They were found in a war zone and look like a militia. Under the geneva convention they deserve a speedy public hearing with legal representation to determine their status - and until such a hearing has taken place, they have all the privilidges of prisoners of war. They may well have no rights - but they have the right to a hearing to decide that.
I run a gnunet node on this computer. It has about 170mb stored there, that I would have no clue how to access. (I may have the keys, I don't know). It stays entirely within that folder, and is space-limited to a max of 1GB. I see it as my contribution to keeping speech free.
That's taken out of context. I'm saying he was wrong near the top, but the lower paragraph wasn't implying that he did something wrong, rather making a more general statement about whether we should criticise people.
You're just fucked.
Insult me, that shows you have a good argument. (That's sarcasm in case you didn't notice)
Presumably the ESRB's guidelines say it is. Whether or not you agree with their guidelines, they have to follow them for their ratings to mean anything.
First, that's the difference between unlocking "fully rendered, unmodified" content that was never meant to be accessible to the user in the shipped product and a third party just adding in that content themselves?
I don't think it was never meant to be accessible. People find 10-button cheat codes, they'd be able to find an extra level that was never accessed and Rockstar knew it.
Second, what's the difference between having content that was never meant to be accessible to the user in the shipped product and that content not existing at all?
The difference is between the content being there and the content not being there. I can't see how you can say they are the same thing
Those nudity textures can't normally be accessed by gamers without using a third party tool that goes in and physically changes a few bytes in files in the game.
They're stored in the normal fashion, so if anyone creates a level editor (and I can't imagine there won't be one with such a popular game) they'll be accessible with that.
So, what does this mean for ESRB games in the future? That no graphics of nudity can exist in the game, no matter how obscured/hidden/encrypted they are? Does ESRB have to scour all binaries now, looking for graphics in every conceivable format?
ESRB never looks at the actual game CDs, they just ask the publisher to send them examples of the most extreme violence and nudity it contains. They will continue to do the same, and the only thing they can do if publishers lie to them is revoke the rating like they did this time. The whole system operates primarily on trust.
Furthermore, it wasn't just textures... there were 3D animations included. Take out the textures, and you still a plethora of white shadows humping, possibly with dangly or jiggly bits in the right places. Would Rockstar have gotten in trouble for explicit white shadows, and had to have made sure all traces of these were removed too?
Probably not, but if that was the most extreme sexual content in the game they would have to send it to the ESRB for rating, who would take it into account.
I mean, this is rediculous. The mini-games were solidly hidden, and people who want to unlock it have to download a tool that was specifically crafted for this game by someone else. There's no other way to unlock it. If there's a nipple hidden deep inside a binary, let it be.
The content was there, it was a part of the game, it only requires a single bit to be changed. It was clearly meant to be discovered.
It's pretty easy for women to take their shirts off too, you know. That functionality should be a federal offense too.
No, but if an entertainer is given to taking her shirt off in shows that should be taken into account when deciding if the show is suitable for children.
It may be pre-rendered like cut scenes, that might be easier than adding appropriate bits to the character models and getting the physics engine to have them move appropriately. Not ever owning the game I don't know.
The Gentoo guy not only didn't have a non-compete clause but was also very much in need of a job. I say good on them for hiring him. Like it or not, Google is not an angel but a corporation like any other.
"After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs". That's why they're changing the rating. Of course they don't rule on completely player-created content.
I know people don't RTFA, but is it too much to ask to RTFSummary? "After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs". That's the difference.
The point is that he was probably a lot wiser than you and may have understood things about his child's upbringing that you could not comprehend. You shouldn't be second-guessing him.
Try me. If he's had these insights, why aren't they public knowledge? The way we learn is through questioning.
No you're not,
Ok, I'm not. I'm trying to be polite here, you seem to be criticising me again for not doing so later on. I'm reasonably confident she'll do a good job.
and yes it can
How? Are you saying he would have been a negative impact on his child's upbringing?
You were preaching
If that's preaching, how can I say what I think is right or wrong without doing it? Or are we not allowed to discuss such things here?
Were you not trying to imply that James Doohan was a bad parent?
No. I was trying to imply that, as a human like all the rest of us, he was wrong in that particular decision. It doesn't make him a bad parent on the whole. No-one's perfect, and he may well be far closer than I'd be. But I will still call out anything I see as being wrong that he does. I'd expect anyone else to do the same for me.
