You're right - really young children, those too young to have these things explained to them, ought not to see graphic sex scenes (a la porn or late night Cinemax) or graphic violence (as seen in many R-rated movies). There's no reason to expose them to that before it's possible for them to be explained some of the context. Once a kid is 12 or 13 years old, sometimes as young as 9 or 10, they are old enough to have these things explained to them.
I'm not exactly condoning 12 year old kids watching porn, since porn generally presents a pretty distorted view of sex, but you're not really going to be able to prevent it no matter what you do. I saw plenty of porn when I was 12 or 13 and I didn't end up broken or traumatized by it. Then again, it was mostly just naked chicks suggestively posed and at the worst Hustler and some floppies filled with porn GIFs - we didn't have easy access to hard core porn movies and really nasty shit on the Internet like they do now. Which makes it all the more important to make sure your kids have a healthy understanding of sex and sexuality at a reasonable age when they start to go out there looking for it themselves anyway (at least, boys will).
You clearly don't have kids, because it is easier to explain violence than sex to them.
I understand where you're coming from on this, but this is really just the result of your own upbringing and the shame about sex that's been instilled in you. I'm not saying young kids (pre-teen) will _understand_ the reasons or subtleties involved in sex when you explain it to them, but I don't know if they'll understand any better the reasons or subtleties behind war or human brutality.
It's not necessarily easy to explain any of these things to children, but your discomfort with explaining sex is definitely not something fundamental about sex, but something societal that was instilled in you.
So they say. However, I have a friend (also a Slashdot reader) who recently started a business in New York, and Lloyds actually refused to provide him with liability insurance for his business. Mind you, this business is somewhat risky, but it is a legitimate business, and he's making quite a bit of money now.
The thing is that Lloyds is actually a marketplace of "syndicates", not exactly a monolithic institution (at least, this is how he explained it to me). So you have to have a broker who really knows Lloyd's to figure out who the right people to approach are. And as far as I can tell, they may like taking fairly crazy sounding but actually low risk bets on actresses thighs or singer's voices, but they don't like taking higher stake bets on businesses that are hard to assess or known to be risky.
Right, a 2.6 billion dollar drop in sales. Part is attributable to the economic slump. Let's say only half - this comes out of my ass, but I think a 3-4% drop in sales when the economy has essentially not grown, joblessness in the US has been up, and so on isn't unreasonable.
Then what about the other 1.3 billion? Basically, people are going to substitutes. What are the substitutes? Well, you can download an unauthorized copy from Kazaa - cost: $0, time: perhaps 20 minutes fucking around, downloading broken copies, redownloading until you find a good copy assuming the song is sufficiently popular. Or you can buy a legitimate copy from iTunes or other online music service: cost: somewhere between $0.80 and $1.00, time: minimal once you are signed up for the service. Now we have the REAL problem. What did people do PREVIOUSLY when they liked a song? Well, their only option was to browse over to the record store and buy a whole frigging album for 15 bucks. 15 bucks vs. less than 1 dollar. Remember, most of the music coming out of the industry is still the crap-pop with one good song and an album full of schlock.
So do I think perhaps 100 million dollars in online song sales (and whatabout all these song giveaways by Pepsi et. al.?) could explain 500+ million in lost album sales? Yes, I do. Sure, some other part of the "lost" sales may be people substituting P2P downloading for purchases, but I see less and less of that going on now among the mainstream now that the major P2P networks are so polluted (yes, you and I can figure out how to get songs, but I'm not at all convinced that a large portion of the market does anymore or has the interest in learning about the harder to use alternatives).
My friend, you need to learn the way to get ahead in the world. When they ask you back, tell them you'll come back if you get your old boss' job. Or his boss' job. Seriously, that's what I'd do.
Then again, it can be satisfying to watch the people who fucked you over lose their jobs as a company fails. But there are usually nice people who don't deserve to lose their jobs who'll get screwed over in the process too. Revenge is sweet, but getting your old boss' job, saving a company's ass, then using this line item on the resume to get an even sweeter job is far, far better for you in the long run, and is really the best sort of revenge you can ask for (not to mention you can't put "they begged me to come back and I told them to bugger off" on your resume).
Sounds nice in theory, you "play fair". Me, I play fair too, but I do eek back every red cent I can from the government (without lying of course), and I'm VERY good at coming up with deductions.
