Of course GM doesn't really have much to comment about in terms of the banking industry either, as they were sort of a part of the problem. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial
Simply said, GM became part of the problem with their very own major bank... including a clear demonstration that often people in one industry simply don't know how to succeed in another industry either. It sounded like a good idea at the time, where GM would have its own bank that it could use to finance loans that would be focused on buying cars that it produces... in effect making money off of the cars all over again while the interest was being paid.
A better managed financing company perhaps could have made a huge difference for GM, and in fact would have given them a huge edge in the current market place, where perhaps they would have been able to have the credit available for both themselves and their customers. Unfortunately for GM, it didn't work out.
I think that the government preserving bad revenue models in general is a bad idea. There should be no sort of special protection of any kind for any particular business model. IMHO this includes the various groups like the RIAA, MPAA, and ASCAP who have unfortunately also legislated specific revenue models that have preference over others. Just look at what they did to the DAT media format when it became a threat to vinyl records and cassette tapes. Basically, that format was taxed into oblivion.
As a matter of fact, the rationale and justification for the legislation being proposed here for the newspapers had its roots with this Audio Home Recording Act.... and was the later justification for the DMCA and other copyright legislation that has been something to love to hate here on slashdot.
This time around, however, those who have a clue are more keyed into the situation and more likely to put up a resistance to an issue of this nature. It is about time we stop this kind of idea dead in its tracks.
The question here is then if Facebook has become a "common carrier" and as such must take all forms of speech (including offensive kinds of speech) or if they are exercising editorial control over their content. Once you accept that you are engaging in editorial control, you need to make editorial decisions about all content.... something I think Facebook would have some trouble with.
Facebook then becomes liable for everything which is posted on its site and written about on their site. That is a situation which most sane people would not want to be in and that having the status of common carrier is preferable. That requires permitting speech that can from time to time be offensive.
The only thing that was a problem with the depiction of Mohammed is the topic and subject, not the method or manner in which somebody is depcited.
From a Muslem viewpoint, there is no particular prohibition against picture of Mohammad..... they view all images of any kind or depictions of living things in general to be something avoided. If you look at a typical mosque or open a copy of the Qur'an, you will never see any sort of image of anything. Instead, calligraphy (the words themselves) are used as a form of art instead, and at best you will see some really amazing geometric symbols.
The concept of a prohibition against graven images comes straight out of all Abrahamic faiths, where in the Decalogue (aka the "original" 10 commandments carried down Mount Sinai) explicitly mentioned making "graven images". I'm not necessarily saying that the interpretation of a complete prohibition of all forms of images is necessarily a correct application of this commandment, but it is something that has been found in religious expressions for quite some time and isn't even necessarily restricted to just Muslims either. In early Christian cathedral construction, images of demons and gargoyles were made explicitly because those creatures were not living things, and therefore could be made legitimately without compromising this commandment. Depictions of Jesus were also similarly prohibited among the Christian faithful at various times in the past.
The intolerance here, however, is that the prohibition on the depiction of Muhammad is being made upon non-believers of the Islamic faith. It is one thing to be critical of a fellow believer and complaining that they are not "keeping the faith". It is something else entirely to complain that a non-believer is not complying with your faith and willing to take their life if they don't follow your belief.
My concern about caving into the extremist Muslims on this issue is that it is it gives legitimacy to their viewpoint.... to the exclusion of any other viewpoint. The freedom of speech is something that is incredibly important to preserve, including preserving viewpoints that are on occasion distasteful and against your own viewpoint.
The dilemma of "new media" groups is to see how much editorializing will be done.... and sticking to your guns in terms of that editorializing. Facebook unfortunately, for good or ill, has become a community bulletin board where they have at least to this point cultivated all sorts of viewpoints including overtly political viewpoints that they are broadcasting and supporting.
If Facebook, or any other similar group starts to engage in censorship for what is overtly political speech, and much of what is done here in regards to cartoons of Muhammad is explicitly political speech by its nature, it puts that group onto incredibly slippery ground to be "forced" to censor other kinds of speech to the point they are really only advocating a particular political point of view. I don't have a problem with censoring types of content, such as pornographic images or perhaps groups that are advocating various kinds of illegal activity (aka some video on YouTube that is a "how to" for making meth.... to give an example). What concerns me here is more that the topic itself is somehow forbidden.
I don't see that Facebook would be censoring a cartoon depicting either George W. Bush or Barack Obama with nuclear missiles in a hat they are wearing. Why should the fact that the subject of the image simply being Muhammad be singularly targeted if anybody else would be acceptable? This is where it really goes over the top. If Muhammad were to be depicted in a manner that would be otherwise offensive and censored regardless of who is the subject of the image.... fine, get rid of the image.
The other aspect here is that those who are promoting the Islamic faith are cramming that faith down my throat, and the throat of everybody else in the world too. I respect the freedom of worship and belief. This is something which is essential to a free society in general and something I claim for myself. That freedom includes even the complete and total rejection of a belief in a god of any type, or worshiping things that I would consider down right silly.
By telling me that I, a non-believer in the Islamic faith, can't make a rendering of the image of Mohammad and use that image in a political fashion, they are in turn forcing a religious belief upon me and others who may wish to engage in this kind of activity. It is especially galling when the target of the activity (in this case the cartoon) is in fact directed toward other non-believers and is not being done explicitly make to flamebait or otherwise cause a reaction out of the believers.
As a Christian, I am particularly offended that in this case the Islamic faith is somehow being protected when in fact religious icons and symbols of Christianity are routinely depicted in a negative light as well and are not similarly protected. Perhaps it is a valid point where something which is held as sacred should be respected in some fashion and not trashed. This includes even symbols that are not overtly religious but are still held in some reverence such as a national flag. If Facebook is going to be consistent here, at least set up some general and broad policy that all sorts of similar symbols ought to be treated with respect. That isn't exactly an easy policy to implement nor enforce.
I certainly don't understand why death threats ought to be made over non-believers (or believers for that matter) making light of these things. When people make light of religious symbols which I consider important, I certainly am willing to grant them some latitude and don't necessarily get angry with them. I still am disappointed, but I wouldn't seek to harm somebody for doing that.
The problem is the exclusive nature of the agreements signed by the various parties, where those joining the pool are barred by contract from joining another licensing pool. That is significant and may apply to the NFL as well if there were to be a team that would want to independently license its logos and mascots or team uniforms under a separate licensing agreement.
It is this exclusive arrangement that is at the heart of the MPEG-LA lawsuit by Nero. The major media companies and consumer media equipment manufacturers certainly have been engaging in acts for some time that locks potential competitors out of the market for some time.
It is good that this regime is being called on the carpet and being called exactly what it should be: A trust in the classic sense like the rail barons of a previous century were doing that caused the anti-trust legislation to be enacted in the first place. It is about bloody time!
Gasoline is generally used for passenger vehicles because GM screwed up the images for diesels in the 70s for Americans.
Most of europe is diesel (as well as Manual transmissions)
I wouldn't blame it on GM, but rather how most American drive their vehicles vs. how it is done in Europe. Diesel engines have a much narrower RPM range and have other issues involved with how they operate vs. gasoline engines, and the double nickle speed limit also introduced some interesting aspects into both highway designs and vehicle construction (such as the drink holder and some other "creature comforts") that weren't found in European vehicles. General Motors knew their target customers in America all too well, and people in America simply weren't buying Diesel engines. What introducing Diesel cars did in the USA was to screw up shipping costs for long haul freight and ultimately drive up the cost of Diesel fuel so it became more expensive than gasoline.... further eroding any rationale for switching fuels.
