Yeah, that's the ticket. Vote in order to clear your conscience, not to help the country.
You were in a battleground state, asshole. Last time Gore lost Florida by what? A couple hundred votes? Probably the closest squeeze in the history of American democracy, and yet you decided to throw your vote away.
"But both political parties are the same!!!!" No, they're not. Kerry would have been a mediocre president, but he would have been a far sight better than Bush.
And then, to top it all off, you move away and wash your hands of it. "Well, I tried my best, voted for some extremist candidate who had literally zero chance of winning and he didn't win, time to expatriate."
Your vote could have literally determined the president of the United States. But instead, you thought it would be more "useful" to "encourage" Harry Brown by making sure he got 642 votes instead of 641. Well done.
Take a lesson from the Republicans. Business interests, religious conservatives, and strict constitutionalists all hang together, combining their agendas until they've got enough support to take over the entire government. Meanwhile, the other side would rather bicker and splinter, because they think the difference between a Green candidate and a Democrat is more important than the difference between a Democrat and Republican. Hopeless idealism won't get you jack shit. Hopeful pragmatism is how you make a difference.
Has the US control really been so onerous to date? Any huge issues of censorship or repression?
No?
Then I don't exactly see why control should be handed over from an organization that's doing a perfectly fine job of it to some ambiguous international organization. Or is the goal to make the Internet as efficient and quick-moving as the UN?
So your saying that people LIKE it when someone promotes their own agenda, and DISLIKE it when someone promotes an agenda diametrically opposed to their own? Scandalous!
So where can I download it?
on
Open Sources 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Seems kind of hypocritical to me, all these opensource "gurus" allowing their essays to be reproduced under what I assume is the old copyright scheme many of them claim to hate.
Sure, hypertext could be done in different ways. Gotcha. But right now, HTML/XML seems to be doing the job just fine. So all those potential alternates are utterly irrelevant, unless you give some concrete reason why one of them would be preferable.
The status quo changes, but not just for the hell of it. The Internet COULD have been done differently, just like Kerry COULD have won the election. That and 99 cents will buy you a song in iTunes. You want people to pay attention to your "rambling," come up with a superior, lucid, and non-bullshit alternative to that status quo.
A related question: why do Slashdot posters get so upset about stuff like the Patriot Act and VOIP wiretapping? I mean, the government has stated that it only wants to use those capabilities to find terrorists and criminals, and how could that upset anybody?
But oh, I forgot. Google is ever so much more trustworthy than an elected government. Whereas the government can't be trusted to safeguard our liberties, we can all rest assured that Google will never use the entire works they've indexed for anything "bad." Because, I mean, scanning in entire libraries is SUCH an improvement over just typing in keywords like a REAL card catalog. Otherwise, people wouldn't know about the one-paragraph mention of $KEYWORD on page 512!
Actually, according to a friend of mine who works as an energy consultant, only about 50 people ever died because of Chernobyl - including death from radiation poisoning, cancer, and so on. Friend might be full of it, though.
"...They assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that..."
To be fair, the other major OS options are either free (Linux) or built specifically for a hardware architecture that only the OS manufacturer produces (MacOS). So Microsoft is the only one who HAS to demand all that crap.
1. Nobody wants to read books on a computer. 2. Books are already available for free "rental" from your local public library.
So why, exactly, would I want to spend ANY time scanning books into text files, when the result would be an inferior copy that I had to view through an inferior display, when the book is essentially free in the first place?
"Very few people of the ultra-conservative persuasion, however, need to be persuaded - they already are fanatically against video games that contain violence, sex, etc."
Yeah, but they may not be VIRULENTLY against video games.
I think Thompson is proceeding on the assumption that there are plenty of fellow whacko conservatives out there who just don't know enough about video games to be properly outraged. So he pulls PR stunts like this, in the hopes that those untapped crazies will read the headlines and join his crusade.
I think he's doing this just right, rhetorically. There's no point in going after a more rational or moderate audience, because rational and moderate people realize his argument is crap. He wants to stir up the crazies. And Lord knows it's been a successful strategy in the past.
I've been hearing this touted for over a decade, now. "In the future, your PC will turn on as quickly as your TV!"
The thing is, I don't care how long my computer takes to boot. With decent sleep and hibernate modes, I don't need to boot more than a couple times a month anyway - and that's usually rebooting for software updates. (If you're wondering, this is on a PowerBook G4 laptop).
It takes my computer under a second to wake up from sleep mode. How much more "instant" does it need to get?
