Long term, heavy-academic-contribution stuff was exactly what he choked off. He was bad for America's research base and bad for big-picture American security, IMHO. Apologies for the gratuitous Dubya swipe (as you say, mod-bait on /.), but I do feel that Tether and GWB shared a disdain for academia, which was no problem for the president, but had terrible consequences for what is supposed to be the blue-sky research arm of the DoD.

Also, you're aware that this not some hindsight Bush-bashing here, right? I mean, they actually had Senate hearings on the Tether/DARPA mess back in 2005.

Read the TFA. There would have been unimaginably more cool stuff if Tether hadn't choked off academic funding for anything not directly usable in the current wars. DARPANet/ARPANet/the Internet definitely is not something that could have happened on his watch.

No mention of the disastrous Bush-era reign of Tony Tether at DARPA? With an incurious, aggressive president, we got an incurious, aggressive DARPA head, who cut long-term and academic research in favor of short-term corporate research. His dumping by Obama led to joy and celebrations (OK, cautious hope) across the land.

Google did maps, it was okay but not #1, they bought Keyhole(now google earth) and advanced their tech to become #1

They hired the guys who made the Google Maps precursor, but it was a separate acquisition (and technology) from Keyhole / Google Earth. They only recently got the two systems to use the same imagery data, I think.

I was going to add the same comment. The point of a botnet is that the computers, being hijacked consumer/corporate pcs, are from all over the world and indistinguishable from random traffic IPs. If you're getting attacked by an all-China botnet, just cut off a well-defined set of addresses and the threat vanishes.

It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears" and "what is the population of iceland" (without quotes). The answer appears at the top, separately from the search results.

Nope. Win32 is emphatically not Unix. If anything, it's closer to the old DEC VAX VMS OS (Dave Cutler's earlier OS). While there are POSIX compatibility adapters, the native OS provides services that look pretty different from the classic UNIX ones (process creation, IPC, security, etc.).

I recommend Windows System Programming by Hart if you want to get a feeling for it. It's arguably a better (and certainly more modern) API than the classic UNIX set. I mean, fork() is a pretty weird way to create a new process, if you think about it.

This is _not_ an endorsement of the entire Windows OS, which has miles-deep layers of cruft and crap on top -- just talking about the kernel and core system services.

There are several. Search for "rotary dialer" in the iTunes App Store.