There is no continent called America. North America is a continent, as is South America. "The Americas" is a region including both, and "America" is a shortened form of "United States of America", which is a country. And you have violated my moratorium for the day on anti-American posts. Please report for summary execution. Have a nice day.
I hereby declare a moratorium on America bashing for the next 24 hours on Slashdot. Seriously. I'm fucking sick of it. Only we (Americans) get to talk about how much our government sucks. Just like only black people can call each other "nigger" without getting beaten to a bloody pulp. 90% of the Slashdot American readership thinks George W. Bush sucks and should be booted out of office. Preaching on about it here is about as masturbatory as you can get. We all agree some Americans are bad people, just like some of every other country's people are bad. And we mostly agree that the current American administration is horrible.
I won't even bother addressing your inappropriate use of the word Imperialism. Not every right wing government that you or I hate is Imperialist, and not every nation that seeks to exercise political or economic power abroad is Imperialist.
Tomcat and the other Apache Java projects, and JBoss aren't niche applications. They are important server side applications - these are the kinds of things most large companies use for a huge portion of their development work. If by niche, you mean only a relatively small fraction of people actually need to download and install these applications directly, then you're right, but they are used all the time by people accessing web applications built around them.
Java just isn't ideal for most client-side stuff - if it was used more often, more people would already have the JRE installed and set up so they could just double-click on a Java app they installed and it would run. Certainly, with SWT and the like available these days, writing decent client-side Java apps is entirely possible. Personally I still hate Swing (well, it's fine from a development point of view, I just don't like using apps written in it with a few exceptions which are all development tools or IDEs).
Yes, it's an important choice. But it would be nice if it were really a _choice_. I'd also like the choice to not have to do that. And too often, the binary packages available just don't work, are for the slightly wrong OS version, have dependencies on libraries that are already installed but it can't figure that out because the names are slightly different, and so on. Windows monoculture may be bad and all, but making sure your app works with the stock DLLs on Win 98/ME, 2k, and XP is much, much easier than making sure your app works with every release of every major distro in the Linux world, and all that for a much smaller market share to boot.
Anyway, I've always found the Linux dependency issues much harder to deal with in practice than any DLL dependency issues with modern Windows releases (i.e. 2k/XP - it's been so long since I've used 98 I can't comment, though I remember things really used to suck back in the day). Also, I've almost never had a Windows installer tell me to go out and install random obscure library dependencies - it just installs it if it's not already there. I realize certain tools like urpmi on Mandrake provide nearly this level of ease of use if the packages are there. The problem is I don't want to be dependent on each distro to maintain their own repositories of the most up-to-date versions of every Open Source app ever made (and what about those times you absolutely need a feature only in a beta or non-release version - happens all the time to me). And closed source apps are never going to be included in these repositories. There needs to be much better standardization of library dependencies and mechanisms for autoinstalling across that work across distros (within reason - I guess things like major GCC version shifts will always break compatibility).
You are simply making things up now. I never said "The British were _justified_ in taking India as a colony because the results were good for the Indian people". Do you agree that India has done substantially better having been a former British colony than they would have never having had any relationship with Britain at all? Do you agree that the British imported educational system, parliamentary system and governmental bureaucracies have been highly beneficial for the Indian people? If you do, then you agree with the intent of my statement that British colonialism was in many ways beneficial in the long run for the Indian people. That doesn't mean it was justified to bring soldiers into the country and declare it a British colony in the first place - no more than it was justified to seize land from Native Americans when we wanted it for American expansion.
Which brings us to an interesting comparison that is closer to home for us in America - the way the Native Americans were displaced, forced onto reservations or killed outright in many cases. The results of American expansionism were generally very bad for the Native Americans, who didn't end up a successful powerful people with their own homeland.
Looking at individual acts, there were plenty of terrible things done by individuals in America, and plenty of terrible acts committed by others elsewhere. I'm sure there were British commanders who did awful things in India at certain points in time and those acts weren't justified. In general, the Indians probably weren't given, at the time, fair recompense for the natural resources or labor they contributed during colonial rule.