Now, those quick-loading programs, on the other hand, do sound appealing...
I don't really see your point. Are you saying that 800,000 people living in extreme poverty and the cultural annihilation of Tibet AREN'T bad things? Or perhaps that these are minor issues compared to the glory that is a high-altitude railway system?
Just as you see a bunch of posts related to the US government every time there's a NASA article, you're gonna see the same for the Chinese space agency. I can't imagine anything fairer.
And just FYI, disliking the Chinese government is in no way "racist." As far as I can tell (and in the posts you quoted), nobody even mentions race or ethnicity (except in reference to the Tibetan culture being exterminated). I guess your idea is that since China has Asian people in it, a criticism of that government is an implied criticism of the Asian race? Would you say I'm prejudiced against Anglo-Saxons if I criticized England's foreign policy? If there's anything "disappointing" about Slashdot, it's that idiotic assertions like that will get you an Insightful rating.
In "A Modest Proposal," Swift published a "suggestion" that was actually an exaggeration of his political opponents' viewpoints, which allowed him to cleverly point out the viciousness of that rhetoric. What made it so clever was that someone who didn't know Swift wouldn't be able to tell whether he was a serious guy just outside the mainstream of public opinion, or if he meant it ironically.
Now, Jack ain't too bright. He probably vaguely remembered "A Modest Proposal" from high school, and figured he'd do the same thing. He'd propose a video game so violent that it would look completely outrageous to the average reader, and in doing so he would point out his ideological opponents' innate viciousness.
Unfortunately, he's a grandstanding idiot. Jack couldn't just publish something zany like that and risk having people think he really IS in favor of violent video games. So he muddies the issue by lacing his "suggestion" with a tirade about how evil the video game industry really is. This ruins the most interesting and subtle aspect of Swift's parody, since it's obvious where Thompson really stands.
But still, not quite enough. Jack needed something headline-grabbing, something that would make him look good... of course! He could offer to donate money to charity! After all, no sane publisher would actually follow through with his idea, and it would let him get a bunch of headlines like "Lawyer Offers $10,000 to Charity, but Game Companies Won't Deliver." Perfect!
Problems with Jack's reasoning: 1. He's an asshole. 2. He completely ruined the parodic aspects of his piece. Now it just looks violent and muddled, much like Mr. Thompson himself. 3. He didn't realize how easy it is to make a game mod, and he ALSO apparently didn't realize that game designers DON'T THINK THEY'RE TRAINING KIDS TO BECOME ZOMBIE ASSASSINS. So a modder group was able to hack together something that fit his requirements pretty quickly, and most gamers (even those who'd never read Jack's diatribe) would just find it darkly ironic. Because we realize IT'S A GAME. 4. He's not willing to fork over the money. Reason: See #1.
But you know what? Despite all this, the only news most non-gamers will ever see about this little escapade is the original "Lawyer offers 10 grand for charity" headlines. His retraction, his duplicity, his sheer idiocy... all will remain occulted by the sensational leaning of mainstream media.
So, well done, Jack. You screwed over a bunch of kids, stirred up some hysteria, proposed a lot of violence, and got decent PR in the process. Must be a good day for you.
Any given individual is only called up for one iteration. Therefore, if you survive the current iteration, you're safe.
It sounds like you're going with the standard 35/36 chance for this. But the fact remains that about 90% of the people who participate in this experiment will die. When you first find out you've been selected, how can you have both a 97% chance to survive and a 10% chance to survive?
There is a land populated by a lot of people and ruled by an insane but all-powerful tyrant. One day, that tyrant decides to play a very special game. He sends proclamations all over the land announcing the following upcoming "event":
"Some time in the future, I will summon one randomly selected peasant to my palace. He will come into my room, where I will be waiting with a pair of dice and a firing squad. I will roll the dice, and if I roll double sixes, he will be shot.
"If he is NOT shot, however, I will release him, but make him swear not to tell anyone else that he participated in this event. The next day, I will summon TEN new people to my palace, and repeat the procedure for the whole group: one roll of the dice, they all die if it's double-sixes, and they all go free otherwise. If they go free, the next day I summon in a group of 100.
"The cycle will keep repeating, each iteration with ten times as many subjects as the previous iteration, until I finally shoot someone (or a group of someones)."
