Marketing a special social network for smart people is like marketing a special vanilla-creme filled chocolate cheesecake to health fanatics.

Which is to say, the moment they take the bait is the moment they demonstrate they're not whom you thought they were...

The charter for Stora, a Swedish mining company, was granted in 1347. It's probably the oldest limited-liability corporation in the world. Yes, it's still around today.

There are two different ways to do network display: the RDP way and the right way. With RDP you're sending the entire "screen" over the network, so all the windows have to be composited first. Thus RDP requires a fully featured compositor like Weston on the remote end.

The right way is to send each window over the network, which should require a lightweight compression proxy. No one appears to be working on this.

Then you're going to be disappointed.

The speed of light in optical fibre is about 200km per millisecond. So a round-trip ping of 10ms, ignoring all other sources of latency, limits you to a range of 1000km (call it 600 miles). And that's never going to change.

Yes.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to point out that while America might be building walls to keep unwelcome visitors out, the Soviet Union built walls to keep its people in. A state that needs to imprison its entire population is not a state that has any right to exist.

I'm really not sure why we even need to discuss this. Assuming people are too young to personally remember this, were they also asleep during their history classes?

Communism is an economic theory that can't work in theory - it centralises economic planning leading to an insoluble information processing scaling problem, while at the same time destroying precisely the information (prices) that are needed to make sensible decisions - and has been proven not to work in practice. There have been plenty of Communist states. They all failed spectacularly, generally displaying massive corruption and brutal oppression as they did so.

They may not have looked like you imagine Communism should look, but that's because Communism cannot function at the scale of a nation-state, not in the real world, not with real people. And an economic theory that doesn't work unless people stop acting like people is not a very good theory.

Yes. The Soviet Union was a nightmare state.

Tell that to Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Not to mention North Korea and Vietnam. I'm sure they enjoyed doing their "own thing".

What? Seriously, what? How old are you? Do you actually remember the Cold War?

The fact that America is a flawed nation is no excuse for false equivalencies with brutal totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. Those countries, under those leaders, deliberately killed tens of millions of their own people. We never want to see anything like that again.

I agree with that for the most part (and history bears you out with regards to Communism). However, Fascism doesn't tie itself to a specific, unworkable, economic theory; it accepts capitalism so long as the state maintains control. Which is is a very prominent factor in Russia of late, possibly even more than in China.

Fascism is far more apt for Russia's state of government under Putin than Communism.

£5.5M for a year's support for hundreds of thousands of of XP systems is extremely good value, and far cheaper than any other option.

Of course, they'll still be in the same position a year from now. But in government, if you pass the buck for long enough, it becomes someone else's problem.

Honor Harrington? The first 67 books in the series were okay -- the ones that took place when Harrington was still a mere human. The last 589, however, have been a bit of a stretch. You know, the ones where she becomes a master space-yachtsman; a martial arts master; acquires a bionic arm; a bionic eye; an elite cadre of crack-shot martial arts masters bodyguards; a super-intelligent, super-empathic, telepathic, vicious pet "treecat,;" when her friends, relatives and everyone around her acquire these same "treecats;" becomes CEO of a planet-spanning multi-billion dollar corporation, fabulously wealthy Duchess of a land on a medieval planet, and High Admiral of the galaxy's most formidable space navy, close confidant of The Queen -- all the while boning the Prime Minister (while the PM's wife looks on approvingly because, well, she's Honor Harrington (see above)).

That would be awesome.

It's just the photino birds.

Smug, arch, deliriously self-absorbed, and given to carrying around precious little pet dogs like he was some kind of eccentric Bond Villain. That he would pay Slashdot to interview him -- and that he would be so out of touch as to think there were any genuine tech decision makers left on Slashdot -- comes as no surprise at all.