the internet is the blue e on my desktop!

err i meant the orange smudge around the blue dot on my gnome panel! ;)

That's actually the reason that the US government will most likely never go to a physical denomination higher than the $100 bill.

If I understand correctly, all large electronic transactions (>$10k) are auto-monitored by the banks, and tracked by the government. It is a lot harder to pay someone $50 million dollars if you do it in cash due to the size of the physical dollar bills than if you do it as an electronic payment. Given that the government wants to monitor criminal activity, super large drug cartel type money movement is a lot harder with smallish $100 bills.

$3000 being prohibitive? Try to stuff $30mil into your wallet!

even better, use a FOSS middleware product for all your libraries, then just sell them a configured instance of that middleware!

So how did myself and tons of others upgrade to 3GS models in an apple store?

I left with my 3GS fully activated and able to make calls (with no data synced) and my 2G iphone with no service. No SIM card was changed.

Your phone number can be activated to a different SIM card... in the Apple Store.

Soooo....

Apple has no mechanism to transfer the registration of the SIM card to your phone number and set it up on the new phone.

is just outright wrong.

That makes sense. Common sense is that they bought a site license from an anti-virus vendor.

So how much is that Norton/Symatec/?? license for those 30,000 computers? Is that part of the Windows TCO, the mandatory virus protection and lcoal system firewall?

An answer from most people running windows is that linux systems should also have anti-virus measures in place, but in my limited experience (only ~100 machines), that was never needed since rarely was root access given out to users.

if you have driver problems with the desktop LiveCD... you should use the alternate install CD, it's what it is used for.

From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation

"If your computer is not able to run the standard Desktop installation CD, you can use an Alternate installation CD instead. The Alternate CD also allows more advanced installation options which are not available with the Desktop CD. "

Chicago is doing that for their buses: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp

even with mobile applications (where you need the information the most).

God that made no sense. s/html/packets

"Are they just pinging twitter.com and waiting for packets over its default port returned?"

How do you break this down? Are they just pinging twitter.com and waiting for timeouts on html returned?

I ask, because lots of twitter is their distribution via their APIs. How many of those other moblog sites have http GETs to non-html documents? Check for yourself: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

I wonder how many statuses were updated from facebook.com or pulled there from a twitter API poll. It would be nice if a site like facebook could post their timeouts on their user status polls they do from their site. That might give people more of an idea of the complete twitter uptime.

I think he is more thinking about competition, not about how big a company is.

Why do people use your "highly regulated complex industry" software over someone else's? Because it has more features? My bet is that you don't have any true competitors. Now seriously ask yourself why you don't have any competitors.

One of the reasons that you might not have any competitors, is because of the checks that are put in place by the regulations. Companies that could compete with you on a per-capability basis will not compete because the cost of the regulation "checks", which is the whole point of the essay.