I'm using an older laptop that has several black marks indelibly marked on its screen. When this article's summary appeared on my screen, one of the black marks was so positioned to make the summary read: "Microsoft released an update for its various foolbars".

Ok, what is it with people who write about technical subjects that they think they have to use ridiculous analogies?

"if this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second"?? Yes, and if this was a goat it would have a thousand young. WTF. This was a Google blog post, not some story-for-the-terminally-stupid from The Daily Show ferchrissakes. The author even measures storage capacity in the universally used miles-of-iPods.

What is the sound of one vein popping?

Heh Heh Heh. I tell you I haff master plan! Now vee blow up zee nuke! No more Moose and Sqvirrel!
Booris! Vas Master Plan to set off nuke oaffer oil vell?
Off COURSE set off nuke oaffer oil vell! Vat else vee tell US?
Fearless Leader's zubmarine vas over oil vell, Booris.
Hoo Boy.

Bomb, this is Lt. Doolittle. You are *not* to detonate in the bomb bay. I repeat, you are NOT to detonate in the bomb bay!

What makes the Internet so threatening to incumbent companies is the way in which it's layered and platform-independent. New protocols can be deployed on the existing network as long as they conform to its rules. Flash is different, in that it is not as open as the Internet's underlying layers, but the way in which it threatens Apple's vertically-integrated hold on everything from the user to the bandwidth provider operates in the same way. It's a mistake to focus on the killer app -- the real threat is a platform that enables the distribution of a range of applications, some of which have not yet been imagined.

Also IE and the a lot of things else.

You know... the Only reason People used Windows was because of the apps (no serious games for Linux other than a selected few) and lock-in.

Now that games are becomming multi-platform and Steam and Source are comming to the Mac (and Linux! It somewhat runs already!) there will be no reason anyone would still use Windows.

And suddenly I can't for the life of me figure out why people defend MS and Windows and say it's so muc h more awesome... :S

When we're talking about the "collapse" of the Maya, we usually mean the "collapse" of the Mayan classic civilization and that usually means the abandonment circa AD800 - 1000 of what might have been cities but which were, in my opinion, which is always correct, because I speak loudly in restaurants, really big haciendas that put The Ponderosa to shame. This has nothing to do with the disappearance of the Maya people (Van Daniken aside) or the disappearance of their language or culture. Hell, the Maya held out against the Spanish at Tayasal until 1697!

On top of that, we're usually confining our "collapse" or "disappearance" talk to the later sites like Tikal, Copan, Palenque and Chichen Itza while ignoring the older "collapse"s at El Mirador and Nakbe which followed the exact same pattern but happened hundreds of years before. We also like to utterly ignore Lamanai which happily rolled with no "collapse" at all.

To get a good feel for how the Maya "collapse" really happened try "The Fall Of The Ancient Maya" by David Webster. It's a very readable popular survey of a hideously complex subject. I'd give you the Amazon.com link but unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain it.

Speaking of D&D, Baldur's Gate pulled this off really well. They did a damned fine job of allowing you to kill pretty much whatever you want, if you could suffer the consequences and it wouldn't ABSOLUTELY RUIN THE STORYLINE. I can only think of a fistful of people that this would apply to, usually those who would overpower you in a heartbeat anyway if you played through the story without cheating.

That said, you could go wander around and do whatever, or go back to the main quest and events would pull you through to the same conclusion because of your relative uniqueness in the world, good or evil. It wasn't so much AI as accounting for "what would happen if you killed this guy?"

A Linux-based but not totally open OS that only runs dinky JS-based applets?

A better mobile OS already exists, it's Maemo 5, you can install/compile/run/distribute/sell whatever the hell you want, no strings attached. It's mostly open source with a few closed-source components (some of the included apps and drivers) but its successor will be 100% FOSS.

Why IE9 Will Not NATIVELY Support Other Codecs Than H.264.

From the article:

I love linux and think MS is rapidly falling behind, but let's not go overboard here.

There weren't really any good anti-hacking laws on the books in 1988. The Internet wasn't really on the public radar, and Morris did a lot to change that. I remember this time well because I was 20 years old in 1988 and was doing a lot of the same things Morris was. For anyone who could read a Unix man page, Internet security back then was a complete joke. Every system from pretty much every vendor was trivially hackable from the second the coax was attached. The thing that Morris did that the rest of us didn't was hack together some shell scripts to automate the process.

Anyway, when the worm hit, there were a lot of questions over what he could be charged with. I think the whole "unauthorized access of a computing device" was drafted in response to that. At that time, My cohorts and I were on fairly good "friendly enemy" terms with the college sysadmins, and would dutifully notify them (i.e. brag) whenever we found a new exploit. However, starting right about the time the Morris worm hit, attitudes about our activity started changing rapidly. Laws were drafted, at the Federal and state level. There were mutters from higher up about "teaching those kids a lesson". The sysadmins didn't smile and wave anymore when we passed each other. Computers were starting to become important to "regular people".

Personally, I wised up, and found more creative uses for my talents. I also got my own sysadmin job, which changed my outlook regarding hacking greatly :). But I would have fully expected, two years after the worm, to have faced far harsher treatment that Morris had, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to blame class-ism. It was a time of great change, in technology, attitudes, and criminal statutes.

From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms. I've read some rumors about Google supposedly pushing their own open-source codec, but I haven't seen any actual products. Do they exist? Is there an open alternative that can compete with H.264 on a wide range of platforms?

Priests and/or pastors are not even the biggest threat to children it's teachers, at least once a week another teacher is in the news for molesting one of their students.

Tick tick tick tick whir whir (30% done) tick tick tick tick tick tick whir whir (56% done) Tick tick tick tick whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir (99%) whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir whir-whir Not ready reading drive A:. Abort, Retry, Ignore

Die floppies so I can piss on your grave.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-122

We just GIVE the FCC the power to regulate (bitchslap) troublemaker isps like comcast.

We don't have to. The FCC can do that part itself.

The only thing that this ruling really says is that the current FCC regulations don't allow the FCC to do net neutrality. But since the FCC writes its own regulations, all it has to do is issue a new set (using the procedures required by itself (public comment periods, that sort of thing)) and they can then do net neutrality to their hearts' content.