That's the Whorfian Hypothesis. Linguists are divided on it.

And...?

Um, you are being sarcastic because you're aware that Australia's in the middle of a natural resources boom caused by exports to China, right?

You must be new here. This is the home of the know-it-alls who piss on every new product announcement because they could have built better themselves (begging the question of why the fuck didn't they?). You wanna see what they said about the iPod when it first appeared!

Anyone use The Great Courses DVDs from the Teaching Company? I find that stuff pretty addictive. And it's good quality too, they have qualified tutors from real colleges including Ivy League schools.

Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

When I dream of a juicy hamburger its sure the hell ain't cultured meat.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

Reminds me of all the self righteous blog posts by industry insiders about how average person just don't understand the elegance, and the future direction of the GUI.

The said the vocal outspoken are just loud cry babies that don't know anything, don't contribute, and just waste everyone's times.

As if removing the start button and window themes and ridding the world of "archaic" features like a program list and mouse will enlighten the common man to GUI nirvana.

Yeah, didn't happen did it.

Exactly. People who dismiss Wikipedia because of its inaccuracies often forget about what we usually did *before* Wikipedia existed: We made stuff up based on our intuitions, *maybe* talked about it at a coffee shop with a small number of our friends, and believed it as fact. Sure, if we were doing academic research, we were more rigorous (and that's improved, too, IMHO), but how often did that happen? Now, with portable devices that can access the WWW, our first reponse when we're not sure about something is often to look it up.

I can't emphasize this enough: Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.

So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!

/sigh