This goes against the very idea of Java: write once, run everywhere. And there is at least one compiler to native code: gcj

If vact, there is: executable JAR.. There's also Java Web Start, that allows running a Java window application in a single click from a webpage, using the sandbox security. For this two options, you need the Java runtime installed

Sun didn't care for desktop Java for a long time, unfortunately.

Then someone would use imperial units, which are less useful to almost anyone outside the USA than Mini Cooper measures. ;)

In Portuguese, "Sergey" is pronounced exactly like "ser gay", which means "to be gay". Sergey Gaylord would be quite amusing. :P

You've got very wrong information here. Just 8 million cars in Brazil? The article said 8 million cars running on ethanol, not 8 million cars overall. There are almost 28 million cars running now. 25% is the amount of ethanol in the gas sold here. 85% of the current Brazilian car production is comprised of flex-fuel cars, that run on ethanol, gas or any mixture of them.

That's right, but most of the deforestation is done for wood and to open land to cattle, not agriculture. The Amazon land is not good for agriculture.

(Reposting as myself because I posted as anonymous by mistake)

I was the anonymous coward by mistake. In Brazil, raising cattle ("pecuária") is not considered agriculture, which just includes growing vegetables).

Brazil has been using sugar cane ethanol since the 70s and we never had any food price surges because of it. Most of our car production comes with engines that can use any mixture of ethanol and gas, so you can choose the best one by cost or by ecofriendliness or any other reason. Even if the sugar price raised, we could see it as a good consequence: people would eat less sugar, less calories, maybe even eating more fruit! :-) Corn-based ethanol and the US tax in Brazilian ethanol is a something completely anti-free-market in the land that people love to quote the "invisible hand of the market" as the solution to almost anything. Go figure.

The first thing I thought: "Gran Turismo" gamer becomes "Pro Race Driver". TOCA Race Driver (formerly known as Pro Race Driver in US) is a series of games that is a direct competitor of the Gran Turismo.

May God and Allah see eye to eye in this conflict.

Allah is the name of God in Arabic, so you're saying that God will see himself eye to eye.

I feel that most people here is Slashdot didn't get Opera Unite:

• It's not meant to replace traditional webservers. It's meant for average joes to be able to quickly and easily run some ephemeral services from their own computer, specially file sharing. If I want to send some file to a friend, I need to upload it to some place (via e-mail. FTP, whatever). With Unite, I just turn on the file sharing service and give the URL to my friend. No uploading needed.
• Bandwidth issues are mostly moot, as Unite services are not meant to replace traditional Web servers (unless you share loads of files with doeload-hungry friends, of course :))
• Regarding security: people talk about this issue as if Unite was a full-blown Web server. It's is not Apache nor IIS (God forbid), it's just an environment where simple applications written in HTML, CSS and Javascript are run. So Unite is as secure as Opera's Javascript security, and Opera has a very good security record to date.
• The whole environment is sandboxed. All file access is only allowed in folders chosen by the user, and only when it runs some service that needs file access. Unite provides a file storage for services date, but the service doesn't know where its data is located.
• Opera does not run Unite by default. No services are run by default, just the ones started by the user.
• The FAQ

• address most issues people discusss here and elsewhere.

• Unite supports UPnP, so the Opera proxy servers are only used when UPnP is disabled.
• You can use your own domain server.

Once a client has found and connected to a Unite user, does Opera still continue to act as an intermediary, in the same way a cloud service would?

No. Opera Unite supports UPnP (enabled by default) so that users can bypass Opera's proxy service. More details here

At least, here in Brazil, the election results always match the exit polls and no serious allegations of tampering were made. We've been using this system for 10 years without any major problems.

Something that the Americans could learn from the Brazilian system is the simplicity of its use: no touch screen, you just type the number of your candidate in a keyboard that is the same used in telephones and then press a huge green button.