every Mac checks a server at Apple for important security updates, as well as regular maintenance updates for the OS. Yes, "Windows Update" existed in windows 2000 as well...
Mac OS X v10.5.0 "Leopard" will be the around the 45th shipping version of Mac OS X... during that time we've had Windows 5.1, 5.1 SP2, and 6.0... three versions. There was also 5.1 SP1, but besides that, there have also been numerous updates ("hotfixes") pushed down on a regular basis (I think it's called "patch tuesday"). If you count all those, theres probably been hundreds of versions. If I wanted to, I could get numerous updates to my Debian etch system pretty much every day - does updating each package count as a version number increment? Does that mean it's more secure, because there have been more versions pushed out?
The point is, there is nothing conclusive that can be drawn from version numbers. Please don't confuse number of "releases" with security. This is the same kind of FUD Microsoft uses to show how they're more secure than Linux - "look, we released x number of security updates, in the same time period, linux (as if that refers to a product) only released y".
Really, in something big like an "operating system", using version numbers drives me nuts. The kernel can have a version number. The shell/user interface can have a version number. The web browser, text editor, music player, mail program, archive program, calculator, screen magnifier, image viewer, chat client, solitare, disk defragmenter.... they can all have version numbers too. But does updating any one of those applications mean you've updated the operating system itself? How many updates do you need to do before you increment the OS version number? Do you wait until you get x packages that all have updates before you push out your "operating system update"? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to get updates out ASAP, especially if they're security fixes?
Now, I think I have to go take a shower or something, how dare you make me defend Windows..
Not to mention -- as the article points out -- businesses will probably feel the need to register their copyrights and names (just to protect them from being turned into a porn site), which means an extra $60/yr going to some domain registrar. Porn sites will keep their.com's, as you say (why would they give them up? Even if they did, the majority of names are utterly useless for any other purpose..). Domain squatters will register everything they can and attempt to resell desirable domains..
Basically, the *ONLY* group this benefits is domain registrars, who will profit from the $60/yr (and possibly the squatters - but the domains are expensive enough that the resell prices will have to be high if they expect to get any short-term return - eg, if you sell two.xxx's of the 30 you hold, you need to get $900 a pop.. actually I have no idea if that's low or high in the reseller business. Over $8 sounds expensive to me:) ).
Or you borrow a leaf from the commercial page and build in automated tool(s) that provide most of the needed information, and the user fills out the rest. That's assuming a crash (or something that can be identified by the computer as a problem) happened, and your system is relatively simple. If you're working with something that involves multiple services, and there is simply unexpected behaviour (eg, action A causes B to happen, when you were expecting C.. in other words, the outcome is 'successful' but it's not what should have happened), it's very hard to provide automated tools to gather the required information (without just dumping all logs for the last x minutes - which really puts you in the same situation as requring a large amount of developer time).
I ran into an annoying little bug with Perl Win32::SoundRec, figured out how to fix it, patched my own system, and then spent 30 minutes trying to find info on where to submit the fix. I finally emailed the author and got no response. Months later, the bug is still there. The fix is three lines of code and two extra calculations. That's a real problem, but it's really a fault of the project, not the open source process in general. The nice thing about this is you can at least post your patch somewhere (like the mailing list) and at the least other users who encounter the same problem can fix it. At best, if the author never comes back and fixes it, someone (or you) can fork it and maintain their own version with that and possibly other fixes/enhancements..
So, when I as a 99.9% user tries that 0.1% of the time to contribute, why is it always a pain? I would love to contribute. If the bar were lower, if I could take a 1-line fix and get someone to pay attention, or if I could take that bug and get support in debugging it other than "compile it yourself", I am sure my contribution rate would quadruple. Again, it's really up to the project. I've been involed with projects where the only interaction between the developer and users is a forum (eg, this is where bugs/patches/etc go) and although it's easy to contribute a patch (just post a message), it's incredibly irritating in many other respects. There's no real way to "track" bugs/patches, they're just messages that eventually get lost on page 2+ (I say this as a user, but I'm sure the developer(s) would have as hard a time as I).
On the other end, some projects use ticket tracking systems that are overly complex - eg, you have to register first, and then fill out 50 fields, search 4 or 5 times to be sure it's not duplicated, etc. In some projects this tracker is not linked to from the main web page, which makes the process even more difficult. In some projects, after reporting a bug you'll get a response "please try in the latest cvs/svn version". All of these things add up to make it a hassle for the causal user to report bugs. From a developers point of view, they mean the developers (who are volunteers, remember) spend less time going through false bug reports.
I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Having to register is a response to spam - there are a lot of spam bots that attack the common bug tracking systems. Having too many fields is annoying, but in a big project it can be useful to get people to report the proper information and be sure the right people look at it. Sometimes asking the user to try the lastest version is appropriate (eg, if there's a possible fix in, but not totally tested for all cases), but sometimes it's just lazyness.