I am supremely capable of self-evaluation, and I regularly practice it. I don't hold to any sort of American exclusion whatsoever, and there was no evidence of that in my post. I do not hold the "opinion" that I am a reasonable person, I am stating fact - I have on many occasions been swayed by the presentation of evidence and convincing arguments that I am wrong about something. I have never been swayed by ad hominem attacks, however, and I try not to make them, which gets to the heart of the difference between you and I and the definition of "reasonableness". I can certainly recognize an unreasonable person from a single post on Slashdot like yours.
You have been proven wrong completely. You have lost. Give up, learn to tidy up your style of argumentation, and come back another day. I also highly recommend you spend some time with intelligent Americans to disabuse yourself of some of your rather peculiar notions about us - these stereotypes that I hear tossed about by the radical European liberal contingent here on Slashdot are pretty laughable - the biggest purveyors of racism I've ever seen, but it's all permissible because it's packaged in anti-Americanism, which is somehow okay because you are against the big-bad-enemy.
The words coming out of your mouth are no different than a white person going up to a black person and saying "You told a lie, and niggers are dishonest. Stop acting like a nigger, and I'll stop calling you one". Think on that before you spout off again.
Agreed on most points, I don't think the ends always justify the means or that that gives a pass to those who sometimes did very reprehensible things in the past. But those individuals are now long dead and gone, and we can dislike them and their motives while still agreeing that some good came out of the situation they created. And in the case of British rule over Hong Kong, bad things from the 19th century aside, I don't think their rule of the island in the years leading up to the handover was by any means evil or capricious, at least based on what limited information I have. And it certainly seems that in many ways the people of Hong Kong were better off than they are now as a nominal part of China.
No, I don't go around telling black people they should be glad their ancestors were enslaved. I didn't say the ends justify the means in all cases, and your analogy is essentially a slippery slope argument.
Slavery was undoubtedly an unabashed evil, but that's not necessarily comparable to colonization under British rule. Furthermore, it is true that sometimes a person or an entire nation can benefit from evil things that were done to their ancestors. For example, my ancestors were Jews who were forced out of Eastern Europe due to pogroms, racism and poverty. I can loathe the individuals who did this (now long dead of course) without having to agree that my ancestors coming to America was a bad thing - undoubtedly, it had a good outcome for my family and I in the present as we are much better off and enjoy a higher standard of living than we would have as peasants in Eastern Europe.
And your final suggestion, that anybody with a rational argument that you disagree with must be American because the only way they could hold such an opinion is by conforming with stereotypes of Americans is a vicious ad hominem that is entirely unjustified. I share very few opinions with the vast majority of Americans, I'm a moderate democrat currently living in the Northeast, educated at a top Ivy League university. Thus your suggestion discredits your own ability to engage in rational discourse and recognize a reasonable person when you encounter one.
While I agree with much of what you say, I think your viewpoint is annoyingly anti-Eurocentrist. Hong Kong, and thereby China as a whole, benefitted immensely from the British occupation of HK, the creation of a stable bureaucracy, system of laws, educational system, local elections, and positive business environment. This backdrop created an immense amount of wealth and success for the people of Hong Kong, and given them a standard of living today they couldn't hope for if it hadn't been for the British occupation. This doesn't make the actions of 100-year-ago, now long dead British parliament members or prime ministers morally right, but it DOES mean people today living in HK should look back and appreciate what the British system as a whole did for their country.
I would point to India as another shining example of the success of Britain's colonial system - the educational system, widespread use of the English language, robust trade in urban centers, trade links to the rest of the world, relatively stable democratic system of government, these all came from the British system. Sure, the people of India are better off as an independent nation, not having their wealth shipped off to England, but their rapidly rising position in the world wouldn't be possible if it hadn't been for their place as a British colonial territory. Sure, we can bitch all we want about outsourcing, but right now India is reaping the benefits of their position.
I am not British, for the record, I'm American. And I have friends who are Indian who despite their national pride and harm done to their families or regions under British rule, privately admit that there have been a lot of long term benefits reaped from colonialism too. I think the British get knocked too much for the ill they supposedly did and get insufficient credit for the good they did. It's not that I think the people of these countries were barbaric heathens before the British came, nor that without the British they would have sat around in Stone Age squalor, but I'd imagine many people in Hong Kong today are looking back on British rule and realizing that despite their love for Chinese culture and their feelings of national pride, the British did a damn good job at maintaining a free, stable system that benefited everybody there, and the Chinese government will continue to see the Western mindset of the people of Hong Kong as a threat to their control of the mainland.
