I know we're not supposed to complain, but this one seems obvious...

How about family? Some of us actually like spending time with them...

Last I looked (admittedly some time ago), Virtual PC was really only useful for running Windows guests on Windows workstations. VMWare's closest competing product (VMWare Player) has already been free for a while. I'm not particularly familiar with VirtualBox, but from what I understand, it's very similar to VMWare Workstation, is it not?

VMWare's primary breadwinner seems to be the server virtualization market. While Xen can provide solid competition on Linux servers (albeit not nearly as easy to use), there doesn't seem to be any serious competition for windows servers. I suspect that Workstation stopped being a significant source of income for them some time ago. The only people I know who still use Workstation got their licenses for free because they were already spending so much for their server products.

Internet Explorer lost ground because Microsoft abandoned developers. Unless Microsoft can win back developers, it doesn't matter how many alternatives there are, assuming they remain sufficiently compatible with the same standards. As long as developers prefer to work with Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it doesn't really matter how much share of the end user market IE has, it will never again have the same dominance it did in 2001.

Just because they can't learn from their parents doesn't mean that they couldn't learn from other octopi. If every newborn octopus spent the first two years of his life following around a three year old octopus, they could learn quite a bit. What they lack is not the ability to reproduce without dying, but rather the instinct to congregate with other individuals for mutual benefit. This instinct has developed in many unintelligent species, and has failed to develop in some other intelligent species, so I would say things aren't completely hopeless for them, but I would expect that if they don't already have any social tendencies, it would take an awfully long time for them to develop.

Let us suppose that instead of a highly intelligent /.er, you're someone who has trouble reading through several dozen pages of highly technical documents and following all the details. You do your best, and follow some of it. The guy sitting across the table from you, whose job it is to understand these things, tells you that you can afford it. Is it really so unreasonable to trust his understanding over your own? After all, he is better at it than you are.

Is it unreasonable to assume that somebody who makes his life selling something is looking out for my interests in the sale rather than his own? Excuse me, but F*** NO! it is not reasonable. Let's talk about something other than mortgages for a seecond. Assuming that you are anything like a typical slashdotter, you have probably had at least one occasion where you were looking at a big purchase at Best Buy/Fry's/Micro Center. While you were there, some helpful BestFryCenter sales droid probably tried to give you some advice on which thingamaboob would best serve your needs. Now he may have given you some useful advice, but on the whole his job is not to understand these things, his job is to sell them. And he will have a definite interest in in selling you the most profitable piece of junk he can convince you to buy. Pretty much everyone has had an experience where somebody has tried to sell them something they knew that they didn't need. Why would you assume a mortgage broker is any different?

If somebody is trying to sell you something that you didn't understand, the only assumption that you should make is that this guy is trying to make money selling you something. If you don't understand it, and you need some assurance that what you are doing is a good idea, the person who is trying to sell it to you should not be the person you seek that assurance from.

If the brokers actually committed fraud by telling the borrowers something that wasn't true, then by all means go after them. And it did happen. I know one couple who had the broker show up at the closing with papers to a completely different loan than the one they had agreed to. But it is hardly fraud when they were telling the truth and explaining exactly how the loan worked if the borrower simply failed to understand. Certainly, I think the brokers deserver to feel some heat for what they did, especially in cases where they engaged in blatantly fraudulent practices, such as encouraged people to lie on loan applications, or changing loan applications. But as a whole, I don't think the label fraud is justified, because what they were doing isn't any different than a car salesman or a guy out on the floor at best buy, or anyone else who tries to sell things for a living.

If Ted Stevens had made an otherwise coherent argument where he happened to characterize the Internet using a new variation of otherwise common technical slang, I suspect that very few people would have even noticed, and I doubt that we'd still be talking about it two years later.

But if you look at the whole speech, you get several other wonderful nuggets like: "Ten movies streaming across that internet, and what, what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got- an internet was sent by my staff at ten o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all the other things that are going on in the internet commercially!" In that light, it's a lot harder to think of him as a generally clueful person who happened to misuse a bit of jargon that he was not acquainted with. In that light, the "Series of Tubes" comment, rather than being a sign of incompetence itself, is just the easiest bit for the world to latch onto, and repeat forever and ever. Sort of like President Bush's "Internets".

Indeed...

In total 200,000 website hits and perhaps 1,000,000 people have seen this on other sites since Feb 2007.

Not if you're wife happens to be Dutch... or rather happens to have a somewhat rational outlook on the value of things. At least, my wife claims it comes from being Dutch and I don't know enough other Dutch people to argue with her.

I once found myself in a conversation with several of her college girlfriends and their husbands about designer purses. (sorry, "handbags") I think the extent of my contribution was a sarcastic "Loiue who?" when one of them was explaining how to identify a counterfeit Luis Vuitton. When one of them asked me why I had never bought one for my wife, I had to explain to them that they may not know my wife as well as they thought, because I would be sleeping on the couch if she ever found out that I spent that much "on a purse". They weren't amused. Instead, she's perfectly happy carrying around the $20 knockoff she bought at a party.

"An Inconvenient Truth" was a good movie, but fortunately for him, he is a politician and not a scientist, so he didn't have to worry about inconvenient facts getting in the way of his story. I give him credit for raising awareness (for which he won his Nobel Peace prize), but I think we're better off leaving him to his evangelizing. Let somebody with a firmer grasp of the actual facts behind the matter propose policy.