There you go again, implying that he did something wrong,
I'm not implying that he did something wrong, any more than I'm implying he abused his children when I say elsewhere that people survive childhood sexual abuse and grow up normal.
and you don't seem to understand that it's bad form to speak ill of the dead.
No, I don't. Are the people here who criticise Stalin guilty of bad form? It's not like we're at his funeral or speaking with personal friends/family of his. If the topic comes up in the discussion (I didn't introduce it), I'm going to give my views, if I think he did something wrong, I'll say he did something wrong. Do we have to pretend dead people were perfect?
Nice strawman there. As I've said elsewhere, you do the best you can in the circumstances that happen, but when it's a complete obvious certainty that something bad for your child will happen should you have the child, as was the case here, then you shouldn't have the child.
Do you think your child needs to be wealthier? You have to balance things like whether your child has a greater chance of disabilities because you're older. If you think waiting is the best thing for your child then it's what you should do, the child's interests come first. Obviously you have to judge for yourself what you think will be best, but I can't imagine him thinking his child would be better off with him not around.
Peer-to-peer sharing content, shoucast, apache, etc.. thats a server in my mind, and I don't waste resources with desktop stuff on servers.
Many (most?) home users only have the one box, so it will have to wear both hats. A modern machine is more than capable of running services in the background, and the Internet would be much better if everyone did.
Nor would I host anything I cared about on a typical home connection
It isn't much by itself perhaps, but they add together. If everyone serves what they can, it's better than only those who think they have the power serving.
I think of "home users" as the 90-some percent of users who run windows and use the Internet to browse, email or maybe games. If you're running linux on your desktop and want to do that sort of stuff you're not a "home" user in my mind
All I do most of the time is email and browsing the web, a bit of usenet and the occasional P2P download or game. I'm more knowledgeable perhaps, but my use is (I'd say) pretty typical.
i'll assume that your boxes have host-based firewalls setup
Not generally. I deliberately disabled ipchains (or is it iptables, whatever) because I never bother sorting it. I do have an SMB share which only accepts local connections, but that's a servery thing and not something the one-computer home user is going to need. Everything else is accepting connections from everywhere (It's nice to be able to SSH home). Haven't had any problems yet (well, a bit of slowdown once when I had that SMB share open as people tried dictionary attacks, a complaint to the ISP sorted that. I realise the typical user is not likely to be able to sort such things though).
How is this wacky? Polyploidy is probably the simplest mutation to induce, generally easier than any other effect you want, but affects a surprising number of things depending on the organism. I wouldn't have been able to predict this result (the growing faster, how do they know they're infertile?)
And this child has the best chance it can be given, considering its father will die (has died) when it's very young.
But that was obvious from before it was conceived, so it was something to take into consideration at that stage.
Do you feel the same way about children whose mothers (and more rarely, fathers) choose to have them, planning on raising the child alone, though usually without the death of their spouse in the plan?
Yes. Obviously, once your child is alive (and I'm not going to argue over at what stage that occurs, that's another debate entirely) you do the best you can for it. But I'd say to have a child you know beforehand will have a single-parent upbringing is irresponsible, just like to have a child you know beforehand you can't afford to feed (ignoring for a moment any child welfare systems your country might have) is irresponsible.
Yes it does. The child will be cared for by people who knew him well.
But presumably not with the same experience that was such an advantage. I know a few old people fairly well. What was the point you were trying to make when you said "He probably knew a lot more about life than you do"?
Why don't you send a note to his widow and explain it to her?
I'm sure she'll do a good job, but it can't possibly be as good a job as the two of them would have done together.
It's not for you to decide which methods are proper.
So I can't criticise anyone's ways of bringing up their children? Obviously it's far, far from clear-cut in this case, but there are some practices that are clearly wrong. I suppose you could argue that only the children who have been through it can criticise the way they were brought up, but that way we can never have any kind of comparison, and can't stop people until the child is old enough to complain themselves, not a situation I would want to be in.
Not only are you being arrogant,
I'm giving my views. This is a discussion website, that's what people do here. I've seen people stridently declare there is no god with no such criticism. Or am I not allowed to have opinions about other peoples' parenting?
you're being plain rude by criticizing the recently departed
It's where the topic came up, and I didn't introduce it. If someone did something wrong, they did something wrong, regardless of whether they just died.
