I kind of expected to find this level of stupid in a thread like this. Maybe some of you really do hate America or yourselves this much, or maybe some people are just so dumb that we'll have to see a few thousand more people die to realize that this really is a war.
Yes, let's all say it together - this is a war. It isn't exactly the same as WWII, or really, any other war before. What we are fighting is a culture, an idea. It isn't really based in any particular country, but it is capable of and fully intends to do us warfare-scale levels of harm. This war won't be over before the end of American Idol, but it won't involve truly massive levels of troops and equipment either. Like all wars before, it will involve doing some things that could be considered to violate the Constitution. Since it will be a long war, we will have to be on our guard to see that it doesn't go too far against the Constitution, especially since it will be hard to say when it's really over.
(By the way, we most certainly have declared it properly, or at least Bush did. The Constitution says that Congress must approve all wars, but it doesn't say that they must be against specific countries or include the phrase "declare war".)
There are a lot of misunderstandings about how this all will work, but only some are really troublesome. Like the idea that we must bend all possible effort to capture enemy combatants alive and try and convict them in open courts. In some cases we certainly should, like for American citizens on American soil, but in most cases, it won't be possible, or would be insanely expensive. We are generally going pretty far out of our way to try people in some sort of court when it's at all possible, but in many cases, it just isn't.
There will be mistakes too. Plenty have already been made, and I'm sure we'll make a lot more before it's all over. It's important to keep some perspective - wars can never be perfect or clean, but we are the good guys here and we will win. It's become cliche, but there are only 2 sides in this war, and you better pick one, because there's no room for "neutral observers". It's pretty clear that if you take everything that, say, the Taliban, says as face value and distrust everything the US Government and Military put out, then you've picked a side all right, and it isn't ours.
Could only work if their employees are glorified button-pushers. If anyone at the company is doing anything at all interesting or innovative, then they're going to be doing lots of research about it, which will generate traffic to thousands of random websites, and handling whitelist requests for all of them will be a huge drain on everybody's productivity.
There's also the personal websurfing aspect. Not gonna lie, I do plenty of that too. Do you really think that's wrong? I say that if your employees are doing anything creative as part of their job, like maybe writing code or designing application architectures, then they're going to need some slack time periodically.
The bottom line is that if you treat your employees like moron button-pushers who must be monitored every second, then that's the kind of work you're going to get out of them, and good luck competing like that in today's business environment. If you hire smart, effective people and trust them, then they'll create amazing things for you, which is better for the bottom line and your employees' sanity.
I actually thought of this a while ago too, more in terms of replacing air travel with long-distance vacuum maglev subways. It'd be cool in that you could just keep accelerating to the halfway point with no effective top speed - travel times might be an order of magnitude shorter than aircraft. Main downsides I can think of are:
Constructing even one such inter-city tunnel would be insanely expensive, much less a network comparable to the current air travel system.
Nobody knows how much of a pain in the ass it would be to maintain the vacuum. And it could be a big failure point - if you end up needing pumping stations every few miles and one of them fails, do you suddenly pressurize the tubes and effectively vaporize some train running at 50,000mph or so?
Loading and unloading will be a pain in the ass. You'll need long-term reliable very low-leakage doors and couplings on the trains and stations. And then how do you fix broken ones without re-pressurizing the whole system? Maybe we should make them full airlocks on both the trains and stations...
Who are these people to be giving love advice? According to the summary, their supposed expertise consists of "reading books on relationships" (How many, and which ones?) and "enlisting the help of a couples therapist" (What, like one? What are the qualifications of this supposed couples therapist?).
In case any of you guys haven't figured it out yet, 90% of people trying to give you advice on any subject are completely full of shit, including the authors of books and therapists. In anything related to love and relationships, there's even more bullshit. My advice is: Find people in your real life that have the kind of relationships you want, and get advice from them. Ignore anyone who claims to be an expert until they have proven themselves to you, either through their advice matching your real-life experience, or you personally witnessing them having the kind of relationships you want with the kind of people that you want.