I'm active on a decently large project now, and there are a LOT of false bug reports - bugs reported in branches that are obsolete (and have been fixed for a year), people posting what amounts to help questions as bugs, and bugs that say "____ doesn't work" (eg, utterly useless). Luckily we have non-developer users that go through and close these, ocasionally CC'ing a developer to ask if it's legitimate. However, not all projects have these, and indeed, we didn't for the first year or so of existance. As a result, there were often bug reports that would sit there for a long time before someone got around to going through them. Let me tell you, it's pretty annoying to spend 30 minutes trying to duplicate a bug, only to find out in the end it was a configuration error or some other unrelated problem, where if the user had read documentation they would have solved it.
So basically what it gets down to is: do you make users spend slightly more time to file a decent bug report, or do you waste lots of developer time (in aggregate) tracking down false bugs? Since it's usually the developers that set up the bug tracking system, guess what the answer is...
As far as criminal copyright charges do, downloading a fake file makes you as guilty as a real one. But that's something along the lines of putting a sign on your car that says "free car! take me!" and leaving the keys in the ignition.. and then charging the person that takes it with grand theft auto. Advertising a file on a bittorrent tracker and running a bittorrent client seeding that file seems to me like it would be the same sort of thing. It's quite different than if someone copies the file off your hard drive without your consent.
Unfortunatley, since the *AA have much more money than most of the people they're sueing, they will probably continue to get away with that kind of behaviour while the people being sued cannot afford to fight it, and settle instead.
.. but when is the rest of the USA going to follow suit?
According to wikipedia, As of 2005 only three countries, the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar (Burma) have not converted to metric yet. Canada officially converted in 1970, but both systems get used on a day-to-day basis. Most tape measures, rulers, etc have both systems. Most older people still use imperial for most things, and younger generations seem to be mixed.
It's actually interesting that a lot of people here (Canada) use mixed units. Personally, I usually use feet if I'm estimating a distance (it's just a very convienient size - the closest metric equivalent is a decimeter, just doesn't quite cut it), and pounds and feet/inches for human weight/height. We still order a pound of wings and a pint of beer (I think you get beat up if you ask for 568mL of beer in a bar). Most other things are metric: road signs are km/h, the weather report is in celcius. Most stores sell things by the kilogram, meter, or liter/milliliter. I'm not sure what they teach kids in school now, but my generation (mid 20's) seems to be decently fluent in both systems (I remember learning how to add inches as part of learning fractions).
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Why do you need to "try out" a domain? Either you need it, or you don't - the only people "trying out" domains are squatters. I just say the minimum should be a 1yr registration (at $8+ like it is now). You need a lot of clicks on your ads to pay that off, it quickly becomes unprofitable.
This is a good idea in theory .. but how do you determine that someone is using them for a "legitimate reason" ?
Is advertising a legitimate reason? Sure, any rational person can see that the typosquatter sites are really just advertising sites, and no content. However, some of them have "search engines" (that just return advertising results..) and how can you argue that those are not legitimate, while google (also a search engine, also returns some paid results/advertising) is? If you mandate that sites have to have useful content, then they'll probably just start inserting blobs of random content, or news feeds, or something else that technically complies with the requirements. Why shut them down, but not, eg, MSN or Yahoo, which are both a bunch of ads crammed around some content?
Unfortunately I don't know how you solve the problem that way. In the end, the squatters will continue, making changes to their sites whenever you change the content requirements, and in the worst case, legitimate sites will be forced to make changes in order to comply (even though a legitimate site should never have to change, since they are legitimate).
Sure, go ahead. But you'll be wasting your time.. most companies don't spam.
I've been doing what the GP suggested for a long long time now (6 years probably?). I actually have a subdomain with a catch-all that goes to my main address. It's nice because I literally don't have to do anything. I just sign up with eg, slashdot@subdomain.mydomain.com. In the past 6 years, any time I've needed to sign up somewhere, I do it with of these addresses. I've gotten absolutely no "spam" to any of those addresses. That's right, none. The only thing I get are mails from the company themselves - promotions and newsletters and crap like that. If it annoys me enough, or they send it often enough, I click the remove link and all is well.
I'm of course not just signing up for any websites, I am still a bit selective about it. I only sign up when I need to.. eg, forum registrations, registering to be able to download something I need (though I hate that, so only do it if I absolutely have to).
The other side of this, is I've never posted my "main" email address on any website, I only use it for personal communication. And yet, I get a couple hundred spams per day to that address. When I first got my current main email address (which was probably, 5 years ago I guess..?), I got no spam. In fact, I was happily using it for a few months with no spam. Then someone sent me an online greeting card. In the couple months following, there was a huge increase in spam, and since then, it's just gone up. It's no mystery, if you go to those sites, their privacy policies specifically state "any email address or pesronal information you provide to us can be used by us for whatever we want" - which includes selling to other people.
