And your statement more or less proves his point. When women stop being whiny, they're just as, if not more capable than men. And likewise, men who spend all day whining about how unfair life is will get nowhere.

That looks almost exactly like The Ultimate Boot CD with the addition of a few pirated programs. I suggest having a copy of UBCD around - it's handy, free, and easy to obtain.

Didnt they try to sell off the entire company recently?

Its obvious that the magazine is pretty worthless these days. Actually most magazines are. The business is just dead, as the internet is where readers now turn and magazines just dont know how to make that profitable yet. Its amazing that they cant figure it out. I actually have ideas on this but i'm not selling or telling them :P

Playboy yet again behind the internet, we've all seen Marge, Lisa, and Maggie naked on the net for years :)

Oh I wish I had mod points right now - this is VERY true. AT&T's network is painfully slow in most markets (luckily, my primary market is pretty good, but I frequent others where it is almost completely unusable). 3G data is pointless if you have zero capacity in your back-haul to the backbone...I can see this only as fodder to raise rates and cry fowl against the voip companies in a few months...

"Communication is the process of transferring information from one entity to another" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication).

One way communication is an important and valuable form of communication. There are other forms, and they are equally important, but that doesn't mean there is no value in essays.

I am sure that if your application essay was ranting or overly "expressing" that would not get you accepted. Just like in any other situation in life - if you meet with your boss and start rambling incoherently you are not going to be the one who gets the promotion. You can call that "thought crime" if you want. I call it life.

What the heck is a climate denier? THERE IS NO CLIMATE. ITS ALL IN YOUR MIND

Actually, that statement right there already tells me that the article has an agenda.

Miguel seems to think that there are people within Microsoft who are steering the company towards better relationships with free software. Irrelevant, I say. The corporation, Microsoft, is, like any other corporation, interested in one thing. Profit, and shareholders. There may very well be many people within Microsoft who like open source and even free software, but they will always be overriden by what the legal entity that is Microsoft, wants. Period. Mono is the perfect example of how a corporate entity will behave in a market where profit cannot be made. The corporation will try its absolute best to figure out a way to make profit from the situation. It is after all in the interest of its own survival.

Mmmh, I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, my collection is also 99.999% legit, save for the odd copy of something bloody hard to find that I got from a friend.

My personal experience on the iZune thing, however, is that a lot of them are bought by young people, who, almost per definition, often don't have the money to buy a lot of the argumentably too expensive on-media music. That drove them to learn how to get the music they want for cheap, and because the industry has been too stupid to swiftly hop on to the digital bandwagon, 'for cheap' became 'downloaded from the internet for free'.

A very convenient habit, and one very hard to break even now that the music industry have started to realise that there is something to this whole intarweb thing after all.

Yes, us older types with a good income and a lot of appreciation for the bands we choose to listen to will buy the stuff, often on physical media.
However, add to the above circumstances the fact that music has become not so much of an art as another mass-produed consumer item to be rammed down the shee-err, valued customers' collective throat, and what incentive is there to pay good money for something that you'll never listen to again in three weeks, when the newest fad buys airtime ?

Again, the above is based on personal experience, but I have a feeling that the share of illegal copies on the world's music players, while spectacularly less than what the MAFIAA wants us to believe, is still a lot more than you seem to think.

They each have their place, but on low end hardware you would never choose vista over XP, so the only way to switch to Vista is buying new hardware also.
I think most people who like Vista over XP either don't run IO intensive applications over a network or never had XP and Vista on the same hardware. I wouldn't mind Vista on a desktop where it's not too pricey to get the additional specifications required by Vista. And their is little doubt at the high end hardware front Vista can be better.
I don't see why I want my dept to pay extra in power consumption, specifications, and OS price so that IT and Sony will have more control over our computers. (warning car analogy) then again I am one of the few that still drives a manual transmission because I don't want a little convenience at the cost of additional maintenance, lower economy, reduced reliability, and higher upfront price.

At least in the USA, unfair and deceptive commercial practices are forbidden by the FTC Act, and deception by omission is still deception.

Quoting from the FTC: "Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment."

The practice of publishing only the positive reviews, without disclosing that fact, appears to be an ommision likely to mislead a consumer, and would therefore be an illegal practice. You didn't say whether the merchant is based in the US, so this may not apply, if they are ouside of US jurisdiction.