Even more than that - the standard rooting setup for Android phones is to install a command-line and graphical sudo utility. Individual apps don't have root access normally, just the access they already applied for. When an app asks for root access, the Superuser app pops up a dialog asking the user to confirm. So to get the data, you'd have to root the phone and then either connect it to a computer or install an app and manually give it root access. Sounds secure enough to me.
Dammit, you're making sense! You actually have some clue about the realities of foreign relations! I demand that you stop this immediately! Slashdot is the place for fairy-tale visions about a world free of war where the US is responsible for every war that's ever happened, including the ones that happened before it was founded. A place to pretend that dismantling the entire US military would result in a world free of warfare and oppression. Stop cutting into our fantasy!
Interesting research. I wouldn't consider myself to be a survivalist, but what I consider to be the most important thing about any survival plan is to define exactly what it is that you are trying to survive and how likely that actually is.
I think I'm well prepared to survive a Hurricane, for example, which is a very realistic threat where I live - I've been through several already. In that case, what you're mostly preparing for is a week or two with no power and nothing shipped in from the outside, some light property damage, possibly light looting, and roads possibly obstructed with trees and debris. In that case, a week or two worth of non-perishable food and good water and a couple of quality firearms should do the job, with some basic repair equipment as bonus. Flashlights that last a long time and battery powered radios with batteries are good, and a few other relatively minor things.
For what it's worth, I don't think there are any credible threats that justify maintaining a running farm and being prepared to survive without outside assistance for years, or even 90 days for that matter. What are they preparing for? Nuclear war? A new plague? Alien invasion? I don't think there's ever been a disaster resulting in a civilized first-world area going without outside shipments for over a month in the entire history of the modern world. For any disaster that's likely to actually happen in my lifetime, I'll be looking to survive the initial danger, get to safety, and get back to living a modern life, not run a farm for the next 20 years.
It's also worth considering how many people are on the world right now. If you live anywhere near a large or even medium-small city and the initial catastrophe, whatever it is, doesn't kill 90% or more of the people (and why didn't it kill you too then?), then your fancy survival farm/bug out cabin is going to be overrun by tens of thousands of refugees, far more than you could ever shoot. Even worse if you're in a city, which will probably be taken over by assorted gangs, and if you aren't part of some sort of group already, you'll probably be overrun. Better move to rural Iowa or something if you really want to survive.
If running a farm is what floats your boat, than good for you, go to it. But I'd rather live in the modern world than devote my life to preparing for some imaginary Zombie apocalypse.
Why are you bothering to argue with a BBE in the first place? Isn't it common knowledge by now that they know absolutely nothing about tech except how to convince stupid people to buy overpriced stuff? Just say no thanks politely and buy the stuff or don't.
Exactly. They aren't standing up for shit, and they don't believe in shit except pissing people off for the hell of it. The fact that they were trying to be anonymous and are running and hiding when they start to get exposed proves it.
People trying to excuse the actions of these brats keep saying that there's tremendous numbers of quiet hackers out there, but I'm not buying it. Just saying that there could be quiet hackers out there doesn't make it so. If they're out there, where's the results of their actions? Why would they bother doing all of their theoretical quiet hacking? Criminal groups wouldn't care unless they could get money out of it, and we'd notice if they did. The Government doesn't need to - they'll walk right up to the front door and get whatever they ask for. If you think any of these companies will stand up to the Government for the sake of your privacy, well, I've got a bridge to sell you...
I don't remember them ever saying anything about limiting their hack-spree to 50 days. Sounds like they've pissed enough people off that they're starting to get ID'ed and arrested, and are hoping they can quit before it gets really bad. They're a bunch of weenies all right, but I don't think it's over for them. I for one will be lulzing my ass off when they all get caught and sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
I'm not sure if it's true, but i have heard that a lot of the spam is a result of the spammers themselves being scammed. They find some less bright guy running some sort of shady small business and convince him that spam is a legitimate form of marketing. He buys into it and pays to send some spam. Whether or not it works at all, the spammers still make money. Which means that spam will keep going as long as there are no consequences for the spammers and there are stupid people running shady businesses.