You might not be able to imagine someone with a single parent being "brought up right". But there are many millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of humans, who are just fine with one parent.
Of course there are. Some of my best friends grew up in single parent households. But just because people can be just fine after it doesn't mean it's ok, to take an extreme example there are thousands of people who suffered childhood sexual abuse and most of them grew up fine. And on the whole, even when you factor in the lower socio-economic status, children of single parent households are worse off, intellectually, socially, economically in later life. Not in every individual case, obviously, people do well or badly with any kind of upbringing, but on the whole it's a worse upbringing, and it's irresponsible to knowingly inflict it on a child. Of course if you have a child and something happens, you have to do the best you can, but for him it must have been pretty obvious this was going to happen soon. Of course life is wonderful, but there's nothing to not be born if you're not born. Every child deserves the best chance it can be given.
NAT and firewalls, not a good idea? Can you please elaborate on why NAT and firewalls are a bad idea for home users?
Sure. They make it much harder for people to publish their own content, which as a whole makes them more dependent on big media companies. We have wikipedia, but that relies a lot on donated hardware, and you can go into more detail on your specialist subject with you're own website. Even if they're not the type to produce something themselves, they could help by participating in more peer-to-peer things, like acting as a server for shoutcast streams. Of course you can still do these things, but it takes extra effort and knowledge that most users are simply incapable of. I'm sure more of this type of thing would be available if ordinary users participated more - perhaps wikipedia and similar could run a few pages on every user, saving their bandwidth and diskspace a bit (obviously the main server would have to have the official copy, but users could act like a more intelligent version of their squid servers).
I'm sure everyone who sees all the crap traffic infected home windows systems create on networks would disagree.
That happens anyway, it's the fault of windows far more than direct connection.
Connecting your desktop directly to the Internet is very 1998, it is a bad idea.
I'm sitting here on my home desktop which is in the DMZ on my router (I'm connected to a router simply because it was the easiest way to get a working ADSL connection under linux). It's fine, haven't been infected unless by someone very subtle, and allows me to run my apache server, shoutcast server, etc much more easily.
I read this as, "if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be on the internet, and when that is the case, firewall and NAT technology is unnecessary."
Not really. If you don't know what you're doing you're still fine without NAT or firewalls, unless your OS maker turns on a load of pointless services by default.
1. That's not the case. Everybody and their grandmother is on the internet. That means that if ISPs didn't NAT their customers, we'd have run out of IP addresses (IPv4 at least) years ago.
I don't think that's the case, and if it is it just means we'd have moved to IPv6 sooner.
2. Your network stack is only part of the concern. Any applications you're running must be flawlessly written, as well.
If the applications are serving anything, then it makes no sense to block them off. If they aren't, why are they listening at all?
3. You state that things SHOULD work one way, and that NAT/firewall users are idiots for coping with how things DO work? I don't follow that logic.
I never said anything about how it should work. How it is is there is no way to externally connect to an application unless it is listening on a port. If an application is listening on a port, either it's needed, in which case it is stupid to firewall it off, or it isn't needed, in which case it's stupid to be running it. The only way you can be affected without running an application that's listening is with a TCP stack flaw, and given how small and closely audited most TCP stacks are, a vulnerability in your firewall program like the one that got people running blackice nailed is probably more likely than one in your TCP stack (when was the last time you saw such a flaw?), and one in your nat router is just as likely, it may well be running the exact same tcp stack. All of those are simple facts.
You couldn't really have the noble gasses on the left as there is a scientific reason for the table to be arranged the way it is: rows are electron shells, which fill in as you go from left to right.
Yes, but it makes just as much sense to say Helium has an empty second shell as a full first shell.
A glance at the position of an element in the real periodic table tells you which orbitals are empty, partially full (and therefore chemically interecting) and full. All of this is less obvious in a circular chart.
Only from experience I think. Which spoke they are on is just as clear as which column they are in, and the "extra" series (transition metals and then those two that are normally plonked to the bottom) are better integrated.
Plus, this new thing has hydrogen over carbon - what sort of sense does that make?
As much as any. It can both gain and lose electrons (well, its electron) can't it, like carbon? It's a bit of an odd element and doesn't belong firmly in any one group, some conventional periodic tables have it floating above more or less in the middle (which seems to be what this one is going for).