Try this one: RFC 1347. IPv9 is another name for the TUBA protocol (see here), which was apparently a competing proposal of IPv6 for big-number addressing with TCP and UDP that has never been put into broad use. Some people seem to think it's superior to IPv6 in some ways, but I was under the impression that it's largely deprecated at this point. Obviously some people are still using it - perhaps they are using it as an interim solution until they can transition to IPv6 (when everyone else does - which will be a cold day in hell).
I thought the same when I first read the summary, it's filled with meaningless goop-words. But "China IPV9" does return other hits in Google that lead me to believe this is at least semi-legitimate. See this company, or this powerpoint presentation. Apparently "IPv9", in addition to being used in those April 1st RFCs actually refers to something called TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses), an alternative "big number" addressing protocol to IPv6 that is described in RFC 1347 (see this post for example).
And ironically, Gorbachev is one of the more disliked former leaders in Russia. From our perspective here in the West, he was a visionary who was more responsible for ending the Cold War than anyone else. From their perspective, even many liberal, Westernized Russians (i.e. people I've met here in the US that have spent many years working and living here in the US, have Green Cards, and so on) seem to have somewhere between an indifferent and negative view on him. I just dug up this link with survey results on this exact subject. Anyway, I'm sure there are reasons for this, but I've always found it interesting that our perceptions diverge so much on some of these cold war leaders (Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev).
Howzabout you make a reasonable effort to make the rules clear to your child, and punish them if they willfully violate them. Locking everything up like a paranoid fruitloop won't go very far towards teaching them responsibility. I'm working under the assumption that really young kids aren't going to be sophisticated enough to take all the steps you describe, and by the time the kids are old enough to figure out how to circumvent these measures (drop into single user mode, hack the router, etc.) they are probably old enough to understand the basic concept of trust and rules with respect to what kind of material they are allowed to browse on the web and can understand that they'll have all their internet access taken from them for some period of time if they break the rules.
The evidence against Microsoft was overwhelming from the perspective of a technically informed audience. Much of the bad blood against Microsoft is about them having never gotten the beating they deserved over the browser case. Not much different from the kind of disdain OJ Simpson gets in the vast majority of American households after seeing the overwhelming evidence indicating his guilt, followed by the miscarriage of justice (with the possible exception of blacks who often seem to cling to the outrageous idea that he was innocent).
So yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Microsoft has just proven about a thousand times over that they are a monopolist unafraid to use that position to crush competition, screw over customers and do other nasty things. Google is just being presumed innnocent here because they haven't previously exhibited behavior that would incline us to believe they are guilty. You make it sound like we are supposed to entirely discount the concept of credibility and habitual behavior of people or organizations when it comes to judging their actions. That would be foolish.
Hate to tell you, but over here the decimal point (period) is used to separate the ones from the tenths place. This is semantically distinct from using it in the thousands separators, so we require a different character to clearly differentiate. Thus, the comma. If you have a clearly superior system, then explain it - our system lacks ambiguity and is quite clear. What's wrong with it?
In New York City, Dell uses Unisys who employees a bunch of low-wage service monkeys to come around and replace parts. They don't do a terrible job, I guess I'm not being totally fair, but they always seem to bring the wrong parts with them the first try. I guess that's really the fault of the call center who takes the service call in the first place though, and since they are most likely located in India, well, I guess you get what you pay for.
Despite the excessive dissing on the general idea, there's more than just eye candy to this. Yes, the eye candy is nice and cool, but a big part of this is making more efficient use of space in the desktop and taking advantage of our natural visual ability to process 3D information.
Several people pointed out with the Looking Glass screenshots the other day that keeping a bunch of foreshortened (i.e. nearly perpendicular to the screen) windows open lets you actually see whats in them and visually manage multiple tasks better than you can with current overlapping 2D windows. Yes, you can do the same with a bunch of miniaturized 2D windows on the side of the screen, but it's still a good concept. The "peeling" feature demoed here with Metisse is also nice - I like the idea of bending a window aside to see what's behind it. The sphere-embedded windows uses a trick similar to the Looking Glass window foreshortening to create more available desktop space for multiple tasks by keeping a bunch of non-primary windows angled around the primary task window which faces the user directly, like a normal window, for optimal visibility.
