Nobody gives a hoot about how " high performance applications " do on netbooks.

Reminds me of basic training in the army in the 70s. A projection screen is rolled around two rotating vertical cylinders, one on the left and one on the right, therefore forming a "double layer screen". A movie is projected on the front of the screen and light also shines from the back. The trainee shoots at the screen, where the movie representing the advancing enemy is running. At the "bang", the movie projector freezes the frame and we can see light shining from the back through the two aligned holes in the front and back screens. The instructor can determine whether it's a hit and then the cylinders are rotated so that the front and back holes are not aligned anymore and the impact disappears, and the exercise continues.

That's just ideological drivel. The point is, SVG is a " standard " with a nice w3c.org - hosted spec and a nice diversified, academy-industry panel of contributors, but the fact remains, that in the 10 years since it became a standard, nobody really cares. Even browsers that support it officially only support subsets of it. The pragmatic reality is that it's a standard only in name, not in fact. If you want something with a clean, complete, consistent documentation describing a real, working, complete, multi-platform implementation, then what you call " proprietary" solutions are actually the way to go. Read the actual license terms for them and you'll see there's actually NOTHING that they prevent you to do, that you'll likely to have any interest in doing.

Why "don't you get much choice about using an IDE" on Windows ?
There's nothing you can do on Unix-style boxes that you cannot do on Windows.
Just download the Windows SDK for free from the Microsoft Download website, it comes with the command line VC++ compiler, and then install VIM or EMACS and ther you go, you can feel right at home.

That since most of the cost resides in doing something useful with the data (completely producing the images), the time and talent of the people that are _in_ the suits, etc, the producers really don't give a frak that their motion capture system costs $1000, $15000 or even $100000. What they want is something that is proved to work, that technicians are familiar with, and that you can readily rent by the hour along with the facility it's located in. So thank you Media Lab for another useless gadget.

It's actually very difficult to really understand who's really affected by a tax. Very often it's not the person who writes the check. For example if you increase a tax on the business profits, to a certain extent the shareholders of the business will tend to react by increasing the pressure on the operating costs in order to preserve their net earning, which means the salaries will be lower. If the job market allows it, that is, which obviously is the case now.

Another example, is that of the progressive income tax. However steep the progression is, and how high the marginal rates are, the following assertion will always be true : if you earn more, you keep more. And a lot of what constitutes the way of life of the wealthy is not based on production costs, but on comparison : "My mansion by the lake is bigger than yours because I could offer more money than you to the person that was selling it than you could". So if you increase the rates, the actual effect on the standard of living will actually be small since the wealth hierarchy will stay the same.

What's really important to look at is how a _change_ in the tax code will affect people, trying to factor in all higher degree effects. And it's very difficult.

Word uses a paragraph composing algorithm that is at least as sophisticated as TeX's. Actually, Knuth's published papers ARE the basis of it. It's otherwise much more sophisticated in its supports of bidirectional, vertical and mixed vertical/horizontal text layouts, and even more so in table composition and mixing text with graphics.

The problem with TeX and LaTeX, beyond the fact that it they have never got a frontend that would put them within grasp of non-technical users, is that actually their typographical references are pretty old themselves and date back to an era dominated by the printed book. Even shoeing it in the constraints of the periodic scientific publications with its multi-column layouts and other constraints has, back in the days around 1990, involved significant overhead development and hacking of the platform. With the new dominance of on-screen reading, dynamic composition, rendering as slides, hyperlinking, mixing with graphics, it's getting less and less competitive.

This only applies to existing air defense systems. There's around two dozen nations who have the capability to develop a specific weapon against such a blimp on a relatively short notice, and not all of them are US allies.

Slapping together a few existing gadgets into an application that is in dire need of a real problem to solve.

Government regulation is like poison. Most of the time you're better off without taking any and then you find yourself in circumstances where it's actually better for you to take some and you call it chemo.

Slip in a paper share of MSFT in the time capsule with a note : can you imagine that in OUR time, people would pay seventeen BUCKS for that !!?

Here's how it goes when I shop:

Me : type "IDE to SATA power adapter"
Me : click on "price : low to high"
Me : click on "Add to Cart"
Me : click on "Checkout"
Me : click on "Use registered credit card xxxx-xxxx1234"
Me : click on "Use registered address"
Me : click on "confirm purchase"

And that is so complicated only because certain people have patented certain things.

(Don't ask me which planning genius decided we needed that level of saturation, but at least there were advantages for the consumer.)

Actually retailers like being clustered with the competition. This produces positive co-stimulation of traffic, it's a completely standard practice.

I think that it's from Vista on that users are steered away, maybe even prevented, from doing that in a client OS. Vista's not so bad, believe me.

That's one of the main reason I didn't switch. The zoom implementation was useless, and I always use zoom to fill my widescreen monitor.

Unfortunately I also don't like very much the "single address and search box" concept, but maybe I can get used to that after all so I guess I'm going to give it another try.