You're bitching that we're being oppressed because nobody feels like translating foreign news sources into English for free for you?!? If you're implying that there's some sort of conspiracy to suppress the wise and insightful words of Hezbollah and Osama Bin Ladin, I suggest YOU put up some evidence instead of trying to get everyone else to do your work for you. Because I think it's just barely possible that most people have figured out long ago that these people haven't had anything interesting to say in years/decades, and nobody cares anymore.
And what exactly are these news sources saying that is so important to hear? Why don't you just tell us what this important information is, instead of trying to get us to jump through a bunch of hoops to hear it from someone else?
Oh, it's even worse than that - that sloppiness is fueled by blatant political bias. I don't think they even really care about the issues anymore, as long as the current Democrat party gets and keeps power. Anything that slams a Republican gets published with little to no fact-checking, as long as it has nothing to do with any actual issue. And anything that slams a Democrat gets ignored no matter what the facts are until there's so much attention on it that they'd look like complete idiots not covering it, if that ever actually happens.
So if the old media is dying, goodbye and good riddance.
And I'm sure that Jon Stewart would never just cover for his good buddy and old roommate by saying that the picture isn't him. And of course there isn't any bias at all implied by Mr. Stewart being a college roommate to a Democratic Senator. I suppose Breitbart also forced Weiner to follow a bunch of pretty young girls that he had no other connection to. And also forced Weiner to act like this is a slimy coverup instead of a legitimate breakin. Last I checked, they demonstrated how hacking yfrog in this was easier than suspected, which is far from proving that an account hack is what actually happened.
And "The user who brought this to Breitbart's attention has an unhealthy fixation on Weiner, and has stated his desire to destroy the man" is not at all like your desire to see Breitbart in prison.
Funny how mixed the reaction to this fascinating revelation is... Does anybody want to bet what the reaction would look like if the story was claiming that global warming was a giant scam with no scientific basis, and it was later revealed that the poster ran a medium-sized oil company?
I really hope you're joking... otherwise, this is basically evil. It's okay to lie to the people, as long as it's supposedly in service of what you think is a greater good? This is exactly why so many smart people don't believe in AGW. People see that you're lying about this, and they start to wonder what else you're lying about.
Add up the lies and ridiculous hyperbole about what global warming is going to do, the blatant money-making schemes (see carbon credits), the political power-grabs by the same people who have been trying to grab more and more power for decades, the ad-homium attacks against the opposition, and the ineffective things that we're supposed to do to stop it, and it's no wonder that so many people think that it's all a giant scam.
Maybe if you take the view that everything ever produced in this country really belongs to the Government and is theirs to do whatever they feel like with, and they should only let us have whatever they haven't thought up a way of using yet. Otherwise, how could anyone make such an insane statement as that spending isn't causing the deficit? Do you seriously think that nearly doubling Federal spending from 2000 to 2010 has nothing to do with the deficit we're running now?
Personally, I want to see some big cuts before taxes are increased. Otherwise, I think we'll get into the same old routine where they up spending, create a deficit, then up taxes to cover it, and do it all again in a few years, resulting in a Government that gets bigger and bigger with no end in sight, taking up more and more of our money yet not actually giving most people anything for it. And i mean big cuts - the stuff we've done so far is peanuts. If people aren't protesting in the streets about budget cuts, then they aren't big enough yet.
I just stopped identifying myself at the computer guy in my social life. Once I leave the office (and even at the office), I don't know or care about anyone's computer. My roomate has some kind of laptop. I don't know or care what kind or what the specs are. We drink beer, go to bars, hang out with people and watch TV instead of play with computers. Ditto with my friends. My girlfriend has some kind of laptop too. Same deal. We spend out time going out to places and screwing, not playing with computers.
For that matter, I don't care about them much at the office either. We have a desktop support staff that can take care of problems like that so I can do my actual job. So pretty much nobody asks me to mess with their computers, and I didn't even have to be a jerk to anyone.
Yeah, they could in theory run Android apps like that, but seriously, there's zero chance that they're going to take back a leadership position in the smartphone market with a hack that lets them maybe sorta run some Android apps sometimes. They need lots of real apps, written for them, or they will never be anything more than an also-ran.