Obviously, you generally want the primary focus of your attention to be as easily visible as possible. This is all about making multitasking more intuitive and easier to manage. I don't think anybody is going to run out and install any of this stuff on their mother's desktop at this point, but it's great that some of this stuff will at least be ready for experimentation soon. I know that the window soup that is usually my desktop would be nice to improve on, and I've never really found any of the existing funky alternative window management technologies (like the entirely keyboard driven X WMs with no overlapping - forget what this is called) to be very satisfactory for me.
Oh, and eye candy, combined with even very modest usability enhancements, sells stuff. Though those Matisse screenshots are about as ugly as sin thanks to the terrible window borders, color schemes and applications they chose to mix. The Looking Glass screenshots, on the other hand, were quite hot and sexy looking.
I nominate for post-of-the-week - this one got a genuine, gut-deep laugh out of a mix of something entirely geeky and something entirely pop culture. Excellent!
Unlike many who spout off on this topic on Slashdot, I am actually qualified to address this issue, having worked for quite a few years in the software industry, and now running a small consumer products development and marketing company. Most software, both enterprise software and consumer desktop apps, run in incredibly complex environments on lots of different hardware configurations, with different OS versions, different patches, different versions of apps and libraries on which they are dependent, and so on. Very few pieces of software are truly monolithic, and almost none always run on a guaranteed, controlled hardware platform with no variations. Perhaps this is why game shops love developing for console platforms - you don't have to deal with the massive return rates, huge QA costs, and consumer bitching no matter how hard you try to make your awesome 3D game run on everybody's PC decently, and to look really great on some people's PCs.
When you are developing a consumer product, whether electronic or not, there are usually a very limited number of modes of interaction between the user and the device, and generally a very well-defined, firmly specified set of data it operates on. Testing and making sure it works properly is relatively easy - you don't worry about whether somebody has a Voodoo 8 Extreme graphics card or Kingston 1-bit-weird RAM or the strange USB dongle that overrides the standard Windows drivers with their own DRM-enabled gunk. Product lifecycles are much longer, it may take anywhere from 8 to 36 months to get a product to market depending on its nature, and it is expected to have a shelf life of several years to earn back all the R&D costs and make a profit.
Anyway, if my device that plugs into a wall socket and has an on/off switch blows up and burns somebody's house down, it's pretty clear who's at fault - either the people that designed it, or the people that manufactured/assembled it. If my software fails, there's often no way to say whose "fault" it really is - was it the hardware assembler? The video card manufacturer with their flawed drivers? The OS developer with their crappy architecture? The spyware bundler that stuck destabilizing software on the system? Or the application developer who wrote an app that worked fine on all the systems they did QA on, but mysteriously failed in some unanticipated configuration?
Even ignoring these problems, we still have the issue of short product lifecycles, lots of feature-based competition, version warfare, and so on. They all occur in most product businesses, but at nowhere near the rate and intensity as in the software industry. And when it comes down to it, the people who buy software for personal use and often for businesses too, consistently prove they value ooh-ahh features and version numbers at least as much as, if not more than stability and security.
Ironically, this lemon law stuff usually comes from frustrated software developers, not consumers. The developers hate the fact that their companies' marketing or sales people force them to release products too early, in unfinished or untested forms and then they get blamed for the fallout. Usually this is the result of poor project management and the inability to accurately assess tradeoffs between featurization, release schedules, and financing prior to setting out on the project and prior to beginning development. Know what you're building before you build it, or make sure you have lots of time and money.
Because RedHat is a business, and their business is to extract large sums of money from PHBs for "enterprise-quality" software and support. They also happen to give everything away most of what they develop as GPLed source code, but if they stuck a big logo there that said "FREE DOWNLOAD!" and put somewhere in the corner "or pay $2200 for the supported version", the PHB would likely point to his system administrator and send him forth to the download site instead of busting out the corporate purchasing card.
Lessee, Woz - greak hacker, check. Mitnick - great hacker/cracker, check. Jello Biafra - founding member of the funny name posse, where he is joined by other people who get an inordinate number of speaking gigs relative to their qualifications, like American McGee, Simpson Garfinkle, and Jennifer 8. Lee. Hmm, I thought geeks were supposed to be smart enough to judge people on their actual merits, not the marketing they do of their name cum public identity. Blah, ridiculous stuff like this makes me lose faith in humanity.