As for manual transmissions being all that awesome, that is hardly a new invention. For myself, I prefer manual transmissions as I have more control over the performance of the vehicle and "feel" the engine better to know what I can do as a driver. Fuel economy is the least of my concerns or reasons for using a manual transmission, but it also has a higher learning curve in terms of driving skill to use it properly. Again this is a cultural difference between America vs. Europe... not that one culture is better than the other but that Americans tend to hand out driver's licenses to almost anybody with a pulse (heck, they don't even have to be citizens or even "legal" residents) while Europeans tend to treat driving more as an advanced skill... with almost professional legal requirements in order to get that same kind of license. Until recently, most kids could get a driving permit at age 15 and it was almost universally accepted that 16 was when a formal license was granted. Some states offered driving licenses to kids who were 14 and even younger in the past.
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How can you worry about the Earth melting when the entire Solar System is going to be wiped out by Sirus A exploding in a supernova?
Man, get your priorities straight. We need to develop interstellar propulsion just to save the species!
The advantages of getting up to 100km first by balloon is at least some of the following points:
Cost - Getting to 100 km by balloon is certainly a whole lot cheaper than getting to that altitude by rocket. It does save some propellant mass, but as pointed about by the above AC post, the amount of savings is relatively trivial. If it was for this one reason, I'd agree that this is not a good reason for using a balloon as a first stage.
Weather - Flying above the troposphere and even the stratosphere, you can avoid most of the problems that typically postpone a launch. As long as the conditions are good enough for launching a balloon, you can send the payload up under conditions that would typically be horrible for a missile launch. You may still want to avoid launching the balloon in a thunder storm, but you don't need the 30 mile clearance circle that the Space Shuttle has before it launches.
Incremental testing - Using a balloon can be useful for developing a rocket just a few baby steps at a time, starting with cheap and simple rockets and gradually tweaking things as you get to larger vehicle sizes. This is something which can't be underestimated, where testing a rocket engine in a vacuum can be done at a cost which would normally be prohibitive for an amateur rocket designer.
Dynamic loads - As there is no atmosphere to worry about, the design of the "rocket" would not have to be the sleek pointy missile that has been a staple of rocket science since before the V-2 was built. That could in theory be a substantial savings in terms of a payload weight budget, and all that is necessary is a skeleton which can keep the rocket together. It would certainly be interesting to see what sorts of designs could be developed where there is no concern about aerodynamics, and calculations for "Max-Q" (maximum dynamic pressure) would be a joke at that altitude.
I'm sure other significant points could be made here for what other advantages could be had with a balloon launch. I agree that the goal is to get into orbit, and that the energy budget is a key contributing factor there. I just don't think that the energy budget is necessarily the one thing keeping the cost of spaceflight so high, and that some alternative approaches ought to be at least tried, no matter how crazy that they may be. There certainly are classes of satellites and scientific research equipment that can be tested by flying on a rockoon that would be considerably cheaper than by using a traditional missile launcher, even if those vehicles don't necessarily achieve full orbital velocity.
Rio de Janerio was the capital of Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th Century, so there is at least a source of confusion over which continent the country is really located at. The capital was moved (with the royal family, government seals, and library/archives) to keep it from falling under French control. That was also one of the seeds for the independence of Brazil, as trying to move the capital back to Lisbon proved to be a bit more complicated than they thought it would be when the war ended. Some of the bureaucracy simply didn't want to go back.
That would be like England moving the capital of the UK to Philadelphia, which would have been quite an event if had ever happened.
Yes, this is not only possible, but happening. I don't know about getting to the Moon, but getting into orbit is something that is actively being tried. One really cool video of a rocket getting launched off of a balloon can be found here:
This was launched by JP Aerospace and is the real thing, from a balloon flying at 10k feet. It was merely a demo flight to test the flight control hardware and to make sure that a rocket actually would launch... and in this case it was just an Estes rocket shoved in a tube when the flight computer remotely ignited the fuse to launch the rocket. The trick was to get the rocket to launch at all, not necessarily to go anywhere.
One other interesting group is the N-Prize that is offering a £10k prize for the first team to launch something into orbit for under £1000. What is really crazy is that there are several teams working on the idea, and that some of them are actually in the process of "bending metal" and trying to make it work. Even if it is just a ping-pong ball sent into orbit, that would be some kind of accomplishment to get a payload of that size to orbital velocities.
Yet another group using this approach is ARCA, and these guys are trying to get to the Moon. They are one of the original X-Prize teams that showed some real promise and have kept tweaking their rocket designs, with the latest attempts for getting to orbit using a very different kind of rocket staging system that you've simply got to see to believe. It pulls up each stage on a tether instead of pushing it up as a disintegrating pyramid.... presumably to develop economies of scale. They are doing most of their launches over the Black Sea, and is perhaps the one group using balloons that I think will get into orbit first.
Trolls go after big players all the time, as is shown by statistics like these. Not only do they sue a lot but also do they walk away with large payments in a number of cases.
I should note that in addition to having a very good legal team, IBM also has a very good lobbying team that can influence the other branch of government involved with patent law: The U.S. Congress. Seriously, if these guys were any real threat that would start to cost more money than a major lobbying campaign to get new patent law written, there would be some significant new laws that would also come down the pike as a result.
This was one of Microsoft's problems is that they neglected to follow IBM's lead in working the political games in DC... leading them down the road of not having any political support when the chips were put on the table. While a patent troll may be good in court, they simply don't have the fiscal resources to play the whole field on all fronts... something IBM does have the resources to do for good or ill.
This does get back to IBM and its application of patent laws for itself. While defensive patents may have "zero deterrent effect on patent trolls", IBM does have one ace up its sleeve that even patent trolls generally don't:
They have attorneys who have practiced law in nearly ever circuit court of appeals and have legal experience practicing before nearly every judge that has an impact on patent law. Simply put, going before the Nazgul and trying to play ball on what is their home turf is something that only the most experienced lawyers would ever really care to get involved with.
If it is somebody already in the industry and is "practicing", they aren't a threat as the defensive patents then kick in and do the real damage. Anybody who is a direct competitor against IBM likely is violating one of IBM's patents in some way or another.
As for those who have no skin in the game and therefore nothing to lose, they don't have the fiscal resources to really go after IBM except as a target of last resort. A good patent troll would be intelligent to not try and swallow the whale but instead go after the guppies in the pond first. Of course there are some stupid idiots who do try to sue IBM right out of the gate, but that is why IBM has such attorneys on retainer in the first place. Enough people have tried and keep trying to do stupid things that those attorneys continue to get experience.
That is part of the picture of what needs to be fixed in terms of having an engine explicitly designed to handle repeated starts and stops. While wear on engine parts due to a lack of oil is indeed one of the major considerations, it isn't the only one either.
Thermal contraction and other issues in engine design also have an impact, which is where some specific engineering would have to take place and some additional compromises made in terms of the metallurgy and structural design of the engine would have to be made. Many engines right now are designed for sustained highway usage, which is a very different environment from stop and go traffic.
Mind you, I'm not a mechanical engineer here either, but I've spent plenty of time under the hood and have first hand experience in what happens when engines start to fall apart.
