By the same logic, let the business decisions be made by business people.

What's a "business" person? What knowledge falls under "business"? There's no such thing as a business decision. There are H.R. decisions, product strategy decisions, accounting decisions. But these are all disparate domains with specific knowledge. It's like saying "hey, the decision has to be made by an I.T. person". What good is it letting a sysadmin decide on the development framework of a new application? Might as well let a "business" person do it. Odds are their choice will be just as good (or bad).

By which I only mean to say that the problem with modern business is too many people knowing too little having too much decision-making power.

The systems aren't put in help the doctors. They are put in by the non-medical managers to help their jobs.

I've seen this in action now several times, even at my current job. Management often don't understand the job of the people they're supposed to manage, so they introduce these systems that cater to managers in the hope that it will make up for their lack of understanding. Quite often it doesn't help. This is why companies that require their management to regularly work "on the factory floor" generally do better.

Another big problem is misapplication of tools. Using software aimed at one problem domain in a closely adjoining problem domain might not be a good solution. It's like using the wrong type of screw driver. "It turns screws, that's good enough" doesn't cut it in the real world.

Then again, much business software is designed without really understanding what it is that is supposed to be done with the software when it is finished, mostly because the problem domains are heavily underestimated. I've had to fight epic battles to actually get to speak to end users before I start on the functional design of an app module. The only constant is that users will always tell you some new aspect of the problem that you didn't know about yet.

They're called web workers, in the process of being W3C standardized, with shipping code in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome, with fallbacks possible to google gears on other browsers. Basically they're threads with no shared memory model, relying only on message passing / event mechanisms for synchronization.

With web workers you can do stuff like ray tracing or interactive video processing in the browser. If you can't see the potential for that in client-side code then nothing I say further will convince you otherwise.

Microsoft has many programs to help tech startups get their software very cheaply, like bizspark and the action pack subscription. If you're a tech startup that's pirating microsoft software, you probably haven't done your homework.

At my job we switched to openoffice due to the licensing cost of office.

I was very positive about this at first, because I used openoffice writer at home for when I needed to type up a letter, and that had been a positive experience.

Using it all day for serious word processing quickly changed my mind. Word had one issue that annoyed me: bullet layout going on the fritz if you tried to get fancy with nesting and copy/paste. OO writer by contrast has dozens of issues that annoy me, some minor, some major. The supposed office compatibility is so poor that using it to exchange documents with office users is basically impossible (at least for anything that uses tables and headers/footers). It also has many bugs, some of which shockingly critical, like occasional irreversible corruption of a document when trying to save it with CTRL+S while auto-save is running.

I've done a complete 180 on openoffice. I don't think it's good enough to use, even if it's free. If I was the decision maker, I would chose to pay for microsoft office instead of using openoffice, because the time lost with openoffice's annoyances vastly outweighs the license cost of office.

That's just a matter of accounting. The writers could just charge more up-front and end up with the same amount earned at the end of the road.

The issue is not with how long they're paid, it's with how much they're paid. Do you think writers are overpaid? What do you base this on?

If someone has announced his intention to kill you and has the means to carry out that threat then you kill him first.

Actually, my first response would be "why on earth does someone hate me enough to want me dead?"

I think the objection is not to going after people that do harm, it's about blindly doing that, without thinking or doing anything about how it ever got that far.

Terrorism is a threat. To think otherwise is naive.

You're misreading the argument. It's not that terrorism isn't a threat, it's that this threat is overblown. In the U.S., more people die from car accidents in a day than die from terrorism in a year. In africa, more people die from hunger in a day than died on 9/11 (btw, the world currently produces enough food to feed everyone, it's only politics that prevents this from happening). Terrorism in the grand scope of things is pretty small as a risk.

Now, I know the counterpoint to that "terrorism may be a small risk, but it's an unknown risk, it only takes one guy one time to kill thousands...". That may be true, but then if it's so easy for terrorists to strike, why focus so much on killing them, which doesn't do much for lowering the risk? Why not solve the underlying causes? Why not seek oil independence so military presence in the middle east is no longer required? With the money spent on iraq, america could have dramatically reduced its dependence on foreign oil.

The argument on the other side is not that these aren't causes worth fighting for, it's that the effort spent fighting them is spent the wrong way. Terrorism isn't prevented by deploying troops, it's prevented by reshaping global politics. Then another argument is entirely is why this money is misspent, and for that you only have to look at the money trails in american politics. There's no need for america to spend more on defense than all the other nations in the world combined. It's not under that big of a threat.

The appropriate response to terrorism is to find those responsible and kill them.

Israel has been killing terrorists with dedication for half a century, and they're no safer today than they were then.

Terrorism is a symptom, not a cause. Killing terrorists to become safe is like having a liposuction to become thin. It works only in the short term, but in the long term you only make your problems bigger. The only right solution is changing your lifestyle.

Ofcourse, people have to be punished for their crimes, but going after evil-doers is just that, punishment. It has nothing to do with becoming safer.

Personally, as an American citizen, I could give a rats fuck what the international community thinks about us.

That thinking (which isn't exclusive to americans) is exactly why the poorest billion in the world are no better off today than they were 50 years ago. The problem is that international politics is still busy more with national self-interest than with trying to make life better for everyone. The whole system is deeply and fundamentally broken.

Still, things are changing. Asia has made huge leaps the past 50 years, to where they're going to surpass the US and EU. The world is changing, and you would do well to notice it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html

The sad thing is before his 1st term is over, we will be hardly distinguishable from most of the European countries in terms of economics and social and political policy.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I swear, the way some americans talk about socialist europe you'd think we were all sleeping on dirty concrete floors and living off water and bread.

You think having to spend your Presidency worrying about the next attack is really better than having a domestic Presidency?

The thing is, 9/11 didn't change anything from the perspective of the president. The threat was just as big before, and it was just as big after. When you have the scale and footprint of the U.S. (remember, military bases in 63 countries!), you're going to have a lot of enemies. The threat is not immensely larger today than it was a decade ago, or two decades ago.

It was his choice to focus exclusively on the symptom (terrorism) instead of the cause (global trade and power imbalances). It was his choice to "solve" that problem by increasing the military presence in the middle east (which anyone should have known would only make things worse). He had a lot of opportunity and goodwill, and he deliberately chose to misapply it.

Computer science is not an exact science. Vagueness is to be expected, even in the little things.

Did you submit your idea to the html5 mailing list? It's a good idea. At the very least this should be debated within the scope of html5.

Users don't know what a browser engine is. They don't even know what a browser is. They know that if they click on the big blue e, they can google the internet, and that's pretty much all they know.

The reason they're not switching to chrome is because even if they do manage to click and install it, they won't even realize that they have to click the chrome icon instead of the ie icon to browse the web. And even if they get as far as realizing that, they won't like chrome because it looks too different.

What chrome frame has also demonstrated beyond a doubt is that microsoft could have shipped a solution that preserved IE6 compatibility and upgraded web standards at the same time. They didn't because they didn't want to.

Microsoft is going to keep delaying the web's advance as long as possible. They only way to get things done is to side-step them.

The best way to reduce surface of attack is to abandon IE entirely and switch to chrome, as it was the only browser nobody managed to crack during the Pwn2Own contest earlier this year.

If security trumped all else, everybody would be using chrome. That they aren't shows that functionality does matter. So, yes, sometimes you have to install a plugin to get things done.