WinPhone7 is essentially the only chance now, since I doubt they could actually be anything other than a commodity hardware provider under Android. With WinPhone7, they at least have a shot.
The phone manufacturers aren't North American, but the money is in the software, and all of the software IS North American right now. That software money is what Nokia needs a piece of to stay on their feet, and before the announcement, they had essentially no chance of getting it anytime soon.
Maybe you think app stores are dumb, but the rest of the world wants well-populated app stores, and they're the ones with the money. There's no money in being able to SSH out of your phone without buying an app or whatever it is you love so much, and there never will be. I don't know about the rest of the world, but as far as the US goes, the N900 bombed, just like every other smartphone Nokia has put out here in the last few years. Who cares how long they were sold out for if virtually no phones actually made it into customer's hands? Everyone I know has iPhones, various Droids, or Blackberries; nobody I know is even aware that the N900 exists. In this age of rapid enhancement, that makes the N900 and the Meego OS toast. No users = no developers making apps = even less reason for users to want it. At this point, iOS and Android are established, and Meego has no chance of getting the apps that actually sell phones. Microsoft's WinPhone7 is big enough to have a chance, which is why they went with it.
You're saying there's no reason they can't be on top again? I can think of plenty of reasons. To have a successful modern smartphone OS, you need an application ecosystem. Apple has one. Android has one. Microsoft has a decent shot at building one. Nokia has had phone OSes for many years and has shown no ability to build an app ecosystem on the level that Apple and Android have. I think it's virtually certain that by the time they get anything new out the door, the overall ecosystem will be crowded enough that they won't have a chance, no matter how good the software is. Thus their future is to either get squeezed to death between better smartphones on top from Apple, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, etc and cheaper Chinese phones on bottom, or to adopt either Android or WinPhone 7. I can easily see WinPhone7 being a better deal right now.
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I kind of expected to find this level of stupid in a thread like this. Maybe some of you really do hate America or yourselves this much, or maybe some people are just so dumb that we'll have to see a few thousand more people die to realize that this really is a war.
Yes, let's all say it together - this is a war. It isn't exactly the same as WWII, or really, any other war before. What we are fighting is a culture, an idea. It isn't really based in any particular country, but it is capable of and fully intends to do us warfare-scale levels of harm. This war won't be over before the end of American Idol, but it won't involve truly massive levels of troops and equipment either. Like all wars before, it will involve doing some things that could be considered to violate the Constitution. Since it will be a long war, we will have to be on our guard to see that it doesn't go too far against the Constitution, especially since it will be hard to say when it's really over.
(By the way, we most certainly have declared it properly, or at least Bush did. The Constitution says that Congress must approve all wars, but it doesn't say that they must be against specific countries or include the phrase "declare war".)
There are a lot of misunderstandings about how this all will work, but only some are really troublesome. Like the idea that we must bend all possible effort to capture enemy combatants alive and try and convict them in open courts. In some cases we certainly should, like for American citizens on American soil, but in most cases, it won't be possible, or would be insanely expensive. We are generally going pretty far out of our way to try people in some sort of court when it's at all possible, but in many cases, it just isn't.
There will be mistakes too. Plenty have already been made, and I'm sure we'll make a lot more before it's all over. It's important to keep some perspective - wars can never be perfect or clean, but we are the good guys here and we will win. It's become cliche, but there are only 2 sides in this war, and you better pick one, because there's no room for "neutral observers". It's pretty clear that if you take everything that, say, the Taliban, says as face value and distrust everything the US Government and Military put out, then you've picked a side all right, and it isn't ours.
Could only work if their employees are glorified button-pushers. If anyone at the company is doing anything at all interesting or innovative, then they're going to be doing lots of research about it, which will generate traffic to thousands of random websites, and handling whitelist requests for all of them will be a huge drain on everybody's productivity.
There's also the personal websurfing aspect. Not gonna lie, I do plenty of that too. Do you really think that's wrong? I say that if your employees are doing anything creative as part of their job, like maybe writing code or designing application architectures, then they're going to need some slack time periodically.
