What you are saying is inherently racist. I read an article on Yahoo a few months back along similar lines: "them asians are too good at math and number crunching, but don't worry, us Americans are still inherently superior because while they produce better grunt engineers, we produce entrepreneurs and artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson! We need to be focused on creativity rather than brute force and logic so we can make the big bucks while China gets stuck with the boring mediocre-paid, long-houred engineering jobs!" The quote is paraphrased but that was roughly what the article was saying. This argument is racist on so many levels..and pathetic too. Implying that somehow caucasians, and even more specifically, white Americans (since eastern european are also good at math and programming and they're technically white too), are somehow inherently more creatively than the rest of the world is completely nonsense. Your whole "device driver" vs "itune" analogy precisely shows my point; you do realize that Google's success is based on its innovative page ranking algorithm right? The minimalist interface is secondary....else Microsoft could search their whole search-engine dilemma real easily...cut off all javascript and images except for the search engine. Microsoft's problem isn't with interface, it's the fact that its search engines are shit and gives random marketing product links.

You see this way too often from over zealous parents. I took a ton of community college courses while in high school (in the mornings) from the best ranked community college in California and let me tell you, the standards and depth of material as well as overall peer competition is so low that I am absolutely certain I could have graduated from a community college in 11 with a C or B- average. This kid is definitely extremely bright to manage a perfect GPA even in "East Los Angeles Community College" and to know what he wants to do so early, and not want to be a ...neurosurgeon unlike all those National Spelling Bee champions. Basically, the scheme is this 1)Bug teachers like crazy until they relent and let your kid take some easy standardized test to skip 2-3 grades in the period of 60 minutes. 2)Bug some poor, no-name community college administrator like crazy (hours on the phone, personal meetings) until they let your kid start taking a few classes. 3)Once your kid actually passes those classes, bug the administrator some more until he decides to let your kid enroll full time. 4)After your kid graduate from community college, tell local media who loves this kind of sensation stories, and also tell local media your kid is the next einstein with plans to save the world from AIDS, the energy crisis, and Microsoft (okay, that's a joke). 5)Use the media frenzy as bargaining chip for elite private (Ivy league) colleges who loves to have media attention and national spot light and are more than willing to accomodate this little genius to promote themselves all over the country ("we enroll geniuses: future astrophysicists AND brain surgeons!!!") ... 10)New houses for son and parents. Of course, between steps 1-5, I'm not sure the kid gets much input except in terms of what color laptop he'll get for college. These parents here are at least considerate in not forcing their kid to be another brain surgeon. For the Chinese mother, I congratulate her for letting her mathematically-gifted son to pursue a field which actually uses math.

Yeah, but dude, most people get around firewalls to watch porn. You can't expect them to stream porn at 10 kb/s! (OK, maybe specially encoded ASCII porn) What would you propose next? Give those hungry people muffins without muffin tops? EH?

Do these polish people understand the definition of steganography? If you reveal how you're secretly embedding information in this communication system, then your secret is out and the whole method is useless. This is why you can [should] publish [good] cryptographic systems but you don't go on the web and blare to everyone how you're hidding messages in the TCP/IP protocol. Let's hope those authoritarian censor state's IT people don't read slashdot...

And I have the SSNs to prove it!

...We need MORE POWER to the REALITY DISTORTION FIELD, now!

So when my CS friends tell me the computer is some kind of stochastic state machine and that the CPU is never truly idle, it's really playing Tetris when I'm not using it?