Now, look at this and you'll realize that only about 10% of the people who participate in this experiment will survive. The math doesn't work out exactly, but since each iteration contains ten times as many people as the previous iteration, it's ABOUT that much. For example, if the tyrant finally rolls double-sixes on the fourth iteration of the experiment, 1000 people are killed while 111 people from previous iterations will have gone free.
On the other hand, it would seem that the people in any given iteration have a 35/36 chance of survival, since there's only a 1/36 chance that the tyrant will roll double-sixes for that group.
So let's say you live in this country. You get a knock on your door one day and find out you've been summoned to be a part of the current iteration. What is your chance of survival, 35/36 (~97%) or ~10%?
Does this chance of survival change when you're actually standing before the tyrant and he's about to roll the dice? If so, why?
(P.S.: If there is one "right" answer to this, I haven't heard it. I heard this puzzle in a philosophy class, and it has something to do with anthropic reasoning, if that's at all helpful.)
(P.P.S.: Assume that the dictator doesn't run out of people before the experiment is over. Really, this problem is less about the fiddly numbers than the basic probabilistic concepts involved.)
Just read an article stating that they've found remnants of some 9000-year-old beer at a Chinese archaeological dig. The interesting thing is, I'm pretty sure agriculture has only been around for about 10,000 years, and there's no reason to think this is the oldest beer around...
Could it be that beer caused civilization? This impartial observer believes, almost certainly yes.
Last I heard from the Intel OSX leaks a while back, you could just install Windows on the systems with no problems. I don't imagine there would even be any legal issues with this, as long as your Windows copy is legit.
So yeah, I'm guessing you'll be able to buy a Mac, buy a copy of Windows, and with a bit of fiddling, install it so you can choose to boot to Windows.
Even if this isn't possible, I'm sure programs like WINE will be running a LOT faster with the Intel Macs, so you could probably run your Windows programs through those.
Remember why iTMS got so popular in the first place? People were used to downloading free songs from Napster et al, but iTMS offered higher-quality, less buggy, legal music files at a time when the RIAA was suing people left and right.
Now, the TV shows they're selling are competing with free torrents. But unlike their music store, the iTunes video files are much lower quality than the free option, and the legality doesn't matter so much since (to my knowledge) there hasn't been a huge public campaign of suing people for downloading TV episodes. And to top it off, the price is about the same as retail DVDs.
Why would I pay for this? If I want to watch Lost, I'll get the torrent and watch it at decent resolution. If I'm a stickler for legality, I'll wait a couple months and rent the DVDs for $3 apiece (or buy the set for $40).
I'm hoping that this is only an initial foray, and that eventually Apple will be selling significantly higher-res video on a lot more shows. Until then, Netflix and BitTorrent are doing just fine by me.
Yeah, becaause it was those damn Newtonian special interest groups holding back Einsteinian physics.
So tell me again, what is the "political motivation" of those climatologists who believe in global warming? They want to believe we're poisoning our atmosphere because... they hate convenience? Seems to me the only side with something to gain is the anti-warming crowd.
I'm primarily a Mac user myself, but you've got to recognize that 90% or more of potential Linux customers are people who are currently experienced with Windows.
Is the Windows UI ideal? Of course not. But it's what people know. So unless you've got something that's a clear and very intuitive improvement on Windows, you're probably better just sticking with the Windows de facto "standard."
Mac OSX is actually a good example. They've got all sorts of cool and intuitive ways to toggle between different windows, but they also stuck Alt+Tab in there (well, Apple+Tab) so that Windows guys would feel comfortable.
Of course, this is all assuming that the goal of Linux on the desktop is to win converts from Windows and other OS's. It the goal is simply to make the UI as advantageous as possible for a few intrepid and adventurous folks, by all means, have fun.
That would be good for some Windows users, I suppose. But it's hardly going to be beneficial for Mac/Linux users, Firefox users, Opera users, and anyone else who's not running IE.
If you're going "semi-fat," why not just go all the way and use Outlook? The only inherent benefit to webmail is the fact that you can access it from almost any computer, and a "semi-fat" system would sacrifice that anyway.
Yeah, they're gonna be huge, possibly flash-based ads in the release version.
Google's advertising may be intrusive (thanks to their evil email scanning), but at least it's low-key and doesn't hog my precious screen real estate and bandwidth.
Other than that, though, the interface does look pretty slick. Hopefully it'll encourage Google to improve their own interface a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's the ticket. Vote in order to clear your conscience, not to help the country.
You were in a battleground state, asshole. Last time Gore lost Florida by what? A couple hundred votes? Probably the closest squeeze in the history of American democracy, and yet you decided to throw your vote away.