The bottom line is that if you treat your employees like moron button-pushers who must be monitored every second, then that's the kind of work you're going to get out of them, and good luck competing like that in today's business environment. If you hire smart, effective people and trust them, then they'll create amazing things for you, which is better for the bottom line and your employees' sanity.
I actually thought of this a while ago too, more in terms of replacing air travel with long-distance vacuum maglev subways. It'd be cool in that you could just keep accelerating to the halfway point with no effective top speed - travel times might be an order of magnitude shorter than aircraft. Main downsides I can think of are:
Constructing even one such inter-city tunnel would be insanely expensive, much less a network comparable to the current air travel system.
Nobody knows how much of a pain in the ass it would be to maintain the vacuum. And it could be a big failure point - if you end up needing pumping stations every few miles and one of them fails, do you suddenly pressurize the tubes and effectively vaporize some train running at 50,000mph or so?
Loading and unloading will be a pain in the ass. You'll need long-term reliable very low-leakage doors and couplings on the trains and stations. And then how do you fix broken ones without re-pressurizing the whole system? Maybe we should make them full airlocks on both the trains and stations...
Who are these people to be giving love advice? According to the summary, their supposed expertise consists of "reading books on relationships" (How many, and which ones?) and "enlisting the help of a couples therapist" (What, like one? What are the qualifications of this supposed couples therapist?).
In case any of you guys haven't figured it out yet, 90% of people trying to give you advice on any subject are completely full of shit, including the authors of books and therapists. In anything related to love and relationships, there's even more bullshit. My advice is: Find people in your real life that have the kind of relationships you want, and get advice from them. Ignore anyone who claims to be an expert until they have proven themselves to you, either through their advice matching your real-life experience, or you personally witnessing them having the kind of relationships you want with the kind of people that you want.
Even more than that - the standard rooting setup for Android phones is to install a command-line and graphical sudo utility. Individual apps don't have root access normally, just the access they already applied for. When an app asks for root access, the Superuser app pops up a dialog asking the user to confirm. So to get the data, you'd have to root the phone and then either connect it to a computer or install an app and manually give it root access. Sounds secure enough to me.
Hadn't heard that - where did you read about it? (I suppose it would be a little ironic to just google it)
Dammit, you're making sense! You actually have some clue about the realities of foreign relations! I demand that you stop this immediately! Slashdot is the place for fairy-tale visions about a world free of war where the US is responsible for every war that's ever happened, including the ones that happened before it was founded. A place to pretend that dismantling the entire US military would result in a world free of warfare and oppression. Stop cutting into our fantasy!
Interesting research. I wouldn't consider myself to be a survivalist, but what I consider to be the most important thing about any survival plan is to define exactly what it is that you are trying to survive and how likely that actually is.
I think I'm well prepared to survive a Hurricane, for example, which is a very realistic threat where I live - I've been through several already. In that case, what you're mostly preparing for is a week or two with no power and nothing shipped in from the outside, some light property damage, possibly light looting, and roads possibly obstructed with trees and debris. In that case, a week or two worth of non-perishable food and good water and a couple of quality firearms should do the job, with some basic repair equipment as bonus. Flashlights that last a long time and battery powered radios with batteries are good, and a few other relatively minor things.
For what it's worth, I don't think there are any credible threats that justify maintaining a running farm and being prepared to survive without outside assistance for years, or even 90 days for that matter. What are they preparing for? Nuclear war? A new plague? Alien invasion? I don't think there's ever been a disaster resulting in a civilized first-world area going without outside shipments for over a month in the entire history of the modern world. For any disaster that's likely to actually happen in my lifetime, I'll be looking to survive the initial danger, get to safety, and get back to living a modern life, not run a farm for the next 20 years.
It's also worth considering how many people are on the world right now. If you live anywhere near a large or even medium-small city and the initial catastrophe, whatever it is, doesn't kill 90% or more of the people (and why didn't it kill you too then?), then your fancy survival farm/bug out cabin is going to be overrun by tens of thousands of refugees, far more than you could ever shoot. Even worse if you're in a city, which will probably be taken over by assorted gangs, and if you aren't part of some sort of group already, you'll probably be overrun. Better move to rural Iowa or something if you really want to survive.
