"that's a big problem with large government, it reduces competition."
The problem you cite is actually the result of governments (or sectors thereof) being in the pocket of wealthy industrialists, not a function of how big or small they are. Indeed, an argument could be made that small government is more liable to be corrupt than big government because there are fewer people that need to be bribed, a lower chance of bribers and the bribed will be caught in the act, and bought policies have an easier job of becoming legislation because, if we assume that the total power a government has is a constant, then each person in a small government has more power than their counterpart in a big one.
iPods haven't got a monopoly in the EU, where their share of MP3 players is around 40%. EU anti-trust legislation is only concerned with monopolies in their own markets, not those that may exist elsewhere.
"And so many people in the USA want to be more like Europe! "They are so hip over there. They really know how to run a country.""
Perhaps those people could start their education by learning that (a) Europe isn't a country; (b) the EU isn't Europe, or synonymous with Europe; and (c) it doesn't run countries, although it frequently behaves as if it would like to!
"What is next Toyota being forced to put other manufacturers parts in their cars?"
Perhaps you should do a bit of fact checking before bleating out yet another inappropriate car analogy, because car manufacturers, like manufacturers of everything else from bread to nuclear submarines, use components made by third parties in every product they sell.
With cars in particular, third-party components make up a very large proportion of the final product, hence the fact that governments in many parts of the world are helping to prop up domestic car manufacturers to prevent the collapse of large numbers of smaller companies who supply them with an extremely wide range of parts, and in aggregate employ far more people than the car manufacturers themselves do. These include (but are far from being limited to): starter motors and generators, electrical systems (including electronic ignition), spark plugs, injectors, hoses, oil filters, thermostats, light bulbs, brake assemblies and shoes, tyres, seats, seat-belts, air bags, instrumentation, carpets, rubber pedal covers, paint, windows, batteries, and lubricants.
"ll these stupid decisions coming out of the EU is a sick joke. Boycott OK, tax OK, telling someone what they can and can't do with their product not OK."
So it should be OK for me set up a stall outside a school offering guns and hard drugs to children because they're my products, and nobody should be allowed to tell me what I can do with them.
"If this keeps up I will be installing Visual Studio and be asked if I want Boreland as my compiler"
There never was a company called Boreland that made compilers, and Borland sold their development tools division to Embarcadero last year, so you wouldn't be offered any of their compilers because they don't have any.
"This is ridiculous and stupid. Anyone supporting this is stupid and belongs in prison."
Whereas someone like you who obviously has no factual basis whatsoever for his opinions isn't stupid, and therefore deserves to be allowed to walk around and spout utter tripe whenever he feels like it.
"Since they obviously do not like Freedom."
And you obviously don't like freedom either, because being able to set rules for one's own territory that those who enter it are expected to abide by is the oldest and most fundamental freedom of all.
"I say let Microsoft put whatever they want in their Software."
So you'd be quite happy for them to include a lifetime membership of NAMBLA with free subscriptions to a bunch of child pornography sites, and a button that lets people donate money to Al Quaeda, Hamas, or Hezbolla with a single, convenient click. And you would of course oppose any rules that required removing those components before being allowed to sell whatever initially contained them because doing so would infringe on the freedom to include whatever one wishes to with a product.
"The real question is will they force Apple to do the same"
They'll force Apple to do the same if Apple achieve enough personal computer market share for them to be considered as having a PC OS monopoly in the EU. With their current share of the the EU market at around 5%, it'll probably be a very long time indeed before Macs achieve the necessary 51% share (MS has about 93% of the EU PC OS market).
"How about going all the way: what about shipping computers offering other OS's?"
This is a matter of EU anti-trust laws, under which having a monopoly in one market (personal computer operating systems in Microsoft's case) isn't illegal, but using that monopoly to try and establish another one in a different market (Internet browsers and rich Internet content) definitely is illegal. Note that the definition of "monopoly" from the EU's viewpoint only concerns their own markets, so it's irrelevant what share of other markets a company may or may not have.
"The above suggestion is much like the browser issue is to windows"
It bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the browser issue under EU anti-trust laws, which existed before Microsoft did, and were therefore also being used to curtail corporate monopoly abusers before Microsoft existed.
"The lie that there is some sort of "editorial fact checking" is exposed every days"
They do check facts. The first organ with a story looks at relevant Wikipedia entries, and subsequent ones check their facts by reading the first story, so any errors in Wikipedia (and let's face it, there are plenty of real howlers in there) finds its way into every version of that same story. Our dear Wikistazi will then refuse to accept any attempts to correct those errors because their veracity has been confirmed by multiple printed sources; and thus does the collective perception of reality diverge just a little more from what used to be called objective reality, but but is now known as Wikireality.
"And today, we can send and receive blocks of styled text, with images, buffered locally -- to say nothing of audio and video. I think I can say with confidence that all terminals were dumber than a web browser."