I am aware of similar work at the MIT Media Lab that's quite a few year's old now. Skin-based power transmission, and also skin-based data transmission had already been demoed by the Gershenfeld group when I worked there in the summer of '99. I don't think the concept itself is novel. The implementation or specifics may be, however.
Don't confuse "the US" with the current administration and president. Many of us are working very hard right now to make sure he doesn't get elected again. The rest of your claims ("horrific record on just about every topic that you could possibly list") just don't hold any water.
False dichotomy. I want a mail protocol where the sender's identity/From address/server IP address are verified. This definitely isn't impossible, and doesn't require every packet to be tracked or monitored by any central authority. I don't need the government to track every web site I visit or keep that data. Verifiable identities (which would allow for accountability, legal enforceability of existing SPAM legislation, and at least a 95% reduction in spam) shouldn't require giving up all rights to privacy on the Internet.
Also, nobody trusts the UN because outside of the security council, it's just become a vehicle for US-bashing, and synonymous with ineffectual military pseudo-actions.
I am not saying Microsoft's approach is reasonable - nobody trusts Microsoft either. But there's no reason that registered email server must necessarily lead to a fragmented internet, it just means that there always has to be some chain of accountability for every email sent out.
I don't know what the heck this "green economic" theory is, but you don't really need that to analyze this problem. We covered this in AP Economics in high school, many years ago before spam existed. These are called negative externalities - the commons is polluted because the polluter doesn't pay the cost of the collective damage he does. Just like pollution, the solutions all require some sort of government regulation.
The problem with spam is it's much harder to catch spammers than illegally polluting factories where disgruntled workers, regular inspections and so on can be used for enforcement. Spammers are hard to catch since they operate through intermediaries in other countries and fly beneath the radar, and because the legal tools to fight spam have been very slow to catch up. And there need to be government organizations dedicated to tracking down and prosecuting spammers, like there are for polluters.
I would guess it is possible... the E46 M3 and E46 3-series models are pretty similar - I am pretty sure they have roughly the same wiring harness, can use the same CD changer, and this connects to the same spot the CD changer connects to (unfortunately, I already have the CD changer, so I realized this won't work for me anyway).
Also - the M3 is a joy to drive. If you are thinking of getting a 3-series, consider spending the extra for the M3, or get one pre-owned, there's no shame in that. It's by far the best driving experience I've ever had, much more enjoyable than the rough, adrenaline-rush of a Ferrari (no, not mine, but I've driven a friend's). I was weary about getting one because of the somewhat obnoxious associations I have with poeple who drive M3s, but I've realized that the car rocks, screw the reputation, forget about who else drives it. If you really enjoy driving, you can't help but love this car.
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There is no continent called America. North America is a continent, as is South America. "The Americas" is a region including both, and "America" is a shortened form of "United States of America", which is a country. And you have violated my moratorium for the day on anti-American posts. Please report for summary execution. Have a nice day.
I won't even bother addressing your inappropriate use of the word Imperialism. Not every right wing government that you or I hate is Imperialist, and not every nation that seeks to exercise political or economic power abroad is Imperialist.
Java just isn't ideal for most client-side stuff - if it was used more often, more people would already have the JRE installed and set up so they could just double-click on a Java app they installed and it would run. Certainly, with SWT and the like available these days, writing decent client-side Java apps is entirely possible. Personally I still hate Swing (well, it's fine from a development point of view, I just don't like using apps written in it with a few exceptions which are all development tools or IDEs).
Anyway, I've always found the Linux dependency issues much harder to deal with in practice than any DLL dependency issues with modern Windows releases (i.e. 2k/XP - it's been so long since I've used 98 I can't comment, though I remember things really used to suck back in the day). Also, I've almost never had a Windows installer tell me to go out and install random obscure library dependencies - it just installs it if it's not already there. I realize certain tools like urpmi on Mandrake provide nearly this level of ease of use if the packages are there. The problem is I don't want to be dependent on each distro to maintain their own repositories of the most up-to-date versions of every Open Source app ever made (and what about those times you absolutely need a feature only in a beta or non-release version - happens all the time to me). And closed source apps are never going to be included in these repositories. There needs to be much better standardization of library dependencies and mechanisms for autoinstalling across that work across distros (within reason - I guess things like major GCC version shifts will always break compatibility).
