This is why it pays not to be a zealot. I mix Linux, OSX and Windows systems at home and work. I try to select and use software because it works, not because it's part of an ecosystem, and I try to do as much of the work myself, despite my poor coding skills. It's not perfect, but I think it's the best you can do these days without spending inordinate amounts of time hustling to protect every tiny last bit of data from becoming 'known' to the big corporations.

So if I walk through an open door with malice in my heart and and start rifling through your desk looking for documents about aliens I can be expected to pay for the fact I could have splattered the place with paint, smashed all your plates, peed in your coffee pot etc. ?

Not "clever." This is standard practice in the shipping industry.

And outside the shipping industry, it's quite common: any galvanized steel you're using is covered in a sacrificial anode, and that includes thousands of miles of long-haul steel electrical poles.

Agreed. But their thinking is probably that good sales people are good sales people no matter what they sell. I'm not a sales person, so I don't really know if that is true or not, but my thinking is that it is not.

If Microsoft doesn't think this then their only motive for hiring Apple employees would be to weaken Apple, and I don't know if they would do it for that reason alone.

If someone developed a 99% efficient solar cell, would you really care what it cost?

Yes, I would. If it cost $1,000,000 for enough solar cells to generate 1 kilowatt at 99% efficiency, it would be essentially worthless for anyone but NASA.

What I'm looking for is something that costs $1,000 per kilowatt. That's cheap enough that I could actually make use of it.

Why is it a given that our perception of beauty is distorted?

Seem to be a fallacy to me.

 

I work in regulating an industry (aggregate mining) that is pretty hated and ill regarded even though it is one of the most important building blocks (pardon the pun) of civilization.

I have come into contact with many many lobbyists. They are NOT all the same. The "tree hugging Luddites" as you put it, make up a VERY small percentage, and while vocal are not the norm. By far are pretenders that basically pretend to be "tree hugging Luddites" but in reality are only doing so to further their own agendas.

Primary to this is NIMBY. If you actually look at the BIG environmental lobby groups, they are typically coalitions of many many tiny lobby groups. Most of these can fall under the Cottage Association, or Residents Coalition, etc... Basically the big this here is that they are more worried about the location of some undesirable land use type popping up next to where they are located and driving their real estate prices now. Period. All the save the whales and other BS is mostly posturing. SOME actually believe in that, in the actual environmental impact, most however don't give a crap and are only interested in the short term fiscal real estate issues.

I always like to mention that it is short sighted as they don't look at big picture. So sure they will piss and moan and make a big fuss about pretty much ANYTHING coming into their area (queue save the whales and think about the children), however in a decade when Energy doubles in price they certainly won't like that too much or when aggregate goes from 3 bucks to 80 bucks a tonne and makes the house they wish to build cost about double, then they certainly will be unhappy.

One of my favorite examples, and it l made my jaw drop on how stupid it was, was the proposed development of wind turbines off shore of Toronto. This was on "The Nature of Things" which is actually an environmental show (which sort of surprised me that they even looked at this angle, or maybe it was just me that found it stupid). Anyway the current obstruction is a lobby group which for all intents and purposes is a cottager's association comprised of people that own million dollar cottages in and around Toronto waterfront. During the interview they basically admitted when pressed that there was zero environmental impact (however still use that as an official argument) but they were what they called heritage environmentalists or some such nonsense, in which they are concerned about the aesthetic health of the environment, and that the wind turbines were ugly, and not at one with nature and thus a form of pollution and contamination. I am not kidding. So you have an "Environmental" lobby group blocking the development of environmentally friendly energy sources because basically they think they are "ugly" and it will reduce the price of their multimillion dollar cottage (of which in the grade scheme only a few rich people have). It truly boggles the mind. To date, they are still not built, and development is still being blocked by a bunch of environmental posers. I can respect someone's environmental views even if I might not agree, however people just using those ideals for very un-idealistic ends.

Stentorian, yes, though not in this context. I believe "stentoriously" may be an unnecessary neologism.

what's the big deal of dealing with creative works like any other form of property that can be passed down to family?

Impressing people and having sex happen after you've had something to drink, eat, and you're brainstem thinks you're safe.

Sounds like someone has a dull sex life.

I mean, it would be business as usual. :P

Linux x86 64
Linux PowerPC
Linux i386

And they still can't claim to support Linux as the superset, since they keep the source closed and don't have the resources to port it to other platforms.

When will they learn that Firefox is kicking their ass just by virtue of being open source? Firefox is probably inferior in many ways, but at least they don't get THE most obvious marketing move wrong.

it's REALLY difficult to prevent snarls during retraction

Couldn't they just use a winch with the cable fed through a pair of rollers with brakes on them to keep the cable from piling up in the winch?

Or reel it in from both ends while its still spinning (to keep some small amount of tension on it) and apply counter-spin thrust to keep the RPMs constant as radius decreases?

Granted none of this seems trivial, but not does it seem that difficult.

Or gyros to eat up the momentum?

Try telling that to The Tetris Company, which claims that it owns trade dress on "Geometric playing pieces formed by four equally-sized, delineated blocks" plus eight items that appear in Nintendo's Dr. Mario.

Opera still doesn't support border-radius or box-shadow, probably the two most important properties that make web designers life's easier. Safari (or really Webkit) seems to be doing all the innovating lately when it comes to CSS3 features with Firefox and Opera battling it out for 2nd place. Either way, as a developer I still prefer to use Firefox with all its useful developer tools and addons.