Styled text was standard on a number of terminals, as was the ability to only update those portions of the screen that had changed (something that's a fairly recent development with web browsers). Graphics terminals have existed for a long time, starting with vector graphics (where text was also drawn with vectors, so it could be displayed in any combination of font, size, and orientation), and later, raster graphics, which reached its zenith with X Terminals, many of which had sound hardware. And all terminals that could send and receive blocks buffered locally, because they wouldn't have been able to send and receive blocks otherwise.
The following link contains some info about the late and much lamented Doug Engelbart's NLS, which had a GUI, hypertext, video conferencing, and various other "modern" features in 1968. It includes a picture of the terminal the system used, complete with mouse (note the round display, which was typical of vector graphics terminals).
"Of course, with a proper netbook, you would streamline the operating system and the applications."
Then please cite some examples of "proper" netbooks that ship with streamlined operating systems and applications.
"However, being able to run more users does not imply that they were doing more useful work, either."
It does when all of those users are actually working, which was pretty much always the case with mainframes, because people whose jobs didn't require access to a terminal weren't granted access to a terminal. I think you would have a very difficult job demonstrating that one person can do more _useful_ work on a netbook (or for that matter, any PC) than 17,000 people doing similar jobs on a mainframe equipped with block-transfer terminals.
"16 megabytes of RAM will support a lot of text, but not a lot of images before you start thrashing"
How many of the jobs that people do in the sorts of companies who used (and in some cases still use) big mainframes actually require images for anything? And for that matter, how many of the web-sites that people might want to use for such work-related tasks use images to convey information that's (a) actually useful to the person who is seeking information, and (b) couldn't have been equally well expressed (and in some cases been better expressed) by some text that would have significantly less Internet bandwidth and machine resources to store, serve, decode, and display?
"Some other things I doubt you would have seen: Find-as-you-type autocomplete"
Auto form completion was a common feature of mainframe applications.
"underline-as-you-type spellchecker"
That's something they didn't have. Score 1 for the web browser.
"a GUI at all (let alone a rich one)"
NLS had a GUI running on terminals; much of the original work on GUIs at Xerox was done on graphics terminals; and X Terminals also frequently ran GUIs. Note also that, as the Xerox Star, the original Mac, the Amiga, and in the modern world, various mobile phones have demonstrated, it doesn't require a gigabyte of RAM, a 1.6 GHz CPU, and several gigabytes of hard disk space to run a GUI for one user.
"audio and video chat in realtime"
Check out the link to NLS. The capabilities of mainframe operating systems and peripherals reflected the requirements of the corporations who were the manufacturers' customers, not the capabilities of the technology. As Englebart so aptly demonstrated in 1968, if those customers had wanted (and been willing to pay for) that sort of stuff, they could have had it.
"multiple simultaneous text conversations"
The PLATO system developed by CDC and the University of Illinois in the 1970s had both real-time c
"I can't even imagine a programmer who would use an application online where his source code is made available on a public-facing server (which is a big deal for those writing propriatary software) when a superior program is available natively for for their platform where they can keep their rights."
Especially when so many programming editors and IDEs are FOSS and / or free as in beer, and do not therefore have any onerous DRM schemes, registration requirements, or installation limits.
Note though that having said the above, I think that systems like Bespin (or rather, what it could eventually evolve into) would be extremely useful for certain types of work _if_ they could be run from any web server, especially if both installation and integration with an existing project structure, version control system, etc. was quick and easy. Its appeal would be much more limited without that option, because not only companies, but also individuals (including a lot of FOSS developers) would be wary of putting their source on the servers of any organisation whose EULA includes a "reserves the right to change the terms of service at any time without prior notice" clause.
"The dumb terminal was pretty dumb -- it would send individual keystrokes across the network, and wait for a response. If you scrolled, it had to redraw the screen."
This was indeed the case with "glass teletype" dumb terminals, but not all terminals were dumb. By the early 1970s, there were plenty of terminals that sent and received blocks of text that was buffered locally, e.g. the IBM 3270.
"The netbook is still several orders of magnitude more powerful than the machine your dumb terminal would've been connecting to."
This does not however mean that it does more useful work. IBM Mainframes from the early 1970s with 16MB RAM could support 17,500 users on 3270 terminals, whereas some netbooks (and indeed a number of machines that aren't netbooks) seem to struggle with one user running today's operating systems and applications.
"It would seem to follow that when trapped in a gas bubble in ice, CO2 does not diffuse because water ice is not permeable to CO2 at any of the temperatures or pressures that the ice has been at since it formed."
The problem here is that the "ice cores" which are used in these studies are actually compressed snow, not ice of the "cubes made in a freezer" variety, and snow has very different properties from solid ice.
