Stieg Larsson was right, perhaps....

While I personally have the feeling that Wikileaks has more to do with Julian Assange's ego than with freedom of information, I find myself stuck in a paradox with respect to Wikileaks. On the one hand I find it highly offensive and wrong that wikileaks seems to only publish secret information on the US, given to Assange by disgruntled individuals in the US. On the other, I find it great that finally, someone is screwing over the governments like they screwed us over.

However, for Wikileaks to maintain its credibility, it'll need to find someone to give it North Korean state secrets on Kim Jong Il's bong collection, info on Osama Bin Laden's guilty pleasures and Chinese plans for the invasion of Taiwan.

As of OSX 10.7 and the soon arriving Mac App Store I think developers will be in the same boat as they now are with the iPad and iPhone App Store. Of course, developers can still develop natively for OSX without the Mac App Store, but where do you think all the app sales will be? In the Mac App Store. Apparently Microsoft want to do this as well with Windows 8. I'm beginning to despair and I'm pretty glad that at least on Linux I can do what I want.

Your government seesm happy enough to spend money it doesn't have and then make more paper money when it runs out of the money it didn't have, so it's possible that there will be an increase in scanners across your country.

But you know what? I, for one, will not even consider visiting the US as it currently stands, because I'm not interested in being treated like crap for no reason at all.

Tourism to the US is declining due to this treatment above the already ridiculous fingerprint and iris scanning.

And then you have Janet Napolitano publicly wondering about the "psychology" of terrorists. I suppose that it didn't occur to her to, you know, just ask them.

It seems like the terrorists have already won.

P.S. You want Afghanistan to stop being a hotbed of stone age fanaticism? Invite the Chinese to police the place. The Chinese would do to Afghanistan what they did to Tibet and Xingjiang; introduce draconian laws applying to native traditions, enforce them by mass arrests and bring in tens of millions of Chinese immigrants. I don't think the muslim fanatics are people you can negotiate with and they are never going to surrender as long as their cause is half way popular, so you either need to do the modern equivalent of ethnic cleansing/genocide or get out.

That's right. I don't. Now fuck off. XBox is not a democracy, it's a business, and it has a vested interest in making sure that it pleases the majority of its customers and keeps within what is commonly held to be social norms. Wankers like you are too interested in being little internet VIPs to compensate for your stupidity in real life.

I would really like to see a citation, a.k.a. reference, because, I think you're classing things like military spending as social services and the rest of us don't really think that's valid. ;)

You learnt grammar from science fiction books? Oh man, that is really sad.

Ah, Sweden, that bastion of freedom that has the US's dick so far up its collective ass that they trump up a charge on Julian Assange to make him become a fugitive while discrediting him (regardless of Assange's reportedly crappy personality), where the media is now tripping over its collective feet to be even more draconian than the US with regard to IP laws. It's a shame, used to be a nice country before it became a little banana republic police state that will do anything the US tells it to.

I'm the system admin for a large design company (4 Xservers and one XRaid that replaced 4 Linux boxes about 4 years ago). This is pretty fucking awful news for us, and I'll lay out the reasons:

1. Apple's servers are very easy to manage. Much easier than Windows or Linux machines.

2. Apple's Workgroup management features are much easier to use than the Windows or Linux equivalents.

3. Apple File Sharing being able to mix AFP/SMB and NFS seamlessly was world class.

All of this led to large productivity gains in that much less time was being spent on admin tasks than necessary.

So now that's gone.

Shit.

And, what worries me more is that I can see Apple killing traditional OSX on Macs in favour of iOS as well.

I think Apple just lost a customer in us because we can't trust them anymore.

This Tea Party circus reminds me so much of the Taliban in its rabid extremism and lack of real ideas on how to save your country. I used to work for the USAF many years ago and met many Americans that I liked, but honestly, I don't see many signs of the American people being able to dig themselves out of this hole in the near future. What I do see is a people in abject terror because their traditional ways of doing things are not working anymore and they are grasping at straws instead of buckling down to go through the process of fixing all the things that are broken in the USA.

Some of those things are:
The national infrastructure in the USA is simply catastrophic. There is not enough money being invested to avert the negative effect that this has on your economy.
The American health system, even though it spends more per person than any other country, is a disaster. You have death rates that are on par with developing nations. You eat food that is so high in calories and so low in nutritional value that you are amongst the world's fattest people.
The education system is terrible and becoming worse. Your universities are the world's best but it seems that the majority of the students are from India or China in fields which produce graduates that then go out and produce economic growth instead of graduates that go out and work in the service industry.
You spend a fortune on wars that have nothing to do with you and which you haven't and will not win.
Your political parties, their agendas and their supporters have become empty vessels that spend more than any other political parties on earth on expensive campaigns that are nothing but circuses and theatre, that produce nothing but more hysteria and fear.
Your people are behaving like stereotypical uneducated 3rd world peasants who believe that so-called "moral values", like penalising abortion and the American version of Christianity will save your country.
Your industry produces almost nothing anymore. All the production capacity has been sent overseas to where it is cheaper, but which has a long term negative effect on your country. That a country like Germany which has vastly higher taxes and benefits can produce more should be a point worth thinking about. Instead your American politicians try to tell the Germans that they should consume more.
Your consumption of goods and services remained at levels from the days when American industry was still strong, and was sustained only by increasingly high levels of debt, all of which culminated in the catastrophic crash of 2008. One of the results of this is that property foreclosures are higher than they have ever been.
The level of abject poverty in your country is higher than almost any other developed nation.

This Republican victory will do no more to improve your country's economy than the Democratic one before it.

To make a real and lasting change you Americans would have to start using your brains and start thinking pragmatically, spending less on empty promises and consuming less and producing more.

Welcome to the rest of the world.

You're saying Hitler's to Blame for Microsoft and Steve Jobs?

The increasing tendency for languages to use their own script on the internet not only on websites, but also in TLDs does lead to people who have no knowledge of that script being less and less able to access it, as they can't even input the characters for the domain any more. That said, how many people were looking at foreign websites in any case? Non-English speaking people were used to accessing English websites, as the biggest majority of the web was in English, but English speakers, who are notoriously bad in foreign languages weren't doing that so much.

English was more or less an internet common language and that is now changing again, so yes, I do think the web is currently being segregated by language again.

IMO the best bets for enhanced international web understanding lie with things like Google's translate, which will hopefully improve over the years. This because I don't see people being able to cope with all the myriad languages on the web.

Is 0.888888888888888.... = 0.999999999999999999999999....?

If so, does 0.1111111111111..... = 0? or 0.1?

Or does 0.8888888888.... + 0.1111111111111.......... = 0.999999999999999999.........?

You know, not everyone who posts something that isn't mindlessly, absolutely pro-Apple/Steve Jobs/iPhone/iPad etc works for Microsoft.

Some of them work for Google.