I'm surprised no one has suggested the most obvious upgrade path from the DOS batch file, Windows PowerShell. It's the intended replacement for batch files, and basically looks like Perl, but a little more Windowsy. It's integrated with lots of .NET goodies and ActiveDirectory, but in many ways it will be familiar to DOS scripters.

The land area of Great Britain is 84,556 square miles. The land area of the colonies that became the United States was nearly 400,000 square miles. It was pretty big. We're still not quite sure what to do with all of it, and that's after putting in a lot of effort to make it even larger. :)

When I read your first clause the first thing that popped into my head was "The Stuarts!" and then "Bloody Mary!" but I see you've got those covered. I'd say the monarchy had the country pretty terrorized until William and Mary, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "terrorized." We've been using the word quite liberally on this side of the pond lately. But if you mean "cruel rule by an absolute monarch who burns people," then yes I guess the pre-Elizabethan Tudors were the last.

I'd like to see a US state form a treaty with a foreign government, or declare war on one, or establish an official religion. Then we'd see how sovereign they are.

You didn't, so why should I? :)

You have no direct personal control over how your tax money is spent, like the tax dollars we take from your paycheck and send to NASA (which I mention because we should pay at least cursory attention to the subject of TFA), or use to build roads and bridges, or for any socialized services. Unless all those things are socialist as well (and maybe they are), you haven't come up with any argument demonstrating that this differs substantially. You might as well argue that the Interstate highways should be shut down because the government doesn't have the Constitutional authority to run them, or that Neil Armstrong (quoted in TFA) should never have had a job in the first place and should have moved to Russia if he was so eager to join a socialist space program.

It's true that the bill forces you to buy insurance rather than simply providing it to you through taxes, but this hardly makes it socialist. It might be socialist if the public actually owned and allocated the healthcare system as we do the socialized highways or military, but this this plan is to the political right of those services. It's way more conservative than healthcare systems in other modern industrialized countries. But then, its basic ideas were suggested by Republicans.

I call BS. Give me your definition of socialism and we'll see whether the healthcare bill fits it. Taking Wikipedia's definition, which you are free to reject:

Since the states and federal government own no more healthcare or insurance providers than they did before the bill passed, it's incorrect to call it socialism. (Again, by that definition, which you are free to reject because making up your own definition of socialism might help you here). Public assistance is provided for some people to buy insurance, but both the insurance and health care providers are still owned by the people who owned them before, not by the public or the workers.

All I know is, Obama refusing to spend billions on this government-run program proves once again that he is a socialist. :-)

Not exactly the flow of money. Rather, Flash is one of many tools that changes the focus of software development. The best way to think about it is with this analogy: Flash is to Apple in 2010 as Java was to Microsoft in 1997.

Apologies to the fanboys for comparing Apple to Microsoft, but the comparison is very apt. Flash, like Java, provides a write once, run anywhere strategy for developers. Sure, it's not entirely identical because this is not the Flash plugin we're talking about, but rather new Flash tools with which you'd compile separately for different platforms, but the point is that it makes cross-platform development easier. Microsoft tried to kill Java by creating their own broken JVM and releasing the .NET runtime because they were afraid developers would start effortlessly making programs that would run on multiple platforms. Apple is scared of exactly the same thing. For me, this provides an easy answer for GGGGG...P post above:

Adobe. I hate Flash as much as any web developer, but eliminating it as a choice is all about stifling developers. Apple is very much the bad guy here.

Didn't you hear the CEO of Verizon? He says we're number one! That's us in the US, not some Vikings of the north. Stop clouding the debate with your "facts."

You know, it feels like time to deregulate again. It hasn't worked for the last decade and a half, but I'm sure it will work from now on. Too bad there are no countries on the Internet except the US or we'd be able to compare broadband policies and consider something different.

So the legislature successfully removed the one useful bit of the new law before passing it. In the US we're always careful to remove everything positive from our laws as well.

IANAL, but I understand contract law and licensing law are separate animals, and licenses are not as binding as contracts. Despite pressing "I agree" you don't actually sign anything; the thing you're agreeing to is just a license, and unreasonable license requirements are sometimes judged invalid by the courts. If you bought a valid copy of OS X and ran it on a non-Mac I doubt anything bad would happen to you (aside from finding out your OS has stopped working after installing an update designed to deliberately sabotage your type of installation from your friends in Cupertino).

None of which contradicts the core idea of your statement, of course. The Psystar lawsuit was about this specific license requirement and Psystar argued that it's not valid. They lost this argument and are appealing.

If they use my intellectual property I will sue them for one billion dollars. No, five.

This hits the nail on the head. It's always nice to see an administration admit that we're not in the Cold War anymore - you know, outside of the context of scaring us about the new age of global terror.

This is my impression as well. They seem to be changing things for the sake of looking busy. The controversy over the button order is a good example - the new max/min/close buttons make no sense, and Canonical is getting testy about complains. I'm thinking of trying OpenSuSE the next time I install a Linux; my only gripe is that KDE4 destroyed my workflow by changing its component programs substantially. (Rather the opposite of what Canonical does with Ubuntu, but equally irritating.)

In the end it's entirely possible I'll be a Mac user.

I think good science requires anthropomorphic theories because it feels insecure.

Oh, it's meant to be funny. Lighten up. :)