Which brings us to an interesting comparison that is closer to home for us in America - the way the Native Americans were displaced, forced onto reservations or killed outright in many cases. The results of American expansionism were generally very bad for the Native Americans, who didn't end up a successful powerful people with their own homeland.
Looking at individual acts, there were plenty of terrible things done by individuals in America, and plenty of terrible acts committed by others elsewhere. I'm sure there were British commanders who did awful things in India at certain points in time and those acts weren't justified. In general, the Indians probably weren't given, at the time, fair recompense for the natural resources or labor they contributed during colonial rule.
I am supremely capable of self-evaluation, and I regularly practice it. I don't hold to any sort of American exclusion whatsoever, and there was no evidence of that in my post. I do not hold the "opinion" that I am a reasonable person, I am stating fact - I have on many occasions been swayed by the presentation of evidence and convincing arguments that I am wrong about something. I have never been swayed by ad hominem attacks, however, and I try not to make them, which gets to the heart of the difference between you and I and the definition of "reasonableness". I can certainly recognize an unreasonable person from a single post on Slashdot like yours.
You have been proven wrong completely. You have lost. Give up, learn to tidy up your style of argumentation, and come back another day. I also highly recommend you spend some time with intelligent Americans to disabuse yourself of some of your rather peculiar notions about us - these stereotypes that I hear tossed about by the radical European liberal contingent here on Slashdot are pretty laughable - the biggest purveyors of racism I've ever seen, but it's all permissible because it's packaged in anti-Americanism, which is somehow okay because you are against the big-bad-enemy.
The words coming out of your mouth are no different than a white person going up to a black person and saying "You told a lie, and niggers are dishonest. Stop acting like a nigger, and I'll stop calling you one". Think on that before you spout off again.
Agreed on most points, I don't think the ends always justify the means or that that gives a pass to those who sometimes did very reprehensible things in the past. But those individuals are now long dead and gone, and we can dislike them and their motives while still agreeing that some good came out of the situation they created. And in the case of British rule over Hong Kong, bad things from the 19th century aside, I don't think their rule of the island in the years leading up to the handover was by any means evil or capricious, at least based on what limited information I have. And it certainly seems that in many ways the people of Hong Kong were better off than they are now as a nominal part of China.
Slavery was undoubtedly an unabashed evil, but that's not necessarily comparable to colonization under British rule. Furthermore, it is true that sometimes a person or an entire nation can benefit from evil things that were done to their ancestors. For example, my ancestors were Jews who were forced out of Eastern Europe due to pogroms, racism and poverty. I can loathe the individuals who did this (now long dead of course) without having to agree that my ancestors coming to America was a bad thing - undoubtedly, it had a good outcome for my family and I in the present as we are much better off and enjoy a higher standard of living than we would have as peasants in Eastern Europe.
And your final suggestion, that anybody with a rational argument that you disagree with must be American because the only way they could hold such an opinion is by conforming with stereotypes of Americans is a vicious ad hominem that is entirely unjustified. I share very few opinions with the vast majority of Americans, I'm a moderate democrat currently living in the Northeast, educated at a top Ivy League university. Thus your suggestion discredits your own ability to engage in rational discourse and recognize a reasonable person when you encounter one.
I would point to India as another shining example of the success of Britain's colonial system - the educational system, widespread use of the English language, robust trade in urban centers, trade links to the rest of the world, relatively stable democratic system of government, these all came from the British system. Sure, the people of India are better off as an independent nation, not having their wealth shipped off to England, but their rapidly rising position in the world wouldn't be possible if it hadn't been for their place as a British colonial territory. Sure, we can bitch all we want about outsourcing, but right now India is reaping the benefits of their position.
I am not British, for the record, I'm American. And I have friends who are Indian who despite their national pride and harm done to their families or regions under British rule, privately admit that there have been a lot of long term benefits reaped from colonialism too. I think the British get knocked too much for the ill they supposedly did and get insufficient credit for the good they did. It's not that I think the people of these countries were barbaric heathens before the British came, nor that without the British they would have sat around in Stone Age squalor, but I'd imagine many people in Hong Kong today are looking back on British rule and realizing that despite their love for Chinese culture and their feelings of national pride, the British did a damn good job at maintaining a free, stable system that benefited everybody there, and the Chinese government will continue to see the Western mindset of the people of Hong Kong as a threat to their control of the mainland.
