The contractors governments often do business off-shore the work and that is one of the reasons why the projects are so shitty. But there are other reasons. Government agencies don't operate in the same way businesses do. For example, the requirements documents are NEVER frozen. Some reptilian politician gets a burr up his ass, writes some new regulations, and *POOF* the requirements have to be changed and any code already written has to be either dumped or changed to reflect it. Also, when the law changes, as happens way too often, the same problems occur. Every coder here knows what happens in these situations!

The fact that the public library is an actual place is important. Libraries are not just places to get information. They are sometimes positioned to be social centers of communities, places for those without Internet access to get that access, a quiet place to avoid the hustle and bustle of life, a place to meet friends, a place to hold a meeting, a place to do homework and study, and so on and so on. Libraries have long since been simply a place to get the latest novel or some old classic.

In the UK there is pretty much nothing that can hurt you by way of flora and fawna (bee stings and bramble prickles aside).

I seem to recall running into (literally) some poison ivy (or something resembling it) in the remains of Sherwood Forest off the A1 (I think) on a visit to the UK many years ago. I didn't think it grew in the UK but my skin said otherwise. It's a bit worse than having to deal with bramble prickles.

It would be interesting if this "embargo" lasts any length of time. Given the importance of Java in today's IT world, it would be interesting if our colleagues in St. Petersburg would produce another clean-room implementation of Java. But it'll never happen. All trade embargoes are leaky. Consider, for example, Kim Jong-il, the North Korean un-leader, and the iMac on his desk. That certainly wasn't bought at the local Pyongyang Apple store

I think the problem is Oracle isn't innovating, isn't advancing the technology, some aspects of it are essentially dead, the Java Community Process is largely ignored ..

And Sun was innovating the Java platform? How long did it take them to implement closures and lambda expressions? When did Microsoft implement them in C#? Groovy, the scripting language that was intended to be a "groovier Java" had them from the beginning. I was at the Java One when Sun announced that they would be added in Java 7. Well, that didn't happen. Java 7 was simply lame.

It knows it's evil stuff because it matches one of the MD5 tags. They don't have to look at it. I suspect that it's more of an automated process they have which spots these things and sends off info to the DOJ that then looks at it. Why do law enforcement's job more than is necessary?

RTFA....

The Google rep said:

Since 2008, we’ve used 'hashing' technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. ...

We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain 'information' that should never be created or found. We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.

The U.S. Justice Department is almost certainly giving Google the MD5 tags of the images they have in their child pornography database and those of new images that are discovered by law enforcement, and Google is using them to identify such images in web pages they index and in the e-mails and report it to law enforcement. They do maintain one, you know.

I think changing the messages produced by 404 pages so that they produce haiku similar o that produced by BeOS its NetPositive browser runs into a problem would be funny, especially if the sysadmin doesn't know about it!

Ah, here's another one for those Klingonophiles among us:

GhoS!

"Good for you, you've decided to clean the elevator!" You have to be of a certain age to know the hilarious movie that came from.

The government is corrupt, morally bankrupt, and will do what those with the most money want them to do. As someone suggested above, if the EFF was the NRA of Internet it would be a different matter. But, in the end, since this really is an issue of two conflicting corporate interests, and one of these interests just happens to mirror that of the people.

Frankly, I think net neutrality will win out in the marketplace because of the things some companies, e.g., Google, are doing to let their users know that the ISP's are throttling them. The ISP's can't prevent them from doing this and ISP's customers can choose another ISP that doesn't do it, or at least offers better performance. Another possibility is that the content providers the ISP's are throttling will eventually become ISP's themselves, especially Google.

Hmmm... maybe not ALL but several. They ran at 3 mips and there is an emulator.

While reading this a thought occurred to me. Assuming that our African friends are ingenious in their use of this computing power and do a lot of good with it, in a few years perhaps more decommissioned government supercomputers, like the one that replaced Ranger which is 20 times faster, will head in their direction and bless other African universities. African universities are full of very clever, brilliant people who will make use of this gift, and likely do it in ways that will surprise us.

Do those countries really have the resources to invest in that research?

When I came across this article I immediately called my dad, a person who has lived and taught in Africa and maintains an interest interest in the place. His thoughts were along the line of what projects do they have which demand supercomputing power. My response was, "If you build it, the demand will come." These computers are going to be placed in an academic environment, where brilliant people who have not had access to such computing power are now, all of a sudden, going to have it. The ideas will come forward quickly enough. Give our friends in Africa a few years and they may surprise us with their ingenuity.