Comparing the mechanical regime of stop and go traffic that has to occasionally hit a highway but also varies in speed and engine rotation velocity is a very different regime than what a stand-by power generator would have to face. That is one of several reasons why a Diesel (a proper noun BTW) engine is used for power generation, but gasoline is generally used for passenger vehicles. They have different engineering requirements and even the choice of fuels has a substantial impact on how those engines can be used.
All of engineering is a choice of compromises, and trying to decide which compromise is best to deal with the current situation that the engineer is facing. What is suggested by the original story post is that this is a different engineering environment.
One of the largest reasons for having such a huge patent portfolio is mainly to discourage patent trolls from trying to sue IBM. Especially if it is another manufacturer they can shut down competition that goes after them in the courts by throwing up enough other patents to make it a patent war on a large scale. So from a defensive standpoint, IBM is merely doing a good business practice by taking a bad system and trying not to get harmed by it.
I've never really understood the patent system in the first place, as it really doesn't protect "the little guy", in other words the lone tinkerer in a garage who comes up with some crazy idea and wants to earn some bucks from the concept. Until anybody can show that such a person is legitimately protected, I have to consider the patenting process as something more of a scam that is designed to extract money from those who are least able to afford it. For a private person to patent something, I would consider it to be 99% of the time to be an utter mistake.
For a corporation that already has full time lawyers working for them, having some of that legal time engaged in dealing with patent protection perhaps makes some practical sense. In other words, this is a system that mainly protects those who already have money and not those struggling to get some in the first place.
The problem with roundabouts is that they are incredibly expensive and something that chews up some real estate more than a simple intersection. Any time you start to condemn property it is going to be a political mess to start with. Of course even traffic lights chew up real estate and cause problems if the government entity hasn't made zoning allowances to get an intersection built with those lights.
BTW, I like roundabouts for the most part, and I've seen how they can actually handle more traffic than a standard 4-way stop or even a simple traffic light... and certainly it keeps the traffic moving. They also take up far less real estate than a clover-leaf intersection or other similar methods that are intended to keep traffic flowing at high volumes.
How many times have you seen somebody stall out (or been that driver in a stalled out car) where the engine simply won't restart? There are multiple reasons for that, and I'll admit it tends to happen on older cars that really need some maintenance happen on those engines, but it is something that to me causes more problems than the solution it is trying to fix.
BTW, I have to agree with you on the need at times to be able to punch the gas to get out of a sticky situation... which is one of the problems with gasoline vehicles. It takes some time to get the engines "warmed up" even in the best of circumstances, and certainly it takes some time from when the ignition is started to when you have power available to do something like get out of the way in the circumstances you are noting. We are not talking electric vehicles here, or even a hybrid engine that at least has some reserve electrical power to pull away at a moment's notice.
Of course I consider the big brother issues to be even larger, where some law enforcement officer can flip your engine off to meet some "public safety" requirement (whatever they may be or even if it is a legitimate concern) and essentially giving control over your vehicle in an intimate manner to somebody who really doesn't necessarily deserve that level of trust. So in this regards, I consider this as much of a political issue as it is a technical one, and something that cedes too much authority to a government entity. "Saving the environment" is not something I consider important enough to give up personal liberties on a fundamental level of this nature.
Some of this is an issue of reliability and having an engine designed for multiple restarts. For at least older gasoline vehicles, starting an engine can cause hell on the internal wear of engine parts and is generally discouraged on a practical dollars and cents level as you will be paying far more in engine repair bills than the little bit of money that you save for turning off an engine. Even if you are a backyard mechanic and figuring in the cost of the replacement parts alone, it can get quite expensive. If you factor in the environmental factors for metal refinement used to make these parts and shipping those parts across the country to get them to you, it could be argued that turning off engines actually does more harm to the environment and perhaps even more carbon pollution than simply keeping the engine running.... at least if the time you keep the engine off is but a short period of time. The rule of thumb I've heard is you start to save money if you are going to be stopped for more than a few minutes... that is not the amount of time people are typically at an intersection waiting for a street light.
The point being that you need a vehicle designed explicitly for being turned off and restarted on a whim and have that happen repeatedly during a typical driving experience.
BTW, part of the patent here is that it specifically addresses the above issue I mention, where the manufacturer puts into is electronic control system some sort of calculation for how long an engine ought to be kept on before wear and tear on the engine from restart begins to do some damage, and if the traffic signals "intelligently" indicate that the wait time is going to be longer than that predetermined time period, that the engine shuts off while the car is already stopped anyway. It is an interesting solution to the issue, but I'm not really sure how "non-obvious" that concept really is if the goal is to engage in saving fuel in this manner. A competent automotive engineer would have responded to the same engineering goals with at least that same sort of solution.... which to me makes the idea not patentable. Of course who ever said that the USPTO ever made sense on what they considered for a patent.
There still was some reluctance on the part of the White House (President Eisenhower in particular) in terms of even letting any launches happen beyond sub-orbital flights that stayed completely in American airspace or over international waters. The issue was in regards the legal status of overflight of another nation's territory, in particular the Soviet Union. The fear was that if the USA launched a satellite first, that the Soviet Union would assert that every time a satellite flew over head, that it would be considered an invasion of their country and could be dealt with in a military fashion (aka shot down or destroyed).
One of the most significant applications for spaceflight, even before any satellite was launched, was in regards to surveillance. Eisenhower was certainly aware of the value of aerial reconnaissance from his time as commander of the European theater during WWII and desperately wanted to know what was going on within the borders of the Soviet Union. While flights of the U-2 were already happening and producing some success, it was just a matter of time before they would be attacked and the information from those planes would be stopped again.
Yes, the infighting between the Navy and the Army was an issue too, and there was even infighting between parts of the Army as the Air Corps was trying to define its mission with its creation as a separate military branch and the fact that Von Braun was working for the Army Ordinance branch, treating missiles as a form of artillery and therefore not within the purview of the Air Corps.
I doubt that both programs would have been canceled outright or put on hold indefinitely, but there was some effort to try and slow down both programs for orbital spaceflight in hopes that the Soviet Union would catch up and set the precedent for orbital spaceflight first. To suggest that Sputnik was a surprise to those actually working in the industry and with at least some reasonable access to classified materials discussing what the Soviet spaceflight program was doing on even a broad and cursory level is a joke. Almost everybody in the intelligence community knew that the Soviet Union was very close to launching a satellite, in particular the White House itself.
Of course once the public announcement of the launch of Sputnik happened, the White House had to for political reasons (and to protect intelligence sources) act surprised and say that they had no idea that such a launch was going to happen. They also used the occasion to shake the leaves out of the U.S. Congress and get some additional funding for some pet projects related to spaceflight... which didn't really hurt from a political viewpoint either. I am suggesting that the bumbling and supposed incompetence displayed during the early days of spaceflight by the USA was mostly an act designed for public consumption, as that was a sure fire way to get additional funding to "fix the problems".
Suggesting this extreme interpretation of the scriptures is a little over the top here. The whole point of the scripture is that you shouldn't make an idol for the worship of god.... and preferably don't make that idol into your god.
It could be argued for some people that the worship of a Benjamin Franklin $100 bill is such an idol to be worshiped and admired.... something that is also a mainstay of Christian preaching for centuries too. That isn't the same thing as what is being said either, but at least it is on the correct general train of thought.
To make an image of something, a living thing, is not expressly prohibited.