But there are some things I find ridiculous, being a resident of Taxachusetts, one of the fine states mentioned in this article. Like that great 5% "Use Tax" - they basically expect me to report something I bought off of eBay, or from Dell, and pay sales tax on it just like if I bought it from the store around the corner. I realize you say you "play fair", but do you go and add up every item you buy on the internet and report it to your state to make sure they are getting their "fair share" of that dollar they already taxed once when you earned it? I realize you may live in a more sane state than I do so this all sounds far fetched to you, but that's the reality of living here.
I won't even get into the raw insanity that is working for a New York LLC and being a Massachusetts resident who travels to New York for work frequently. If you work one day out of the year in New York, New York thinks you owe taxes on the COMPLETE total sum of the monies paid to you by the New York LLC or Corporation. Massachusetts, being slightly less insane, will actually let you count this amount against your taxes owed in Massachusetts, I believe. But I'm certainly not so honest that I plan on filing taxes in New York and figuring this out, just because I travel there and do some work there now and again. They aren't going to eat their 8.whatever percent of my income instead of just letting me pay the honest 5.whatever I owe Massachusetts.
So anyway, yes, I support paying my fair share to the state and federal government, but I don't support letting them unfairly rape me. And I honestly have never met anyone in Massachusetts who goes and adds up their out-of-state purchases for the "Use Tax".
Microsoft does not have "real, thought-out interface guideline documentation" - yes, there is the Windows User Interface Guidelines, but it's not like most apps actually follow this stuff in any meaningful way in Windows. What Windows does have going for it is that Win32 is a consistent GUI toolkit - apps may have inconsistent use of widgets, and weird custom widgets, but at the base of it, the menus, buttons and by FAR most importantly fonts are all rendered through the same calls to the Win32 API, pass through the same base rendering mechanisms and look consistent.
Windows could certainly use better UI design consistency that developers actually adhered to. Linux doesn't get far enough for that to be an issue - the menus, fonts, application colors and pretty much everything that defines the basic look and feel are still different with different toolkits, and no matter how hard you try, they always seem to look ever so slightly different. Qt rendered Arial 12 doesn't look the same as Gtk rendered Arial 12. You need to tweak colors to match. Menu sizes are slightly different. This stuff causes me to want to scratch my eyeballs out before I even get to worrying about inconsistencies from app to app in the types and uses of custom widgets, location of information, etc.
Also you have to love how Slashdot posters get quoted in all sorts of articles these days, and they always cite a single highly rated post and make it sound like it represents the voice of geekdom on the Internet. Usually there's enough diversity in even the highly modded posts on Slashdot to show that there is no one opinion out there (well, perhaps we all agree that SCO are a bunch of scumbags...).
Early adopters, loud opinions, and lazy journalists. Great combo.
Unfortunately, the blog comment you mention is just wrong. See my post here for the real story. The period after the 8 is either just to add to the mystery, or was originally done by a layout/production person and she liked the way it looked and kept it that way. There's no real logic to it, so stop looking for it.:)
Okay, I just want to set the record straight on this story since it's actually on-topic for once. I know Jenny Lee. We went to the same college, she was class of '99 and I was class of '00 (yes, you can easily figure out where that is if you want).
She uses the number "8" in her byline, a clever device she came up with to differentiate herself from the hordes of other Asian girls named "Jennifer Lee". In fact, I believe there was actually another Jennifer Lee at her high school (Stuyvesant, in NYC, if I remember correctly) that wrote for the paper and she wanted to differentiate herself.
Lots of people have made up stories about the origins of "that wacky NY Times writer's middle initial", that her parents gave her the middle intial "8" because it's a lucky number in China or some such thing. These stories were either made up by silly people or things she once told at a party after a few beers just to see if people would actually believe them, and they have propagated over the Internet (because when you are a Circuits writer, you get geek-fans). The 8 is a creation of her own. Why 8 rather than 9 or 10? I believe because she thought it sounded cool, though the number may have some other personal significance.
So these days she may actually tell people her name is Jennifer 8. Lee because that's her byline and it's become associated with her. But it certainly wasn't her given name by her parents, and to the best of my knowledge she has never gone and changed her legal name or anything of that sort.
No commute is a nice thing around here - I live in Cambridge, and worked for several years out in Lexington, and that was a "short" commute by standards around here. My current apartment is a 4-5 minute walk from the center of Harvard Square, and this is a fabulous location. I like the Kendall Square area too, especially as a place to work (much better than working out in the burbs for a city boy like myself).
