[quote]I still know small business owners who refuse to hire non-white employees.[/quote] And there are many, many large businesses who will hire an underqualified minority candidate over a white candidate any day to fulfill affirmative action quotas. [quote]Obviously there is something going on, and unless you know how bad the problem is, there's no way to figure out how to fix it.[/quote] Agreed, but remaining fixated on skin color is only going to exacerbate the problem. I know people of all colors who are quite well off and many others who aren't. Programs like affirmative action designed to fix the balance in a quick, crude way only serve to get under the skin of those passed over for opportunities because they're not a minority. A better solution would be to figure out what caused those 1 in 9 black males between 18 and 25 to do something that landed them in jail. I doubt they just happened to be hanging around 7-11 at 4 AM when a bunch of white guys in ski masks broke in and stole a bunch of 12-packs. That's a tough, complicated issue to deal with - the sort of thing nobody's going to touch with a 10 foot pole because it gets into some very personal subjects.

You think this is bad? I wonder who Slashdot would side with if an evil record label went to court like this against Metallica.

It's no different. We all just like to imagine that someone somewhere is worse off than we are. Targeting Chinese helps because they're less likely to come to Western sites to defend themselves.

I'm forced to use Novell enterprise software at work and while I'm not sure how it compares to other enterprise email/scheduling bundles I can tell you that it is far inferior to Google's offerings. The calendar is excessively clicky and unintuitive with an interface that looks like it hasn't been updated since the 80s. Contacts are equally strange. Email... I'm really not sure what a cabinet is supposed to be, why there is a separate folder for documents, and why sending emails into an archive throws them into a bottomless pit whence they rarely return. I'm reasonably sure that if companies weren't locked into Novell software and had more competent management so as not to get sucked into using Novell in the first place that Novell would be out of business.

Dear Google, Yahoo, and anyone else who has more money than I do. I would like some of your money. Please give me some money or I will have to sue you for it. Thank you and have a nice day.

So the data is wiped because the System32 folder is fucked up? Uh-huh... guess they have to throw out all those computers and order new ones. Looks like the data's gone forever.

It's not difficult to figure out why PDFs are targeted.

1. Most big corporations and academia use PDFs for everything from forms to memos to sending photos of last week's retreat.
2. Most big corporations and academia hire super-specialists that can, for example, diagnose a medical issue that occurs in 1 in 10,000,000 people within 5 minutes, but these people cannot function in the larger world and have no time, patience, or idea of what to do with these things you call "files."
3. Most of these aforementioned corporations and academia will have ridiculously oversized bureaucracies that can agree to standards once every 15 years, are easily swayed by easy solutions, such as those advertised by Adobe, and don't really know or care about whether anything gets done so long as the policies they set 15 years ago are followed to the letter.
4. And yes, Adobe makes awful, bloated software that's full of security holes and doesn't get patched for weeks or months after those holes are made public.

In other words, the issue is roughly 25% bad software and 75% PEBKAC.

...welcome our new all content, all service providing do-no-evil overlords.

This is because the average person probably isn't thinking much farther ahead than what he'll have for lunch tomorrow. By the time he realizes he won't have anything for lunch tomorrow he's no longer in a position to do anything about it.

It's taco time!

It's not even illegal then if the government sanctions your monopoly.

Obligatory UserFriendly

...otherwise hardware vendors would fail. By us here I mean the folks who assemble computers from individual parts because the stuff sold pre-assembled is garbage hardware with garbage bloatware pre-installed. So I don't see how 90% of the PC market will ever be portable platforms, let alone netbooks.

Nationalism doesn't count for nearly as much as it did during the Cold War. Big business owns government, big business is multinational, and big business is connected with big business. If India or China put a permanent settlement on the moon before the US it'll be only because big business found a cheaper, more desperate labor pool there.

And it's a great way to cull excess population without the social stigma of war...