Studies performed on snow falls in various cold parts of the world have revealed that gas concentrations (including, but not limited to CO2) can vary by a not inconsiderable amount between snow layers in a particular year, let alone those accumulated over several years. This is caused by a phenomenon called "wind pumping", i.e. winds of varying temperatures, speeds, and angles altering both the temperature and pressure of the upper snow layer, and therefore its diffusion / absorption characteristics for various gases, including but by no means restricted to CO2.
Wind pumping varies considerably with both meteorological conditions and terrain. The effect is most pronounced in large flat areas (for what I hope are obvious reasons), but the situation is complicated by the fact that many of the winds responsible for pumping can also pick up snow from other, less pump-vulnerable regions and deposit it on those that are (and of course, vice-versa). This mixed layer may then be subject to any number of further pumping events before subsequent snow falls bury and compress it to the point where it's unlikely to be exposed to wind effects.
NB: wind pumping doesn't in and of itself invalidate gas concentration measurements in ice made up from compressed snow. It does however introduce an extra error factor that can't be easily compensated for due to its completely unpredictable nature, and this is one phenomenon we know exists now -- there may be further effects in today's world we haven't discovered yet, and still others that were only present when our planet was both warmer and colder than it is today that we may never know about at all.
"That's funny, I thought the Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec all lived in North and Central America?"
Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec are languages or language groups, not peoples, so they weren't only spoken / written by the people or in the region that _we've_ decided to name them after (nobody knows what their original names were, or for that matter, if they had a name). It should also be noted that the Mayas were present in Panama, which was also home to South American people such as the Chibchas, and Chibchas are known to have used coca (they considered it to be sacred).
"I was assuming that since we were talking coca any proposed contact would be between South Americans and Egyptians because to the best of my knowledge coca is only found in S.A"
The three highest alkaloid types of coca (there are around 250 species with varying levels of alkaloid) were originally from South America, but have been widely cultivated elsewhere. In the 1930s for example, the world's biggest producer was Japan, followed by the US, Germany, the UK, and France, with production in those countries eventually ceasing for legal rather than agricultural reasons. It's also been grown successfully in several Central American locations in post-Columbian times, so it's possible from a purely botanical perspective for pre-Coumbian peoples to have grown it there, although whether they actually did so (and indeed whether they knew about it) is of course another matter entirely.
"excepting the quipu but since we don't even know how they worked and if they could contain linguistic information I don't think it's fair to say they count"
The only ancient American writing system that's so far been (mostly) decoded is Maya, so the quipu are actually just part of a long list of not only American, but worldwide (potential) written languages that we're completely unable to read, and in many cases, positively identify as actually being writing. Sadly, despite our being able to read Maya, most of their writings were destroyed by the Spanish, including many valuable sources of information about their history and culture .
"Removable batteries in most laptops is correctly described as a feature that people perceive the need for, but very few people actually ever use, and some very small single-digit percentage actually ever need."
Expansion slots in budget low-end consumer desktop PCs are in the same category. All the stuff that originally used to live in those slots has been built into their motherboards for years, and the vast majority of the target market will get a new PC after a couple of years "because the chip's worn out on this one" (their memory, CPU, and Internet bandwidth are maxed out hosting four dozen botnet clients and keyloggers, so stuff they want to use takes ages to load, and runs very, very slowly).
"So, is there some reason this seemed perfectly reasonable that I missed?"
Because there are so many totally legitimate reasons for having the facility to execute something that looks like a data file to users, and actually is a data file as far as *NIX and everything else that runs on it is concerned. For example:
1)... err.. I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with some reasons here. Somebody please help me (sob).
"Human harvesting of these plants in the wild could even have been a contributing factor to their extinction. But I believe if the Egyptians were smart enough to use these plants for recreational use, then they should have been smart enough to cultivate them as well"
I presume you mean that they were smarter than the Romans, whose recreational use of the European lion in their arenas was an important factor in its extinction.
"Whats wrong with the 27000 year old one from France?"
Nothing apart from the fact that few archaeologists think it was actually a spear thrower, with the prevailing opinion being that it was a baton. The oldest items that are indisputably spear throwers found in Europe are from between 15000-16000 BCE, which is only about 4000-5000 years before the first known bow.
Note that this doesn't prove spear throwers (and indeed bows) weren't used in Europe at an earlier date because unlike stone tools, they're made of biodegradable materials that can easily disappear or be rendered unrecognisable by the passage of time, but It would be pure speculation to say that they _were_ present in Europe when the Neanderthals were around, and one could equally easily speculate that Neanderthals also knew about and used them. The most recent finds do after all indicate that their general tool and weapon technology was better than ours in a number of ways, so it's not at all unreasonable to think that they may have also had the edge here, especially given the fact that there's evidence they used adhesives at a time when Cro-Magnon people don't appear to have known about them.
