I wish someone would finally notice that the Flash player is a closed, commercial product, so the fact that its Linux version sucks hardly reflects on the quality of free software or its development model. Strangely enough, the only piece of software on my computer that truly sucks dump trucks through a straw is that Flash plug-in. It also happens to be the only bit of non-free software here...

Mind, by that logic the porn industry would be entitled to a much bigger share. I buy a hundred CDs a year, underground music, though, and I do not download non-free music. I would be pretty pissed off at a RIAA tax on my net connection - especially as none of the independent musicians I listen to would get a dime of that.

The NSA tapping American phones? I would feel really bad about that, if I did not just recall that I'm European and that the NSA requires no warrant or reason to invade my privacy. It was expressly created for that. Do not expect me to feel sympathy when a Chinese agency snoops on your communications. You never gave it a thought whether indiscriminate spying on 'them danged furriners', i.e. me, was ethically justified.

I would like to point out that I'm male.
And thanks for the mention. First time anyone has considered me an authoritative source for anything.

Yours truly,

Rene "random ranting blogger" Kita

Unfortunately that is the first criterion by which I must judge an office suite. I see the occasional customer accidentally saving files as DOCX, but nobody has ever asked me whether I do OASIS documents, as well. So any word processor I use must first scale that mountainous mess of MS file formats to be at all useful to me.

Quite a few Fortune 15 companies have not been doing well recently and many of the decisions that have led them there have appeared deranged in hindsight, be it derivatives trading or persisting with the production of monstrous SUVs in times of skyrocketing oil prices. Thank you for the insight into how that might have come about.

The worst director's cut I have seen is Monty Python's Meaning of Life. It simply ruins much of the film. Avoid at all costs or you'll be left wondering why people are raving about the genius of the thing.

Spoiler:
Crime #1: They've cut out the Crimson Insurance intro. Which makes the later attack of the pirates look about as meaningful and funny as a giant mechanical spider in a western movie...

A generation taught to read online will be very rarely exposed to the kind of polished prose that can teach you both style and clear thinking. Almost any book ever published has been first rewritten by its author once or a dozen times and then vetted by an editor for spelling, grammar, style, structure and contents. Just about everything on the net is first draft - this present post included.
So it is not just the atrocious apostrophes, the equally asses, the complementary compliments and their brethren that will haunt them, but a flabby race-to-the-first-post argumentative style that has no patience for intellectual rigour.
Mind, that goes for us old farts, too. Lately, I have been forcing myself off the computer and into the library to refresh my ear for language with past and present masters of the craft. Reading good literature - as opposed to paperback fantasy and such dross - is a revelation. You can see the time the author has lavished on the crafting of his/her sentences to make them both beautiful and persuasive carriers of argument.
I wish there was a way of transferring this to the internet, but, although many blogging sites allow authors to tinker with their posts, it would be futile to go through several drafts, as there are no readers to dig into bygone articles to see how they are shaping up after five months of revisions...

I'm a Finnish translator. The differing approaches to sex denomination can cause quite a bit of pain when translating passages of stories with protagonists called just 'he' and 'she'. Usually, we end up using their names, if available, or clumsy constructions like "the woman says", "the man went". It is entirely possible to write whole novels in Finnish without giving away the protagonist's gender. It's been done, too. Yes, we have a few gender specific job descriptions, like the speaker of the parliament is the 'puhemies' - the 'speaker man' - which got somewhat awkward as soon as the first woman got the job and had to be referred to as Madam Speaker Man...
So, no, sex is not automatically conveyed with anything in Finnish. And we do not address people by name in every other sentence, like Americans, either. Determining the sex of an online Finn can be tricky. :)

Ah, yes, the legendary suicidal leader who has power enough to prod his whole nation into annihilation without getting deposed. I really wish Americans wouldn't base foreign policy decisions on second rate fantasy novels. Mind, I grant you that dehumanizing the enemy/all foreigners has always been a standard war propaganda method among all human nations in history. You know, crap like Sting's

"I hope the Russians love their children, too."

Yes, the Soviet Russians loved their children and in turn told them horror stories about inhuman capitalists who were plotting to wipe out life on Earth...

Tss. You know, the thing people have about Godwining threads is that comparing Nazi institutions to modern ones trivialises a system that caused a world war and directly killed 6 million Jews, 250,000 Romany people, thousands of homosexuals, mental patients, mentally handicapped persons and opposition figures. While certain innovations of the Bush administration make its propaganda abroad about human rights and freedom look silly (various dictators have taken to quoting Bush phrases when justifying atrocities), comparing these is obscene.
Yes, it does feel more comfortable to laugh at the Nazis, but our refusal to take this universal taint of the human character seriously has already led to unchecked massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, to name but a few.
Oh, and the various aspects of Jim Crow caused a lot more death and suffering in America than any present measures. Israel exists today, because in 1945, the world's Jews had reason to believe that there was no nation on Earth where they could feel safe.
Read some history and gain some perspective, okay?

The peculiar thing about this story is that you are talking about CryptoAG in present tense. Yet again we learn that having one's integrity utterly compromised means nothing in the business world! Why would anybody buy a cryptographic product that does not encrypt properly? "We did it because they had shiny brochures." "We bought CryptoAG because the Americans promised us that only they and the Germans would be reading our communications." Insane.
Oh well, I still use clear e-mail for all business. In a world where nobody trusts anybody nobody gets anything done.

44 tabs in 10 windows: Haven't closed anything in a while. Restart tabs on crash.
10 web comics.
5 work related googling tabs.
15 news/sport site tabs.
10 blogs of friends.
4 Slashdot tabs.

I live here. What's your excuse?