I imagine the goal of what's left of the music industry is to retain some semblance of control of distribution. That's how they over-charge consumers for their content.

The entertainment oligopoly wants this deal. It marries content playback to hardware. This is a way to regain control of digital distribution and extract way more money out of consumers than a LastFM.

Where is my ARM/MIPS/PowerPC motherboard so I could build a proper workstation?

Because there is no demand for ARM PC motherboards. You would need a different power supply too. No demand for that either. The RAM is different too. The hardware business is very low profit margin, so if an ARM motherboard were available, all of the components would cost you at least 2x what a low-spec x86 board costs. And then there's the problem of limited device drivers.

I currently do all my work on a Powerbook. It is actually nice to know that there are no proprietary, binary blobs available for this system.

Yes, there are. You may or may not be running them, but there are more binary blobs every year for Linux. Another word for them is firmware. Some of the architectures and firmware licenses are crafted such that they can be distributed in Free software. This is not ideal, but practical.

Imagine being the guy they hire to manage an ARM port at Microsoft. Could there be a worse job at Microsoft?

Imagine how the ARM guy has to go around and convince various development, marketing and management fiefdoms built on x86 since day 2 to make an ideological shift to include or even imagine an ARM port.

-The costs will be blown sky-high if only to keep things just as they are right now.
-The resource constraints will be retold as enormous
-The market research will cast the ARM market as "bad" for all kinds of crazy reasons.

This ARM guy will probably quit if he has a brain in his head, or get fired for non-performance.

Meanwhile tiny non-x86 devices will eat away at Microsoft's business until they can't pretend any more and the 'business' collapses.

A libertarian would have the state declare bankruptcy
Ok, declare bankruptcy. Now what? State bond rates *skyrocket* It turns out that would be the first of maybe 25-35 dominos where States would have no choice but to declare bankruptcy.

And then there's all those pesky retirees that hold State bonds because of their perceived security that you've just made near penniless. How do you think that's going to play out?

and nullify the state employee union's contract and pensions.
Ok, done. Now what? How does the daily uninteresting work of running government get done? Who are you going to hire? Probably the people you just fired because they're the only ones that know anything. Now what? They reorganize. Ohh, but there's the false promise of contracting the work out. Ask some of the regular slashdotters in the Military Industrial Complex how well that works. Hint: it doesn't shhh!

I know, I know, I don't 'understand.' Or, it doesn't have to work that way. Well, it does work that way. Libertarian ideals are being sold as a solution to every government problem when in fact, they accelerate the rate of corruption.

For *every* *single* I told you so post, I want to know how many had infants at the time of the peak of the hysteria or have infants now. The issue looks a whole lot different as a parent.

In the U.S., there's a complicating factor. Vaccine manufacturers are generally shielded from liability. Where is the manufacturer's disincentive for distributing deadly product?

Not every step forward in medical anything turns out necessarily good. Read up on Pharma's invasion of Psychiatry sometime.

Finally, the choice with my kid was old-fashioned single vaccines. More shots, but essentially the same product that was given to me as a kid. For reasons I really don't get, there was a great deal of resistance to this method by a couple of pediatricians. We just found a pediatrician that had it on hand and did one at a time with time between each one.

My wife buys into this stuff regularly, so my position was not immediately accepted. But she got to the point pretty quickly where one at a time was a good compromise.

Qemu has a powerpc emulator. when will I be able to run a playstation virtual machine on top of Qemu?

I blame this on the OEM's who could have escaped the grasp of Microsoft but, in their haste, failed to ensure that the customer experience was a good one.

On the OEM side, the urgent need is to build a rapidly sale-able product. Microsoft is a good way to sell product for an OEM. Brands like Dell and HP sell lots of boxes with Windows on them. OEM's know this and tailor product accordingly. End users know Microsoft's Windows and are comfortable with it. Add to that the strong likelihood there are Marketing dollars committed by Microsoft to help sell the device.

If an OEM takes a huge chance and has an alternative OS, the business climate inside an OEM is as obsessed with capturing as much value as possible, so building their own distro seems like the best choice. Weird, but true. Look at the OEM that shipped Linux to Walmart. Their own distro.

What about Ubuntu? They can't possibly make a viable deal with an OEM. No money, no market penetration. Very little money in end-user sales like Ubuntu's so they will scrape along until the patriarch is tired of funding the project and fires most employees to get it breaking even.

It takes quite a bit to line up a deal where an OEM is shipping Linux. Especially with Microsoft discouraging the presence of Linux distro-equipped end-user devices like notebooks, tablets, phones, etc.

1. the supernode requirements suggest that most skype calls use some kind of NAT helper that proxies the call between two or more people. The 'brain' of the NAT helper (aka supernode) is centralized. There are very likely lots of conventional ways to halt supernode service if one spent the time to analyze supernode packets.

2. the fact that 2/3 of users can't log in is an authentication problem, not a 'calling' problem. The auth system has to be centralized.

It looks like ebay Engineering is going to be busy over the Christmas holiday!

100% accurate

Some of you should check the statistics on global smart phone dominance. You'll find Nokia in top spot by a very wide margin. Right now, it looks like more breathless anticipation for a platform that has a very, very long way to go to threaten Nokia's worldwide dominance.

You guys should try one sometime. The e7x series is great. Relatively open platform, lots of apps, total media freedom, total device freedom like tethering, turn it into a wireless access point, free maps/gps features, and reliable. The Communicator is awesome too. I couldn't afford to replace my old one.

I hereby dub thee, Android Reality Distortion Field.

They have plenty of stats already.

I had a 2003(?+/-) version of Office that contacted a server at port 80 every time the send/recieve went off. This was in a bulk-licensed office. I could deny the activity with the software firewall I had, but that stopped Outlook from downloading mail.

My current employer's Office 2007 license is the super-duper-no-holds-barred license bonanza for Microsoft version. I don't recall if it phones home.

Another nice one is the windows update still phones home even with the Windows Update service shut off. This is on XP and Server 2003. I don't know what it's doing, but it sure is doing it.

  I think Microsoft's management is strangling any notion of new and exciting features that might/might-not grow the product beyond a single quarter. Instead, more hard to explain features requested by customers number 1 and 2 that don't mean much to the rest of the world. The only thing left to do is make it cheaper/easier to get and look the other way.

Hardly a phenomena unique to the University of Illinois: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois_clout_scandal

t Linux Security is somewhat atrocious these days with the whole security via obscurity approach

Your ideas are intriguing to me. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

News that matters.

Next up, Microsoft/Symantec/Cisco security product and costs 10's of thousands more! Can't leave the point-and-click jui jitsu black belts out.

Either we have a Constitution, and it applies, or it does not.

Why is this insightful? Human language, the U.S. Constitution in particular, is not a finite state machine.

And then you follow with an artful interpretation of the situation. Good work making us all poorer!