As we learn more about both Neanderthals and the AMH peoples that lived alongside them in various parts of the world, we're finding that their eventual extinction is much more complex than we thought, and took place over a significantly longer period of time. Evidence from Gibraltar for example suggests that there were still some isolated communities of Neanderthals living in the kinder climate of the Southern Mediterranean 24,000 years ago, a full 11,000 years after they'd disappeared from the more severe Northerly areas.
I believe it is not a meaningless coincidence that the neanderthals disappeared not long after "modern humans" acquired the technology of the spear launcher."
The problem here is that while there's a fair reason to believe that spear throwers appeared about 30,000 years ago, the oldest specimens are found in Africa, where there never were any Neanderthals. We have no evidence that they were used in Europe prior to 15,000 years ago, so it's rather unlikely that they'd have been a factor in the disappearance of Neanderthals.
"No definite specimens younger than 30,000 years ago have been found [wikipedia.org]."
This highlights how trusting what Wikipedia says about anything can lead one to misplaced conclusions, because as this quote from Archaeology, published by the Archaological Institute of America notes, some Vindija remains have been recently and definitively dated to 28,500 years ago, which puts them at the same age as ones that have also been definitively dated at 28,500 years from the Zafaraya cave in Southern Spain:
"the author of TFA who restrains himself from using a car analogy for a whole 5 paragraphs"
That together with the link which claims to be a white-paper on how to jailbreak iPhones but turns out to be a legal paper about why the EFF thinks it should be allowed to jailbreak them, and the whining, self-righteous tone of the whole thing were very helpful indeed in leading me to conclude that the author is an utter wanker.
"unlike MS you are not free to choose the hardware to run their OS on"
And also unlike MS, it's still very easy to walk into any computer store and buy hardware without Apple's OS on it, and you can even get an extremely wide range of hardware at said arbitrary computer that you can put Linux, BSD, etc. on without having to pay Apple for a load of stuff you don't want.
You obviously don't remember the way Apple behaved in the 1980s, because today's Apple is a veritable bastion of freedom compared with the one that was around in those days.
"It wasn't brute force that won those battles so much as superior tactics and equipment."
It was actually superior organisation and training to that of the barbarians that they were usually fighting which gave them their victories. That's why they were on the receiving end of some major arse-handing when they were confronted by equally well-organised troops with better commanders (the Carthaginians), or even massively inferior ones with leaders who had an intimate knowledge of how they fought and therefore what their weaknesses were (Arminius leading the tribes of the German Tutoberg, who annihilated three legions, six cohorts, and three squadrons of cavalry with a force whose main armaments were fire-hardened wooden spears).
" Keeping those territories all in line over an extender period of time though, is a different animal than initially conquering them."
The Romans did a much better job of holding their empire together over an extremely long period (over 500 years for the Western Empire, and over 1000 years for the Eastern one) than anyone else who came either before or after them. And what brought both of those empires down was decadence rather any inherent difficulty in keeping them going, a decadence in which Roman citizens were transformed from proud, outward looking conquerers to fearful, comfort-obsessed sheep who thought that they could pay others to do their fighting for them while they lived in luxury behind the walls of their fortified cities and towns.
"Hell a perfect correlation is the US in the Middle East now. Militarily we stepped in, kicked ass, and took over Iraq pretty darned quickly. That is a much different animal though than maintaining that over there, and after much spending and loss of life on both sides"
It's far from being a perfect correlation, because if the US was like the Romans, they'd regard any casualties except a complete massacre of all their forces as acceptable, and deal with rebellion (i.e. terrorism) by massacring all the men in any areas where they thought a single rebel might be hiding, enslaving and deporting the women and children, and publicly crucifying anyone who they actually suspected of being involved. This policy would be continued for centuries if necessary, because the Romans thought long-term, and were therefore both persistent and utterly merciless when stamping out rebellion.
"in the end it looks like we may very well just say "Fuck it." and come back home."
Which is something that again separates the US from the Romans, because Rome wouldn't have even considered giving up and going home after just a few years of taking what they'd have regarded as trivial annual casualty levels. And as many subsequently conquered peoples found out to their cost, even when the Romans did go home because they got their backsides well and truly kicked, they would return, this time with a much bigger force, an attack plan that was the result of analysing what went wrong the last time, and a desire to teach them why resisting Rome is a very, very bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"that's a big problem with large government, it reduces competition."
The problem you cite is actually the result of governments (or sectors thereof) being in the pocket of wealthy industrialists, not a function of how big or small they are. Indeed, an argument could be made that small government is more liable to be corrupt than big government because there are fewer people that need to be bribed, a lower chance of bribers and the bribed will be caught in the act, and bought policies have an easier job of becoming legislation because, if we assume that the total power a government has is a constant, then each person in a small government has more power than their counterpart in a big one.
iPods haven't got a monopoly in the EU, where their share of MP3 players is around 40%. EU anti-trust legislation is only concerned with monopolies in their own markets, not those that may exist elsewhere.
