If I read this right "When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority" then unless an idea starts with a 10% or greater it can never pass through that point on the way to being a majority.

DON'T EVER COME UP WITH AN IDEA OR IT WILL NEVER BE.

your analogy utterly fails. Sure it's inflammatory on an emotional and illogical level perhaps, but you'd have to include armor and defenses for the subject into your metaphor for it to even begin to work. A Linux box, or any box for that matter is not a 'hapless pedestrian', it is taken for granted that it has defenses against such 'punches'. Try again

Security through obscurity isn't. Publish.

I've a friend who has been making these for customers for years. His are machined from brass propeller shafts recovered from antique motorboats. He milled them down in all size from a 24" long barrel to monster sized artillery. They are quite functional, firing lead balls he casts himself from self-made tools and the polished brass is absolutely beautiful. Just an idea for anyone with a hankering to make one, but doesn't have access to a foundry to cast iron.

Robotron is the best arcade game ever, bar none. I purchased the stand up version from the local Chuck E. Cheese that I used to play it on, years ago. None of the console version compare to the dual joystick action of the arcade version. For the record, the score rolls at 10 million; My record sits at about 21 million which took about 5 hours until the comic shop owner finally conceded that my kung fu was stronger and begged me to quit to he could close his score.

Here is some interesting trivia: The original reason I was drawn to Robotron:2084 back in the heyday 80's arcade madness is that unlike normal games that allowed you 3 characters for you initials when you posted a high score, Robotron 2084 allowed you a glorious 20 character taunt for high score!

For my customers in a very rural, very southern town, it's a toss up between hard drive and: 'There's something wrong with the modem' "You mean you can't dial out?" "What?" "Dial out. You can't dial into your internet provider" "No. We got DSL. There's something wrong with the whole modem" "..."

Be thankful

I can't believe how many of you are crying about 'what we did to Saddam'. You all need to remember what culture this man is a part of. There is no question that he was gonna die at someone's hands for all of his murder; far be it from us to impose our high-minded cultural values on them. The truth is that Saddam got off easy with a botched hanging. I have read comments from outraged Muslims who wanted Saddam to die in an ancient, more 'traditional' manner for one who has wronged so many: To be placed in a pit, and have everyone who was wronged by him walked past and spit on him until he drowns. He killed enough people that the survivors could have made quick work of it I bet.

I have been buying Dell Precision 470 and 490 workstations on eBay for $200 or so delivered with twin dual-core Xeon processors, SATA with raid, nVidia Quadro FX3400 dual head video and 4GB ECC, Regged, buffered ram.

I run Lunix and VirtualBox from sun (emulating Windows XP, Vista, 2000, Server) and am working on getting a MaxOSX image installed. YOu cannot beat these used Dell boxes for price, performance and reliability.

the LAST thing any of us want is for the
bureaucracies to be responsible for what e-mail we receive and what e-mail we do not. If people cannot be trouble to acquire or hire the expertise necessary to reduce spam, then let them eat spam. People have the right to pursue happiness, bear arms, to assemble and to worship. They also have the right to be cold, hungry, homeless sick and dead.

And to have their inboxes stuffed with spam.

with VirtualBox, anyone can get good software. Which is actually a good idea. If someone is gonna fiddle with risky downloads, they should set up a VirtualBox Sandbox and check that puppy out before they let it loose in the dog yard.

w4r3z n00bz abound in every user base, Mac is no exception. Hooray for learning experiences!