If running a farm is what floats your boat, than good for you, go to it. But I'd rather live in the modern world than devote my life to preparing for some imaginary Zombie apocalypse.
Why are you bothering to argue with a BBE in the first place? Isn't it common knowledge by now that they know absolutely nothing about tech except how to convince stupid people to buy overpriced stuff? Just say no thanks politely and buy the stuff or don't.
Exactly. They aren't standing up for shit, and they don't believe in shit except pissing people off for the hell of it. The fact that they were trying to be anonymous and are running and hiding when they start to get exposed proves it.
People trying to excuse the actions of these brats keep saying that there's tremendous numbers of quiet hackers out there, but I'm not buying it. Just saying that there could be quiet hackers out there doesn't make it so. If they're out there, where's the results of their actions? Why would they bother doing all of their theoretical quiet hacking? Criminal groups wouldn't care unless they could get money out of it, and we'd notice if they did. The Government doesn't need to - they'll walk right up to the front door and get whatever they ask for. If you think any of these companies will stand up to the Government for the sake of your privacy, well, I've got a bridge to sell you...
I don't remember them ever saying anything about limiting their hack-spree to 50 days. Sounds like they've pissed enough people off that they're starting to get ID'ed and arrested, and are hoping they can quit before it gets really bad. They're a bunch of weenies all right, but I don't think it's over for them. I for one will be lulzing my ass off when they all get caught and sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
I'm not sure if it's true, but i have heard that a lot of the spam is a result of the spammers themselves being scammed. They find some less bright guy running some sort of shady small business and convince him that spam is a legitimate form of marketing. He buys into it and pays to send some spam. Whether or not it works at all, the spammers still make money. Which means that spam will keep going as long as there are no consequences for the spammers and there are stupid people running shady businesses.
You're bitching that we're being oppressed because nobody feels like translating foreign news sources into English for free for you?!? If you're implying that there's some sort of conspiracy to suppress the wise and insightful words of Hezbollah and Osama Bin Ladin, I suggest YOU put up some evidence instead of trying to get everyone else to do your work for you. Because I think it's just barely possible that most people have figured out long ago that these people haven't had anything interesting to say in years/decades, and nobody cares anymore.
And what exactly are these news sources saying that is so important to hear? Why don't you just tell us what this important information is, instead of trying to get us to jump through a bunch of hoops to hear it from someone else?
Oh, it's even worse than that - that sloppiness is fueled by blatant political bias. I don't think they even really care about the issues anymore, as long as the current Democrat party gets and keeps power. Anything that slams a Republican gets published with little to no fact-checking, as long as it has nothing to do with any actual issue. And anything that slams a Democrat gets ignored no matter what the facts are until there's so much attention on it that they'd look like complete idiots not covering it, if that ever actually happens.
So if the old media is dying, goodbye and good riddance.
And I'm sure that Jon Stewart would never just cover for his good buddy and old roommate by saying that the picture isn't him. And of course there isn't any bias at all implied by Mr. Stewart being a college roommate to a Democratic Senator. I suppose Breitbart also forced Weiner to follow a bunch of pretty young girls that he had no other connection to. And also forced Weiner to act like this is a slimy coverup instead of a legitimate breakin. Last I checked, they demonstrated how hacking yfrog in this was easier than suspected, which is far from proving that an account hack is what actually happened.
And "The user who brought this to Breitbart's attention has an unhealthy fixation on Weiner, and has stated his desire to destroy the man" is not at all like your desire to see Breitbart in prison.
Funny how mixed the reaction to this fascinating revelation is... Does anybody want to bet what the reaction would look like if the story was claiming that global warming was a giant scam with no scientific basis, and it was later revealed that the poster ran a medium-sized oil company?
Win.
Yes, they're not at all like the left wingers attacking Sarah Palin and her children, who are the epitome of class and independent thinking...