"But both political parties are the same!!!!" No, they're not. Kerry would have been a mediocre president, but he would have been a far sight better than Bush.
And then, to top it all off, you move away and wash your hands of it. "Well, I tried my best, voted for some extremist candidate who had literally zero chance of winning and he didn't win, time to expatriate."
Your vote could have literally determined the president of the United States. But instead, you thought it would be more "useful" to "encourage" Harry Brown by making sure he got 642 votes instead of 641. Well done.
Take a lesson from the Republicans. Business interests, religious conservatives, and strict constitutionalists all hang together, combining their agendas until they've got enough support to take over the entire government. Meanwhile, the other side would rather bicker and splinter, because they think the difference between a Green candidate and a Democrat is more important than the difference between a Democrat and Republican. Hopeless idealism won't get you jack shit. Hopeful pragmatism is how you make a difference.
Has the US control really been so onerous to date? Any huge issues of censorship or repression?
No?
Then I don't exactly see why control should be handed over from an organization that's doing a perfectly fine job of it to some ambiguous international organization. Or is the goal to make the Internet as efficient and quick-moving as the UN?
So your saying that people LIKE it when someone promotes their own agenda, and DISLIKE it when someone promotes an agenda diametrically opposed to their own? Scandalous!
Seems kind of hypocritical to me, all these opensource "gurus" allowing their essays to be reproduced under what I assume is the old copyright scheme many of them claim to hate.
I don't get it. What are you SUGGESTING?
Sure, hypertext could be done in different ways. Gotcha. But right now, HTML/XML seems to be doing the job just fine. So all those potential alternates are utterly irrelevant, unless you give some concrete reason why one of them would be preferable.
The status quo changes, but not just for the hell of it. The Internet COULD have been done differently, just like Kerry COULD have won the election. That and 99 cents will buy you a song in iTunes. You want people to pay attention to your "rambling," come up with a superior, lucid, and non-bullshit alternative to that status quo.
A related question: why do Slashdot posters get so upset about stuff like the Patriot Act and VOIP wiretapping? I mean, the government has stated that it only wants to use those capabilities to find terrorists and criminals, and how could that upset anybody?
But oh, I forgot. Google is ever so much more trustworthy than an elected government. Whereas the government can't be trusted to safeguard our liberties, we can all rest assured that Google will never use the entire works they've indexed for anything "bad." Because, I mean, scanning in entire libraries is SUCH an improvement over just typing in keywords like a REAL card catalog. Otherwise, people wouldn't know about the one-paragraph mention of $KEYWORD on page 512!
Actually, according to a friend of mine who works as an energy consultant, only about 50 people ever died because of Chernobyl - including death from radiation poisoning, cancer, and so on. Friend might be full of it, though.
"...They assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that..."
To be fair, the other major OS options are either free (Linux) or built specifically for a hardware architecture that only the OS manufacturer produces (MacOS). So Microsoft is the only one who HAS to demand all that crap.
Important differences:
1. Nobody wants to read books on a computer.
2. Books are already available for free "rental" from your local public library.
So why, exactly, would I want to spend ANY time scanning books into text files, when the result would be an inferior copy that I had to view through an inferior display, when the book is essentially free in the first place?
I am a freelance newspaper reporter, and I use a Mac.
My mother is a newspaper editor, and she also uses a Mac.
THEREFORE, we can extrapolate from my family that 100% of reporters use Macintosh computers.
That's some mass-media-quality statistical research right there!
"Very few people of the ultra-conservative persuasion, however, need to be persuaded - they already are fanatically against video games that contain violence, sex, etc."
Yeah, but they may not be VIRULENTLY against video games.
I think Thompson is proceeding on the assumption that there are plenty of fellow whacko conservatives out there who just don't know enough about video games to be properly outraged. So he pulls PR stunts like this, in the hopes that those untapped crazies will read the headlines and join his crusade.
I think he's doing this just right, rhetorically. There's no point in going after a more rational or moderate audience, because rational and moderate people realize his argument is crap. He wants to stir up the crazies. And Lord knows it's been a successful strategy in the past.
You guys get to work on "chili" and "defense", and maybe we'll get cracking on "aluminium," OK?
I've been hearing this touted for over a decade, now. "In the future, your PC will turn on as quickly as your TV!"
The thing is, I don't care how long my computer takes to boot. With decent sleep and hibernate modes, I don't need to boot more than a couple times a month anyway - and that's usually rebooting for software updates. (If you're wondering, this is on a PowerBook G4 laptop).