"And so many people in the USA want to be more like Europe! "They are so hip over there. They really know how to run a country.""
Perhaps those people could start their education by learning that (a) Europe isn't a country; (b) the EU isn't Europe, or synonymous with Europe; and (c) it doesn't run countries, although it frequently behaves as if it would like to!
"What happened to the freedom of a company to sell their own product without interference?"
There's hasn't ever been a time or place where one had the freedom to sell all types of products without interference.
"What is next Toyota being forced to put other manufacturers parts in their cars?"
Perhaps you should do a bit of fact checking before bleating out yet another inappropriate car analogy, because car manufacturers, like manufacturers of everything else from bread to nuclear submarines, use components made by third parties in every product they sell.
With cars in particular, third-party components make up a very large proportion of the final product, hence the fact that governments in many parts of the world are helping to prop up domestic car manufacturers to prevent the collapse of large numbers of smaller companies who supply them with an extremely wide range of parts, and in aggregate employ far more people than the car manufacturers themselves do. These include (but are far from being limited to): starter motors and generators, electrical systems (including electronic ignition), spark plugs, injectors, hoses, oil filters, thermostats, light bulbs, brake assemblies and shoes, tyres, seats, seat-belts, air bags, instrumentation, carpets, rubber pedal covers, paint, windows, batteries, and lubricants.
"ll these stupid decisions coming out of the EU is a sick joke. Boycott OK, tax OK, telling someone what they can and can't do with their product not OK."
So it should be OK for me set up a stall outside a school offering guns and hard drugs to children because they're my products, and nobody should be allowed to tell me what I can do with them.
"If this keeps up I will be installing Visual Studio and be asked if I want Boreland as my compiler"
There never was a company called Boreland that made compilers, and Borland sold their development tools division to Embarcadero last year, so you wouldn't be offered any of their compilers because they don't have any.
"This is ridiculous and stupid. Anyone supporting this is stupid and belongs in prison."
Whereas someone like you who obviously has no factual basis whatsoever for his opinions isn't stupid, and therefore deserves to be allowed to walk around and spout utter tripe whenever he feels like it.
"Since they obviously do not like Freedom."
And you obviously don't like freedom either, because being able to set rules for one's own territory that those who enter it are expected to abide by is the oldest and most fundamental freedom of all.
"I say let Microsoft put whatever they want in their Software."
So you'd be quite happy for them to include a lifetime membership of NAMBLA with free subscriptions to a bunch of child pornography sites, and a button that lets people donate money to Al Quaeda, Hamas, or Hezbolla with a single, convenient click. And you would of course oppose any rules that required removing those components before being allowed to sell whatever initially contained them because doing so would infringe on the freedom to include whatever one wishes to with a product.
"The real question is will they force Apple to do the same"
They'll force Apple to do the same if Apple achieve enough personal computer market share for them to be considered as having a PC OS monopoly in the EU. With their current share of the the EU market at around 5%, it'll probably be a very long time indeed before Macs achieve the necessary 51% share (MS has about 93% of the EU PC OS market).
"IMHO they're missing the point."
It seems to be you who's missing it.
"How about going all the way: what about shipping computers offering other OS's?"
This is a matter of EU anti-trust laws, under which having a monopoly in one market (personal computer operating systems in Microsoft's case) isn't illegal, but using that monopoly to try and establish another one in a different market (Internet browsers and rich Internet content) definitely is illegal. Note that the definition of "monopoly" from the EU's viewpoint only concerns their own markets, so it's irrelevant what share of other markets a company may or may not have.
"The above suggestion is much like the browser issue is to windows"
It bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the browser issue under EU anti-trust laws, which existed before Microsoft did, and were therefore also being used to curtail corporate monopoly abusers before Microsoft existed.
"The lie that there is some sort of "editorial fact checking" is exposed every days"
They do check facts. The first organ with a story looks at relevant Wikipedia entries, and subsequent ones check their facts by reading the first story, so any errors in Wikipedia (and let's face it, there are plenty of real howlers in there) finds its way into every version of that same story. Our dear Wikistazi will then refuse to accept any attempts to correct those errors because their veracity has been confirmed by multiple printed sources; and thus does the collective perception of reality diverge just a little more from what used to be called objective reality, but but is now known as Wikireality.
"And today, we can send and receive blocks of styled text, with images, buffered locally -- to say nothing of audio and video. I think I can say with confidence that all terminals were dumber than a web browser."
Styled text was standard on a number of terminals, as was the ability to only update those portions of the screen that had changed (something that's a fairly recent development with web browsers). Graphics terminals have existed for a long time, starting with vector graphics (where text was also drawn with vectors, so it could be displayed in any combination of font, size, and orientation), and later, raster graphics, which reached its zenith with X Terminals, many of which had sound hardware. And all terminals that could send and receive blocks buffered locally, because they wouldn't have been able to send and receive blocks otherwise.
