NASA studied using mirrors in space to illuminate the jungle at night during the Vietnam War; they would have launched a cut-down LEM with a large folding mirror attached which would unfold when it was in orbit.

I thought that was cool. OK, it was also stupid and insanely expensive, but I'm sure plenty of soldiers would have preferred to spend their Vietnam War service sitting in orbit pointing a mirror at the jungle rather than being shot at down in said jungle.

Define "interact." The bits that represent the letters I am typing into this field have passed from my iMac, through my router, through my cable modem, up through my ISP's machines, up until it finally reached the Slashdot data center, with all its web servers, load balancer, firewalls, etc.. How many different OSes were on the machines in the journey of those bits? Linux? Solaris? Windows?

And the numerous interactions only get more tangled when sending email, what with multiple MX machines, DHCP lookups, etc.

And what's an OS? Is my router running its own OS? My cable modem?

It could be hundreds without even talking about my iPhone or TV...

That's what I want to know. If my iPhone is off or locked, other than being pistolwhipped into unlocking it, how safe is my data from those widgets the cops are starting to use for random device copying and snooping?

Assuming of course, auto-wipe is turned on and I used a complex passphrase for locking?

People always accuse doctors of having a God complex, and in many ways the low fat paradigm is the result of that.

Ancel Keys made some observations and weak correlations about dietary fat and cholesterol being related to heart disease in the mid 1960s. This was fertile ground for researchers and clinicians and many of them staked their careers on it and due to the fact that they could never quite get their studies to prove the relationship between heart disease and dietary fat & cholesterol (and still haven't!) they were able to string this out into an entire career.

Once you have careers and reputations on the line, you have a self-sustaining paradigm -- nobody wants to come out after 30 years of being dedicated to this idea to say "Gee, we were wrong all along." So they never promote research that questions their beliefs -- and that's probably putting it mildly, they actively attack and discount it.

Despite nearly 40 years of this advice, though, obesity is skyrocketing and the low fat paradigm is starting to crumble.

I think there's another unspoken element in this, and that's an American cultural predisposition to promote paradigms which are judgmental and involve denial of pleasure. Certainly by the mid 1960s, overall economic success had made meat an everyday staple for most Americans. It tasted good and made you feel good -- so a solution to heart disease and obesity was penance -- don't eat what you enjoy and what makes you feel good. And if you don't get thin on low-fat? Why you're not trying hard enough -- not enough exercise, not enough self well, it's a weakness of character problem!

Part of why they reacted so severely to Atkins was that he never preached that -- he said "Hey, eat as much of that steak as you like! Put a tab of butter on it! Eat until you're full, don't go hungry!" This was like religious blasphemy, not only did it contradict the fact of low-fat proponents, it contradicted the morality of their position.

Killing the competition accomplishes the same thing. Think about it, would Google have asked for phone numbers and insisted on using real names a decade ago? They've got power now and their going to use it.

I do of course, but the question should be presented as "would you like to give us your phone number" in a Y/N box, and N should be the default. Who in the world would be f'ing crazy enough to give that type of information anyway?

Oh, and of course Google wants to be on them all.

Apple is easy to avoid by buying any of the thousands of other products their software doesn't run on. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to be on all those thousands of other products.

At the end of the day, it's always about management decision making and resource allocation.

As much as I distrust Google, which is quite a bit ever since they started asking for phone numbers, they still haven't reached the same level of fear that I have Microsoft and its insistence on forcing everyone into its collective. Add to that the fact that it's also against Nokia, a company I once adored before they jumped in bed with the devil incarnate, I must now say "good on you Google!"