Agreed 100%. "Hydrogen economy" is just political buzzword bingo these days. I wish more money would go into renewable fuel production from potentially useful sources, like ethanol production from cellulosic biomass, and even some of the more promising biodiesel production techniques (though those seem farther off from economic viability to me). These alternative fuels, combined with hybrid technology, are far more likely to be powering our cars for the next 20-30 years than hydrogen.
But hey, if they can make the whole fusion thing work (hah, yeah, sure), maybe we'll be using fuel cells sooner than that. Though the inefficiencies in the hydrogen production process are still bad, if energy were much cheaper, I'd guess it would still make sense. I just don't think this is likely to happen in the near future.
No, I'm basing it on a whole slurry of articles that were published 10-12 months ago that I read. Specifically, I remember reading some articles like this and this one. These two describing the incomplete nature of planned Office XML support. Not to mention looking at the older pseudo-HTML stuff that Word et. al. produce, which generally works and looks exactly as I described.
As I remember all the negative articles were based on early access MSDN stuff (there were dozens of them at the time), so I'm open to the idea that they were all wrong. Since I don't have Office 2003 yet and I'm still running Office XP, I don't have the interest or means to verify any of this personally. If somebody would care to show me somebody's actual review of the relevant schemas and document that in fact they are complete, human and machine parseable, and do not contain big chunks of essentially unmungeable data, then that's great. Just telling me that you glanced through the schemas yourself doesn't really provide me with much information - did you write an application that parses and displays complete Microsoft Word docs with embedded Excel spreadsheet charts?
Right, the point about non-IE users isn't that they are 10% of the market, it's that for many high tech apps, a substantive portion of that 10% are the early-adopters and technological evangelists. These people are often key to acceptance and adoption of these "disruptive" sorts of products. You have to appeal to Joe Average, but just appealing to Joe Average itself isn't necessarily enough.
Not saying the way to make money is appealing to the ultra-rabid Linux geek or anything, but the broader set of technological trendsetters generally know better than to use IE.
Corporations are more efficient at creating wealth than nation-states, but they are essentially just an expression of capitalist tribalism within the nation-state. They aren't necessarily or always more efficient at maximizing happiness or utility or any of the other measures of what is "good" in the world than the nation-state.
Laissez faire wasn't handed to us by the gods, and it doesn't necessarily maximize utility within the nation-state to adopt that position. I don't have an answer to the other poster's challenge about providing better alternatives to the corporate structure for efficiently organizing economic resources, except to note that especially in the centers of wealth, we are moving to a service-based economy in this country. And services are often better performed in semi-collaborative trade groups or professional service corporations, like legal partnerships and medical practices. I'd love to see better structures for organizing larger, product-oriented companies, such as networks of collaborating service or trade groups that cooperate for mutual economic benefit.
I agree with some of what you say, though I think your tone goes too far in the other direction. However, this is just wrong:
Office Suite manufacturers should, in my opinion, get their act together and start making their applications compatible with each other. The author quite clearly shows a bias against Microsoft here by stating that they have no excuse for supporting the OpenOffice formats. IIRC, Microsoft Office has been around for quite a bit longer than OpenOffice, and has become a standard in its' own right.
You do realize that Open Office does publish specifications and standards for interacting with their documents, and Microsoft does not, right? Microsoft desperately wants to claim "we're using XML, so it's all 'open'", but in reality their XML "standards" are loaded with chunks of GUIDs and unparseable binary data in undocumented formats that require embedded use of other proprietary Microsoft components to access. It's insanely unfair to point a finger at OpenOffice here when they have made every effort to embrace openness and enable compatibility with MS Office at the same time and Microsoft has made every effort to keep their formats closed, make PR noise about opening their formats, and thereby reinforce their effective monopoly on office software.
Oh please. A "murderous nanny rescue"? The people are already much more empowered than they were under Saddam. And within a year or so, they will be far more empowered yet. Whether or not you agree with the means (I don't, so please don't start attacking straw men here, it seems to happen every time this comes up on Slashdot), the end here is a good one. Don't get me wrong, it's not hard to look down on a people who were unable to have their own revolution, but you have to realize how tight the iron grip in countries like Iraq and the Soviet Union at its height was (the Soviet Union really had to decay economically and dwindle in terms of the central authorities' power before disintegration became inevitable).