Majority of Jewish population in Israel is secular. And if you are born to Jewish parents, you can immigrate, regardless of your beliefs (e.g. only a few percent of more than 1 million russian immigrants are non-atheist). However because of a political system called democracy, religious parties have ~20% representation in the parliament. It's not possible to form a coalition without them, so they are given too much power in a lot of matters, and marriage is one them. The workaround is simple - register your marriage abroad and the state recognizes it, even if it's a gay marriage. A lot of Jewish couples, too, prefer to go this route rather than dealing with rabbis.

Or this could work out in your favor (and the environments no more dead books!). What if we completely cut out the publishers? Set up your own author's webpage with your works on them. All author's pages catalogued on servers, could even be a decentralized server to cut out more middle men. Have your works freely downloadable or for a nominal fee (say the amount you get paid per book by your current publisher). Have a micro-payment system so that individuals can easily pay you small amounts, whether for the book or as a donation. Perhaps even be totally open about your expenses and have a running total of donations vs amount needed to survive/publish the next book in your series.
I think this might be a better system than the current one because there's a bunch of crap out there and once you buy the book you can't do anything about it. Here, you would be supported by people who genuinely appreciate your books and not simply by how many fools your publisher can convince to buy your book.
If the system was wide-spread, there could even be deals made with instant book printers, and people would still be paying less than they are currently.

First of all: as a technology, MMS is just "emails with multimedia attachments". Thus, it becomes is pointless once the majority of handsets that can send and receive mail either natively or by accessing a webmail server.

What happens when you "register for MMS" (either explicitly or implicitly by sending a MMS using the known settings) is that a MMSC (MMS Center, one of possibly many your carrier operates) is assigned to you (or rather, your Subscriber ID). Once that assignment is committed to the HLR database, incoming MMS for you will be forwarded tho that specific MMSC; without this assignment, you will only get a text message ("A MMS was received but we don't know how to reach you").

Sending a MMS is simply a "HTTP post" that uploads a "MMS Send request" (including your content as as MIME-Multipart Message) to the MMSC (Which then has to figure out how to forward it to the recipient(s) listed).

Receiving a MMS is the hard part: the MMSC sends a binary short message to your mobile, telling it "please fetch MMS at "http://$addr-of-mmsc/some-unique-but-hard-to-guess-id". (Insert lots of cursing about MMSC vendors whose software creates URLs so bloated that the Notification message gets longer than ~120 Bytes, causing it to be split into two SMS that need to be reassembled on them mobile).

If/When you decide to download the message

• the mobile will do a "HTTP GET $theURL" (including headers describing the Capabilities and limitations of the UserAgent (i.e. your mobile)
• the MMSC tries to re-encode the Message to conform with those limitations (e.g. by shrinking or transcoding images and videos)
• your mobile receives the transcoded Message (as the response to the GET)
• your mobile must upload a "receive confirmation"; otherwise the MMSC will keep sending those notifications.
• your mobile might send a separate "read confirmation" when the message has been displayed.

The MMS protocol contains a lot of functionality (message forwarding, permanent storage for messages, reverse charging, user selectable send/expiry times, ...) that never reached the customer. And with the limited features offered by the carriers (at premium prices nonetheless) MMS was dead in the water even before the advent of email-capable mobiles and "unlimited data" options.

The "spaghetti" coding I'm talking about is very specifically sections within the bill that refer to other sections within the bill, both ahead and behind. So, for example, Section 223 ("Payment Rates for Items and Services") makes three references to Section 224. Section 225 ("Provider Participation") makes two references back to Section 223. And so on. Spend more than a few minutes with the bill, and you'll see what I mean.

That's quite different from the modifications to various existing laws and regulations, which I largely address in a different paragraph.

I do touch upon references to existing legislation in the 'spaghetti coding' paragraph, but that's because of potential namespace issues: while HR 3200 generally tries to fully qualify section numbers belonging to pre-existing laws and regulations, in some places it relies upon context instead, and you have to scroll back up to figure out if the section reference is internal or external.

One thing I didn't touch is that many of the definitions of key words are pulled in from existing laws/regulations as well -- in effect, qualified import statements (a la Python). ..bruce..

If you were dumb enough to buy a scanner designed and built by a text publisher it may very well do just that.

Surprise surprise when you buy an OS designed and built by Microsoft it has features that serve Microsoft's interest.