The following link contains some info about the late and much lamented Doug Engelbart's NLS, which had a GUI, hypertext, video conferencing, and various other "modern" features in 1968. It includes a picture of the terminal the system used, complete with mouse (note the round display, which was typical of vector graphics terminals).
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_engelbart.htm
"Of course, with a proper netbook, you would streamline the operating system and the applications."
Then please cite some examples of "proper" netbooks that ship with streamlined operating systems and applications.
"However, being able to run more users does not imply that they were doing more useful work, either."
It does when all of those users are actually working, which was pretty much always the case with mainframes, because people whose jobs didn't require access to a terminal weren't granted access to a terminal. I think you would have a very difficult job demonstrating that one person can do more _useful_ work on a netbook (or for that matter, any PC) than 17,000 people doing similar jobs on a mainframe equipped with block-transfer terminals.
"16 megabytes of RAM will support a lot of text, but not a lot of images before you start thrashing"
How many of the jobs that people do in the sorts of companies who used (and in some cases still use) big mainframes actually require images for anything? And for that matter, how many of the web-sites that people might want to use for such work-related tasks use images to convey information that's (a) actually useful to the person who is seeking information, and (b) couldn't have been equally well expressed (and in some cases been better expressed) by some text that would have significantly less Internet bandwidth and machine resources to store, serve, decode, and display?
"Some other things I doubt you would have seen: Find-as-you-type autocomplete"
Auto form completion was a common feature of mainframe applications.
"underline-as-you-type spellchecker"
That's something they didn't have. Score 1 for the web browser.
"a GUI at all (let alone a rich one)"
NLS had a GUI running on terminals; much of the original work on GUIs at Xerox was done on graphics terminals; and X Terminals also frequently ran GUIs. Note also that, as the Xerox Star, the original Mac, the Amiga, and in the modern world, various mobile phones have demonstrated, it doesn't require a gigabyte of RAM, a 1.6 GHz CPU, and several gigabytes of hard disk space to run a GUI for one user.
"audio and video chat in realtime"
Check out the link to NLS. The capabilities of mainframe operating systems and peripherals reflected the requirements of the corporations who were the manufacturers' customers, not the capabilities of the technology. As Englebart so aptly demonstrated in 1968, if those customers had wanted (and been willing to pay for) that sort of stuff, they could have had it.
"multiple simultaneous text conversations"
The PLATO system developed by CDC and the University of Illinois in the 1970s had both real-time c
"I can't even imagine a programmer who would use an application online where his source code is made available on a public-facing server (which is a big deal for those writing propriatary software) when a superior program is available natively for for their platform where they can keep their rights."
Especially when so many programming editors and IDEs are FOSS and / or free as in beer, and do not therefore have any onerous DRM schemes, registration requirements, or installation limits.
Note though that having said the above, I think that systems like Bespin (or rather, what it could eventually evolve into) would be extremely useful for certain types of work _if_ they could be run from any web server, especially if both installation and integration with an existing project structure, version control system, etc. was quick and easy. Its appeal would be much more limited without that option, because not only companies, but also individuals (including a lot of FOSS developers) would be wary of putting their source on the servers of any organisation whose EULA includes a "reserves the right to change the terms of service at any time without prior notice" clause.
"The dumb terminal was pretty dumb -- it would send individual keystrokes across the network, and wait for a response. If you scrolled, it had to redraw the screen."
This was indeed the case with "glass teletype" dumb terminals, but not all terminals were dumb. By the early 1970s, there were plenty of terminals that sent and received blocks of text that was buffered locally, e.g. the IBM 3270.
"The netbook is still several orders of magnitude more powerful than the machine your dumb terminal would've been connecting to."
This does not however mean that it does more useful work. IBM Mainframes from the early 1970s with 16MB RAM could support 17,500 users on 3270 terminals, whereas some netbooks (and indeed a number of machines that aren't netbooks) seem to struggle with one user running today's operating systems and applications.
"It would seem to follow that when trapped in a gas bubble in ice, CO2 does not diffuse because water ice is not permeable to CO2 at any of the temperatures or pressures that the ice has been at since it formed."
The problem here is that the "ice cores" which are used in these studies are actually compressed snow, not ice of the "cubes made in a freezer" variety, and snow has very different properties from solid ice.
Studies performed on snow falls in various cold parts of the world have revealed that gas concentrations (including, but not limited to CO2) can vary by a not inconsiderable amount between snow layers in a particular year, let alone those accumulated over several years. This is caused by a phenomenon called "wind pumping", i.e. winds of varying temperatures, speeds, and angles altering both the temperature and pressure of the upper snow layer, and therefore its diffusion / absorption characteristics for various gases, including but by no means restricted to CO2.