Try this one: RFC 1347. IPv9 is another name for the TUBA protocol (see here), which was apparently a competing proposal of IPv6 for big-number addressing with TCP and UDP that has never been put into broad use. Some people seem to think it's superior to IPv6 in some ways, but I was under the impression that it's largely deprecated at this point. Obviously some people are still using it - perhaps they are using it as an interim solution until they can transition to IPv6 (when everyone else does - which will be a cold day in hell).
The original RFC is here.
And ironically, Gorbachev is one of the more disliked former leaders in Russia. From our perspective here in the West, he was a visionary who was more responsible for ending the Cold War than anyone else. From their perspective, even many liberal, Westernized Russians (i.e. people I've met here in the US that have spent many years working and living here in the US, have Green Cards, and so on) seem to have somewhere between an indifferent and negative view on him. I just dug up this link with survey results on this exact subject. Anyway, I'm sure there are reasons for this, but I've always found it interesting that our perceptions diverge so much on some of these cold war leaders (Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev).
Howzabout you make a reasonable effort to make the rules clear to your child, and punish them if they willfully violate them. Locking everything up like a paranoid fruitloop won't go very far towards teaching them responsibility. I'm working under the assumption that really young kids aren't going to be sophisticated enough to take all the steps you describe, and by the time the kids are old enough to figure out how to circumvent these measures (drop into single user mode, hack the router, etc.) they are probably old enough to understand the basic concept of trust and rules with respect to what kind of material they are allowed to browse on the web and can understand that they'll have all their internet access taken from them for some period of time if they break the rules.
So yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Microsoft has just proven about a thousand times over that they are a monopolist unafraid to use that position to crush competition, screw over customers and do other nasty things. Google is just being presumed innnocent here because they haven't previously exhibited behavior that would incline us to believe they are guilty. You make it sound like we are supposed to entirely discount the concept of credibility and habitual behavior of people or organizations when it comes to judging their actions. That would be foolish.
Hate to tell you, but over here the decimal point (period) is used to separate the ones from the tenths place. This is semantically distinct from using it in the thousands separators, so we require a different character to clearly differentiate. Thus, the comma. If you have a clearly superior system, then explain it - our system lacks ambiguity and is quite clear. What's wrong with it?
In New York City, Dell uses Unisys who employees a bunch of low-wage service monkeys to come around and replace parts. They don't do a terrible job, I guess I'm not being totally fair, but they always seem to bring the wrong parts with them the first try. I guess that's really the fault of the call center who takes the service call in the first place though, and since they are most likely located in India, well, I guess you get what you pay for.
Several people pointed out with the Looking Glass screenshots the other day that keeping a bunch of foreshortened (i.e. nearly perpendicular to the screen) windows open lets you actually see whats in them and visually manage multiple tasks better than you can with current overlapping 2D windows. Yes, you can do the same with a bunch of miniaturized 2D windows on the side of the screen, but it's still a good concept. The "peeling" feature demoed here with Metisse is also nice - I like the idea of bending a window aside to see what's behind it. The sphere-embedded windows uses a trick similar to the Looking Glass window foreshortening to create more available desktop space for multiple tasks by keeping a bunch of non-primary windows angled around the primary task window which faces the user directly, like a normal window, for optimal visibility.
Obviously, you generally want the primary focus of your attention to be as easily visible as possible. This is all about making multitasking more intuitive and easier to manage. I don't think anybody is going to run out and install any of this stuff on their mother's desktop at this point, but it's great that some of this stuff will at least be ready for experimentation soon. I know that the window soup that is usually my desktop would be nice to improve on, and I've never really found any of the existing funky alternative window management technologies (like the entirely keyboard driven X WMs with no overlapping - forget what this is called) to be very satisfactory for me.
Oh, and eye candy, combined with even very modest usability enhancements, sells stuff. Though those Matisse screenshots are about as ugly as sin thanks to the terrible window borders, color schemes and applications they chose to mix. The Looking Glass screenshots, on the other hand, were quite hot and sexy looking.
I nominate for post-of-the-week - this one got a genuine, gut-deep laugh out of a mix of something entirely geeky and something entirely pop culture. Excellent!
