I'm sure it's not, but this really looks like you responding to yourself with an anonymous sock-puppet. Just saying. Please continue with the rational discourse.

Somehow I've missed this issue over the last couple of months (I read /. daily, my memory must be getting worse than I thought). At first look, the bill reads like a bad joke. The wording of this bill as it stands now will allow the take down of any website which provides user forums / comments. Simply visit the forum, post a link to download copy-written material or other 'illegal' data (which covers a tremendous amount of ground), and the owner of the website has committed a felony and immediately loses all advertising income.The owner is then guilty - you can't even say 'guilty until proven innocent' - you've likely lost your main income, their reputation among 'reputable' businesses is gone, and their opportunities for defense and damages seem pretty insignificant as stated in the bill.

The user forum example just scratches the surface of absurd possibilities.

Amazon selling a book which could facilitate access to whatever a corporation declares is 'illegal' data,e.g. computing book which touches on bit-torrents.
Services like Pandora (you can record it on your home PC) or Google Music (obviously)
Any data backup company (oops, had illegal data on my backed up hard drive - bye bye Carbonite).

Did I miss something? I don't see where in this bill that any line is drawn between a site like Pirate's Bay and the examples above.

I think you need to spend some time with the general population, not just your friends or coworkers --- they (or others) are giving you a false sense of the intelligence of the majority of the population - US, India, wherever. A good percentage of the population does not have the intellectual capability to understand calculus. You might be able to force them to memorize things to the extent that they can pass an exam, but that doesn't serve any purpose to society (ostensibly the impetus behind making it a graduation requirement). This idea that all kids are equally smart doesn't do any of them any good.

Most of the EE's (and SW engineers) I know, including myself, use a Linux based OS with variants of Windows in a VM. Most of the tools many of us use (Cadence, Matlab, ISE, Quartus, Mentor, Spice variants, Modelsim, Synplify, etc., etc.). are optimized to run on Linux. There's a huge number of other advantages to using Linux for this type of work - ease of scripting (TCL / Python / shell / you name it), ease of off-loading simulations to dedicated machines - RDP can't touch X forwarding, superior HW/SW support for tools, and so on. Bottom line - efficiency is way higher in a measurable way - as we used to be forced to run windows only, with cygwin as our only unixy fix.

But I spend a fair amount of time with MS Office, and most of the corporate infrastructure is windows based. So the virtual machine solution is fantastic for me and my co-workers. Seamless mode (aka Unity for VMWare) is nice for some people, but personally I like minimizing Windows (and the accompanying flood of email) while focusing on detailed work (easily distracted). I frequently move files between OSes, and dual-boot isn't a solution - I personally think virtualization will stay the main way to run a multi-OS environment for a long time to come. I like the direction things are going, and am looking forward to running a true multi-OS environment at some point in the future (with a light weight HV running the show), when Host / Guest start getting irrelevant.

A little off subject, but while talking about OSes and electrical engineering, a rising trend that is driving me nuts is that so many of the scope and logic/spectrum analyzer manufacturers are running windows as their OS - and they brag about it in their marketing materials. The only thing I can think of is that many engineers don't get to pick the specific scope they get, and the purchasing or mgmt types think having XP on a scope is just fantastic. In an environment with security issues, Windows has to be locked down so hard it needs 2 or 3x the RAM a normal install would, and I frequently end up with $25k scopes which perform worse then their 15 year old equivalents. Ask a sales rep from one of these companies about offering Linux (or whatever) alternative OSes, and you get a 'wtf is wrong with you?' look.

It's nice that so many of you put yourselves up on a pedestal that lets you see what all people in the 'real' world are doing with OSes. And to reference the GPs 'out' - EE /= Circle of Geeks (although I'll give you that there is pretty strong correlation).

That might be the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Thanks. Applies to so many situations....

It's a new service. While I understand that all /.ers release perfect products at initial release, google might take some time to collect user feedback and improve their service. I'm not a google fanatic, but over the years most reasonable people can see that their products follow a user beneficial trajectory over time.

Should they have taken a closer look at iTunes - maybe looking at complaints about that service, and incorporate those - but in general, my opinion is to give them time to improve. Whatever else you might say about Google, it's clear to me (at least) that they are dedicated to continuous improvement.

With that said, I have an android phone, and I don't like the Android Market all that much at this point either. Generally I 'search' for apps using google's search service, narrow down to what will do what I need, and then type the app name into the market. Works for right now, and I'm looking forward to better integration of searching - we all know they are good at that - into the Android Market.

You must not have visited some of the same websites that I have.

This is pretty close in price to that denon crap, but worth the money:

http://www.tensolite.com/v2/productFiles/HiPerfCable_NETflight.pdf