My mother had cancer. While visiting in my home, she had a stroke, which put her into a coma about an hour later. We called 911, went to the hospital where we were told she would never awaken from that coma. She had a "no extraordinary measures" clause in her living will. The hospital honored it, and so did my father and my sister and myself. We knew within minutes of arriving at the hospital that my mother would never leave the hospital alive. She would never again open her eyes. She would never say any more words. In fact, when I asked the doctor if there was any chance she would awaken, he informed me that they were giving her medication to ensure she didn't, because her organs were shutting down and she'd be in terrible pain if she were to awaken.

So, all of that, guaranteed that this was her end, she was going to die, right then and there, and we still had to sit there and listen to her moan for 18 HOURS. 18 hours of watching, waiting for her final breath, and there wasn't anything we could do to ease her passing.

This wasn't "terminal illness, you'll die in six months", this was "you'll die sometime in the next few hours" and it was STILL illegal to make her passing easier, not only for her, but for her family.

My 18 hours is nothing compared to what Scott Adams had to deal with, and it didn't cost us $8,000/month, but the feeling is the same. When my dog had kidney failure I took him in, we gave him a shot, and he passed quickly and mostly painlessly. Why couldn't we have done the same for my mother? Why did she have to endure 18 hours of waiting for her organs to fail? Why did we have to watch, unable to help?

I understand the law is there to prevent people from dying when they've just been diagnosed, but there comes a point where the only thing left is to die, and we should be able to make it easier on the dying, and on their loved ones. It is a crime against humanity that we cannot.

As a former Naval Aircrewman, and an all around "flying is awesome" kind of geek (I knew I wanted to fly when I was 3), I have to say I understand the reticence. Flying is awesome. It's hard to give up something you love doing.

At the same time, the cost-benefit analysis is swinging/has swung towards unmanned craft. They can have performance envelopes that won't allow a human inside. They can have significant cost savings in not having to protect the human inside.

Situational Awareness is big, but we do that with the Electronic Battlefield now. Some years ago I was very much in the "you'll never replace a pilot in the cockpit" side of the argument. Now.. I think the F-35, a fighter I so desperately wanted, should be eliminated, and replaced with drones. Times change. Technology changes. We all love the Sopwith Camel and the P-51, but you wouldn't use either one in a modern war.

It's going to be a difficult political move, but it's the right move, long term. And it took me many years before I could say that without gritting my teeth first. :)

Except, of course, that they aren't.

The FAA recently certified iPads for pilots to use for charts. There's never been a netbook that even attempted that task.

A tablet is not a netbook any more than a shrimp is a clam.

The Daily Show is a COMEDY Show. Jon Stewart doesn't pretend otherwise. His job is to skewer the news.

Beck (and Fox) pretend otherwise.

Considering that Unix is STILL dominant in the Datacenter I think your argument that "The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr[sic], Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before" is totally flawed.

You are probably unaware that major commercial vendors made their products for desktop Unix for many years. WordPerfect, for example, which at the time was the most dominant word processor on the planet, made versions for many Unixes, including SCO, and several other x86 Unix products that existed at the time. These major vendors left the market because of fragmentation.

No less than John Carmack has complained about the problems developing for Android vs the ease of developing for iOS. Feel free to ignore history, but having lived through it, I see it playing out again.

There has been a lot of discussion of late comparing the Apple iOS market and the Android market to the battle between Windows and MacOS many years ago. I think this comparison is misleading, and I think people looking at todays "OS Wars" would do well to remember the "OS Wars" of yesterday.

The comparison goes like this: Apple makes a proprietary device, with their own OS on it, and you can only get it from them. Google makes an OS (Android) that they license to multiple vendors, and you can get it on a large variety of hardware. This makes Google Android the Microsoft Windows of this battle.

Except that what a lot of people don't remember is that when Windows rose to dominance, Apple wasn't their only competitor. The truly entrenched product was Unix. And Unix owned the Datacenter. Unix people couldn't imagine Microsoft Windows ever being inside their Datacenter. It was inconceivable. And so the Unix vendors engaged in what we now call the "Unix Wars".