Note, I think you really need to use a subdomain to do it properly. When I first started doing it, I was redirecting *@mydomain.com to my personal mailbox.. that lasted for one day. I was getting email to people who were previously using that domain, spam to everyone, etc. These days with spammers blindly mailing info@ sales@ etc on top of anything else they can, it's not worthwhile.
It's not even necessarily infringing. Case in point, open source. The authors of the work still hold the copyrights, but they've effectively granted a license to distribute it freely (GPL, BSD, etc).
Since this is straight from the Sqlite web page, take it with a grain of salt (but also realize they're not trying to sell anything, so don't really have any reason to lie).. but they claim a practical upper limit is 100GB (http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q10), and theoretically 2TB.
You have to also remember though, that often the content generated dynmically is going to be of no use to a search engine, it will often be user-specific - there's obviously some reason it's being generated that way.
:)
And if pages are designed using AJAX and dynamic rendering just for the sake of using AJAX and dynamic rendering.. well, they deserve what they get
Yes, RFID is cool and all, but in a lot of ways people are using it as solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
They're starting to put it in credit cards, which just makes no sense to me at all. Instead of sliding it through a reader, you just 'tap' it on a pad? Ok, what's the difference, besides the fact that you're forcing merchants to buy new readers? I'm sure there's probably banks out there sticking RFID in bank cards, then advertising "hey, you don't need to swipe OR use a PIN anymore!"...
It's silly because the cost of a battery is more than the cost of running power to each desk. This includes the cost of a laptop (on batteries) over a desktop - if you're going to buy a laptop, you pay a premium for the fact that it's portable, and happens to require a battery to do so. Not to mention, even if you have batteries, you still have to charge them somehow.
And once you run power to every desk, you might as well run ethernet. The cost of a switch and the cable (and the fact that ethernet jacks are not on-board pretty much every motherboard) is still lower than a good quality access point and PCI wireless cards.
So basically you end up with a lab, which, of course, is not portable from classroom to classroom.
$ of Lab in every classroom > $ of laptops on a trolley from classroom-to-classroom > $ single lab shared by every classroom
And anyways, I agree with other posters here for the most part, learning computers is important, but you still have to learn the basics by hand/on paper first. If a generation of kids STARTS learning addition and subtraction using a calculator/computer, I can't imagine what they'll be like later in life, and later when doing real math.
Perhaps you mean, that your software understands "whiz-bang engineering interchange files" (which happen to be XML-based).. which was my point, there is a distinction.
..that XML will stop being a buzzword, and we will no longer see products with "XML support" as a feature point (supporting formats that USE XML is fine, but "XML" itself is a container format, it can describe literally ANYTHING..)
The programmers concept for windows is just wrong! you can not require root privileges to run Acrobat Reader, Adobe Photoshop or who knows what I've been running at home with XP as a regular user for a few months now (mostly just as a test). I can get MOST things done, since you can do 'run as..' for almost everything in control panel, and every application. The problems start happening when the (3rd party) applications you're using assume you're administrator, and try to store their configuration files in their %programfiles% directory, and sadly, there are too many of those (come on, Windows 2000 was out 7 years ago!). To change folder permissions to get those to work, you have to switch to an admin user (at least fast user switching helps here) and then you can do it.
Someone recently taught me a trick, where you can use 'run as' on iexplore.exe and then type in a local URL, the window turns into a local filesystem explorer window with admin privledges.. but that seems like a pretty big hack really.
Windows firewall blocks any apps that accept inbound connections, so especially at first it can be pretty annoying, you keep having to run these applications.
That said, the way linux handles this is WAY nicer.
Likewise, today, for us to hear someone else, there would have to have been someone broadcasting x years ago (depending on how many light years away), broadcasting sufficiently loudly that we would be able to hear them (and our receivers have to be sensitive enough to hear them), and broadcasting something we consider to be a signal and not noise.
Manufacturers sell to the carriers, who then sell to the consumers (typically). If the carriers see voice recoginition and SMS as taking away revenue from voice calls, they probably aren't going to buy the phone. If they don't want to buy the phone, why does the manufacturer bother building them and putting in the R&D to get full domain voice recoginition working on a cell phone..
I agree, but at the same time, it does have a certain appeal. They manage it, google obviously has more IT resources than, well, pretty much any other company. So in theory, they could actually do a better job.
.. but hopefully they at least have some obligation to you).
Of course, what happens if google or the service goes away? You lose everything. At least if you're paying for it, they have SOME kind of responsibility to you (the terms of service or contract you sign with them remain to be seen
It actually would make me feel better about using it for a business, as a paid service instead of a free one.
