USSR focused heavily on air assets, and both the Mig-29 and Su-27 were very impressive planes. With the exception of the few F-22 ; most of our fighter aircraft are 1980's tech with some updates. Mash stolen Mig-29 & Su-27 designs (soviets feared China too) with 30 years of computer tech and China is test flying the Chinese designed/built J-20 stealth fighter already.

But there is a very short list of countries that expect to face us on the battlefield, countries equip themselves with air forces to defend against the countries that they DO expect to face on the battlefield. Isreal vs Arab nations, India vs Pakistan, etc. Unless you hit that tipping point of US/NATO involvement, you need to be able to stand on your own and there's plenty of evidence that air power is a significant force multiplier, whether its just piper cubs for scouting or the latest supersonic aircraft from the US/Russia/Europe. Witness the Falklands conflict, the US stayed out while the UK could only bring 30-odd Harrier's to the party to defend their far flung island outpost against Argentia's 120-odd aircraft. During this fight, the US never committed its airforce to one of its oldest allies.

In other words, count on the US to defend you at your own peril, but bury them if they do show up against you unless you are China/Russia.

It would also we wise to negotiate your way to settlement quickly. Before the 1st Gulf war, Saddam was a US ally, recieving lots of aid from the US in their war on Iran. There is evidence he may have thought he had the US's nod to invade Kuwait, and if he had agreed to pull out before the first bombs dropped, he'd likely still have one of the largest militaries in that region.

I'm trying to imagine the type of client that laughs about his PR rep being outed as an asshole who abuses their clients and the english language. At best he's been feeding them "his" version of events, and they haven't checked out the well documented reality of it yet. More likely, he's making them up as well since I've not seen anyone else linked to this guy despite the geek-cred bounty currently out on it

Also note that this is in direct contracts to the articles earlier sentence, (In the SAME paragraph, two sentences before) that he had in fact lost at least one client. Which sort of comes around to the fact that this is a very one sided, pro-Christoforo piece that twists actual events. Dave CC'ing several popular gaming sites with the email thread becomes the sinister Dave got the press involved, sending a lengthy recounting of his frustrations to Christoforo and a number of gaming news outlets, etc. Just an really poorly written article trying to syphon of the fame of this jackass.

The standard Kindle is better is better for reading books because of the E-ink technology, which gives it longer battery life (by an order of magnitude) and better readability

The Kindle Fire gives up this advantage by using a color LCD screen, so it will suffer all the disadvantages of the iPad for ebooks. if it has a slower processor and less memory, it is very unlikely it will do the Media thing better. Which doesn't mean it will be a failure, its hitting a low price point, only the foolish will expect it to be as fast and responsive as the iPad2...

Lawyers are the result of people trying to weasel their way out of things, they bring consistency and repeatability into the process. Plain language is rarely as plain as you imagine it, just look at all the arguements over the second ammendment.

Not Foolproof != useless

If you want foolproof, disconnect from the internet, power down, and encase your PC in concrete.

Exactly. 99% of what my Linux boxes scan for are Windows malware (viruses, worms, trojans, etc). I prefer to scan for such things on a box that is not succeptible to most things. Since websites, USB keys, and portable media, bittorrent, etc., mean virus can come into almost any system on the network, all machines shoudl be scanning for all viruses, whatever the platform.

Home users can do what they want, but in any larger networked environment where you don't have absolute control, this is absolutely neccessary.

Actually, Carrier agreements means exclusivity deals, cross promotion payments, etc. Its not as simple as $640x18.4 million units. I'm not sure what exclusivity $ is out there now that its on two networks, or if Verizon is paying Apple to bring the iPhone to Verizon faster, etc. But if they are, that money is captured here.

If you read the article, App store purchases counted as "iTunes" revenue. The big delta here is carrier agreements, which were counted as iPhone revenue.

Most the plastic pipe is actually better than copper. The old black pipe is bad of iron and actively rusts after a bit. Biggest issue is plastic sewer pipes, they are noisier than the old cast iron, and don't even get me started on clay sewer lines used in the ground.

Of course, there's at least 3 "modern" plastic pipes, PVC, CPVC, and PEX, I plan to go PEX (Cu is way to costly now), but admittedly older plastics could do bad things over a very long period of exposure, maybe. Talk to folks whose copper pipes need to be replaced after 10 years due to "pinhole" leaks which they wish their builder had used, or those who had their pipes stolen for scrap...

Same here, but with an 1876 home. You lose!

Yes, some significant percentage of early fit this category, its a classic early adopter profile. Some others likely have a very specific task in mind, from "watching videos in [Airplanes|Ranger Stations|etc] to [Important business function that would justify spending 10x more than it costs]. Don't make the mistake of assuming "People you know" = "World of all iPad consumers"

Or perhaps they already have an iPod/iTunes library and see value in not switching. Or they looked at the application environments and chose Apple's locked down model of reliability of Andriods model of openness at the cost of instability/risk.

That will get you through the early adopter phase, but without some sort of "Killer App" that the tablet does better, it will be a niche product that dies out (again). The vast majority of folks don't have money to bun experimenting with toys, if they don't have a VERY compelling reason to chose tablets over competitors (iPod's, Kindle, Netbooks, desktops, etc). Keep in mind the 5% rule too, if it works for 95% of what you want better but can't do the last 5%, it may get tossed aside as unworkable. This is why so many rural residents drive trucks, a car would be better 95% of the time, but they can only afford 1 vehicle and need the truck that 5% of the time, so they buy a truck.

Only iTunes can place rights restricted music using the native "Fairplay" DRM on the iPod. That is how it is a monopoly. Everybody else has to use unrestricted formats.

Exactly, that bastard Steve forced the record companies to accept his tyrannical 99 cent pricing policy and allow me to burn purchased songs to CD's where they can be ripped back to MP3 free of the restrictions! We must end his monopoly on rights restricted downloadable music for the iPod! Other companies MUST be free to sell us restricted license music & video for our iPods! Unite!

Sometimes things aren't as simple as broken/not broken. Sometimes its fixed for some edge cases at a cost of slowdowns on all systems. Sometimes its removed functionality to prevent a security issue that may be irrelevant to me. You need to be very careful extending the particular "I've never had a problem" to the universal "No one has ever had a problem"

I long ago forgot the original issue, but I definitely recall having to build a custom kernel RPM package every time we decided to adopt the latest kernel fixes for our server farm to undo some "fix" Red Hat had installed that worked great in the majority of cases but broke badly in our environment; it was also obvious from the Bugzilla reports that we weren't the only ones and that Red Hat knew of the issue and were choosing not to undo it because they felt their fix helped more people than it hurt

For the record, RedHat is selling support for a distribution they have engineered. They aren't selling the distribution, except possibly a "media charge", year 1 to obtain the support and year 2 to maintain the support are the same price.

CentOS does not offer any support beyond the standard Open Source model of chat boards, bugzilla, etc. As a general rule, when I introduce Linux to a company with a small unsupported project, I bring in CentOS, not Fedora, because I know if it takes off we'll be bringing in RHEL 9 times out of 10 when the company decides they want/need support. That way, there is pretty much zero retraining of the staff that needs to happen.