"Crime and politics, little girl. Situation is always... fluid." --Badger

What do you suppose are the chances that Microsoft itself is slowing down the W3C's progress, for exactly the reason you state? It would not be the first time a company sabotaged a cooperative effort to further their own interests.

If you think this is really just about a fishing boat, you haven't studied enough history or global politics.

It's EUR10 each, so that's only 60k pre-orders. I wrote a WoW addon that's used by a couple thousand people, and Minecraft is arguably 30x cooler than my addon. The internet is a big place; 60k people is pretty reasonable.

This is what DKMS was invented for. As soon as nVidia starts using it in their binary driver packages, this problem will go away and all your kernel modules will be recompiled automatically when a new kernel is installed.

This is a total straw man and you know it, and I'm disappointed the mods didn't call you on it.

If your mother can't run one script from a command line and follow the prompts to reinstall the driver, then she probably doesn't need the extra 3D performance from a proprietary binary video driver either. Set her up with the open-source driver and kernel updates won't be a problem.

The problem with this is that these content industries (games, movies, music, etc) have the nasty habit of defining piracy figures in terms of sales figures. So if they see falling sales figures, they will claim that as proof of a corresponding increase in piracy. I suspect this DRM lunacy will not end until at least one major company follows this kind of logic all the way to bankruptcy; sales keep going down, DRM keeps getting worse, customers keep getting more annoyed, sales go down even more, until the company is just out of business.

The real tragedy is that even then, in their dying breath, that company will claim that they went under due to piracy, not due to producing a worse and worse product (as the DRM gets more and more invasive).

To some extent I think the question of whether the globe is warming (or climate is changing, or whatever terminology comes next) is secondary.

Whether or not it's already happening in any measurable way today, I think we can all agree that it *could* happen in the future, so we (as a country, and a global society, and a species) need to be careful that it doesn't. To that end, studying human civilization's side effects on the biosphere seems obviously worthwhile.

I think the original batch of climate scientists were well-intentioned but did themselves (and us) a disservice by overplaying the initial data. They saw a potential problem in the future and tried to rally the public by saying "it's already happening!", but when that ended up not being very obviously provable, people started dismissing the entire concern. That, to me, is a huge mistake.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that the sorry state of broadband competition in the US wasn't the fault of laws, but economics: building the necessary infrastructure (coaxial cable, telephone lines, fiber, wireless hubs, cell towers, etc) is prohibitively expensive.

But that only highlights your original idea: high-speed data transfer is a kind of a natural monopoly, due to the aforementioned infrastructure needs. That makes it very much like any other utility: water, sewer, electricity, analog voice telephony, etc.

So I agree, classifying data transfer as a natural monopoly and running it (and, yes, regulating it) as a public utility just like all the other public utilities seems like the only reasonable long-term solution. Net neutrality is never going to be assured without strict regulation or strong competition, and the free market is never going to provide meaningful competition with such a high infrastructure cost to enter the market.

This is an amazing story, and everyone involved deserves all honor and appreciation for their life-saving efforts.

Nonetheless, it raises the question: how can we leverage technology to achieve this kind of effect without requiring a friend-of-a-friend with a direct line to the US State Department?

There were no doubt many other people trapped by the quake who didn't have such fortuitous Facebook connections, and many of them probably weren't found in time. Is there a way to deploy some kind of SMS-based 911 infrastructure in situations like this, even on foreign cellular networks? Could we even deploy our own mobile cellular base stations for this purpose, if the local cell network is too badly damaged? Other ideas?

I had the same reaction; I had to take a guess and type out "accessibility" in the address bar just to confirm the number of letters.

But really, can we please stop abbreviating every somewhat long word with numbers? "txtspk" (or whatever clueless news anchors are calling the SMS dialect these days) is bad enough, but if you're writing for the general public (even the slashdotting public), is it really so hard to use your words?

The same could be said for the necessity of lawyers, in all but truly exceptional circumstances. What kind of society is it where its citizens cannot reasonably know all the laws they are subject to, and cannot reasonably defend themselves in court when they're suddenly accused of breaking a law they've never heard of, which is most of them?

So it's a conflict of interest for government to set the tax law and also assess our payment due, because they'd be inclined to err in their own favor; better, then, to have citizens involved to look out for their own interests.

And it's a conflict of interest for citizens to assess their own payment, because they'd also be inclined to err in their own favor; hence, government has to double-check every return to look out for its own interests.

Now let's complete the triad: it's also a conflict of interest for Intuit to comment on making taxes simpler for citizens, because the more complicated the tax returns are, the more of a market Intuit has for its product.

I think having government do all the math and send us the bill is not the solution, because Intuit does have a point about the dangers there. The solution is making the tax code simple enough for the average person to understand without having to pay somebody like Intuit or risk making a (potentially very expensive) mistake. But of course Intuit would never suggest such a thing, for obvious reasons.

[citation needed]

"Under 30" I *might* give you as an out-of-the-blue ballpark figure, although still totally unsubstantiated; "under 20" is just setting up a straw man to justify the rest of your rant. No wonder you posted AC.

But I understand why you wanted to gloss over that age group of Firefox users -- we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser. It wasn't until 2005 that the free Opera was ad-free, at which point Firefox was already very well established.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

You're sort of getting at how evolution works, but I have to nitpick your word choices. The whole idea is that evolution is random and patterns only emerge when those random mutations lead to statistically significant implications for survival and reproduction.

So it's misleading to say anything "evolved for a reason" because evolution isn't an intelligent process -- it doesn't do things because of reasons. It's also not exactly true that "[c]urrently inactive DNA was active in the past" because every generation is bound to produce lots of random genetic mutations which have no impact on our survival, in many cases because they have no impact on our physiology whatsoever. The commented (computer) code analogy is very apt here.

However, what you're hinting at isn't just that "we have it", it's more precisely that "we all have it." The fact that a large portion of the human population all has the same inactive DNA in this position does imply that it was active in the past, and that it was beneficial in the past, because that's the only way the same DNA could end up in every person's genome. If it had never been active or useful, then we would all have had to (randomly) mutate the same useless code in that spot, which would be statistically very improbable.

As lame as this clearly is, I can't really fault Microsoft entirely; I think this is just a product of the deteriorating state of advertising and marketing in general.

Time was, you only had to take an advertiser's claims with one grain of salt, but in the last few decades it seems like there's been a kind of hyper-inflation; now, you can't even read an advertisement critically to filter the hyperbole and extract some useful information, because there isn't any left. After years of being unabashedly lied to by advertisers, we now have no choice but to assume that all advertising is pure, unadulterated lies.

It's a little sad; it only took a few companies abusing the consumers' trust to ruin it for everyone.