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Uh No.

It's "Don't waste The People's tax money on something that private industry will find a profitable use for". Like using the nuclear waste for nuclear power generation in more modern reactors, thus turning what was once hazardous and incredibly long lasting nuclear waste into less hazardous and very short-lived nuclear fuel AND large amounts of clean energy to power our economy and green the planet.

Or we could waste BILLIONS of tax-payer money on some hair-brained far-leftist scheme that won't work and will actually make the problem worse. I mean, why do the SMART thing and let The People fix the problem through ingenuity and enlightened self-interest? Let's let the Ivory-tower intellectuals have a go at it first so that the proper solution ends up even MORE expensive that it otherwise would be. Look how well that's worked out for our Energy Policy!

*rolleyes*

More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.

You hear that kind of excuse a lot, just like when a politician does something particularly egregious (e.g. Obama's FISA vote) you hear people explaining, "Oh, that's just a compromise to get more votes. He can't do anything if he isn't elected."

The problem with the stock explanation is that it's very often just wrong. Ebay's current emphasis on big sellers at the expense of individuals is losing them money, just like Obama's FISA sellout is losing him votes. Piss off your core market to chase some other potential market, and odds are you won't do well with either. By all means, businesses should try to expand their customer base and politicians should try to appeal to more voters. But when you abandon the people who got you where you are in the first place, you're almost guaranteed to suffer overall.

Businesses that do well are those which build a steady, loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more. This is particularly true in the online world, where changing to a competitor is very, very easy; the few success stories to come out of the dot-com mania of a decade ago show how to do it right. Amazon, for all its evil, still does a damned good job of selling books. Google, no matter what else it does, remains far and away the best general-purpose search engine. Until a couple of years ago, I'd have counted Ebay among those success stories, but now it looks as though they were just as flaky as any HowFastCanWeBurnVentureCapital.com site; they just took longer to show it.

Suits and their sycophants love to talk tough about how they serve the bottom line ... but in the real world, the suits are wrong more often than not, and here's a sterling example.

Oh, stfu. You ain't sufferin and you won't be.

The same fucktards that said - by the year 2000, folks! - we'd be eating each other to survive and predicted a global ice age during the 70s are the same fucktards behind global warming.

Fuck the planet. After we're done raping this rock for every resource, we'll move on to the next one.

Not trolling, not trying to flame - it's how I truly feel. Since I'm not worshipping "Gaia" or bashing "Bush", I'll get modded to hell... but, you know, I care about that as much as I care about the fucking spotted owl.

Hm. KFO. Kentucky Fried Owl. Sounds yummy!

The EPA is basically meaningless. The powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states, and the people. 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Perhaps the most important Amendment in that it limits the reach of the Federals.

Unfortunately (for the better part of a century), the Congress has behaved as if there were no restrictions whatsoever on their authority. As if "anything we can dream up, we can do." This is one of those rare times that a federal court seems to understand the Fed (and it's agencies') power is limited.

And no, "regulation of interstate commerce" clause, so often abused, does not grant this authority; It does not give free reign to the Feds to do anything they wish. Practically speaking, the Framers of the Constitution would not construct a careful balance of power, then undo it all with one clause.

No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.

Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?

About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.

No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.

The point of this isn't so much that it's faster than XML (so is everything else), it's that google took everything that a real person needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that (have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)?

I'd use it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this, and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design anyway.

That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain instead of simpler.

Oh right, after rigging the ISO process with OOXML and their triumph over open standards they're going to go open source? Balmer is still in charge and despite "retiring" Gates is still the executive chairman at Microsoft. There's no evidence of change -- this article is ridiculous.

So what would be evidence of change? Well, they'd need to move to an OSS compatible business model for starters but right now they're still mostly about selling boxes of software. They don't have a services-side in the same way that IBM do. They have some hardware -- the mouse/keyboard/peripherals sell well. The Xbox is about selling hardware below cost but they make it back in SDKs and licensing -- so they couldn't open that.

So there's actually very little of the company whose business model is compatible with open source licensing. That's where you'll see change, if it happens -- not in Bill Gates leaving Microsoft.

Really, it would have been either party, and any person in office that would have fought this.

They are politicians, what do you expect?

JackPowers writes "The Google Health APIs enable portable, standardized, open architecture, extensible personal health records, which is nice but boring if they're just used to manage the paperwork of the doctor/patient relationship. But once the data is set free, all kinds of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 apps are possible. This article looks ahead 10 years at Best Case Scenarios. A follow-up article lists the Worst Case Scenarios."

In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed "fact" will make you feel dirty and ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz.
http://apcmag.com/8017/microsoft_battles_vista_perception_issues_15_000_prize

prostoalex writes "Russia, China and Vietnam took the top prizes of 48th International Mathematics Olympiad that this year took place in Hanoi, Vietnam. The problem sets are available on the official Web site in a variety of languages."
http://www.imo2007.edu.vn/index.php?module=ViewResultByCountry.php

An analysis of DNA from 10 primate species supports the idea that endurance running gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge

http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=f7363f7b69af2f2b26b99156df68f473

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is reporting that Google says that its cookies will now expire after two years, rather than in 2038 — if the user does not visit the website first. 'Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies."'"
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6901946.stm

Blog: The New York Times reports that the live video chat website Stickam.com has corporate ties with a pornography producer. As this story begins to unfold, Stickam's practices alone raise serious child abuse concerns.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9742500-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20