Of course, this interpretation that you were not permitted to make an image of any "living thing" does have precedent within both Islamic and Christian societies. For Islam, most mosques and even most buildings influenced by Islamic thinking have no images at all, and what decorations can be found are simple geometric patterns or calligraphy in some fashion or other. It was not considered blasphemous to have the name of God spelled out in some fashion. For medieval Christian cathedral construction, while showing "living beings" was considered contrary to the very scripture you were citing, fantastical creatures like gargoyles and demons were acceptable as they were never "living creatures".
Considering the context of the original ten commandments, as addressed to a group of mostly nomadic and polytheistic shepherds in a culture that routinely built shrines with elaborate idols within those shrines, it makes sense to draw the line and simply push for a complete prohibition on the practice of building or making anything even resembling one of those pagan idols. It was a problem even for Mohammed when he tried to work with the arab peoples near Mecca and Medina... and that was after a couple of millenia of influence from Moses and the teachings of Abraham trying to stop the practice.
My problem with the whole thing, however, is not with the interpretation of religion where certainly one person can read anything they want into a scripture like this, and certainly a theological discussion about the topic would be interesting. The problem I have is the prohibition of an activity by what amounts to be non-believers. You can believe any thing you want... but when your interpretation of religious thought starts to demand controlling how I should believe or act, I think it has crossed an important and critical point. That is what is being demanded here, where non believers are being expected to stop acts (drawing cartoons of an ancient historical figure) based upon a religious philosophy they haven't even agreed upon in the first place. Your interpretation of this scripture is your own personal belief, and you certainly shouldn't impose that belief upon others.
The basis for this interpretation of personal freedoms actually comes from the teachings of Jesus for myself. It is incumbent from my own viewpoint that in order for me to completely embrace his teachings, that I simply must accept the beliefs of others and let them worship how they would as long as it does me no harm. Somehow those of the radical Islamic faith seem to have missed this point, have thrown Isa under the bus, and are demanding at the point of a gun (now trying for a nuke) that everybody accept the most radical worldview and religious philosophies of Islam. I hope those trying to threaten me in this manner don't mind if I and my fellow countrymen try to point a nuke back at those idiots for even making such a threat.
Windows ME was really MS-DOS v 7.3 (or whatever that would be with the numbering system). It was the final operating system from the DOS legacy that started back in the days when Bill Gates was actually contributing code for the OS. That was ultimately the problem with it, where it had to deal with all of that legacy code base and they tried to make it sort of like Windows 2000, but deliberately crippled it so it wouldn't compete against their other products and introduced a few features that actually backfired as "improvements", notably the registry "preservation" tools that tended to wipe out the registry instead.
Windows 2000 and the Windows NT line that now includes Windows 7 actually started as a sort of fork from VMS, the operating systems used by Digital Equipment on the VAX and similar computers but ported to the x86 architecture. There still is a little bit of legacy VMS code in there, primarily in the thread handling code and some of the really low level kernel parts, which is part of what gave NT its stability. That IBM engineers were involved in some of the early NT development is now a mostly forgotten trivia fact too, but the two lines of operating systems have very different heritages and legacies.
I wouldn't doubt it that there were at least some within Microsoft who wanted to kill that old MS-DOS line for some time but couldn't quite figure out when that should happen.
For myself, I would call Win 2k as actually superior to Win XP. While XP does more things and has more whistles and gadgets, Win 2k is good for what id does. The largest problems with Win 2k is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it and has deliberately thrown in a monkey wrench to kick people off of that (now competing for mindshare) OS.
The jump from Win NT 4 and the abomination called Windows ME (better yet, Windows 98) was huge, and it was a clear step in the correct direction. If you say that Windows 2000 was awful on day one, I take it you never tried "Windows 286" (aka Windows version 2). From day one with my experience on Win 2k was substantially increased stability and complete compatibility with NT 4. If it ran on NT 4, it would run on Win 2k and usually do better. There were a few problems with old DOS-era legacy apps and stuff that used obscure (aka "undocumented") API hooks from the Windows 95/98/ME line that failed on Windows 2000, but that should be expected too if you understood the operating system. XP was OK and does some stuff good, but Vista was actually a step backward.
Windows 7 was finally a chance to fix what was wrong and get back on the right track.
Certainly I wouldn't call Windows 2K a failure on day one.
While I would agree that Larry Sanger is trying to stir the pot up here, the real blame I give to Jimmy Wales is reacting to that controversy rather than simply letting the community deal with the issues and acting as a shield to the community rather than being a blunt instrument to stir things up and make a mountain out of a molehill here. If anything, the actions of Jimmy Wales gave force of authority and power to Larry Sanger than treating the guy like a crack pot.
Seriously, had Larry Sanger been treated as the completely irrelevant opinion that he should have been treated as, this whole "controversy" would have blown by without even so much as a note and certainly wouldn't have deserved repeated/. stories like it has. The issue over pornography and what qualifies as such on the Wikimedia commons is a long debated topic and this brief foray into the decision making process over what qualifies as "legal" or "illegal" is certainly not over. Most of Jimmy Wales' deletions have been overturned and much of the content supposedly removed has been restored... and that is by those within the community who are bold enough to take the initiative. It was the threats against admins who were brave enough to overturn these actions that in part led to the real problems facing Jimmy Wales right now.
As for Jimmy Wales wanting an excuse to give up authority.... I don't buy that for a second. The call to remove the founders flag actually happened before this incident over porn content, and if anything demonstrates that such arbitrary "god-king" powers are abusive. The abilities of the founder class of users (of which Jimmy Wales is currently the only user account with those privileges) have been stripped away merely to save face for Mr. Wales, as having that status completely removed would have perhaps been a bit to embarrassing to the guy and something not supported by the board of trustees.
What should be noteworthy here is not really the involvement with Wikipedia, which has dealt with the temper tantrums of Jimmy Wales for some time, but it is the other sister projects that are starting to get fed up with him. Wikiversity has been through a recent tail-spin in particular when because Jimmy Wales didn't get his way a threat to shut down the entire project was put forward. The whole issue of porn played itself out not on Wikipedia but on the Wikimedia Commons, and the debate over if he should remain happened on Meta. It is mostly these other groups of related projects that are starting to push back, and that is what has become part of the more visible conflict that has happened in the past month or so.
Jimmy Wales was the chairman of the board of trustees (essentially the president) and did wield some executive authority from that position for awhile, but even that was something he gave up a few years ago with the election of a new chair. His current position, as such as it is, is as an unelected member of the board of trustees based upon historical reasons than any real justification for being there. Perhaps there is a role for unelected members of the Wikimedia board of trustees, but there certainly is plenty of other people's money on the line now and this scandal may have some long term impact on the foundation governing body.
On the whole, I think this whole incident will in the long run make for some healthier projects as it does show that no one single person ought to have the kind of authority that Jimmy Wales tried to wield here, and that the community isn't happy that it was used in that manner even if the motives were somehow noble.
The real power that Jimmy Wales had was the power of the purse strings. He originally was the one that paid the bills and hired the staff, all of that coming from his own pocketbook.
Unfortunately for Wales, that era has passed by long ago and there is no way that a single person, even somebody with funds on the order of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, could keep the Wikimedia Foundation going. Jimmy Wales certainly is no Bill Gates in terms of fiscal resources.