Let's not insult the Iraqi people by acting like they don't deserve freedom if they didn't earn it with their own blood. Crazy Shia mullahs and brainwashed nutcases aside, any rational, educated Iraqi (and that may not be many of the people you see shooting AKs on CNN, but plenty of them exist) will tell you their country and their people are better off now than they were under Hussein and that this will in the long term be a positive step for their society.
Ahh, grasshopper, if you spent four years in college banging your head against modern physics you would have realized that there is no such thing as a "correct" theory in physics, there are only useful approximations within certain domains. QM and GR are both useful approximations within certain domains. You can generalize QM to QFT and it's slightly more useful for answering a different set of harder questions.
However, we don't have much of a concept of "right" or "wrong" in physics. Newtonian physics is "wrong", but it's still incredibly useful for the vast majority of engineering work that involves calculations with day-to-day objects. And for studying the physics of pretty much anything that isn't either incredibly small or incredibly big. Somebody might come up with a better theoretical framework for understanding the effects we observe in GR and QM, but people will still use the equations and techniques from those fields since they are incredibly useful for a large number of applications outside of the craziest scenarios.
Bad theories never die - they are just relegated to the status of "useful approximation".
You seem to enjoy the old straw man, don't you. It's fun to attack the straw man when there's nothing else to go on.
My basis for my statements is the testimony of American soldiers I have read. No different from the testimony of the Pakistani man's father you have read. I don't think the information that gets filtered out to me is sufficient to do anything in itself - like I said, it should all be verified by judicial hearing. I'm not sure why you think I would want to see innocent people punished - I'd much rather see every one of them go free if they are all innocent. That would shock me immensely if it were true, of course. There were certainly plenty of people shooting American soldiers in Afghanistan, and if we managed to capture all the wrong people, our soldiers would have to be blind, deaf and dumb.
Meanwhile, have fun banging on your straw man and arguing against individual phrases you take out of context.
Are you disputing the factuality of the circumstances under which the vast majority of these men were captured, or are you making an ideological point? If you accept the facts as I presented them, I don't think my conclusions about their ideological principles are unreasonable. Like I said, it may not be the case for every one of them, and they all deserve a legitimate hearing in a feasible and appropriate context where evidence and testimony can reasonably be gathered and presented.
You then make an ad hominem attack against the sincerity of my belief in principles of justice for reasons that are beyond me. I am certainly sincere in my belief that they deserve a hearing which they have not received. I've said this three fucking times now, but you keep selectively quoting my posts and taking me out of context intentionally.
I just said I support some due process and judicial hearings by joint judicial committees for these detainees. If one of the many detainees was in fact taken from his home in Pakistan, that should come out in a judicial hearing, the US should present the evidence on which they believe he is a terrorist threat, and the judges should decide accordingly. It's impossible to tell from that article whether in fact he was building water wells in Afghanistan or had joined with Al Qaeda and was shooting at American soldiers. I fail to see how you think you know the answer based on that one article.
You can't cite the two exceptions and call that the rule. Most of the detainees were captured wondering around the mountains in groups of Arab foreigners with guns, and yes, they all deserve some due process, but no, it's not reasonable to expect the same kind of evidentiary standards you would be able to obtain in a domestic US trial. I believe that perhaps 70-80% of them probably deserve to be locked up for the rest of their lives. The problem is identifying the other 30% that were random bystanders or armed Afghan tribesmen or whatever who should just be released back to their local authorities or homes - that's where some judicial process is required, and I certainly never suggested that I approve of the way that's been handled.
Not really. Not that I support the approach we are using in Guantanamo Bay precisely, but those people picked up arms against the United States and were captured fighting. Unlike POWs, they weren't foreign army conscripts who were just sucked into a nation-to-nation conflict, either. No, they are religious ideologues who picked up arms against the concept of Western civilization.
I do not support Bush by any means, nor did I really support much of the logic behind the war in Iraq. I don't know how we should deal with people like the Guantanamo Bay detainees, except that we should have some sort of due process for them, probably joint judicial proceedings between the US and Afghanistan. But the analogy to extraditing warez traders from Australia is pretty darned thin, since they weren't shooting an AK-47 at American soldiers trying to oust a terrorist organization that was holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan, and haven't demonstrated both a willingness to take up arms and an idelogical commitment to destruction of Western civilization.
