Yes but the deaths are nicely spread out so no one notices them. It's like car accidents vs train or plain crashes. By most statistics more people get killed in the former but what sticks in our minds is the big ones of the latter we see on the news.

It's just a human failing, if one that our addiction to a constant stimulus of easily digestible news nuggets only re-enforces.

It's also one many unscrupulous people exploit for their advantage, drumming up public support for something based on some newsworthy incident that everybody knows about, to push through laws or policies to further their own advantage , but thats a failing of our current democratic system.

I'm another person for whom Photoshop is one of the major sticking points - apart from anything else I even have a paid for licence for it, though admittedly not the version I'm currently running .

Other thing I use on it is Autodesk Inventor - Linux CAD packages are sadly few and far between, certainly for what I need. You would think that Linux was the prefect rock-solid platform to build such a demanding package on but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Yes having little variation in the range results in economies for the manufacturer, but the "one size fits all" approach combined with Apple's resistance to letting the people who buy their stuff do any changes to it means that very few people are perfectly served by the model range . The more choices you have in choosing a device and what you run on it the more like is the result you end up with something that severs your needs, rather that the needs the manufacturer feels you should have.

Yep it sure is - Now can some what explain to me why the F*ck 40% of a supposed advanced nation still deny it's existence ?

Or do we wait for a time were either their god sends them a sign that they should believe in it or there is some subtle change in the chance of their offspring surviving such that they eventually die off - though then we won't get the satisfaction of telling them they were wrong.

So what happens to the animals that eat them and that aren't immune to the PCB?

And you know who is at the top of the food chain ......

Well if you'd bothered Googling him you would see he doesn't exactly look Chinese http://www.wcl.american.edu/alumni/dac/lee.cfm

Design patents are only valid for 14 years, so would have expired now.

I'm not sure if Slashdot is doing a Google and providing context relevant quotes or it was just pure chance, but the quote at the bottem of my page today sure seems relevant to this story and the state of Real networks - " For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex. -- Gore Vidal"

Maybe governments should start writing contracts that only pay up if a usable systems s delivered at the end of it ?

OK know this is a gross oversimplification but at least it would give the people doing the work some decent motivation to make sure it did actually work in the end.

I was brought in as a capacity planner on a former NHS computerization contract about 30 years ago. After 3 months there s was obvious to me that what the were doing, the very silly way they were doing it was not going to ft on the IBM mainframe they had specified to do this.

On pointing this out to them I was told that some very highly paid consultants had said it was going to work and who was I, a lowly contractor, to question their wisdom even though this was the job they brought me in to do.

I was asked to produce some pretty pictures and my contract was not renewed.

But that is what free trade will eventually accomplish. It's starting to happen in China now. Some of the money we spend buying those consumer goods ends up in the hands of the workers producing them. They spend a bit more in their country and a whole support structure appears there supplying them with their consumer needs. Eventually they start wanting more, looking for higher wages and maybe even political reform.

Even if the US as by this time moved on to the next country with even cheaper labor, then the nascent consumerism it started there can fire up the start of that country's own economy.

It's ironic that a poster child of the right wing - free trade - has done more for re-distribution of wealth from rich to poor counties than all the socialist ideals put together.

And I for one don't think it's a bad idea.

Well it could just be some managements, in some companies, in some counties, are looking beyond what will affect their next bonus check and are actually planning for the future.

And this could just have something to do with why their companies are expanding in a vibrant economy, while most most of the places you've worked at have economised for so many years for short term gains. Now having probably laid off half their labour force they are now wondering why no one can afford to buy their products.

Well of course the US would never introduce mandatory data logging logging and retention https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approves-bill-mandating-internet

There are so many other things that must appear to to be more or less randomized data, how are they going to determine when someone is using encryption?

Using data compression will obscure plaintext, either on the fly compression or putting it into a zip or rar archive. And what about those people torrenting a game ? both the executables and data will not be nice readable textfiles, added to which the various cunks of the torrent may received out of order.

All HTTPS data is already encrypted - is this going to be banned to?

So tell me - how is this different to the US these days?

So if they do force Google to de-list, what is to stop Google continuing to list them on it's local sites outside the US? So everyone switches to using Google.co.uk? Or Google could move it's .com servers outside the US like it did with China.

You can be sure Google will be dong it's best to let people find those sites, as not only does this censorship go against the Google creed but it also knows that if people can't find what the want on Google they will switch to another search provider and bang go Google's advertising revenues.

There may be new search providers who appear out of the ether to fill the gap, and while they can ban these too, one thing you can be certain of, they will not be based in the US. One more nail in the coffin of the US as the major internet player.