The real issue now is what residual authority that Jimmy Wales really has within the community, and how pissed off that community has become over this issue. It is notable that the community has "voted" with a 4:1 ratio to have the "founder" flag removed from the account of Jimmy Wales at this point too. If he decides to use this authority again in any meaningful way, I am quite certain that will be the end of his involvement with the Wikimedia Foundation in general.
For myself, I hope that he does continue within the community and that no matter what is going to happen from this point forward that his opinion will certainly carry substantial weight. The problem is that he now has to participate in the projects as a normal user and participant, and can't make unilateral decisions in a god-king role. If he wants to see something like porn removed, he needs to work with the community debate process to see that it happens. That is perhaps a bit tough for him to give up, but it will also be healthier for the Wikimedia projects in general. He certainly bit off more than he could chew by taking on the Commons community.
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Of course GM doesn't really have much to comment about in terms of the banking industry either, as they were sort of a part of the problem. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Financial
Simply said, GM became part of the problem with their very own major bank... including a clear demonstration that often people in one industry simply don't know how to succeed in another industry either. It sounded like a good idea at the time, where GM would have its own bank that it could use to finance loans that would be focused on buying cars that it produces... in effect making money off of the cars all over again while the interest was being paid.
A better managed financing company perhaps could have made a huge difference for GM, and in fact would have given them a huge edge in the current market place, where perhaps they would have been able to have the credit available for both themselves and their customers. Unfortunately for GM, it didn't work out.
I think that the government preserving bad revenue models in general is a bad idea. There should be no sort of special protection of any kind for any particular business model. IMHO this includes the various groups like the RIAA, MPAA, and ASCAP who have unfortunately also legislated specific revenue models that have preference over others. Just look at what they did to the DAT media format when it became a threat to vinyl records and cassette tapes. Basically, that format was taxed into oblivion.
As a matter of fact, the rationale and justification for the legislation being proposed here for the newspapers had its roots with this Audio Home Recording Act.... and was the later justification for the DMCA and other copyright legislation that has been something to love to hate here on slashdot.
This time around, however, those who have a clue are more keyed into the situation and more likely to put up a resistance to an issue of this nature. It is about time we stop this kind of idea dead in its tracks.
The question here is then if Facebook has become a "common carrier" and as such must take all forms of speech (including offensive kinds of speech) or if they are exercising editorial control over their content. Once you accept that you are engaging in editorial control, you need to make editorial decisions about all content.... something I think Facebook would have some trouble with.
Facebook then becomes liable for everything which is posted on its site and written about on their site. That is a situation which most sane people would not want to be in and that having the status of common carrier is preferable. That requires permitting speech that can from time to time be offensive.
The only thing that was a problem with the depiction of Mohammed is the topic and subject, not the method or manner in which somebody is depcited.
From a Muslem viewpoint, there is no particular prohibition against picture of Mohammad..... they view all images of any kind or depictions of living things in general to be something avoided. If you look at a typical mosque or open a copy of the Qur'an, you will never see any sort of image of anything. Instead, calligraphy (the words themselves) are used as a form of art instead, and at best you will see some really amazing geometric symbols.
The concept of a prohibition against graven images comes straight out of all Abrahamic faiths, where in the Decalogue (aka the "original" 10 commandments carried down Mount Sinai) explicitly mentioned making "graven images". I'm not necessarily saying that the interpretation of a complete prohibition of all forms of images is necessarily a correct application of this commandment, but it is something that has been found in religious expressions for quite some time and isn't even necessarily restricted to just Muslims either. In early Christian cathedral construction, images of demons and gargoyles were made explicitly because those creatures were not living things, and therefore could be made legitimately without compromising this commandment. Depictions of Jesus were also similarly prohibited among the Christian faithful at various times in the past.
The intolerance here, however, is that the prohibition on the depiction of Muhammad is being made upon non-believers of the Islamic faith. It is one thing to be critical of a fellow believer and complaining that they are not "keeping the faith". It is something else entirely to complain that a non-believer is not complying with your faith and willing to take their life if they don't follow your belief.
My concern about caving into the extremist Muslims on this issue is that it is it gives legitimacy to their viewpoint.... to the exclusion of any other viewpoint. The freedom of speech is something that is incredibly important to preserve, including preserving viewpoints that are on occasion distasteful and against your own viewpoint.
The dilemma of "new media" groups is to see how much editorializing will be done.... and sticking to your guns in terms of that editorializing. Facebook unfortunately, for good or ill, has become a community bulletin board where they have at least to this point cultivated all sorts of viewpoints including overtly political viewpoints that they are broadcasting and supporting.
If Facebook, or any other similar group starts to engage in censorship for what is overtly political speech, and much of what is done here in regards to cartoons of Muhammad is explicitly political speech by its nature, it puts that group onto incredibly slippery ground to be "forced" to censor other kinds of speech to the point they are really only advocating a particular political point of view. I don't have a problem with censoring types of content, such as pornographic images or perhaps groups that are advocating various kinds of illegal activity (aka some video on YouTube that is a "how to" for making meth.... to give an example). What concerns me here is more that the topic itself is somehow forbidden.
I don't see that Facebook would be censoring a cartoon depicting either George W. Bush or Barack Obama with nuclear missiles in a hat they are wearing. Why should the fact that the subject of the image simply being Muhammad be singularly targeted if anybody else would be acceptable? This is where it really goes over the top. If Muhammad were to be depicted in a manner that would be otherwise offensive and censored regardless of who is the subject of the image.... fine, get rid of the image.
The other aspect here is that those who are promoting the Islamic faith are cramming that faith down my throat, and the throat of everybody else in the world too. I respect the freedom of worship and belief. This is something which is essential to a free society in general and something I claim for myself. That freedom includes even the complete and total rejection of a belief in a god of any type, or worshiping things that I would consider down right silly.
By telling me that I, a non-believer in the Islamic faith, can't make a rendering of the image of Mohammad and use that image in a political fashion, they are in turn forcing a religious belief upon me and others who may wish to engage in this kind of activity. It is especially galling when the target of the activity (in this case the cartoon) is in fact directed toward other non-believers and is not being done explicitly make to flamebait or otherwise cause a reaction out of the believers.
As a Christian, I am particularly offended that in this case the Islamic faith is somehow being protected when in fact religious icons and symbols of Christianity are routinely depicted in a negative light as well and are not similarly protected. Perhaps it is a valid point where something which is held as sacred should be respected in some fashion and not trashed. This includes even symbols that are not overtly religious but are still held in some reverence such as a national flag. If Facebook is going to be consistent here, at least set up some general and broad policy that all sorts of similar symbols ought to be treated with respect. That isn't exactly an easy policy to implement nor enforce.
I certainly don't understand why death threats ought to be made over non-believers (or believers for that matter) making light of these things. When people make light of religious symbols which I consider important, I certainly am willing to grant them some latitude and don't necessarily get angry with them. I still am disappointed, but I wouldn't seek to harm somebody for doing that.
The problem is the exclusive nature of the agreements signed by the various parties, where those joining the pool are barred by contract from joining another licensing pool. That is significant and may apply to the NFL as well if there were to be a team that would want to independently license its logos and mascots or team uniforms under a separate licensing agreement.
It is this exclusive arrangement that is at the heart of the MPEG-LA lawsuit by Nero. The major media companies and consumer media equipment manufacturers certainly have been engaging in acts for some time that locks potential competitors out of the market for some time.
