Even worse, your companies don't lock customers in with long contracts the way ours do.

Actually, they do. And unlike the US, they get auto-renewed unless you cancel within a specific time window. So you can end up with another 2 year contract and no real benefit to show for it.

Fortunately, market forces are changing that; carriers are increasingly offering good no-contract plans and give you noticeable discounts (rather than overpriced phones) if you do sign up for longer contracts. And the reason is that it's really easy to switch carriers in Europe: not only is there number portability (numbers are required to be ported within one day), the phones are almost all compatible and carriers are required to unlock them, so the cost of going to a different carrier is almost zero.

These are cellular phones. The number of users sharing a cell goes down as the number of towers increases, so you need proportionally less bandwidth to serve the same number of users if you have more towers.

Building more towers is the solution to bandwidth problems with cell phones. That's the whole point of the technology.

It's not quite like that. Many European carriers do have "caps", but they are the kinder, gentler kind. For example, they give you 5Gbyte/month at full 7Mbps, and then drop down to 384kbps (still faster than I get in many places in the US with "3G"). In return, they don't care about how you use that data and even give you extra SIM cards to stick into your laptop if you like. Other carriers charge EU 2/day and have a 1-5Gbyte limit per day (meaning, you get 50-150Gbyte/month for EU 60), but these are true pay-as-you-go plans, making this a particularly good deal. Many carriers also prohibit VoIP in their TOS (but don't actually seem to enforce it).

US wireless Internet is way overpriced and underperforming compared to Europe. But European carriers still have some modest limits. If the US moved to European-style plans and European-style infrastructure, that would be a big improvement.

One of the fundamental problems in the US remains the fact that almost all the carriers have incompatible phone standards. Some carriers even have two incompatible standards themselves (due to acquisitions). That really kills competition.

If you provide a premade type or library class for fixed point, then two decimal places after the point isn't enough

Just like decimal coded numbers, you need a variable decimal point position. And you can get that easily.

All in all, decimal floating-point arithmetics just makes more sense.

No, it is absolutely useless. You want a bigint library and a small, simple fixed point library built on top of that. "Decimal floating point" is totally useless.

(basically you may start missing local cents after two operations already).

Decimal representations don't ensure that your numbers add up correctly either.

So, let's see:

eeeee = leopard
eeeee-oo = unseen predator
kuuu eeeee = timber! (or is that "kuuu eeeee-oo"?)

I don't see the syntax, just reuse of some phonetic inventory. For syntax, you'd need more elements, and they'd need to be combined in more varied combinations.

Big muscles used to be considered undesirable, since they were an indication of low social status. If it gets cheap and commonplace to get big muscles, they'll go out of fashion again. Their value as a signal is that they require dedication, time, and resources.

The role of a democratic government is precisely what the voting citizens define it to be. No more, and no less.

Not quite. If the citizens make decisions that make government undemocratic, then their decision is logically not part of the democratic process anymore (since the democratic process has ceased at that point).

I have to disagree with that. Malware problem is usually because of user stupidity. Like any other OS, you can run Windows securely if you don't do stupid things.

You're exhibiting typical programmer stupidity. Hard as it may be to believe, most people in this world don't give a damn about software, they just want to get their work done. They don't want to be pestered by annoying dialogs, and they certainly don't want to understand security just in order to browse the web or use their PC without virus infestations. If Windows can't support that kind of usage (and it can't), then that's a problem with Windows, not with the users.

But any (good) Linux sysadmin knows there been worms in Linux too and remote hacks are commonplace if the system isn't properly secured (and casual users just wont do that).

It's a lot harder for a casual Linux user to make a Linux system insecure by accident than for a casual Windows user to make a Windows system insecure. Windows really is badly designed from a security point of view.

So, you get unsatisfactory hybrids like Google Android, which uses some open-source components but locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox.

Java isn't my preferred language, but I'm glad that my Android phone uses it. With Java, Android actually manages to enforce permissions decently, it keeps applications from screwing up or crashing too badly, and it allows a component architecture for Android that beats pretty much anything else out there. It's also pretty easy for people to get started in and there are plenty of apps.

Native programming on Android would be nice, and I suspect it will be coming sooner or later, but for now, this is fine. We can look at the iPhon app store and look at what apps in there really do require native programming and hence aren't available for Android, and it's very few.

There are several open source phone operating systems now that allow native programming: Symbian, Maemo, OpenMoko, and they don't work as well. And, frankly, I'd like a bit more non-native programming on my desktop as well.

Pushing functionality into the browser instead of relying on scripting means longer launch times, more failure points, and more disparate functionality from browser to browser for developers to consider.

What utter bullshit. HTML5 doesn't "push functionality [from scripts] into the browser", it provides standards and functionality that cannot be provided in scripts. Scripts can't do video decoding. Scripts can't do geolocation. Scripts can't create a canvas. Scripts can't even provide new input element types (they can do the validation, but they can't communicate portably to the browser what it is they are doing).

