On a site like /. it's assumed that "editors" should always be in quotes

Google's spam filters are the Postini filters, recalibrated with Google's data. I'm in agreement with the parent that gmail is not significantly better than the competition.

The quality of their search engine results have been reduced by people gaming the system, the transparent trick of heavily weighting wikipedia results, and the rise of aggregators. Not that others are doing much better, but a lot of that "I'm feeling lucky" mojo is gone.

Maps came from Telcontar. The street view was innovative, but the maps themselves--not so much.

I'm not a Google hater, but it's important not to look at ANY company through rose-colored glasses.

Aside from the "superpatriotic" you've just described Obama to a T.

The only question left, as far as I can tell, is will our new overlords claim to be right/fascists, or left/totalitarians. Whatever they claim, in practice I see the "traditional" left and right here in the U.S. as two sides of the same coin: power-mad politicians desperate to tell you what to do, what to say, and what to think.

We've always been at war with Eastasia

No. The differences between Bing and Google are anything but minor. From research that I've done (not extensive, but enough to know what's going on) it's clear that Microsoft is tweaking the results of bing searches to provide favorable (to Microsoft) results.

For instance: search both sites for "windows security flaws" and Google's top result is:
Windows Security Flaw Is 'Severe' - washingtonpost.com

Microsoft's top result?
Security Fix - Microsoft Fixes 19 Windows Security Flaws ...

Or you could search for "windows antitrust" and Google provides:
United States v. Microsoft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bing?
Competition law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of why Microsoft's usability is bad is because of their focus on usability "studies".

What you have to understand first is that there are three classes of users: novice users, intermediate users, and power users. Unfortunately, when you do usability testing/studies, you are presenting your interface to users who've never seen it before; i.e. these are the first group: new users. Designing your software to meet the needs of these users would be fine except that for any frequently-used software, new users quickly become intermediate users. So all that "hiding" menu items, only showing "frequently used" controls, etc, that worked so great for the novices is now getting in the way of the intermediate users. And keep in mind that if your software is at all useful, then users are going to use it, learn it, and move from the temporary novice user stage to the semi-permanent intermediate user stage fairly quickly. And most users are going to be at that intermediate stage for most of the time that they're using your interface.

Any software development process that focuses mainly on the novice user is going to create something that's not as useful to the intermediate user. This is the pitfall into which Microsoft has tumbled.

Usability studies have shown that hiding options is a Bad Thing© Users tend to remember items in menus by location, not by name. For instance, the "Save" item is in the first menu, about a third of the way down. Moving items around (by "hiding" less-used or currently unavailable ones) goes against the way that most users locate them.

At 5m/s, that's a lot of Celine Dion < shudder >

Dude--your explanation sounds WAY too much like the Catholic church's explanation of transubstantiation.

You should read Martin Greenberg's Freedom (link to sample chapters at the Baen free library)

It contains a number of excellent Sci Fi short stories about the absence of government.

I think "yourtaxdollarsatrest" would be more accurate

"wonton" participation? Some kind of Chinese fast-food deal with the Bush administration?

< waves hand > This is not the dupe you're looking for

Two dupes. On slashdot you will see two dupes: "this story has been posted before", "this post has been posted before", and "dupe!"

Among the many dupes you will see on slashdot...

I don't think that Apple is willing to sell products with "no support"--which is kind of the point of their beef with Psytar. There are various reasons for this, ranging from Apple's brush with death during the clone period to their almost fanatical devotion to providing a "complete" user experience--something that would be impossible if they allowed random combinations of hardware and software. Let's face it, a lot of Apple's "just works" cred comes from the fact that they're in complete control of the hardware the OS runs on.

I just don't see them being willing to give that up.