When you are developing a consumer product, whether electronic or not, there are usually a very limited number of modes of interaction between the user and the device, and generally a very well-defined, firmly specified set of data it operates on. Testing and making sure it works properly is relatively easy - you don't worry about whether somebody has a Voodoo 8 Extreme graphics card or Kingston 1-bit-weird RAM or the strange USB dongle that overrides the standard Windows drivers with their own DRM-enabled gunk. Product lifecycles are much longer, it may take anywhere from 8 to 36 months to get a product to market depending on its nature, and it is expected to have a shelf life of several years to earn back all the R&D costs and make a profit.
Anyway, if my device that plugs into a wall socket and has an on/off switch blows up and burns somebody's house down, it's pretty clear who's at fault - either the people that designed it, or the people that manufactured/assembled it. If my software fails, there's often no way to say whose "fault" it really is - was it the hardware assembler? The video card manufacturer with their flawed drivers? The OS developer with their crappy architecture? The spyware bundler that stuck destabilizing software on the system? Or the application developer who wrote an app that worked fine on all the systems they did QA on, but mysteriously failed in some unanticipated configuration?
Even ignoring these problems, we still have the issue of short product lifecycles, lots of feature-based competition, version warfare, and so on. They all occur in most product businesses, but at nowhere near the rate and intensity as in the software industry. And when it comes down to it, the people who buy software for personal use and often for businesses too, consistently prove they value ooh-ahh features and version numbers at least as much as, if not more than stability and security.
Ironically, this lemon law stuff usually comes from frustrated software developers, not consumers. The developers hate the fact that their companies' marketing or sales people force them to release products too early, in unfinished or untested forms and then they get blamed for the fallout. Usually this is the result of poor project management and the inability to accurately assess tradeoffs between featurization, release schedules, and financing prior to setting out on the project and prior to beginning development. Know what you're building before you build it, or make sure you have lots of time and money.
Because RedHat is a business, and their business is to extract large sums of money from PHBs for "enterprise-quality" software and support. They also happen to give everything away most of what they develop as GPLed source code, but if they stuck a big logo there that said "FREE DOWNLOAD!" and put somewhere in the corner "or pay $2200 for the supported version", the PHB would likely point to his system administrator and send him forth to the download site instead of busting out the corporate purchasing card.
Lessee, Woz - greak hacker, check. Mitnick - great hacker/cracker, check. Jello Biafra - founding member of the funny name posse, where he is joined by other people who get an inordinate number of speaking gigs relative to their qualifications, like American McGee, Simpson Garfinkle, and Jennifer 8. Lee. Hmm, I thought geeks were supposed to be smart enough to judge people on their actual merits, not the marketing they do of their name cum public identity. Blah, ridiculous stuff like this makes me lose faith in humanity.
I am aware of similar work at the MIT Media Lab that's quite a few year's old now. Skin-based power transmission, and also skin-based data transmission had already been demoed by the Gershenfeld group when I worked there in the summer of '99. I don't think the concept itself is novel. The implementation or specifics may be, however.
Don't confuse "the US" with the current administration and president. Many of us are working very hard right now to make sure he doesn't get elected again. The rest of your claims ("horrific record on just about every topic that you could possibly list") just don't hold any water.
Also, nobody trusts the UN because outside of the security council, it's just become a vehicle for US-bashing, and synonymous with ineffectual military pseudo-actions.
I am not saying Microsoft's approach is reasonable - nobody trusts Microsoft either. But there's no reason that registered email server must necessarily lead to a fragmented internet, it just means that there always has to be some chain of accountability for every email sent out.
The problem with spam is it's much harder to catch spammers than illegally polluting factories where disgruntled workers, regular inspections and so on can be used for enforcement. Spammers are hard to catch since they operate through intermediaries in other countries and fly beneath the radar, and because the legal tools to fight spam have been very slow to catch up. And there need to be government organizations dedicated to tracking down and prosecuting spammers, like there are for polluters.
Also - the M3 is a joy to drive. If you are thinking of getting a 3-series, consider spending the extra for the M3, or get one pre-owned, there's no shame in that. It's by far the best driving experience I've ever had, much more enjoyable than the rough, adrenaline-rush of a Ferrari (no, not mine, but I've driven a friend's). I was weary about getting one because of the somewhat obnoxious associations I have with poeple who drive M3s, but I've realized that the car rocks, screw the reputation, forget about who else drives it. If you really enjoy driving, you can't help but love this car.