It takes my computer under a second to wake up from sleep mode. How much more "instant" does it need to get?
Now, those quick-loading programs, on the other hand, do sound appealing...
I don't really see your point. Are you saying that 800,000 people living in extreme poverty and the cultural annihilation of Tibet AREN'T bad things? Or perhaps that these are minor issues compared to the glory that is a high-altitude railway system?
Just as you see a bunch of posts related to the US government every time there's a NASA article, you're gonna see the same for the Chinese space agency. I can't imagine anything fairer.
And just FYI, disliking the Chinese government is in no way "racist." As far as I can tell (and in the posts you quoted), nobody even mentions race or ethnicity (except in reference to the Tibetan culture being exterminated). I guess your idea is that since China has Asian people in it, a criticism of that government is an implied criticism of the Asian race? Would you say I'm prejudiced against Anglo-Saxons if I criticized England's foreign policy? If there's anything "disappointing" about Slashdot, it's that idiotic assertions like that will get you an Insightful rating.
is Hope!
Yep, it's not too hard to figure out.
In "A Modest Proposal," Swift published a "suggestion" that was actually an exaggeration of
his political opponents' viewpoints, which allowed him to cleverly point out the viciousness of that rhetoric. What made it so clever was that someone who didn't know Swift wouldn't be able to tell whether he was a serious guy just outside the mainstream of public opinion, or if he meant it ironically.
Now, Jack ain't too bright. He probably vaguely remembered "A Modest Proposal" from high school, and figured he'd do the same thing. He'd propose a video game so violent that it would look completely outrageous to the average reader, and in doing so he would point out his ideological opponents' innate viciousness.
Unfortunately, he's a grandstanding idiot. Jack couldn't just publish something zany like that and risk having people think he really IS in favor of violent video games. So he muddies the issue by lacing his "suggestion" with a tirade about how evil the video game industry really is. This ruins the most interesting and subtle aspect of Swift's parody, since it's obvious where Thompson really stands.
But still, not quite enough. Jack needed something headline-grabbing, something that would make him look good... of course! He could offer to donate money to charity! After all, no sane publisher would actually follow through with his idea, and it would let him get a bunch of headlines like "Lawyer Offers $10,000 to Charity, but Game Companies Won't Deliver." Perfect!
Problems with Jack's reasoning:
1. He's an asshole.
2. He completely ruined the parodic aspects of his piece. Now it just looks violent and muddled, much like Mr. Thompson himself.
3. He didn't realize how easy it is to make a game mod, and he ALSO apparently didn't realize that game designers DON'T THINK THEY'RE TRAINING KIDS TO BECOME ZOMBIE ASSASSINS. So a modder group was able to hack together something that fit his requirements pretty quickly, and most gamers (even those who'd never read Jack's diatribe) would just find it darkly ironic. Because we realize IT'S A GAME.
4. He's not willing to fork over the money. Reason: See #1.
But you know what? Despite all this, the only news most non-gamers will ever see about this little escapade is the original "Lawyer offers 10 grand for charity" headlines. His retraction, his duplicity, his sheer idiocy... all will remain occulted by the sensational leaning of mainstream media.
So, well done, Jack. You screwed over a bunch of kids, stirred up some hysteria, proposed a lot of violence, and got decent PR in the process. Must be a good day for you.
Any given individual is only called up for one iteration. Therefore, if you survive the current iteration, you're safe. It sounds like you're going with the standard 35/36 chance for this. But the fact remains that about 90% of the people who participate in this experiment will die. When you first find out you've been selected, how can you have both a 97% chance to survive and a 10% chance to survive?
But bear with be.
There is a land populated by a lot of people and ruled by an insane but all-powerful tyrant. One day, that tyrant decides to play a very special game. He sends proclamations all over the land announcing the following upcoming "event":
"Some time in the future, I will summon one randomly selected peasant to my palace. He will come into my room, where I will be waiting with a pair of dice and a firing squad. I will roll the dice, and if I roll double sixes, he will be shot.
"If he is NOT shot, however, I will release him, but make him swear not to tell anyone else that he participated in this event. The next day, I will summon TEN new people to my palace, and repeat the procedure for the whole group: one roll of the dice, they all die if it's double-sixes, and they all go free otherwise. If they go free, the next day I summon in a group of 100.
"The cycle will keep repeating, each iteration with ten times as many subjects as the previous iteration, until I finally shoot someone (or a group of someones)."
