Web designers everywhere could be known, I really would have no problem with fining Microsoft for that amount, accompanied by the legal use of government police power to seize assets if this is necessary to pay the fine. If that sounds drastic, I say that the only thing more absurd is the idea that we should have to put up with this kind of shit and shouldn't use any means available to discourage it, within the bounds of the law of course.

Seems you're willing to take just about any extreme means to teach Microsoft a lesson except for the most obvious one: stop working around their bugs.

If all these potential web designer litigants stopped bitching and just stopped supporting the browser, web sites would look horrid in them, users would use other browsers, and then MS would have to play catch up to ensure its browser rendered correctly with minimal effort.

Remember, MS's is browser is exactly as compliant as you want it to be.

What's changed?

I'm speaking from a U.S. perspective. I can't say how the media has changed in other countries. During the Vietnam era, the news was graphic it wasn't just reporting on the war it was actually showing it in all its gory details. This is not how the news is today. We see numbers and "approved" videos sanitized for public viewing. At least this is the case for 99% of all the mainstream media.

my sister said it was like watching porn

I know everyone's going to throw their two cents in, but I too grew up in the central U.S. so I know just the type of personality that thinks anything that even remotely aludes to sexuality is porn.

Your sister probably also feels that a trip to Washington is like watching porn. Dr. Manhattans penis is more of a symbol of impotence than sexuality. Aguably the Washington Monument is more phallic than his blue, flacid penis.

Let's be honest with ourselves here... kids today, despite being coddled and sheltered from the outside world, are getting more and more fucked up.

Most of what you say I'd agree with. The movie isn't something I'd take my kids to see, though to be honest as soon as it's out on video they'll probably watch it at johnies house after the parents are asleep. Easily gained from a torrent download and watched specifically because you forbade it.

But kids getting worse? Really. Alarmist much? It was only in recent history that kids could even reasonably expect to be sheltered from seeing violence, sex, etc. like this in real life. And even now, the vast majority of children in the world are still exposed to things like this.

So I guess you mean children raised in the Western world and only compared to the last couple of generations. Perhaps since the last World War/Depression. So that would be the 50's onward. But wait, that was right around the Vietnam erra. An erra where news was not sanitized for the masses to protect us from being directly exposed to the gore, death, and destruction that war causes. Unless you locked your 9 year olds in the basement, they were plenty exposed to real violence.

So yeah, definitely not something I'd willingly expose a young child to, however this "We're all going to hell in a handbasket" routine is tired and completely unfounded.

Unfortunately for you this does meet the requirements for hardware or vendor lock-in

How can it possibly be considered vendor lock-in if any vendor can make the part? Also, assuming they're going to be super expensive is just as premature. The competition hasn't even released their products yet.

Seems like a problem I see very commonly with developers:

Just to chime in as a developer. Here's how the conversation too frequently sounds from my perspective.

Dev: "Due to ever improving changes in hardware capabilities and the demands of the field, we had to refactor several of our libraries. Though we tried to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, in some cases we could not."

User: "Does it do everything the old one did?"

Dev: "Yes, and more. You can now x, y, z which was not possible in previous versions."

User: "So, does the stuff I use now stop working?"

Dev: "Some of the API's changed, so will need updating. We tried to provide verbose warnings that provide an API reference and a suggestion on how to update to the new API."

User: "Oh no! The sky is falling, we'll never be able to update our code. This is a momentous task, we're stuck with legacy software for the rest of our lives! How could you do this!? How?? HOW???" ....

8 years later. User and his group has pushed the legacy version of their implementation to its extremes. Support for the old version was dropped and the user's last bit of ancient hardware that could still run their implementation has died. They are now forced to not only upate to the next most recent transitional version, but also to the several versions that came afterwards possibly compounding the upgrade cycle.

The group insists that the project is an impossibility, but finally assign a developer to the task. They never actually consulted a developer in the first place, the managers just *knew* their code base was so advanced and complex that it would take years to update.

The developer begans collaborating with your support team. Three weeks later their software is updated and working with the most recent version. Many are left wondering why they didn't do this in the first place.

Before discounting this. This story was fashioned after a real life example. I kid you not, the lab group paid more money to the managers and researchers (users) in meetings about how difficult it would be and how nigh impossible to find the funds to do it would be than they did in actual salary to me to fix it.

So I'm reading all these heated DRM posts and do something incredibly silly: before posting, I did a little research.

Calling this "DRM" is simply wrong headed. It doesn't meet any definition of "DRM". Not even remotely. And lockin? How can it possibly be lockin if anyone who wants to can manufacturer them?

If you don't trust them enough to show you everything they're sending back, then I'm left wondering why you'd trust them enough to install their software.

Having learned ruby first and python second, I'd say there's not much difference between the two except a bit of philosophy.

The one thing that ruby provides over python would be unconstrained anonymous functions and a greater emphasis on flexibility for the developer. It also has better package management.

Lastly, it has a cleaner designed feel. By this I mean, once you learn the basic classes in ruby you can easily find other packages since they tend to occur where you'd naturally expect them. In python, there's often quirks of the language on finding what you're looking for. For example, path functions are found in two different modules (sys and os) and if one considered the path to a file as an attribute of the file one could say that attributes and methods relating to files are spread across several modules.

I think this is more of a sign of ruby's relative newness to python and Python 3.0 has attempted to eliminate some of these inconsistencies and oddities that have accumulated over time of the language.

Where python shines is libraries and maturity. The interpreter is very mature and Python has a much deeper library than ruby. If you went with ruby for all your tasks, you'd quickly find yourself becoming a ruby contributor as you likely won't be able to find the library suited for your task. . . especially if your programming in the math and sciences.

Actually, you are incorrect. The initial account in OSX is a member of the admin group. The admin group has an elevated level of permissions compared to a normal account which is a member of the staff group (and not the admin). According to Apple Security recommendations (available on their site along with other reference docs), all day to day activities should be done with a non-admin user.

We'll see how it pans out, but at least they're off to a better start. As far as the data recovery, I'm sure it only applies to data that can be shown to result in money loss. Unfortunately, those photos of Uncle Joe getting drunk and making a fool of himself at our cousins wedding is not worth anything to anyone but our own sentimentality.

Why? Simple. During the DeathStar fiasco almost a decade ago, IBM refused to acknowledge the issue. Leaving small businesses to clean up their mess and cover the costs of replacing prematurely failed drives and lost customer data.

Seagate, on the other hand, has readily acknowledged the issue and pledged to replace drives and pay for possible data recovery?

That's absolutely amazing. No vendor is perfect, shit like this happens occasionally. The true test of a good supplier, vendor, manufacturer, etc. is not what they do when everything's going right. It's what they do when it goes all wrong.

I've seen the argument that software students learn "will only have a minor correlation" to what they use a few years from now. This is utterly and completely wrong. A student starting High School in 2001 very likely may have received his first introduction to Windows XP, coming from '98 of course. The difference between these two (from a beginning user perspective) is negligible.

Most businesses skipped Vista and Win 7 is likely to come around in 2010. So That 2001 student, especially as far as work (job/school/lab/etc) is concerned, has used XP for 9 years. That's 4 years of high school, 4 years of college, and 1 year in the work force.

It might not last forever, but seriously a 9 year run of staring at the exact same desktop. This is assuming people pick up Win 7 out of the blocks and with a vengeance too. There's no reason to doubt that XP will be on plenty desktops years after Win 7 is released.

Yes. Any folder placed in the doc effectively becomes a "Menu" of items contained in that directory. So the Applications directory becomes the applications menu.

Because everyone knows, no matter how obsessed a man becomes he'll still sleep with the enemy.