I really hope you're joking... otherwise, this is basically evil. It's okay to lie to the people, as long as it's supposedly in service of what you think is a greater good? This is exactly why so many smart people don't believe in AGW. People see that you're lying about this, and they start to wonder what else you're lying about.
Add up the lies and ridiculous hyperbole about what global warming is going to do, the blatant money-making schemes (see carbon credits), the political power-grabs by the same people who have been trying to grab more and more power for decades, the ad-homium attacks against the opposition, and the ineffective things that we're supposed to do to stop it, and it's no wonder that so many people think that it's all a giant scam.
Maybe if you take the view that everything ever produced in this country really belongs to the Government and is theirs to do whatever they feel like with, and they should only let us have whatever they haven't thought up a way of using yet. Otherwise, how could anyone make such an insane statement as that spending isn't causing the deficit? Do you seriously think that nearly doubling Federal spending from 2000 to 2010 has nothing to do with the deficit we're running now?
Personally, I want to see some big cuts before taxes are increased. Otherwise, I think we'll get into the same old routine where they up spending, create a deficit, then up taxes to cover it, and do it all again in a few years, resulting in a Government that gets bigger and bigger with no end in sight, taking up more and more of our money yet not actually giving most people anything for it. And i mean big cuts - the stuff we've done so far is peanuts. If people aren't protesting in the streets about budget cuts, then they aren't big enough yet.
I just stopped identifying myself at the computer guy in my social life. Once I leave the office (and even at the office), I don't know or care about anyone's computer. My roomate has some kind of laptop. I don't know or care what kind or what the specs are. We drink beer, go to bars, hang out with people and watch TV instead of play with computers. Ditto with my friends. My girlfriend has some kind of laptop too. Same deal. We spend out time going out to places and screwing, not playing with computers.
For that matter, I don't care about them much at the office either. We have a desktop support staff that can take care of problems like that so I can do my actual job. So pretty much nobody asks me to mess with their computers, and I didn't even have to be a jerk to anyone.
Yeah, they could in theory run Android apps like that, but seriously, there's zero chance that they're going to take back a leadership position in the smartphone market with a hack that lets them maybe sorta run some Android apps sometimes. They need lots of real apps, written for them, or they will never be anything more than an also-ran.
WinPhone7 is essentially the only chance now, since I doubt they could actually be anything other than a commodity hardware provider under Android. With WinPhone7, they at least have a shot.
The phone manufacturers aren't North American, but the money is in the software, and all of the software IS North American right now. That software money is what Nokia needs a piece of to stay on their feet, and before the announcement, they had essentially no chance of getting it anytime soon.
Maybe you think app stores are dumb, but the rest of the world wants well-populated app stores, and they're the ones with the money. There's no money in being able to SSH out of your phone without buying an app or whatever it is you love so much, and there never will be. I don't know about the rest of the world, but as far as the US goes, the N900 bombed, just like every other smartphone Nokia has put out here in the last few years. Who cares how long they were sold out for if virtually no phones actually made it into customer's hands? Everyone I know has iPhones, various Droids, or Blackberries; nobody I know is even aware that the N900 exists. In this age of rapid enhancement, that makes the N900 and the Meego OS toast. No users = no developers making apps = even less reason for users to want it. At this point, iOS and Android are established, and Meego has no chance of getting the apps that actually sell phones. Microsoft's WinPhone7 is big enough to have a chance, which is why they went with it.
You're saying there's no reason they can't be on top again? I can think of plenty of reasons. To have a successful modern smartphone OS, you need an application ecosystem. Apple has one. Android has one. Microsoft has a decent shot at building one. Nokia has had phone OSes for many years and has shown no ability to build an app ecosystem on the level that Apple and Android have. I think it's virtually certain that by the time they get anything new out the door, the overall ecosystem will be crowded enough that they won't have a chance, no matter how good the software is. Thus their future is to either get squeezed to death between better smartphones on top from Apple, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, etc and cheaper Chinese phones on bottom, or to adopt either Android or WinPhone 7. I can easily see WinPhone7 being a better deal right now.