Look where that got it. Until the apps demand innovation for what they want to do, we won't see innovation in the OS sphere. Dos programs were making GUIs and using the mouse before GUI operating systems became popular.
He probably knew a lot more about life than you do.
Probably, but that doesn't do any good now does it?
Proper care of a child involves teaching him to be open-minded and accepting of people who are different.
Yes, and someone needs to do it. Accepting differences doesn't extend as far as accepting people who don't bring up their children properly (not that I'm saying his child won't be brought up properly).
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, here's some terrorists, let's throw away all our rights
They were found in a war zone and look like a militia. Under the geneva convention they deserve a speedy public hearing with legal representation to determine their status - and until such a hearing has taken place, they have all the privilidges of prisoners of war. They may well have no rights - but they have the right to a hearing to decide that.
I run a gnunet node on this computer. It has about 170mb stored there, that I would have no clue how to access. (I may have the keys, I don't know). It stays entirely within that folder, and is space-limited to a max of 1GB. I see it as my contribution to keeping speech free.
"he was wrong"
Then this:
"I'm not implying that he did something wrong"
That's taken out of context. I'm saying he was wrong near the top, but the lower paragraph wasn't implying that he did something wrong, rather making a more general statement about whether we should criticise people.
You're just fucked.
Insult me, that shows you have a good argument. (That's sarcasm in case you didn't notice)
Presumably the ESRB's guidelines say it is. Whether or not you agree with their guidelines, they have to follow them for their ratings to mean anything.
I don't think it was never meant to be accessible. People find 10-button cheat codes, they'd be able to find an extra level that was never accessed and Rockstar knew it.
Second, what's the difference between having content that was never meant to be accessible to the user in the shipped product and that content not existing at all?
The difference is between the content being there and the content not being there. I can't see how you can say they are the same thing
They're stored in the normal fashion, so if anyone creates a level editor (and I can't imagine there won't be one with such a popular game) they'll be accessible with that.
So, what does this mean for ESRB games in the future? That no graphics of nudity can exist in the game, no matter how obscured/hidden/encrypted they are? Does ESRB have to scour all binaries now, looking for graphics in every conceivable format?
ESRB never looks at the actual game CDs, they just ask the publisher to send them examples of the most extreme violence and nudity it contains. They will continue to do the same, and the only thing they can do if publishers lie to them is revoke the rating like they did this time. The whole system operates primarily on trust.
Furthermore, it wasn't just textures... there were 3D animations included. Take out the textures, and you still a plethora of white shadows humping, possibly with dangly or jiggly bits in the right places. Would Rockstar have gotten in trouble for explicit white shadows, and had to have made sure all traces of these were removed too?
Probably not, but if that was the most extreme sexual content in the game they would have to send it to the ESRB for rating, who would take it into account.
I mean, this is rediculous. The mini-games were solidly hidden, and people who want to unlock it have to download a tool that was specifically crafted for this game by someone else. There's no other way to unlock it. If there's a nipple hidden deep inside a binary, let it be.
The content was there, it was a part of the game, it only requires a single bit to be changed. It was clearly meant to be discovered.
It's pretty easy for women to take their shirts off too, you know. That functionality should be a federal offense too.
No, but if an entertainer is given to taking her shirt off in shows that should be taken into account when deciding if the show is suitable for children.
It may be pre-rendered like cut scenes, that might be easier than adding appropriate bits to the character models and getting the physics engine to have them move appropriately. Not ever owning the game I don't know.
The Gentoo guy not only didn't have a non-compete clause but was also very much in need of a job. I say good on them for hiring him. Like it or not, Google is not an angel but a corporation like any other.
"After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs". That's why they're changing the rating. Of course they don't rule on completely player-created content.
I know people don't RTFA, but is it too much to ask to RTFSummary? "After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that sexually explicit material exists in a fully rendered, unmodified form on the final discs". That's the difference.
/I know, I know
Try me. If he's had these insights, why aren't they public knowledge? The way we learn is through questioning.
No you're not,
Ok, I'm not. I'm trying to be polite here, you seem to be criticising me again for not doing so later on. I'm reasonably confident she'll do a good job.
and yes it can
How? Are you saying he would have been a negative impact on his child's upbringing?
You were preaching
If that's preaching, how can I say what I think is right or wrong without doing it? Or are we not allowed to discuss such things here?
