All of your plug-ins communicate with a centrally controlled authority.

No not funny, but it is scary how the people in the world's 2nd largest nuclear power appear to be so far beyond the normal rule of law.

So the third option is

3. Have Yahoo team up with an already convicted monopoly (MS) to help stop Google becoming an monopoly

Making MS stronger doesn't exactly help the consumer or do anything to weaken MS' already existing monopoly on the desktop (as found by the previous DoJ investigation).

Rock, Hard place, Alaska in February

Today the Union of Wise Men complained about the Hubble advent calendar and released the following statement

"How on earth are we meant to follow a star if using Hubble we can now see billions of the buggers and makes it clear that rather than being Wise men we are in fact just gullible fools who are clinging to an outdated set of beliefs and primitive ideas on how the Universe operates. We insist that the Hubble advent calendar and telescope are shutdown immediately in order to prevent our beliefs in star following being ridiculed as a result of this vicious use of information. The Union of Wise Men is in favour of scientific endeavour as long as it doesn't imply that star following is a silly way of finding things."

The Union of Wise Men also denied that Star following tended to happen after they staggered out of a pub drunk and went "oooh look at the pretty star".

Brilliantly "I CANN but I shouldn't" manages to win the dumbest, stupidest, most pointless idea of the whole sodding year.

I mean just having a "standard" of I don't know VCF and using MIMEtypes from a web page would give you the ability to do this sort of connectivity address book stuff within the existing infrastructure. Now the idea is that everyone should register an equivalent .tel (errrr how do they do that when there are different companies at the .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .fr etc addresses).

Quite astonishingly badly stupid and I applaud their genius by making sure it will be in everyone's mind as the "worst idea of 2008" is compiled. The only person who might be happy about this is the 2000-2007 undisputed winning partnership of Bush/Cheney for their "Threatening China", "What Torture?" "What WMD?" "Mission Accomplished", "What problems in Iraq?" and many other household favourites.

As my mother said "Just because 'you can' doesn't mean 'you should'". I propose a name change to ICANN to "Please god no we can't be trusted with this responsibility"

The aim of a really good degree (as opposed to a lecture driven box ticking one) is to be cruel, you want to feel that your head is going to explode and that your subject really is an absolute bitch.

Then you graduate and find out the real world is easier than the theory.

Cruelty is important in a good education to make you achieve in the real world. An easy flow through degree gets you the cert but gives you unrealistic expectation of how hard the real world can be.

Personally my degree was a mind bending bitch of mumbling lecturers and impossible (literally in some cases) questions that covered everything from quantum mechanics "basics" and abstract computing theory through to how to dope a transistor.

It was cruel, it was unusual... it was great.
 

Question: Where can I find a Reading Guide to AI Design & Neural Networks

Answer: Why do you want to AI design & Neural Networks?

Question: Because I want to learn.

Answer: Will learn AI design & neural networks make you happy

Question: Yes

There you go. Now the question is whether Slashdot beats the Turing test on this one.

Seriously folks, can't the greatest power in the world today do some form of prioritisation? Free internet access, brilliant a free utility, a basic fundamental right of every american guaranteed by the constitution and our founding fathers.

Free Healthcare of course is a communist plot to subvert the country and destroy everything America stands for.

Free Healthcare should be a right, the internet should be a utility just like power and water... something that you pay for.

Server side the savings are pretty obvious, especially around maintenance contracts. On the desktop its much harder as you have all the transition and training costs. Looking at things like SugarCRM, rather than Salesforce.com, is a grey area as you have to pay for the implementation rather than just renting.

Oh hang on its Slashdot and we aren't going to worry about the actual business change, implementation or management side of it, we just want to see two list prices compared and be able to go "OSS is free".

The crunch will help OSS, especially as a CapEx reduction strategy. That is the sales pitch even if it increases the OpEx as right now Cash is king. If you can build a case that does OpEx and CapEx then you are completely sorted.

Remember all those adverts with an acorn that grows into an oak tree and some voice over about safe investments that flourish?

Yes folks it turns out the banks really were just investing money in acorns and have now created an "acorn bubble" which has driven all of the squirrels into poverty.

Simple explanation really.

Like most people in IT I spend a certain part of the year helping out those less fortunate than myself. Namely all the friends, friends of the wife, some bloke I met in the pub and the school in getting their computers to work. Most recently I fixed a couple of laptops and an internet connection, one was on XP the other on Vista, the wife asked to have her (XP) PC "look like" her husbands as she like the look of the interface. When I said it was a different operating system she said "Isn't it Windows then?"

The point is of course that it is Windows and the difference between XP and Vista for most users does just come down to the pretty window manager... until stuff doesn't work. The XP box was back-online in under 10 minutes, the Vista box took me longer due to the wonderful UAC and a driver problem.

Most of the time however I feel like a Mac salesman, I turn up with my Mac (the trouble shooting box) run all the tests and have them thinking "ooooh that must be hard to use because its so powerful and techy" then let them play around with it for a few minutes. I'd say that around 50% of those people I've supported this year who are looking at replacements are now looking at a Mac.

Now a Slashdot poll on what is the correct payment for these unofficial support calls (often at a party or other social function) would be good. Right now I'm getting around two bottles of wine and a decent meal out of it.

Come on.... "Dark Energy" this should have everyone wearing some form of mask and a black uniform with just a simple white spark on it or something. We complain about not getting kids into science and then when we get something with one of the coolest sounding names around we make it into something dull and boring.

"Dark Energy has been around for 13 billion years but no-one has been able to harness it. Do you have what it takes to join the Legion of Dark Scientists?"

Part of the issue here is the meaning of the word capable. Balmer has already said that Vista isn't really a capable operating system (or at least wasn't when launched) so surely the argument therefore is that a machine that is incapable of running Vista is therefore getting exactly the same experience (or better) than someone who is actually running Vista.

Thus actually Vista Capable is a comparison between XP and Vista and thus you are better off having XP as that is just as capable as Vista.

Come on are we seriously thinking that Balmer can't talk his way around the word Capable?

MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades

First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today). It became more successful once opened but the original design was very much closed and of course the operating systems that made it successful are pretty much the poster child of the closed software movement. The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open either (otherwise why would there be Ogg?).

So Openness can be a good thing, but your examples are in fact more examples of how closed works commercially as long as it develops an established market.