In the Unix Wars, there were a lot of vendors selling variants of AT&Ts UNIX. Now, in theory, these would all be compatible with one another, because they all came from AT&T (or Berkeley) as a starting point. But the vendors all wanted to make their product better than the competition so they all added different things, so theirs would stand out. And Developers quickly found that they couldn't make one version of their application, but had to make multiple versions, one for each of the major UNIX products out there. They might have different graphical interfaces, or they might have different hardware capabilities. And so, the application market was splintered.

Microsoft, on the other hand, while allowing their product to run on absolutely anybodies hardware, was very controlling over how Windows looked and acted. You could buy Windows from CompaQ or from IBM but what you got was the same. You had the exact same interface, you had the exact same applications, you had the exact same programming libraries available, so developers could make one copy of their application and it would run everywhere Windows did. Microsoft controlled EXACTLY how Windows looked, what was on the desktop, what was on the menu bar, no matter who you bought it from.

It is Apple, not Google, who is following this model. Sure, iPhones are only available from AT&T in this country, but they are available in a lot of other countries, from a lot of other vendors. And you can run your app on any of them, they'll all look and work the same. And when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and you can get an iPhone on other carriers, it will still look and act exactly like an iPhone.

Google, on the other hand, lets the carrier modify their OS how they see fit, and we are seeing a repeat of the "Unix Wars" all over again. Each carrier tries to make their version better, put a better front end on it, change how the hardware works, make theirs just a tiny bit shinier so people will buy it instead of the identical version from their competitor. And the Developers have to deal with that difference, and the Android market is fractured, at least a little bit, because of it.

iOS vs Android isn't MacOS vs Windows. It's Windows vs Unix. And Apple is playing the role of Microsoft this time.

And it was on a sun4m system, which would have been the old Sparc prior to Ultrasparc (sun4u now). I also noticed that Sam used Linux commands (cat /proc/meminfo, for example) and got errors, because EncomOS 12 was newer than SolarOS 4. :)

Rackspace has no requirement to have anybody as a customer. They are a business. The customer violates the terms of service. They have every right to refuse to service that customer.

I was once faced with a similar situation many years ago when I was one of two employees in a very tiny ISP here in Jacksonville. Sondra London was one of our customers and had collected writings of the convicted Gainesville murderer Danny Rolling. She was hosting her site at America Online, when a Senator complained and AOL shut her down. She came to us to see if we would host the book, which was essentially "How to become a serial killer". She has every right to publish that book, but we did not have a requirement to publish it for her. I spent a lot of time thinking about the First Amendment issue there. I am an ardent Free Speech supporter, but I had to choose to not be her distribution point for what was clearly "bad speech". She found a much larger distribution point, and went elsewhere.

Math education in America is pathetic. I went through my nephews High School textbook and there wasn't any MATH in it. There were lots of pictures of butterflies and "Why are we learning this?" columns and the whole thing looked like it was designed to be entertaining, rather than educational. The math was an afterthought, with hardly any problems, no explanations of those problems or how to solve them, and no answers. I was stunned, especially when I learned it was written by four math professors.

There is some argument, of course, that this is on purpose, and that we fail our duties to educate our children because an educated populace would be a danger to those in power. I'm not prepared to accept that, but I do think we've completely failed in our duty, and the uneducated masses of today is evidence enough of that.

My father has a saying, "There's no teaching if there's no learning. Until there is learning, you aren't a teacher, you are simply a presenter". I think we have far too many presenters, and not anywhere near enough teachers.

Microsoft told the Court that removing Explorer was impossible. They lied, but that's not the point. There's an attitude difference.

Microsoft doesn't want you changing their OS. It's theirs, they are the only ones who get to decide what is good and what is bad.

In Unix the choice is given to the user. Change shells by simply typing the name of any of the half-dozen provided to you. If you don't like the ones that are there, write your own and distribute it.

Forking is GOOD. When someone has a better idea in Unix, they release their better idea and people get to see it, to use it, to decide if it really is a better idea, and if it is, it will win out, and the old idea will be replaced. To do that in the Windows world, you have to hope Microsoft decides its a better idea and incorporates it for you. The eco-system is completely different.

And if you think Unix prevents software from advancing, I'd like you to take a look at the World Wide Web, almost all of which was developed by that same open model you denounce. Not just TCP/IP and the web browser itself, but PHP, Ruby, all the new tools doing things that were never done before, come from those places you claim will never advance software.

Sounds to me like you have your own reality distortion field.