Were you not trying to imply that James Doohan was a bad parent?
No. I was trying to imply that, as a human like all the rest of us, he was wrong in that particular decision. It doesn't make him a bad parent on the whole. No-one's perfect, and he may well be far closer than I'd be. But I will still call out anything I see as being wrong that he does. I'd expect anyone else to do the same for me.
There you go again, implying that he did something wrong,
I'm not implying that he did something wrong, any more than I'm implying he abused his children when I say elsewhere that people survive childhood sexual abuse and grow up normal.
and you don't seem to understand that it's bad form to speak ill of the dead.
No, I don't. Are the people here who criticise Stalin guilty of bad form? It's not like we're at his funeral or speaking with personal friends/family of his. If the topic comes up in the discussion (I didn't introduce it), I'm going to give my views, if I think he did something wrong, I'll say he did something wrong. Do we have to pretend dead people were perfect?
Nice strawman there. As I've said elsewhere, you do the best you can in the circumstances that happen, but when it's a complete obvious certainty that something bad for your child will happen should you have the child, as was the case here, then you shouldn't have the child.
Do you think your child needs to be wealthier? You have to balance things like whether your child has a greater chance of disabilities because you're older. If you think waiting is the best thing for your child then it's what you should do, the child's interests come first. Obviously you have to judge for yourself what you think will be best, but I can't imagine him thinking his child would be better off with him not around.
Many (most?) home users only have the one box, so it will have to wear both hats. A modern machine is more than capable of running services in the background, and the Internet would be much better if everyone did.
Nor would I host anything I cared about on a typical home connection
It isn't much by itself perhaps, but they add together. If everyone serves what they can, it's better than only those who think they have the power serving.
I think of "home users" as the 90-some percent of users who run windows and use the Internet to browse, email or maybe games. If you're running linux on your desktop and want to do that sort of stuff you're not a "home" user in my mind
All I do most of the time is email and browsing the web, a bit of usenet and the occasional P2P download or game. I'm more knowledgeable perhaps, but my use is (I'd say) pretty typical.
i'll assume that your boxes have host-based firewalls setup
Not generally. I deliberately disabled ipchains (or is it iptables, whatever) because I never bother sorting it. I do have an SMB share which only accepts local connections, but that's a servery thing and not something the one-computer home user is going to need. Everything else is accepting connections from everywhere (It's nice to be able to SSH home). Haven't had any problems yet (well, a bit of slowdown once when I had that SMB share open as people tried dictionary attacks, a complaint to the ISP sorted that. I realise the typical user is not likely to be able to sort such things though).
How is this wacky? Polyploidy is probably the simplest mutation to induce, generally easier than any other effect you want, but affects a surprising number of things depending on the organism. I wouldn't have been able to predict this result (the growing faster, how do they know they're infertile?)
But that was obvious from before it was conceived, so it was something to take into consideration at that stage.
Do you feel the same way about children whose mothers (and more rarely, fathers) choose to have them, planning on raising the child alone, though usually without the death of their spouse in the plan?
Yes. Obviously, once your child is alive (and I'm not going to argue over at what stage that occurs, that's another debate entirely) you do the best you can for it. But I'd say to have a child you know beforehand will have a single-parent upbringing is irresponsible, just like to have a child you know beforehand you can't afford to feed (ignoring for a moment any child welfare systems your country might have) is irresponsible.
But presumably not with the same experience that was such an advantage. I know a few old people fairly well. What was the point you were trying to make when you said "He probably knew a lot more about life than you do"?
Why don't you send a note to his widow and explain it to her?
I'm sure she'll do a good job, but it can't possibly be as good a job as the two of them would have done together.
It's not for you to decide which methods are proper.
So I can't criticise anyone's ways of bringing up their children? Obviously it's far, far from clear-cut in this case, but there are some practices that are clearly wrong. I suppose you could argue that only the children who have been through it can criticise the way they were brought up, but that way we can never have any kind of comparison, and can't stop people until the child is old enough to complain themselves, not a situation I would want to be in.
Not only are you being arrogant,
I'm giving my views. This is a discussion website, that's what people do here. I've seen people stridently declare there is no god with no such criticism. Or am I not allowed to have opinions about other peoples' parenting?
you're being plain rude by criticizing the recently departed
It's where the topic came up, and I didn't introduce it. If someone did something wrong, they did something wrong, regardless of whether they just died.