Wind pumping varies considerably with both meteorological conditions and terrain. The effect is most pronounced in large flat areas (for what I hope are obvious reasons), but the situation is complicated by the fact that many of the winds responsible for pumping can also pick up snow from other, less pump-vulnerable regions and deposit it on those that are (and of course, vice-versa). This mixed layer may then be subject to any number of further pumping events before subsequent snow falls bury and compress it to the point where it's unlikely to be exposed to wind effects.
NB: wind pumping doesn't in and of itself invalidate gas concentration measurements in ice made up from compressed snow. It does however introduce an extra error factor that can't be easily compensated for due to its completely unpredictable nature, and this is one phenomenon we know exists now -- there may be further effects in today's world we haven't discovered yet, and still others that were only present when our planet was both warmer and colder than it is today that we may never know about at all.
"That's funny, I thought the Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec all lived in North and Central America?"
Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec are languages or language groups, not peoples, so they weren't only spoken / written by the people or in the region that _we've_ decided to name them after (nobody knows what their original names were, or for that matter, if they had a name). It should also be noted that the Mayas were present in Panama, which was also home to South American people such as the Chibchas, and Chibchas are known to have used coca (they considered it to be sacred).
"I was assuming that since we were talking coca any proposed contact would be between South Americans and Egyptians because to the best of my knowledge coca is only found in S.A"
The three highest alkaloid types of coca (there are around 250 species with varying levels of alkaloid) were originally from South America, but have been widely cultivated elsewhere. In the 1930s for example, the world's biggest producer was Japan, followed by the US, Germany, the UK, and France, with production in those countries eventually ceasing for legal rather than agricultural reasons. It's also been grown successfully in several Central American locations in post-Columbian times, so it's possible from a purely botanical perspective for pre-Coumbian peoples to have grown it there, although whether they actually did so (and indeed whether they knew about it) is of course another matter entirely.
"excepting the quipu but since we don't even know how they worked and if they could contain linguistic information I don't think it's fair to say they count"
The only ancient American writing system that's so far been (mostly) decoded is Maya, so the quipu are actually just part of a long list of not only American, but worldwide (potential) written languages that we're completely unable to read, and in many cases, positively identify as actually being writing. Sadly, despite our being able to read Maya, most of their writings were destroyed by the Spanish, including many valuable sources of information about their history and culture .
"Removable batteries in most laptops is correctly described as a feature that people perceive the need for, but very few people actually ever use, and some very small single-digit percentage actually ever need."
Expansion slots in budget low-end consumer desktop PCs are in the same category. All the stuff that originally used to live in those slots has been built into their motherboards for years, and the vast majority of the target market will get a new PC after a couple of years "because the chip's worn out on this one" (their memory, CPU, and Internet bandwidth are maxed out hosting four dozen botnet clients and keyloggers, so stuff they want to use takes ages to load, and runs very, very slowly).
"So, is there some reason this seemed perfectly reasonable that I missed?"
Because there are so many totally legitimate reasons for having the facility to execute something that looks like a data file to users, and actually is a data file as far as *NIX and everything else that runs on it is concerned. For example:
1) ... err .. I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with some reasons here. Somebody please help me (sob).
"we'll never know since Alexandria burned"
I presume you mean the Library of Alexandria, which did indeed burn. Alexandria itself fell over and sank in an earthquake.
"Human harvesting of these plants in the wild could even have been a contributing factor to their extinction. But I believe if the Egyptians were smart enough to use these plants for recreational use, then they should have been smart enough to cultivate them as well"
I presume you mean that they were smarter than the Romans, whose recreational use of the European lion in their arenas was an important factor in its extinction.
"AFAIK there were no literate societies in South America prior to European contact"
There were several literate South American societies, most (but not all) of whom used pictograms. A non-exhaustive list of known written languages is:
Aztec
Maya
Mixtec
Zapotec
"Whats wrong with the 27000 year old one from France?"
Nothing apart from the fact that few archaeologists think it was actually a spear thrower, with the prevailing opinion being that it was a baton. The oldest items that are indisputably spear throwers found in Europe are from between 15000-16000 BCE, which is only about 4000-5000 years before the first known bow.
Note that this doesn't prove spear throwers (and indeed bows) weren't used in Europe at an earlier date because unlike stone tools, they're made of biodegradable materials that can easily disappear or be rendered unrecognisable by the passage of time, but It would be pure speculation to say that they _were_ present in Europe when the Neanderthals were around, and one could equally easily speculate that Neanderthals also knew about and used them. The most recent finds do after all indicate that their general tool and weapon technology was better than ours in a number of ways, so it's not at all unreasonable to think that they may have also had the edge here, especially given the fact that there's evidence they used adhesives at a time when Cro-Magnon people don't appear to have known about them.