It is good that this regime is being called on the carpet and being called exactly what it should be: A trust in the classic sense like the rail barons of a previous century were doing that caused the anti-trust legislation to be enacted in the first place. It is about bloody time!
Gasoline is generally used for passenger vehicles because GM screwed up the images for diesels in the 70s for Americans.
Most of europe is diesel (as well as Manual transmissions)
I wouldn't blame it on GM, but rather how most American drive their vehicles vs. how it is done in Europe. Diesel engines have a much narrower RPM range and have other issues involved with how they operate vs. gasoline engines, and the double nickle speed limit also introduced some interesting aspects into both highway designs and vehicle construction (such as the drink holder and some other "creature comforts") that weren't found in European vehicles. General Motors knew their target customers in America all too well, and people in America simply weren't buying Diesel engines. What introducing Diesel cars did in the USA was to screw up shipping costs for long haul freight and ultimately drive up the cost of Diesel fuel so it became more expensive than gasoline.... further eroding any rationale for switching fuels.
As for manual transmissions being all that awesome, that is hardly a new invention. For myself, I prefer manual transmissions as I have more control over the performance of the vehicle and "feel" the engine better to know what I can do as a driver. Fuel economy is the least of my concerns or reasons for using a manual transmission, but it also has a higher learning curve in terms of driving skill to use it properly. Again this is a cultural difference between America vs. Europe... not that one culture is better than the other but that Americans tend to hand out driver's licenses to almost anybody with a pulse (heck, they don't even have to be citizens or even "legal" residents) while Europeans tend to treat driving more as an advanced skill... with almost professional legal requirements in order to get that same kind of license. Until recently, most kids could get a driving permit at age 15 and it was almost universally accepted that 16 was when a formal license was granted. Some states offered driving licenses to kids who were 14 and even younger in the past.
How can you worry about the Earth melting when the entire Solar System is going to be wiped out by Sirus A exploding in a supernova?
Man, get your priorities straight. We need to develop interstellar propulsion just to save the species!
The advantages of getting up to 100km first by balloon is at least some of the following points:
I'm sure other significant points could be made here for what other advantages could be had with a balloon launch. I agree that the goal is to get into orbit, and that the energy budget is a key contributing factor there. I just don't think that the energy budget is necessarily the one thing keeping the cost of spaceflight so high, and that some alternative approaches ought to be at least tried, no matter how crazy that they may be. There certainly are classes of satellites and scientific research equipment that can be tested by flying on a rockoon that would be considerably cheaper than by using a traditional missile launcher, even if those vehicles don't necessarily achieve full orbital velocity.
Rio de Janerio was the capital of Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th Century, so there is at least a source of confusion over which continent the country is really located at. The capital was moved (with the royal family, government seals, and library/archives) to keep it from falling under French control. That was also one of the seeds for the independence of Brazil, as trying to move the capital back to Lisbon proved to be a bit more complicated than they thought it would be when the war ended. Some of the bureaucracy simply didn't want to go back.
That would be like England moving the capital of the UK to Philadelphia, which would have been quite an event if had ever happened.
Yes, this is not only possible, but happening. I don't know about getting to the Moon, but getting into orbit is something that is actively being tried. One really cool video of a rocket getting launched off of a balloon can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnq3r3tRVP0
This was launched by JP Aerospace and is the real thing, from a balloon flying at 10k feet. It was merely a demo flight to test the flight control hardware and to make sure that a rocket actually would launch... and in this case it was just an Estes rocket shoved in a tube when the flight computer remotely ignited the fuse to launch the rocket. The trick was to get the rocket to launch at all, not necessarily to go anywhere.
One other interesting group is the N-Prize that is offering a £10k prize for the first team to launch something into orbit for under £1000. What is really crazy is that there are several teams working on the idea, and that some of them are actually in the process of "bending metal" and trying to make it work. Even if it is just a ping-pong ball sent into orbit, that would be some kind of accomplishment to get a payload of that size to orbital velocities.
Yet another group using this approach is ARCA, and these guys are trying to get to the Moon. They are one of the original X-Prize teams that showed some real promise and have kept tweaking their rocket designs, with the latest attempts for getting to orbit using a very different kind of rocket staging system that you've simply got to see to believe. It pulls up each stage on a tether instead of pushing it up as a disintegrating pyramid.... presumably to develop economies of scale. They are doing most of their launches over the Black Sea, and is perhaps the one group using balloons that I think will get into orbit first.
Trolls go after big players all the time, as is shown by statistics like these. Not only do they sue a lot but also do they walk away with large payments in a number of cases.
I should note that in addition to having a very good legal team, IBM also has a very good lobbying team that can influence the other branch of government involved with patent law: The U.S. Congress. Seriously, if these guys were any real threat that would start to cost more money than a major lobbying campaign to get new patent law written, there would be some significant new laws that would also come down the pike as a result.
This was one of Microsoft's problems is that they neglected to follow IBM's lead in working the political games in DC... leading them down the road of not having any political support when the chips were put on the table. While a patent troll may be good in court, they simply don't have the fiscal resources to play the whole field on all fronts... something IBM does have the resources to do for good or ill.
This does get back to IBM and its application of patent laws for itself. While defensive patents may have "zero deterrent effect on patent trolls", IBM does have one ace up its sleeve that even patent trolls generally don't:
They have attorneys who have practiced law in nearly ever circuit court of appeals and have legal experience practicing before nearly every judge that has an impact on patent law. Simply put, going before the Nazgul and trying to play ball on what is their home turf is something that only the most experienced lawyers would ever really care to get involved with.
If it is somebody already in the industry and is "practicing", they aren't a threat as the defensive patents then kick in and do the real damage. Anybody who is a direct competitor against IBM likely is violating one of IBM's patents in some way or another.
As for those who have no skin in the game and therefore nothing to lose, they don't have the fiscal resources to really go after IBM except as a target of last resort. A good patent troll would be intelligent to not try and swallow the whale but instead go after the guppies in the pond first. Of course there are some stupid idiots who do try to sue IBM right out of the gate, but that is why IBM has such attorneys on retainer in the first place. Enough people have tried and keep trying to do stupid things that those attorneys continue to get experience.
That is part of the picture of what needs to be fixed in terms of having an engine explicitly designed to handle repeated starts and stops. While wear on engine parts due to a lack of oil is indeed one of the major considerations, it isn't the only one either.
Thermal contraction and other issues in engine design also have an impact, which is where some specific engineering would have to take place and some additional compromises made in terms of the metallurgy and structural design of the engine would have to be made. Many engines right now are designed for sustained highway usage, which is a very different environment from stop and go traffic.
Mind you, I'm not a mechanical engineer here either, but I've spent plenty of time under the hood and have first hand experience in what happens when engines start to fall apart.
Comparing the mechanical regime of stop and go traffic that has to occasionally hit a highway but also varies in speed and engine rotation velocity is a very different regime than what a stand-by power generator would have to face. That is one of several reasons why a Diesel (a proper noun BTW) engine is used for power generation, but gasoline is generally used for passenger vehicles. They have different engineering requirements and even the choice of fuels has a substantial impact on how those engines can be used.
All of engineering is a choice of compromises, and trying to decide which compromise is best to deal with the current situation that the engineer is facing. What is suggested by the original story post is that this is a different engineering environment.
One of the largest reasons for having such a huge patent portfolio is mainly to discourage patent trolls from trying to sue IBM. Especially if it is another manufacturer they can shut down competition that goes after them in the courts by throwing up enough other patents to make it a patent war on a large scale. So from a defensive standpoint, IBM is merely doing a good business practice by taking a bad system and trying not to get harmed by it.