Of course there are. Some of my best friends grew up in single parent households. But just because people can be just fine after it doesn't mean it's ok, to take an extreme example there are thousands of people who suffered childhood sexual abuse and most of them grew up fine. And on the whole, even when you factor in the lower socio-economic status, children of single parent households are worse off, intellectually, socially, economically in later life. Not in every individual case, obviously, people do well or badly with any kind of upbringing, but on the whole it's a worse upbringing, and it's irresponsible to knowingly inflict it on a child. Of course if you have a child and something happens, you have to do the best you can, but for him it must have been pretty obvious this was going to happen soon. Of course life is wonderful, but there's nothing to not be born if you're not born. Every child deserves the best chance it can be given.
Sure. They make it much harder for people to publish their own content, which as a whole makes them more dependent on big media companies. We have wikipedia, but that relies a lot on donated hardware, and you can go into more detail on your specialist subject with you're own website. Even if they're not the type to produce something themselves, they could help by participating in more peer-to-peer things, like acting as a server for shoutcast streams. Of course you can still do these things, but it takes extra effort and knowledge that most users are simply incapable of. I'm sure more of this type of thing would be available if ordinary users participated more - perhaps wikipedia and similar could run a few pages on every user, saving their bandwidth and diskspace a bit (obviously the main server would have to have the official copy, but users could act like a more intelligent version of their squid servers).
I'm sure everyone who sees all the crap traffic infected home windows systems create on networks would disagree.
That happens anyway, it's the fault of windows far more than direct connection.
Connecting your desktop directly to the Internet is very 1998, it is a bad idea.
I'm sitting here on my home desktop which is in the DMZ on my router (I'm connected to a router simply because it was the easiest way to get a working ADSL connection under linux). It's fine, haven't been infected unless by someone very subtle, and allows me to run my apache server, shoutcast server, etc much more easily.
Not really. If you don't know what you're doing you're still fine without NAT or firewalls, unless your OS maker turns on a load of pointless services by default.
1. That's not the case. Everybody and their grandmother is on the internet. That means that if ISPs didn't NAT their customers, we'd have run out of IP addresses (IPv4 at least) years ago.
I don't think that's the case, and if it is it just means we'd have moved to IPv6 sooner.
2. Your network stack is only part of the concern. Any applications you're running must be flawlessly written, as well.
If the applications are serving anything, then it makes no sense to block them off. If they aren't, why are they listening at all?
3. You state that things SHOULD work one way, and that NAT/firewall users are idiots for coping with how things DO work? I don't follow that logic.
I never said anything about how it should work. How it is is there is no way to externally connect to an application unless it is listening on a port. If an application is listening on a port, either it's needed, in which case it is stupid to firewall it off, or it isn't needed, in which case it's stupid to be running it. The only way you can be affected without running an application that's listening is with a TCP stack flaw, and given how small and closely audited most TCP stacks are, a vulnerability in your firewall program like the one that got people running blackice nailed is probably more likely than one in your TCP stack (when was the last time you saw such a flaw?), and one in your nat router is just as likely, it may well be running the exact same tcp stack. All of those are simple facts.
Yes, but it makes just as much sense to say Helium has an empty second shell as a full first shell.
A glance at the position of an element in the real periodic table tells you which orbitals are empty, partially full (and therefore chemically interecting) and full. All of this is less obvious in a circular chart.
Only from experience I think. Which spoke they are on is just as clear as which column they are in, and the "extra" series (transition metals and then those two that are normally plonked to the bottom) are better integrated.
Plus, this new thing has hydrogen over carbon - what sort of sense does that make?
As much as any. It can both gain and lose electrons (well, its electron) can't it, like carbon? It's a bit of an odd element and doesn't belong firmly in any one group, some conventional periodic tables have it floating above more or less in the middle (which seems to be what this one is going for).
Look where that got it. Until the apps demand innovation for what they want to do, we won't see innovation in the OS sphere. Dos programs were making GUIs and using the mouse before GUI operating systems became popular.
Probably, but that doesn't do any good now does it?
Proper care of a child involves teaching him to be open-minded and accepting of people who are different.
Yes, and someone needs to do it. Accepting differences doesn't extend as far as accepting people who don't bring up their children properly (not that I'm saying his child won't be brought up properly).