You can use Firefox on Windows. There is a new beta Silverlight-based player that I know for sure works on IE, Firefox for Windows, and Safari on a Mac. It doesn't work in Google Chrome though. Anyway, you have to opt in by going to some web site that wasn't directly mentioned on the Netflix site, but a simple web search should find it pretty quickly.

I think the issue really has more to do with address spaces than reserving memory, although the end result is similar. Windows (and probably most other operating systems) typically maps the lower half of the address space for the current process, while the upper half in all processes is mapped to the kernel. If you think of memory addresses as signed values, positive addresses are for user mode and negative addresses are for the kernel. If you can't address the memory, obviously you can't use it, which is where the 2GB limit comes in.

The advantage of doing things this way is that the kernel is present in every process. This means when someone moves the mouse and triggers an interrupt, you don't have to switch to the mouse handler process to take care of the interrupt, you can do it from the context of whatever process happens to be running. It also lets you make system calls without having to fiddle around with the address space too much also.

It's probably not what they had in mind, but my state just legalized physician-assisted suicide during the last elections. I'm pretty sure the law only allows a doctor to prescribe a lethal injection, but if not I suppose a doctor could prescribe one of these things for the alleviation of a terminal illness.

To be a tad bit pedantic, there is a small chance that RF noise could cause your text message to be garbled. The digital carrier is still modulated over something that's analog, which means you might receive a 1 when you were sent a 0. Checksums and other error coding can help you detect when stuff like this happens, but it will always be possible that enough bits will flip in just the right way that you won't be able to detect the error.

Yes.

The Constitution specifies what the US federal government can do, and also sets explicit limits that the federal government must not go beyond without a Constitutional amendment. These limits are only effective if we choose to follow them, and I think we should be uniform in the way we follow them. Suppose for some unimaginable reason we decided we needed to ban a particularly dangerous religion. Should we let a pesky thing like needing to repeal the First Amendment stop us? What about needing to fight a war, is there really time to get a declaration of war from congress like the Constitution requires?

The Constitution is over 200 years old now. Some of the things in the original document, such as the 3/5ths clause for slaves, have no place in today's society. The people who wrote this document knew that it would some day be centuries out of date, and they added an amendment process to provide a legal way to update it with the times.

Following the Constitution has become seriously out of favor in recent years. In the 20s, we banned alcohol, and the nation at that time felt it necessary to do so through a Constitutional amendment. For some reason today we ban all kinds of substances, yet have made no such amendments supporting these things. Declarations of war have gone seriously out of fashion, to the best of my knowledge, the last declared war the US fought was World War II, over 50 years ago. Many of the things regarding Guantanamo Bay and the PATRIOT act strike me as Constitutionally questionable, at best.

I don't really care if the rest of the world is screaming past me. I care that we follow the laws that we the people agreed to be governed by, and that if they need to be extended or otherwise modified, that we do so by those very same laws.

If two parties could agree on a set of rules for a war-by-proxy like that, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be fighting in the first place.

I know people like to complain that patents stifle innovation, but this is arguably one case where patents have increased innovation. Rather than just copy Microsoft's scroll wheel design, they were forced to come up with something new and different because of the patent.

Doesn't saying an omnipotent god can do anything that's logically possible mean that said omnipotent god is only as powerful as logic, at best? Instead, an omnipotent god must first create the rules of logic, and then choose to follow them.

It's sort of like a chess board. You might imagine the rooks arguing with each other about whether the chess player could move a rock diagonally. They might claim that's nonsense, since it's inherently impossible for rooks to move diagonally. Clearly we can physically move them diagonally, but we choose to follow the rules of chess when playing because the game wouldn't be much fun otherwise.

I disagree. Consider that you can usually substitute another word and suddenly your sentence becomes much less offensive. If you say crap, darn, freaking, butthole, or whatever, you still have pretty much the same meaning, but now a lot less people will be offended by it. Maybe it's not quite the same meaning in that the euphemistic version will not carry the same weight, but if that's the case, there's no point in separating the word from its meaning. They are effectively the same.

Your point about the F word being over used to the point that it has almost no meaning is more evidence that it's the word and not the meaning that's offensive.

In college I was working on a collaborative programming project in one of my classes. It was one that didn't really lend itself well to decomposing into things we could work on independently. We were using Emacs as our editor, which has this cool feature where you can open new frames on completely different displays. Thus, the guy I was working with and I each had our own Emacs window on our own computer and were editing the same file at the same time. I was impressed.

To be honest, I'm not terribly thrilled by the outcome of this election. Not that I was all that enamored by McCain either, but I did like him better than Obama. One thing I am happy about though is that all the elections I've been watching seem to have been pretty clearly decided, even if not in my favor. I'm glad we don't have to go through months of charges of fraud, recounts, court cases, hanging chads, people who can't spell, etc. While it's important to address the wrongs when they happen, they last several elections have damaged my faith in American Democracy. I'm glad that in this case, at the very least, the result was clear.

Out of curiosity, where would you go? Is there really anywhere you'd like the politics of better than the US, even with a Democrat-controlled House, Senate and Presidency?

About 13 years or so ago, we were dissecting pig eyeballs at school. My friend and I decided it'd be cool to keep ours, so we cut it in half and each of us took one half home and stuck it in a freezer. Several years after that, I checked and the half an eye was still in the freezer, so I left it there. My family's moved since then, and presumably we cleaned out the freezer when that happened and the eye is no more, but my friend's family is still in the same place, so there may very well still be half an eye in his freezer.

Maybe we should thaw it out and clone it...