It's a fountain of whale guts, metaphorically speaking.

Your brain is whale guts, metaphorically speaking.

You get this kind of thing out of the box on Linux: just plug in multiple phones and configure multiple internet connections; you get load balancing, on-demand dialing, and all that for free. Linux got this support years ago for dial-up modems, but mobiles phones look like dial-up modems to Linux anyway. It's not usually done with cell phones because it's expensive (that's why there's no simple UI for configuring it), but it's well documented and pretty easy to set up.

(Of course, with Windows and WinMo, it may actually be rocket science.)

Verbal aggression and physical aggression both have the same root and both have the same effects

It is absurd to assert that calling you a name and punching a fist in your face "have the same effects".

Fortunately, the US Constitution disagrees with you, since "verbal aggression" is protected speech, while physical violence is not.

Freedom of speech applies to identifiable people, to those who are ready to take the heat if they are proven as liars. Not to the so-called "anonymous cowards"

False again. Anonymous speech is legally protected in the US, and for good reason. Anonymous speech is an essential aspect of free speech.

Now, you are entitled to sue my ass and get a large amount of money from my misdemeanor

Libel is not a misdemeanor or a felony. Libel is a civil matter. But in order for something to be libel it needs to be both false and likely to be taken seriously.

Now I, covered by anonimity, go there and write "Shakrai has a small dick, finishes in 2 minutes and can't satisfy a woman ", you wouldn't like it. You could just go ahead and ignore my entry and even the forum altogether, but your co-workers won't.

They'll quickly figure out that the site isn't trustworthy once messages get posted about them, perhaps even by you. That's the thing about anonymous rumor sites: they aren't intrinsically credible.

But sometimes they may get people to notice something that they hadn't noticed before, like Shakrai's string of unsuccessful relationships. If there are ex-girlfriends willing to confirm the rumor... well, maybe Shakrai should be a little more discerning in who he sleeps with or accept the consequences; keeping unpleasant truths private is not the purpose of the legal system.

It's moving heavily into the telephone biz with a mobile Linux that's competing with the iPhone by capturing lots of Linux developers already cultivated into productive position by the community.

Good. The iPhone is a proprietary platform that's tightly controlled by Apple and based on "community projects" that Apple has closed. We need an open and open source alternative to that, and Google is providing it. And neither the iPhone nor Android are taking away Linux developers: iPhone is programmed in Objective C and Cocoa and Android is programmed in Java; neither of those has any great significance on Linux.

Google's got the resources, both financial and personnel, to maintain Linux versions of SW Google produces

No, they haven't. They have a very limited supply of talented people. Those people either work on, say, porting SketchUp to Linux or on developing, say, a product that really competes with Microsoft.

It's evil to build your huge business on a technology made from community contributions, then take more than you give back while shutting down some community projects.

Absolutely. And that's what Apple has been doing. Google has not been doing that.

What Google has done is not created Linux ports of some of their proprietary software. BFD. For most of that software, there are better alternatives.

It looks like the "Don't Be Evil" days are long gone at Google.

No they aren't. But it looks like you're a fanboy with an ax to grind.

If the US were to withdraw its military to within its own borders, I'd be delighted.

So would Americans. We'd love not to have to send our kids abroad and we would love to spend our tax dollars on roads and education, like Europeans do, instead of bombs. The sentiment against getting involved in WWI and WWII was strong in the US, but the US felt it didn't have a choice. And, sadly, we think we still don't.

(For your history lesson, read pydev's response.)

Europeans have used their military forces many times since the second world war. ... Consider it instead a more mature and reasoned approach to world politics.

You mean like the Falklands? Or Northern Ireland? Or British war crimes in Iraq? Or all the shitty little skirmishes that France has been engaging in in its hell-hole ex-colonies? Yeah, truly glorious engagements. Of course, none of them actually ended up cleaning up the messes that British and French colonialism left around the world.

Look at the trouble spots in the world post WWII: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Southeast Asia; they were all created by the UK and France. And when Britain and France became second rate nations post-WWII, the US ended up having to deal with all of this.

Incidenally I do have a problem with corrupt, incompetent regimes, which is why I didn't want one illegally attacking Iraq.

And your government is any better? A constitutional monarchy in which seats in the upper house are for sale? A government that only didn't participate more in Iraq because its military was too impotent? A nation that hasn't been able to solve a terrorism and religious conflict problem on its own doorstep?

Your comparison between the US and Iraq shows just how morally bankrupt you are.

But it really doesn't matter what delusions of moral superiority you harbor. What matters is that either you start pulling your weight in your own defense and cleaning up the messes you left, or the US is going to continue to call the shots and do it its own way.

The US is gonna make mistakes (and Iraq was a mistake), but that comes with the territory. You do better if you can. Oh, wait, you already tried and failed.