I've never really understood the patent system in the first place, as it really doesn't protect "the little guy", in other words the lone tinkerer in a garage who comes up with some crazy idea and wants to earn some bucks from the concept. Until anybody can show that such a person is legitimately protected, I have to consider the patenting process as something more of a scam that is designed to extract money from those who are least able to afford it. For a private person to patent something, I would consider it to be 99% of the time to be an utter mistake.
For a corporation that already has full time lawyers working for them, having some of that legal time engaged in dealing with patent protection perhaps makes some practical sense. In other words, this is a system that mainly protects those who already have money and not those struggling to get some in the first place.
The problem with roundabouts is that they are incredibly expensive and something that chews up some real estate more than a simple intersection. Any time you start to condemn property it is going to be a political mess to start with. Of course even traffic lights chew up real estate and cause problems if the government entity hasn't made zoning allowances to get an intersection built with those lights.
BTW, I like roundabouts for the most part, and I've seen how they can actually handle more traffic than a standard 4-way stop or even a simple traffic light... and certainly it keeps the traffic moving. They also take up far less real estate than a clover-leaf intersection or other similar methods that are intended to keep traffic flowing at high volumes.
How many times have you seen somebody stall out (or been that driver in a stalled out car) where the engine simply won't restart? There are multiple reasons for that, and I'll admit it tends to happen on older cars that really need some maintenance happen on those engines, but it is something that to me causes more problems than the solution it is trying to fix.
BTW, I have to agree with you on the need at times to be able to punch the gas to get out of a sticky situation... which is one of the problems with gasoline vehicles. It takes some time to get the engines "warmed up" even in the best of circumstances, and certainly it takes some time from when the ignition is started to when you have power available to do something like get out of the way in the circumstances you are noting. We are not talking electric vehicles here, or even a hybrid engine that at least has some reserve electrical power to pull away at a moment's notice.
Of course I consider the big brother issues to be even larger, where some law enforcement officer can flip your engine off to meet some "public safety" requirement (whatever they may be or even if it is a legitimate concern) and essentially giving control over your vehicle in an intimate manner to somebody who really doesn't necessarily deserve that level of trust. So in this regards, I consider this as much of a political issue as it is a technical one, and something that cedes too much authority to a government entity. "Saving the environment" is not something I consider important enough to give up personal liberties on a fundamental level of this nature.
Some of this is an issue of reliability and having an engine designed for multiple restarts. For at least older gasoline vehicles, starting an engine can cause hell on the internal wear of engine parts and is generally discouraged on a practical dollars and cents level as you will be paying far more in engine repair bills than the little bit of money that you save for turning off an engine. Even if you are a backyard mechanic and figuring in the cost of the replacement parts alone, it can get quite expensive. If you factor in the environmental factors for metal refinement used to make these parts and shipping those parts across the country to get them to you, it could be argued that turning off engines actually does more harm to the environment and perhaps even more carbon pollution than simply keeping the engine running.... at least if the time you keep the engine off is but a short period of time. The rule of thumb I've heard is you start to save money if you are going to be stopped for more than a few minutes... that is not the amount of time people are typically at an intersection waiting for a street light.
The point being that you need a vehicle designed explicitly for being turned off and restarted on a whim and have that happen repeatedly during a typical driving experience.
BTW, part of the patent here is that it specifically addresses the above issue I mention, where the manufacturer puts into is electronic control system some sort of calculation for how long an engine ought to be kept on before wear and tear on the engine from restart begins to do some damage, and if the traffic signals "intelligently" indicate that the wait time is going to be longer than that predetermined time period, that the engine shuts off while the car is already stopped anyway. It is an interesting solution to the issue, but I'm not really sure how "non-obvious" that concept really is if the goal is to engage in saving fuel in this manner. A competent automotive engineer would have responded to the same engineering goals with at least that same sort of solution.... which to me makes the idea not patentable. Of course who ever said that the USPTO ever made sense on what they considered for a patent.
There still was some reluctance on the part of the White House (President Eisenhower in particular) in terms of even letting any launches happen beyond sub-orbital flights that stayed completely in American airspace or over international waters. The issue was in regards the legal status of overflight of another nation's territory, in particular the Soviet Union. The fear was that if the USA launched a satellite first, that the Soviet Union would assert that every time a satellite flew over head, that it would be considered an invasion of their country and could be dealt with in a military fashion (aka shot down or destroyed).
One of the most significant applications for spaceflight, even before any satellite was launched, was in regards to surveillance. Eisenhower was certainly aware of the value of aerial reconnaissance from his time as commander of the European theater during WWII and desperately wanted to know what was going on within the borders of the Soviet Union. While flights of the U-2 were already happening and producing some success, it was just a matter of time before they would be attacked and the information from those planes would be stopped again.
Yes, the infighting between the Navy and the Army was an issue too, and there was even infighting between parts of the Army as the Air Corps was trying to define its mission with its creation as a separate military branch and the fact that Von Braun was working for the Army Ordinance branch, treating missiles as a form of artillery and therefore not within the purview of the Air Corps.
I doubt that both programs would have been canceled outright or put on hold indefinitely, but there was some effort to try and slow down both programs for orbital spaceflight in hopes that the Soviet Union would catch up and set the precedent for orbital spaceflight first. To suggest that Sputnik was a surprise to those actually working in the industry and with at least some reasonable access to classified materials discussing what the Soviet spaceflight program was doing on even a broad and cursory level is a joke. Almost everybody in the intelligence community knew that the Soviet Union was very close to launching a satellite, in particular the White House itself.
Of course once the public announcement of the launch of Sputnik happened, the White House had to for political reasons (and to protect intelligence sources) act surprised and say that they had no idea that such a launch was going to happen. They also used the occasion to shake the leaves out of the U.S. Congress and get some additional funding for some pet projects related to spaceflight... which didn't really hurt from a political viewpoint either. I am suggesting that the bumbling and supposed incompetence displayed during the early days of spaceflight by the USA was mostly an act designed for public consumption, as that was a sure fire way to get additional funding to "fix the problems".
Suggesting this extreme interpretation of the scriptures is a little over the top here. The whole point of the scripture is that you shouldn't make an idol for the worship of god.... and preferably don't make that idol into your god.
It could be argued for some people that the worship of a Benjamin Franklin $100 bill is such an idol to be worshiped and admired.... something that is also a mainstay of Christian preaching for centuries too. That isn't the same thing as what is being said either, but at least it is on the correct general train of thought.
To make an image of something, a living thing, is not expressly prohibited.
Of course, this interpretation that you were not permitted to make an image of any "living thing" does have precedent within both Islamic and Christian societies. For Islam, most mosques and even most buildings influenced by Islamic thinking have no images at all, and what decorations can be found are simple geometric patterns or calligraphy in some fashion or other. It was not considered blasphemous to have the name of God spelled out in some fashion. For medieval Christian cathedral construction, while showing "living beings" was considered contrary to the very scripture you were citing, fantastical creatures like gargoyles and demons were acceptable as they were never "living creatures".