Now, look at this and you'll realize that only about 10% of the people who participate in this experiment will survive. The math doesn't work out exactly, but since each iteration contains ten times as many people as the previous iteration, it's ABOUT that much. For example, if the tyrant finally rolls double-sixes on the fourth iteration of the experiment, 1000 people are killed while 111 people from previous iterations will have gone free.
On the other hand, it would seem that the people in any given iteration have a 35/36 chance of survival, since there's only a 1/36 chance that the tyrant will roll double-sixes for that group.
So let's say you live in this country. You get a knock on your door one day and find out you've been summoned to be a part of the current iteration. What is your chance of survival, 35/36 (~97%) or ~10%?
Does this chance of survival change when you're actually standing before the tyrant and he's about to roll the dice? If so, why?
(P.S.: If there is one "right" answer to this, I haven't heard it. I heard this puzzle in a philosophy class, and it has something to do with anthropic reasoning, if that's at all helpful.)
(P.P.S.: Assume that the dictator doesn't run out of people before the experiment is over. Really, this problem is less about the fiddly numbers than the basic probabilistic concepts involved.)
Just read an article stating that they've found remnants of some 9000-year-old beer at a Chinese archaeological dig. The interesting thing is, I'm pretty sure agriculture has only been around for about 10,000 years, and there's no reason to think this is the oldest beer around... Could it be that beer caused civilization? This impartial observer believes, almost certainly yes.
Last I heard from the Intel OSX leaks a while back, you could just install Windows on the systems with no problems. I don't imagine there would even be any legal issues with this, as long as your Windows copy is legit.
So yeah, I'm guessing you'll be able to buy a Mac, buy a copy of Windows, and with a bit of fiddling, install it so you can choose to boot to Windows.
Even if this isn't possible, I'm sure programs like WINE will be running a LOT faster with the Intel Macs, so you could probably run your Windows programs through those.
Remember why iTMS got so popular in the first place? People were used to downloading free songs from Napster et al, but iTMS offered higher-quality, less buggy, legal music files at a time when the RIAA was suing people left and right.
Now, the TV shows they're selling are competing with free torrents. But unlike their music store, the iTunes video files are much lower quality than the free option, and the legality doesn't matter so much since (to my knowledge) there hasn't been a huge public campaign of suing people for downloading TV episodes. And to top it off, the price is about the same as retail DVDs.
Why would I pay for this? If I want to watch Lost, I'll get the torrent and watch it at decent resolution. If I'm a stickler for legality, I'll wait a couple months and rent the DVDs for $3 apiece (or buy the set for $40).
I'm hoping that this is only an initial foray, and that eventually Apple will be selling significantly higher-res video on a lot more shows. Until then, Netflix and BitTorrent are doing just fine by me.
Yeah, becaause it was those damn Newtonian special interest groups holding back Einsteinian physics.
So tell me again, what is the "political motivation" of those climatologists who believe in global warming? They want to believe we're poisoning our atmosphere because... they hate convenience? Seems to me the only side with something to gain is the anti-warming crowd.
I'm primarily a Mac user myself, but you've got to recognize that 90% or more of potential Linux customers are people who are currently experienced with Windows.
Is the Windows UI ideal? Of course not. But it's what people know. So unless you've got something that's a clear and very intuitive improvement on Windows, you're probably better just sticking with the Windows de facto "standard."
Mac OSX is actually a good example. They've got all sorts of cool and intuitive ways to toggle between different windows, but they also stuck Alt+Tab in there (well, Apple+Tab) so that Windows guys would feel comfortable.
Of course, this is all assuming that the goal of Linux on the desktop is to win converts from Windows and other OS's. It the goal is simply to make the UI as advantageous as possible for a few intrepid and adventurous folks, by all means, have fun.
That would be good for some Windows users, I suppose. But it's hardly going to be beneficial for Mac/Linux users, Firefox users, Opera users, and anyone else who's not running IE.
If you're going "semi-fat," why not just go all the way and use Outlook? The only inherent benefit to webmail is the fact that you can access it from almost any computer, and a "semi-fat" system would sacrifice that anyway.
Yeah, they're gonna be huge, possibly flash-based ads in the release version.
Google's advertising may be intrusive (thanks to their evil email scanning), but at least it's low-key and doesn't hog my precious screen real estate and bandwidth.
Other than that, though, the interface does look pretty slick. Hopefully it'll encourage Google to improve their own interface a bit.