It does not seem that hard to me, apply the common carrier requirements to ISP's and be done with it.

No lengthy committee meetings, findings, reports, etc.

If the ISP wishes to be a contract carrier and not a common carrier then so be it, but by turning it down they are legally responsible for all the content including the child porn, the pirated software, etc. Accept common carrier and you can not choose but you get legal protection.
 

Replyng to undo faulty moderation

How are you "Endlessly trapped on Lion?"

Apple released the OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" for FREE over a year ago. One of the design criteria for Mavericks was that it would install on any Mac on which Snow Leopard would install. Since you said you were "stuck on Lion" (10.7), which is already 64-bit only, why would this be of concern to you?

Back when I was a computer science student just learning Linux, kdevelop was one of the apps that made Linux accessible for me. That and kde itself. Once I got acclimated, I quickly switched to vim and ended with gnome. But I've always had a soft spot for kdevelop and think it's great they've come so far.

I guess you watched a different Star Trek than I did. Early on it became apparent that Vulcans do have emotions, very deep ones at that. They just chose to let logic and reason form a foundation for thought and way of life. Star Trek 6 inparticular shows a very different Spock than the one you remember. And frankly I like the evolution. He became a man of wisdom, understanding, loyalty, love, and keen humor. And in their own way Vulcans are deeply spiritual. They meditate, revere their ancestors, and have the idea of a vulcan soul. There is even a deep religious component to Vulcan culture (poorly shown in Star Trek III, and often mocked by Mad magazine). Sarek's love affair with Amanda is particularly poignant, even in the few minutes of screen time it got in the TV series. I love the take on it that A.C. Crispin came up with in with her novel, Sarek. Not canon at all, of course, but it's the way I like to think of Vulcans. Highly recommend that novel. Love, happiness, passion, grief, logic.

I hate the way vulcans were portrayed in Star Trek Enterprise, particularly the way Blalock portrayed her character. Apparently she chose not to study vulcan portrayals in any of the other tv shows and movies, and did her own thing. It stinks. Comes across as just a sullen, maladjusted person (the sociopath that you seem to associate wrongly with Spock). That's not how Vulcans are at all, at least in the shows and movies I've seen.

No fooling? With over 30 years of embedded dev. experience, I never would have thought of that! (rolls eyes)

But what I have been trying to get through everyone's collectively addled brains is this:

The excuse that "Windows' 'Moderrn UI' has to be "simple", because they have to work with a wider-range of (Desktop-Class) GPU hardware" is patently absurd, due to the fact that the Windows' software engineers (OS and Driver Devs.) should be able to code an interface with as much "UI-finesse" as what is available in OS X (which is undeniably more "advanced" than the Windows 'Modern UI'), using any reasonable "Desktop-Class" GPU.

I do believe, however, that the main reason that MS decided to make "Metro" so bog-simple (no "shading", no "textures" and no "overlapping windows"), was because they wanted (which is way different than "had to" ) come up with an interface that wouldn't tax the capabilities of Phone and Tablet-Class GPU hardware.

IOW, whereas Apple wisely matched the UI of OS X and iOS more closely to the TYPICAL "Class of Devices" that they were running on (Desktop vx. Mobile), MS just "raced to the bottom" with "Metro", and forced all their "Desktop" users to unnecessarily suffer from a "Lowest-Common-Denominator" UI.

In short: Microsoft took the lazy way out, and then tried to pass it off as a "Unified" UI design.

Jeebus! Are you just TRYING to be obtuse; or do you REALLY have a mental defect?

Based on the fact that you can't FIND a "desktop"-Class GPU, that couldn't do stuff like Apple is doing with Mission Control and Spaces, and even at least support for two monitors.

And are you REALLY here to DEFEND Windows "Modern UI", or just argue against me?

We've done everything we can in our Active Directory network to overcome roaming profile issues. Even with folder redirection, you have a huge fat ntuser.dat for prone to corruption. Users' home folders on a server, with discrete text-based configuration files would be a dream.

Did you know that in 2014 you still can't safely put risking profiles on a DFS share?

Metro is dying before our very eyes. It has been deemphasized in Windows 8.1 and by Windows 9 will be little more than a fancy start menu.

For chrissakes, most suppliers if enterprise systems I deal with still happily ship you Windows 7 Pro machines, or at least heavily advertised downgrade rights. "Business class" systems still ship with Windows 7 preinstalled. The enterprise customers never bloody wanted Metro to begin with, and so act as if Windows 8/8.1 didn't exist.

OpenLDAP, NFS and home folders on a file server.

Jesus Christ, Microsoft junkies well and truly believe there's no alternatives.

Not only that but the companies that manage the booking infrastructure take a cut.

I just need some gas money.

Exactly.

I am an embedded Developer with over three decades of paid experience. Do these people really think someone like me (or me) doesn't realize that technically, these devices could be considered a "computing device"?

But, the less fanatical among us nerds, you know, the ones that don't have to prove that they are "smart enough" to get Linux to run on their toaster, just because they can say they did it (woohoo), realize that these are still, at the end of the day, Appliances with an Embedded microcontroller, or System-on-Chip, inside.

So, with that in mind, is a device with a mask-programmed microcontroller a "computer"? You can't run arbitrary code on it. Isn't the microcontroller just another form of ASIC at that point? You can't install Linux on it, any more than you can do so on your Cat. Yet inside that MCU, it's the same CPU core, same RAM, same peripherals, running the same instruction set. The only difference is that it has been built with a last-mask that happens to have a printed pattern on it that causes the part to act as a particular state-machine. But is it a "computer". No, it is not.

So please quit trying to Impress yourselves by declaring just any-old-thing that happens to have an MCU in it a "computer". Because, in just a very few decades (when it will be even harder to find anything that isn't an Embedded System), people will simply look at you like you're daft, punks.

The genes they identified were all proteins.

I'm not that much of an expert on microarrays, but I'm pretty sure most or all of the arrays they used predate the Encode project's results that made people re-evaluate the question of how much of the genome is really important. Here is a list of the arrays they used:

Illumina: HumanHap550, 318K, 350K, 610K, 660W Quad, HumanOmniExpressExome-8 v1.0, Human610 Quadv1, 370, 317, HumanOmniExpress-12v1 A

Affymetrix: GeneChip 6.0, 250K

This study was the keystone project of a consortium founded in early 2011. I think, given the size, it simply took this long to get the results. That, too, was a time before Encode publications had really started impacting the world. Whatever RNA genes they would have had at the time would be pathetic and paltry by comparison to what we consider worth studying now.

It's my firm belief that one cannot write any software of any moderate to large size without inevitably running afoul of some software patent. There are only two things that protect any developer:

1. Distribution of their software is sufficiently small that it escapes the notice of patent trolls.
2. Being a large company with a legal department capable of dealing with patent threats, and a bank account big enough to buy them off.