Considering the context of the original ten commandments, as addressed to a group of mostly nomadic and polytheistic shepherds in a culture that routinely built shrines with elaborate idols within those shrines, it makes sense to draw the line and simply push for a complete prohibition on the practice of building or making anything even resembling one of those pagan idols. It was a problem even for Mohammed when he tried to work with the arab peoples near Mecca and Medina... and that was after a couple of millenia of influence from Moses and the teachings of Abraham trying to stop the practice.
My problem with the whole thing, however, is not with the interpretation of religion where certainly one person can read anything they want into a scripture like this, and certainly a theological discussion about the topic would be interesting. The problem I have is the prohibition of an activity by what amounts to be non-believers. You can believe any thing you want... but when your interpretation of religious thought starts to demand controlling how I should believe or act, I think it has crossed an important and critical point. That is what is being demanded here, where non believers are being expected to stop acts (drawing cartoons of an ancient historical figure) based upon a religious philosophy they haven't even agreed upon in the first place. Your interpretation of this scripture is your own personal belief, and you certainly shouldn't impose that belief upon others.
The basis for this interpretation of personal freedoms actually comes from the teachings of Jesus for myself. It is incumbent from my own viewpoint that in order for me to completely embrace his teachings, that I simply must accept the beliefs of others and let them worship how they would as long as it does me no harm. Somehow those of the radical Islamic faith seem to have missed this point, have thrown Isa under the bus, and are demanding at the point of a gun (now trying for a nuke) that everybody accept the most radical worldview and religious philosophies of Islam. I hope those trying to threaten me in this manner don't mind if I and my fellow countrymen try to point a nuke back at those idiots for even making such a threat.
Windows ME was really MS-DOS v 7.3 (or whatever that would be with the numbering system). It was the final operating system from the DOS legacy that started back in the days when Bill Gates was actually contributing code for the OS. That was ultimately the problem with it, where it had to deal with all of that legacy code base and they tried to make it sort of like Windows 2000, but deliberately crippled it so it wouldn't compete against their other products and introduced a few features that actually backfired as "improvements", notably the registry "preservation" tools that tended to wipe out the registry instead.
Windows 2000 and the Windows NT line that now includes Windows 7 actually started as a sort of fork from VMS, the operating systems used by Digital Equipment on the VAX and similar computers but ported to the x86 architecture. There still is a little bit of legacy VMS code in there, primarily in the thread handling code and some of the really low level kernel parts, which is part of what gave NT its stability. That IBM engineers were involved in some of the early NT development is now a mostly forgotten trivia fact too, but the two lines of operating systems have very different heritages and legacies.
I wouldn't doubt it that there were at least some within Microsoft who wanted to kill that old MS-DOS line for some time but couldn't quite figure out when that should happen.
For myself, I would call Win 2k as actually superior to Win XP. While XP does more things and has more whistles and gadgets, Win 2k is good for what id does. The largest problems with Win 2k is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it and has deliberately thrown in a monkey wrench to kick people off of that (now competing for mindshare) OS.
The jump from Win NT 4 and the abomination called Windows ME (better yet, Windows 98) was huge, and it was a clear step in the correct direction. If you say that Windows 2000 was awful on day one, I take it you never tried "Windows 286" (aka Windows version 2). From day one with my experience on Win 2k was substantially increased stability and complete compatibility with NT 4. If it ran on NT 4, it would run on Win 2k and usually do better. There were a few problems with old DOS-era legacy apps and stuff that used obscure (aka "undocumented") API hooks from the Windows 95/98/ME line that failed on Windows 2000, but that should be expected too if you understood the operating system. XP was OK and does some stuff good, but Vista was actually a step backward.
Windows 7 was finally a chance to fix what was wrong and get back on the right track.
Certainly I wouldn't call Windows 2K a failure on day one.
While I would agree that Larry Sanger is trying to stir the pot up here, the real blame I give to Jimmy Wales is reacting to that controversy rather than simply letting the community deal with the issues and acting as a shield to the community rather than being a blunt instrument to stir things up and make a mountain out of a molehill here. If anything, the actions of Jimmy Wales gave force of authority and power to Larry Sanger than treating the guy like a crack pot.
Seriously, had Larry Sanger been treated as the completely irrelevant opinion that he should have been treated as, this whole "controversy" would have blown by without even so much as a note and certainly wouldn't have deserved repeated /. stories like it has. The issue over pornography and what qualifies as such on the Wikimedia commons is a long debated topic and this brief foray into the decision making process over what qualifies as "legal" or "illegal" is certainly not over. Most of Jimmy Wales' deletions have been overturned and much of the content supposedly removed has been restored... and that is by those within the community who are bold enough to take the initiative. It was the threats against admins who were brave enough to overturn these actions that in part led to the real problems facing Jimmy Wales right now.
As for Jimmy Wales wanting an excuse to give up authority.... I don't buy that for a second. The call to remove the founders flag actually happened before this incident over porn content, and if anything demonstrates that such arbitrary "god-king" powers are abusive. The abilities of the founder class of users (of which Jimmy Wales is currently the only user account with those privileges) have been stripped away merely to save face for Mr. Wales, as having that status completely removed would have perhaps been a bit to embarrassing to the guy and something not supported by the board of trustees.
What should be noteworthy here is not really the involvement with Wikipedia, which has dealt with the temper tantrums of Jimmy Wales for some time, but it is the other sister projects that are starting to get fed up with him. Wikiversity has been through a recent tail-spin in particular when because Jimmy Wales didn't get his way a threat to shut down the entire project was put forward. The whole issue of porn played itself out not on Wikipedia but on the Wikimedia Commons, and the debate over if he should remain happened on Meta. It is mostly these other groups of related projects that are starting to push back, and that is what has become part of the more visible conflict that has happened in the past month or so.
Jimmy Wales was the chairman of the board of trustees (essentially the president) and did wield some executive authority from that position for awhile, but even that was something he gave up a few years ago with the election of a new chair. His current position, as such as it is, is as an unelected member of the board of trustees based upon historical reasons than any real justification for being there. Perhaps there is a role for unelected members of the Wikimedia board of trustees, but there certainly is plenty of other people's money on the line now and this scandal may have some long term impact on the foundation governing body.
On the whole, I think this whole incident will in the long run make for some healthier projects as it does show that no one single person ought to have the kind of authority that Jimmy Wales tried to wield here, and that the community isn't happy that it was used in that manner even if the motives were somehow noble.
The real power that Jimmy Wales had was the power of the purse strings. He originally was the one that paid the bills and hired the staff, all of that coming from his own pocketbook.
Unfortunately for Wales, that era has passed by long ago and there is no way that a single person, even somebody with funds on the order of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, could keep the Wikimedia Foundation going. Jimmy Wales certainly is no Bill Gates in terms of fiscal resources.
The real issue now is what residual authority that Jimmy Wales really has within the community, and how pissed off that community has become over this issue. It is notable that the community has "voted" with a 4:1 ratio to have the "founder" flag removed from the account of Jimmy Wales at this point too. If he decides to use this authority again in any meaningful way, I am quite certain that will be the end of his involvement with the Wikimedia Foundation in general.
For myself, I hope that he does continue within the community and that no matter what is going to happen from this point forward that his opinion will certainly carry substantial weight. The problem is that he now has to participate in the projects as a normal user and participant, and can't make unilateral decisions in a god-king role. If he wants to see something like porn removed, he needs to work with the community debate process to see that it happens. That is perhaps a bit tough for him to give up, but it will also be healthier for the Wikimedia projects in general. He certainly bit off more than he could chew by taking on the Commons community.