He wants Sun to allow bundled distribution of the JRE with desktop Linux distros so that people start writing mainstream Java desktop apps that can be distributed without having to package in some version of the JRE themselves. We all know that Java is great for server-side enterprise apps, but that's not the point here. Java applets are not the issue here - it's a broader issue about client side Java functionality.
The bad rep Java has on the client is a leftover from the JDK 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 days. Starting with 1.4, and with tools like the SWT, Java as a client app development platform is a feasible thing - not necessarily perfect yet, but closer than it used to be. The major impediment is Sun's excessively uptight licensing. If they want Java to succeed and want to see major penetration of Java into the desktop market, then they are shooting themselves in the foot big time.
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I'm not exactly condoning 12 year old kids watching porn, since porn generally presents a pretty distorted view of sex, but you're not really going to be able to prevent it no matter what you do. I saw plenty of porn when I was 12 or 13 and I didn't end up broken or traumatized by it. Then again, it was mostly just naked chicks suggestively posed and at the worst Hustler and some floppies filled with porn GIFs - we didn't have easy access to hard core porn movies and really nasty shit on the Internet like they do now. Which makes it all the more important to make sure your kids have a healthy understanding of sex and sexuality at a reasonable age when they start to go out there looking for it themselves anyway (at least, boys will).
You clearly don't have kids, because it is easier to explain violence than sex to them.
I understand where you're coming from on this, but this is really just the result of your own upbringing and the shame about sex that's been instilled in you. I'm not saying young kids (pre-teen) will _understand_ the reasons or subtleties involved in sex when you explain it to them, but I don't know if they'll understand any better the reasons or subtleties behind war or human brutality.
It's not necessarily easy to explain any of these things to children, but your discomfort with explaining sex is definitely not something fundamental about sex, but something societal that was instilled in you.
The thing is that Lloyds is actually a marketplace of "syndicates", not exactly a monolithic institution (at least, this is how he explained it to me). So you have to have a broker who really knows Lloyd's to figure out who the right people to approach are. And as far as I can tell, they may like taking fairly crazy sounding but actually low risk bets on actresses thighs or singer's voices, but they don't like taking higher stake bets on businesses that are hard to assess or known to be risky.
Then what about the other 1.3 billion? Basically, people are going to substitutes. What are the substitutes? Well, you can download an unauthorized copy from Kazaa - cost: $0, time: perhaps 20 minutes fucking around, downloading broken copies, redownloading until you find a good copy assuming the song is sufficiently popular. Or you can buy a legitimate copy from iTunes or other online music service: cost: somewhere between $0.80 and $1.00, time: minimal once you are signed up for the service. Now we have the REAL problem. What did people do PREVIOUSLY when they liked a song? Well, their only option was to browse over to the record store and buy a whole frigging album for 15 bucks. 15 bucks vs. less than 1 dollar. Remember, most of the music coming out of the industry is still the crap-pop with one good song and an album full of schlock.
So do I think perhaps 100 million dollars in online song sales (and whatabout all these song giveaways by Pepsi et. al.?) could explain 500+ million in lost album sales? Yes, I do. Sure, some other part of the "lost" sales may be people substituting P2P downloading for purchases, but I see less and less of that going on now among the mainstream now that the major P2P networks are so polluted (yes, you and I can figure out how to get songs, but I'm not at all convinced that a large portion of the market does anymore or has the interest in learning about the harder to use alternatives).
Then again, it can be satisfying to watch the people who fucked you over lose their jobs as a company fails. But there are usually nice people who don't deserve to lose their jobs who'll get screwed over in the process too. Revenge is sweet, but getting your old boss' job, saving a company's ass, then using this line item on the resume to get an even sweeter job is far, far better for you in the long run, and is really the best sort of revenge you can ask for (not to mention you can't put "they begged me to come back and I told them to bugger off" on your resume).
But there are some things I find ridiculous, being a resident of Taxachusetts, one of the fine states mentioned in this article. Like that great 5% "Use Tax" - they basically expect me to report something I bought off of eBay, or from Dell, and pay sales tax on it just like if I bought it from the store around the corner. I realize you say you "play fair", but do you go and add up every item you buy on the internet and report it to your state to make sure they are getting their "fair share" of that dollar they already taxed once when you earned it? I realize you may live in a more sane state than I do so this all sounds far fetched to you, but that's the reality of living here.