So what makes you think the cell phone companies have any interest in developing (or supporting on their networks) a phone that has voice recoginition for SMS? Remember, it's them you're paying to make those 'expensive' voice calls..
If I didn't have the ability to download or use the PVR, I probably just wouldn't watch TV at all anymore, it's not worth adjusting my life to TV's schedule.
The point is, there is nothing conclusive that can be drawn from version numbers. Please don't confuse number of "releases" with security. This is the same kind of FUD Microsoft uses to show how they're more secure than Linux - "look, we released x number of security updates, in the same time period, linux (as if that refers to a product) only released y".
Really, in something big like an "operating system", using version numbers drives me nuts. The kernel can have a version number. The shell/user interface can have a version number. The web browser, text editor, music player, mail program, archive program, calculator, screen magnifier, image viewer, chat client, solitare, disk defragmenter.... they can all have version numbers too. But does updating any one of those applications mean you've updated the operating system itself? How many updates do you need to do before you increment the OS version number? Do you wait until you get x packages that all have updates before you push out your "operating system update"? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to get updates out ASAP, especially if they're security fixes?
Now, I think I have to go take a shower or something, how dare you make me defend Windows..
Not to mention it won't stop it from affecting other computers in the same room / listening range.
Not to mention -- as the article points out -- businesses will probably feel the need to register their copyrights and names (just to protect them from being turned into a porn site), which means an extra $60/yr going to some domain registrar. Porn sites will keep their .com's, as you say (why would they give them up? Even if they did, the majority of names are utterly useless for any other purpose..). Domain squatters will register everything they can and attempt to resell desirable domains..
.xxx's of the 30 you hold, you need to get $900 a pop.. actually I have no idea if that's low or high in the reseller business. Over $8 sounds expensive to me :) ).
Basically, the *ONLY* group this benefits is domain registrars, who will profit from the $60/yr (and possibly the squatters - but the domains are expensive enough that the resell prices will have to be high if they expect to get any short-term return - eg, if you sell two
On the other end, some projects use ticket tracking systems that are overly complex - eg, you have to register first, and then fill out 50 fields, search 4 or 5 times to be sure it's not duplicated, etc. In some projects this tracker is not linked to from the main web page, which makes the process even more difficult. In some projects, after reporting a bug you'll get a response "please try in the latest cvs/svn version". All of these things add up to make it a hassle for the causal user to report bugs. From a developers point of view, they mean the developers (who are volunteers, remember) spend less time going through false bug reports.
I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Having to register is a response to spam - there are a lot of spam bots that attack the common bug tracking systems. Having too many fields is annoying, but in a big project it can be useful to get people to report the proper information and be sure the right people look at it. Sometimes asking the user to try the lastest version is appropriate (eg, if there's a possible fix in, but not totally tested for all cases), but sometimes it's just lazyness.
I'm active on a decently large project now, and there are a LOT of false bug reports - bugs reported in branches that are obsolete (and have been fixed for a year), people posting what amounts to help questions as bugs, and bugs that say "____ doesn't work" (eg, utterly useless). Luckily we have non-developer users that go through and close these, ocasionally CC'ing a developer to ask if it's legitimate. However, not all projects have these, and indeed, we didn't for the first year or so of existance. As a result, there were often bug reports that would sit there for a long time before someone got around to going through them. Let me tell you, it's pretty annoying to spend 30 minutes trying to duplicate a bug, only to find out in the end it was a configuration error or some other unrelated problem, where if the user had read documentation they would have solved it.
So basically what it gets down to is: do you make users spend slightly more time to file a decent bug report, or do you waste lots of developer time (in aggregate) tracking down false bugs? Since it's usually the developers that set up the bug tracking system, guess what the answer is...
Unfortunatley, since the *AA have much more money than most of the people they're sueing, they will probably continue to get away with that kind of behaviour while the people being sued cannot afford to fight it, and settle instead.
.. but when is the rest of the USA going to follow suit?
According to wikipedia, As of 2005 only three countries, the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar (Burma) have not converted to metric yet. Canada officially converted in 1970, but both systems get used on a day-to-day basis. Most tape measures, rulers, etc have both systems. Most older people still use imperial for most things, and younger generations seem to be mixed.
It's actually interesting that a lot of people here (Canada) use mixed units. Personally, I usually use feet if I'm estimating a distance (it's just a very convienient size - the closest metric equivalent is a decimeter, just doesn't quite cut it), and pounds and feet/inches for human weight/height. We still order a pound of wings and a pint of beer (I think you get beat up if you ask for 568mL of beer in a bar). Most other things are metric: road signs are km/h, the weather report is in celcius. Most stores sell things by the kilogram, meter, or liter/milliliter. I'm not sure what they teach kids in school now, but my generation (mid 20's) seems to be decently fluent in both systems (I remember learning how to add inches as part of learning fractions).