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When sharing a cake, if you give more to the hungry students the portions for those who aren't hungry have to be smaller

Blame Bush and 30 years of "Free Trade".

Like the MITer said, few people want to help with a war of aggression, torture and wiretap. The Bush administration has killed close to a million innocent people in Iraq, directly and by infrastructure damage. People die quickly when they don't have clean water, and few have that without the electric utilities and distribution network we bombed out but never rebuilt. All for control of oil.

We are also starting to run out of qualified young people because all of the engineering jobs have been sent to China and India. If you don't make things, you don't know things and the US has been making less and less over the last 30 years.

Trade with China and wars of aggression have a common cause: moral bankruptcy. The result is ruin.

David W. White writes "Wired mag's Danger Room carried an article today that highlighted how desperate the US Military's DARPA has become in its attempts to bring in additional brain power. The tactics include filmed testimonials, folders and even playing cards all screaming join DARPA! Where are all the Einsteins who want to be on the cutting edge for the Government?"

mytrip points out a blog posting by Rogers Cadenhead, author of the Drudge Retort blog, who says: "I'm currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing 'hot news' misappropriation under New York state law." An AP attorney filed six Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment. The AP material they object to consists of snippets of from 33 to 79 words. Cadenhead claims his lawyer believes that all fall squarely within the province of fair use.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Bush running up trillions in debt and making everyone hate us?

Apple is innovating?

They take technology that exists in lots of other places, and put it in a prettier package. OSX is nice, but it's BSD with pretty graphics.

The iPhone is nice, but it's a cleaned up version of the Nokia E70 (see: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone)

Apple is known NOT to listen to their customers. They listen to Steve Jobs (and for their benefit, I might add).

Honestly, Microsoft has been around the block on these types of things before, and while Google and Apple are big threats, I don't consider Microsoft a 'stupid' company by any means -- I feel they will have a period of crap (oh wait, Vista...), reorganize and come back stronger.

And in the end it's better for us all if they do. Although if MS ever put out an OS that is better than Linux on security, and better than OSX on ease of use and prettiness -- Slashdotters would still decry it. So I guess on this site, it's lose lose for them. But their bank accounts are still rather full.

Yahoo! does this already.

Robellus writes "Security researchers have found evidence of a previously unknown Adobe Flash vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The zero-day flaw has been added to the Chinese version of the MPack exploit kit and there are signs that the exploits are being injected into third-party sites to redirect targets to malware-laden servers. From the article: 'Continued investigation reveals this issue is fairly widespread. Malicious code is being injected into other third-party domains (approximately 20,000 web pages) most likely through SQL-injection attacks. The code then redirects users to sites hosting malicious Flash files exploiting this issue.'"

Really, the use of fear of z standard becoming outdated is just a justification for inaction. There is no answer to that in any sort of technical field. What can you say when technology will always improve, standards will always become outdated. Saying you shouldn't adopt a standard because it will become outdated is precisely akin to saying you shouldn't drive a car because it will eventually run out of gas. It's just a mask to allow them to justify to the public why they won't move forward.

If fear of a standard becoming obsolete is a reason for not adopting it, I'm curious as to how they justify any of their IT budget?

Multiple readers have written to point out that New York and Minnesota have reached the end of their lengthy deliberations on open document formats. Both reports agree that an open format would be beneficial, but neither were willing to endorse a particular choice. New York's executive summary notes, "The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated." Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge." In related news, yesterday's announcement from Microsoft that they would provide support for ODF in a future update to Office 2007 has EU antitrust investigators optimistic, but cautious. Microsoft has said that the ISO process was what prevented OOXML from receiving support in the same time frame.

They were connecting the computers via cat-5 cable. Everyone knows you're supposed to use Schrödinger's cat-5 cable in that sort of application.

Narrative Fallacy writes "The Transportation Security Administration has announced that it's beginning pilot tests of millimeter wave scanning technology at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) that allow TSA personnel to see concealed weapons and other items that may be hidden beneath clothes. TSA Administrator Kip Hawley says that that the potentially revealing body scans (YouTube) would not be stored and that 90% of passengers subject to secondary screening opt for a millimeter wave scan over a pat-down. The agency added that security officers viewing the scans would do so remotely, where they will not be able to recognize passengers but will be able to trigger an alarm if needed. The agency also said that a blurring algorithm is applied to passengers' faces in scanned images as an additional privacy protection."

adamengst tips an article up on TidBITS that explores the persistent reluctance of many nerds to embrace fully new communications media such as IM and Twitter. In this thoughtful article Joe Kissell explores, from the inside, the mind of the introvert and how this personality style often struggles with new "always-on" media. The result is a sometimes exasperated incomprehension on the part of the more extroverted. Well worth a read.

stoolpigeon writes "IBM has made a move to support open source RDBMS PostgreSQL by investing in EnterpriseDB, a company that supports PostgreSQL as well as selling their own proprietary extensions to the database product. IBM participated in a $10 million funding round, though the article doesn't say how much they invested. In the past EnterpriseDB has primarily advertised itself as an Oracle competitor, though the article says, 'Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy, explained that Postgres Plus 8.3 also adds in new application quick starts which are supposed to help with installation issues. They will also help in EnterpriseDB's battle against MySQL for open source database supremacy.'"