I won't even get into the raw insanity that is working for a New York LLC and being a Massachusetts resident who travels to New York for work frequently. If you work one day out of the year in New York, New York thinks you owe taxes on the COMPLETE total sum of the monies paid to you by the New York LLC or Corporation. Massachusetts, being slightly less insane, will actually let you count this amount against your taxes owed in Massachusetts, I believe. But I'm certainly not so honest that I plan on filing taxes in New York and figuring this out, just because I travel there and do some work there now and again. They aren't going to eat their 8.whatever percent of my income instead of just letting me pay the honest 5.whatever I owe Massachusetts.
So anyway, yes, I support paying my fair share to the state and federal government, but I don't support letting them unfairly rape me. And I honestly have never met anyone in Massachusetts who goes and adds up their out-of-state purchases for the "Use Tax".
Windows could certainly use better UI design consistency that developers actually adhered to. Linux doesn't get far enough for that to be an issue - the menus, fonts, application colors and pretty much everything that defines the basic look and feel are still different with different toolkits, and no matter how hard you try, they always seem to look ever so slightly different. Qt rendered Arial 12 doesn't look the same as Gtk rendered Arial 12. You need to tweak colors to match. Menu sizes are slightly different. This stuff causes me to want to scratch my eyeballs out before I even get to worrying about inconsistencies from app to app in the types and uses of custom widgets, location of information, etc.
Early adopters, loud opinions, and lazy journalists. Great combo.
Unfortunately, the blog comment you mention is just wrong. See my post here for the real story. The period after the 8 is either just to add to the mystery, or was originally done by a layout/production person and she liked the way it looked and kept it that way. There's no real logic to it, so stop looking for it. :)
How about naming your baby "Oops"?
She uses the number "8" in her byline, a clever device she came up with to differentiate herself from the hordes of other Asian girls named "Jennifer Lee". In fact, I believe there was actually another Jennifer Lee at her high school (Stuyvesant, in NYC, if I remember correctly) that wrote for the paper and she wanted to differentiate herself.
Lots of people have made up stories about the origins of "that wacky NY Times writer's middle initial", that her parents gave her the middle intial "8" because it's a lucky number in China or some such thing. These stories were either made up by silly people or things she once told at a party after a few beers just to see if people would actually believe them, and they have propagated over the Internet (because when you are a Circuits writer, you get geek-fans). The 8 is a creation of her own. Why 8 rather than 9 or 10? I believe because she thought it sounded cool, though the number may have some other personal significance.
So these days she may actually tell people her name is Jennifer 8. Lee because that's her byline and it's become associated with her. But it certainly wasn't her given name by her parents, and to the best of my knowledge she has never gone and changed her legal name or anything of that sort.
I think this was Google's April Fool's joke this year. I think the 1 gig email story is more likely true (though the details may be wrong, who knows).
No commute is a nice thing around here - I live in Cambridge, and worked for several years out in Lexington, and that was a "short" commute by standards around here. My current apartment is a 4-5 minute walk from the center of Harvard Square, and this is a fabulous location. I like the Kendall Square area too, especially as a place to work (much better than working out in the burbs for a city boy like myself).
But hey, if they can make the whole fusion thing work (hah, yeah, sure), maybe we'll be using fuel cells sooner than that. Though the inefficiencies in the hydrogen production process are still bad, if energy were much cheaper, I'd guess it would still make sense. I just don't think this is likely to happen in the near future.
As I remember all the negative articles were based on early access MSDN stuff (there were dozens of them at the time), so I'm open to the idea that they were all wrong. Since I don't have Office 2003 yet and I'm still running Office XP, I don't have the interest or means to verify any of this personally. If somebody would care to show me somebody's actual review of the relevant schemas and document that in fact they are complete, human and machine parseable, and do not contain big chunks of essentially unmungeable data, then that's great. Just telling me that you glanced through the schemas yourself doesn't really provide me with much information - did you write an application that parses and displays complete Microsoft Word docs with embedded Excel spreadsheet charts?
Not saying the way to make money is appealing to the ultra-rabid Linux geek or anything, but the broader set of technological trendsetters generally know better than to use IE.
Laissez faire wasn't handed to us by the gods, and it doesn't necessarily maximize utility within the nation-state to adopt that position. I don't have an answer to the other poster's challenge about providing better alternatives to the corporate structure for efficiently organizing economic resources, except to note that especially in the centers of wealth, we are moving to a service-based economy in this country. And services are often better performed in semi-collaborative trade groups or professional service corporations, like legal partnerships and medical practices. I'd love to see better structures for organizing larger, product-oriented companies, such as networks of collaborating service or trade groups that cooperate for mutual economic benefit.