As we learn more about both Neanderthals and the AMH peoples that lived alongside them in various parts of the world, we're finding that their eventual extinction is much more complex than we thought, and took place over a significantly longer period of time. Evidence from Gibraltar for example suggests that there were still some isolated communities of Neanderthals living in the kinder climate of the Southern Mediterranean 24,000 years ago, a full 11,000 years after they'd disappeared from the more severe Northerly areas.
I believe it is not a meaningless coincidence that the neanderthals disappeared not long after "modern humans" acquired the technology of the spear launcher."
The problem here is that while there's a fair reason to believe that spear throwers appeared about 30,000 years ago, the oldest specimens are found in Africa, where there never were any Neanderthals. We have no evidence that they were used in Europe prior to 15,000 years ago, so it's rather unlikely that they'd have been a factor in the disappearance of Neanderthals.
"No definite specimens younger than 30,000 years ago have been found [wikipedia.org]."
This highlights how trusting what Wikipedia says about anything can lead one to misplaced conclusions, because as this quote from Archaeology, published by the Archaological Institute of America notes, some Vindija remains have been recently and definitively dated to 28,500 years ago, which puts them at the same age as ones that have also been definitively dated at 28,500 years from the Zafaraya cave in Southern Spain:
http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/neandernews.html
(look in the section titled "You Look So Young", although there's plenty of other interesting stuff in there that you might like to look at).
"And wouldn't you know it, as soon as we were able to kill them when we are out of range as their spears, coexistence abruptly stops."
It would I think have been rather difficult for Africans to build spear throwers with enough range to reach Neanderthals who were living in Europe.
"the author of TFA who restrains himself from using a car analogy for a whole 5 paragraphs"
That together with the link which claims to be a white-paper on how to jailbreak iPhones but turns out to be a legal paper about why the EFF thinks it should be allowed to jailbreak them, and the whining, self-righteous tone of the whole thing were very helpful indeed in leading me to conclude that the author is an utter wanker.
"At least Microsoft allows software on their platform without requiring a cut of the profits."
Unless of course that platform happens to be the XBox.
"unlike MS you are not free to choose the hardware to run their OS on"
And also unlike MS, it's still very easy to walk into any computer store and buy hardware without Apple's OS on it, and you can even get an extremely wide range of hardware at said arbitrary computer that you can put Linux, BSD, etc. on without having to pay Apple for a load of stuff you don't want.
"Apple is the new Microsoft."
You obviously don't remember the way Apple behaved in the 1980s, because today's Apple is a veritable bastion of freedom compared with the one that was around in those days.
"It wasn't brute force that won those battles so much as superior tactics and equipment."
It was actually superior organisation and training to that of the barbarians that they were usually fighting which gave them their victories. That's why they were on the receiving end of some major arse-handing when they were confronted by equally well-organised troops with better commanders (the Carthaginians), or even massively inferior ones with leaders who had an intimate knowledge of how they fought and therefore what their weaknesses were (Arminius leading the tribes of the German Tutoberg, who annihilated three legions, six cohorts, and three squadrons of cavalry with a force whose main armaments were fire-hardened wooden spears).
" Keeping those territories all in line over an extender period of time though, is a different animal than initially conquering them."
The Romans did a much better job of holding their empire together over an extremely long period (over 500 years for the Western Empire, and over 1000 years for the Eastern one) than anyone else who came either before or after them. And what brought both of those empires down was decadence rather any inherent difficulty in keeping them going, a decadence in which Roman citizens were transformed from proud, outward looking conquerers to fearful, comfort-obsessed sheep who thought that they could pay others to do their fighting for them while they lived in luxury behind the walls of their fortified cities and towns.
"Hell a perfect correlation is the US in the Middle East now. Militarily we stepped in, kicked ass, and took over Iraq pretty darned quickly. That is a much different animal though than maintaining that over there, and after much spending and loss of life on both sides"
It's far from being a perfect correlation, because if the US was like the Romans, they'd regard any casualties except a complete massacre of all their forces as acceptable, and deal with rebellion (i.e. terrorism) by massacring all the men in any areas where they thought a single rebel might be hiding, enslaving and deporting the women and children, and publicly crucifying anyone who they actually suspected of being involved. This policy would be continued for centuries if necessary, because the Romans thought long-term, and were therefore both persistent and utterly merciless when stamping out rebellion.
"in the end it looks like we may very well just say "Fuck it." and come back home."
Which is something that again separates the US from the Romans, because Rome wouldn't have even considered giving up and going home after just a few years of taking what they'd have regarded as trivial annual casualty levels. And as many subsequently conquered peoples found out to their cost, even when the Romans did go home because they got their backsides well and truly kicked, they would return, this time with a much bigger force, an attack plan that was the result of analysing what went wrong the last time, and a desire to teach them why resisting Rome is a very, very bad idea.