I believe that people need to see the effects of accidents in order for it to truly register. (Heck, do this for other serious stuff, too, like the casualties of wars.) Making it cost "more money" to drive dangerously is basically sugar-coating, hiding the very real risks.

There should be ads in prime time that show accident victims whose lives have been turned upside down. Show people who can no longer walk, or who lost limbs, or who lost family members. Make it clear that it was drunk driving, or cell phones, or whatever, that led to their demise.

Too many ignorant people seem to think that the world is a heck of a lot nicer than it really is. That ignorance continues when they get behind the wheel.

You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up.

Few users seem to realize that the Help menu (as of Leopard at least) has full search of all menu items. You can literally type command-? to open the text field, and start typing to have it find matching items. It is actually incredibly easy to "explore" menus on the Mac now.

On windows, you do alt, F, S and get to the save menu item in the file menu. On OS X you do contol-F2, F, S, and get to the save menu.

Well actually, on the Mac it's control-F2, F, down-arrow, S, then return. As much as I hate Windows, the Mac's method is more awkward. (Save is a bad example because it has a direct short-cut, but imagine accessing any item in a similar way.)

Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?

As expected, spammers keep becoming smarter.

The way to stop spam is to eliminate its value, not its source. Spammers send this crap to make money. So who pays them?

If it's a business, then that business is doing a pretty poor job of analyzing its marketing success rates. Just because you can "reach" the whole world, doesn't mean it's worth the money: everyone will delete your "flyer" and make a mental note to hate your brand for eternity (and tell their friends). So, one step is to convince businesses that spam not only won't win any customers, but it will most definitely lose some.

The other likely payer is the receiver, when receiving scam spam. Scammers aren't paying anyone to send spam, they're expecting a payoff when some idiot gives them what they "legitimately" asked for. Again, the solution is education, but a different kind: people need to be informed about how to recognize E-mail scams (apparently some people really can't). Even if one guy in a million sends his life savings, it justifies the effort of spammers.

Maybe novice computer users need a license to drive their mail client, as if it were a car, and I'm only half kidding. They can harm at least themselves if they don't know what they're doing. This education would solve other problems as well.

For more on this story, please watch the following interview video...oh crap.

I've seen this kind of attitude more and more: organizations terrified to change anything, where even the tiniest tweak starts to require a bureaucracy of change control. Years can go by without significant improvement, until eventually a change seems unavoidable and turns into a complicated, expensive and near-catastrophic upgrade. Ridiculously, in these same organizations, "improvements" as silly as discovering some feature in Outlook are heralded as being amazing productivity boosts.

As time goes by, the I.T. people necessary to successfully pull off transitions from A to B grow frustrated and leave, which only makes organizations less likely to ever successfully make that jump.

Is this fear of change because managers are coming from industries that have moved more slowly than technology? I'm not sure.

But this is one of the reasons I hate Microsoft...their software has set the entire industry -- and maybe several industries -- back by at least a decade. Microsoft delivers junk, and in turn Windows software companies seem to just copy Microsoft's bad examples. Entire groups are essentially now trained to believe that computers must be ugly, awkward, and unstable pieces of junk that require entire legions of I.T. people to keep running properly. They see no problem going for coffee while their machine churns away doing what should be trivial tasks. They are trained to believe that software must be really expensive, and that if it isn't hundreds of dollars and supported by an army, it is somehow a "risk" to use and isn't as "good" as what they've been using. It is truly sad that so many groups around the world will probably be completely screwed into using older versions of Windows for years.

This problem occurred only for people who updated their system's Perl distro via CPAN.

A vendor is free to do what it wants in the part of the system it supports. This isn't new, it's been done for decades on Unix with the distinction between the /usr/local hierarchy (a.k.a. "your crap, not ours") and the rest of /usr (i.e. "our crap, not yours").

People need to know that it's better to install customizations in /usr/local/lib/perl5, or even their home directory, than to fiddle with the vendor setup. This not only avoids vendor clobbering, but the separation is cleaner: mistakes are easier to contain and undo, you can easily test whether a problem is with your customizations or the vendor defaults, you don't necessarily need admin privileges, etc.

I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.

On Linux, I now use /usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.

On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.

Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.

In quotes from interviews in the article, and comments here on Slashdot, there seems to be this misguided assumption that "taxpayer" equals "American". That is wrong!!!

Immigrants who work here, even on a visa, pay taxes on their income. They shop at the same stores, forking over sales tax. Many foreign workers own property that is taxed, they buy stocks that are taxed, etc. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any difference between an immigrant and a U.S. citizen from a "paying taxes" point of view, over the same period of residency.

So, stop acting as if foreign workers contribute no money to the government, as if somehow every use of tax dollars will only impact U.S. citizens.

You can't switch between individual windows in Mac, which is something that pisses me off being an employee of a TV station who uses Macs with Final Cut Studio.

There are several ways to switch between windows on a Mac:
- Open the menu of a Dock icon for a running app; all windows are listed.
- Open the Window menu from the menu bar while the app is in front.
- Use the keyboard (command-tilde or shift-command-tilde for open windows; control-F3 to focus the Dock and tab between icons).
- Use Exposé.
- Click on the window.

Should be: http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/pdf5GxptFPV1D.pdf