I agree with some of what you say, though I think your tone goes too far in the other direction. However, this is just wrong:
Office Suite manufacturers should, in my opinion, get their act together and start making their applications compatible with each other. The author quite clearly shows a bias against Microsoft here by stating that they have no excuse for supporting the OpenOffice formats. IIRC, Microsoft Office has been around for quite a bit longer than OpenOffice, and has become a standard in its' own right.
You do realize that Open Office does publish specifications and standards for interacting with their documents, and Microsoft does not, right? Microsoft desperately wants to claim "we're using XML, so it's all 'open'", but in reality their XML "standards" are loaded with chunks of GUIDs and unparseable binary data in undocumented formats that require embedded use of other proprietary Microsoft components to access. It's insanely unfair to point a finger at OpenOffice here when they have made every effort to embrace openness and enable compatibility with MS Office at the same time and Microsoft has made every effort to keep their formats closed, make PR noise about opening their formats, and thereby reinforce their effective monopoly on office software.
Let's not insult the Iraqi people by acting like they don't deserve freedom if they didn't earn it with their own blood. Crazy Shia mullahs and brainwashed nutcases aside, any rational, educated Iraqi (and that may not be many of the people you see shooting AKs on CNN, but plenty of them exist) will tell you their country and their people are better off now than they were under Hussein and that this will in the long term be a positive step for their society.
However, we don't have much of a concept of "right" or "wrong" in physics. Newtonian physics is "wrong", but it's still incredibly useful for the vast majority of engineering work that involves calculations with day-to-day objects. And for studying the physics of pretty much anything that isn't either incredibly small or incredibly big. Somebody might come up with a better theoretical framework for understanding the effects we observe in GR and QM, but people will still use the equations and techniques from those fields since they are incredibly useful for a large number of applications outside of the craziest scenarios.
Bad theories never die - they are just relegated to the status of "useful approximation".
My basis for my statements is the testimony of American soldiers I have read. No different from the testimony of the Pakistani man's father you have read. I don't think the information that gets filtered out to me is sufficient to do anything in itself - like I said, it should all be verified by judicial hearing. I'm not sure why you think I would want to see innocent people punished - I'd much rather see every one of them go free if they are all innocent. That would shock me immensely if it were true, of course. There were certainly plenty of people shooting American soldiers in Afghanistan, and if we managed to capture all the wrong people, our soldiers would have to be blind, deaf and dumb.
Meanwhile, have fun banging on your straw man and arguing against individual phrases you take out of context.
You then make an ad hominem attack against the sincerity of my belief in principles of justice for reasons that are beyond me. I am certainly sincere in my belief that they deserve a hearing which they have not received. I've said this three fucking times now, but you keep selectively quoting my posts and taking me out of context intentionally.
You can't cite the two exceptions and call that the rule. Most of the detainees were captured wondering around the mountains in groups of Arab foreigners with guns, and yes, they all deserve some due process, but no, it's not reasonable to expect the same kind of evidentiary standards you would be able to obtain in a domestic US trial. I believe that perhaps 70-80% of them probably deserve to be locked up for the rest of their lives. The problem is identifying the other 30% that were random bystanders or armed Afghan tribesmen or whatever who should just be released back to their local authorities or homes - that's where some judicial process is required, and I certainly never suggested that I approve of the way that's been handled.
I do not support Bush by any means, nor did I really support much of the logic behind the war in Iraq. I don't know how we should deal with people like the Guantanamo Bay detainees, except that we should have some sort of due process for them, probably joint judicial proceedings between the US and Afghanistan. But the analogy to extraditing warez traders from Australia is pretty darned thin, since they weren't shooting an AK-47 at American soldiers trying to oust a terrorist organization that was holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan, and haven't demonstrated both a willingness to take up arms and an idelogical commitment to destruction of Western civilization.
The bad rep Java has on the client is a leftover from the JDK 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 days. Starting with 1.4, and with tools like the SWT, Java as a client app development platform is a feasible thing - not necessarily perfect yet, but closer than it used to be. The major impediment is Sun's excessively uptight licensing. If they want Java to succeed and want to see major penetration of Java into the desktop market, then they are shooting themselves in the foot big time.