MOM?!?

I don't understand why it will take so much time and money. I would expect the on-profit to just have to secure purchase of the land. Once they have the land God can just create the park. Right?

I'm curious how it works for regular ships. If I own a sailboat and want to (as a probably bad example) sail from LA, around South America, and over to Florida, do I have to get a license? In my mind that would be the best analogous situation.

I would really struggle to find an example of something MS hasn't been late to the game at. They have a long proven track record of getting into the game after the market looks promising, and then crushing anybody else in the market by whatever means is available to them. Not just competing with a product, but actively working to kill off their competition.

It's not just the distance between solar systems. The distance between the planets is consistently glossed over in various media. How many times have you seen some alien ship passing slowly enough by a planet that the planet stayed in view, but somehow this ship (or meteor...) will be at the earth inside a few hours. It's laughable. First the chance that it would actually be moving past another planet is rather remote, but if it was going to get to earth in any near timescale there would be hardly time for a quick flash as the object flew past the planet.

So we should add more types of tax? Right that way in 5-10 years everybody can be paying the income tax. I'm sure the threshold will never be lowered and the rates will never go up.

I'm fine with adusting taxes to balance things out, but this is just adding taxes to try and deal with a government that got spending happy when the cash was rolling in. You might not know but our governor basically passed on getting any tax revenue from the massive gambling operations the tribes run in our state, funny that the tribes were one of her biggest contributors.

As a Washington resident making much less than $200K I'm so happy Ballmer is spending his money against this. This state already has one of the highest state sales taxes in the country. And now they want to add an income tax. How long do you think that income tax will stay at the $200K mark, and at the 5% mark. Because we all know that taxes, once imposed, never expand or rise.

If your definition of a 'winning language' is the one that has more 'advanced features' I suppose that's fine. I prefer a language that allows me to solve a problem in a clean straightforward manner that can be maintained by just about any decent developer. I'd rather avoid most 'advanced features' not because I lack the skills to use them, but because they tend to add unneeded complexity to a system.

I actually tend towards some of the more recent functional languages (scala comes to mind), but Java can certainly be a nice clean language for many problems that is smooth, predictable, and has the tools available to make the development experience enjoyable.

I also prefer languages that allow me to run across many platforms with minimal work.

I'm not a big fan of Phoronix and it's multi-page click through articles, but saying the rumor had no basis in reality is a bit of a stretch. The short of it is there was never an official announcement. Phoronix pointed out, and many others verified, there was several references to linux in various portions of the Steam client. This all came to a bit of a frenzy as some binaries that appeared to be the early workings of a linux client were found available from a valve server. They were up for several weeks, during which several people played with them and got them to some degree of running, and then the binaries disappeared. Some, including Phoronix, speculated that this was in preparation for getting that client ready for release.

Most likely there have been several pushes to port things to linux, but never enough follow through, so there are linux compatible bits strewn all over the place.

If I had mod points I'd be using them now.

I have a CS degree from a major university. I have to disagree with most of the comments I've seen so far. Things like design patterns, proper object modeling, even advanced data structures and algorithms can be picked up on your own with a bit of effort as you need them, and experience building real production used software is the key to hone those skills.

IMHO there are two things that I got from school. How to properly analyze code (in terms of processing time, memory usage, ...) so that I could accurately predict how it would behave under different conditions (especially when some of those conditions can't easily be tested). And an introduction to a large swath of computer science terms and facets, so that years later something comes up and I have a faint understanding of where to start looking.

The code quality, design, and ability to apply [insert new hot term of the day] correctly all come from real world experience. And I do think you have to get that experience in a professional setting (I would consider much of the open source world profession, just FYI), hobbyist work just won't let you grow the way you need to.

Hmmm. So what you're saying is, as a free market libertarian, the correct decision is to encode government documents in such a way that citizens would be required to pay for a product from a specific private company in order to have access to them because that private companies products are currently popular. And by extension you see to think this is better than placing the documents into a format that is open defined such that any vendor (including the popular vendor in the previous setup) are able to provide access, with the added bonus that decades from now those documents will still be readable (while the proprietary single vendor format would only be readable as long as the vendor continues to support it). For some strange reason I question either your stated position as a free market libertarian, or your intelligence.

I've been writing Java web service, web applications, and client applications for more than six years now. My current project runs on Solaris servers in about eighty countries around the world. My development environment for work is Windows and at home I use Linux. In all that time I've only run into one JVM issue that was specific to a platform (issue on Solaris JVM that caused it to just quit, which we worked with Sun to get fixed). I'm not saying "write once" is perfect, but it's so damn solid that I don't even give it a second thought.

It seems to me that the proper analogy lies with UPS and a phone company. I'm not fully up to speed on the law, but IMHO you should have to pass the same legal barriers as if you were to get phone records and open a package from UPS. Basically it should work like this. I need to use the same legal hurdles as if I were getting phone records. This gets me the all the email header info that falls within the applicable warrant (all correspondence between Mr X and me during November and December for example). Then you can take that one step further and get a warrant for the contents of one or many of those specific emails. That would seem perfectly reasonable to me. I'm sorry, but you have entrusted your data with a third party. I don't think you can really claim a privacy issue if a proper warrant has been obtained and served at the location the data exists. Of course there is always the possibility that the third party in question is perfectly happy to hand over all your emails without a warrant, and that (in the best of my understanding) would not break any laws.

And here is the torrent: http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent