Technically the wii won't be supported until 3/26...

When I click on the "Find Out More" it shows that they shipped my disc and it will arrive on 3/26

How are the Chinese government officials going to find the objectionable content if they can't Google it?

Are you saying Americans are immature? Kids in other countries seem to handle this okay.

Maybe if you didn't keep 16 year olds stuck in high school when they are ready for college level or trade study then they wouldn't act like such high school students.

You're observation is spot on. I doubt Microsoft asked permission from the creators of the C programming language when they came out with C# and decided that is what they were going to name it... and C is a widely used language, where "Go Bang" really isn't.

From a copyright perspective, I know books and movies can have the same title and not be considered infringing. Google might have trouble trying to claim a trademark on it though if it was already being used by these guys.

"Goto" might be more nostalgic for us old BASIC programmers, but then you could only use it to write a new version of pong or have your name bounce around the screen...

What does marketing have to do with it? MySQL was just introducing the clustering features that database users needed in order to more easily use MySQL in enterprise settings. "High end" is only good if you actually have product features that really differentiate it from the free product. One by one those "high end" features were less and less obvious. And MySQL was already being openly used by a lot of high volume websites, so it was getting proven results.

The trend line was extremely clear, anyone starting a fresh software project that required a database was probably better off with a MySQL back end rather than try to work under Oracle's onerous licensing costs. MySQL was or soon would be undermining Oracle's market, so they keep MySQL from introducing any more features and undermining Oracle's bread and butter business. I'm sure there are other benefits that Oracle was expecting, but this one was probably pretty key.

Problem is that economists have built "innovation" into their forecast models as if it is a resource unto itself. We shouldn't assume the availability of technology before it is invented. Each major technological advance in food production, health care, communication, construction and transportation has moved the limits of population growth higher and higher, but to assume that this will continue is to court disaster. Innovation should be incorporated into economic models after it happens and not before.

The major open source projects like Ubuntu have many professionals working on them. But unlike Windows Vista, it probably won't take the ubuntu folks 2 years to work out the kinks.

But people are bitter at Microsoft for their monopolistic business practices: vendor lock-in with proprietary document formats, market manipulation through licensing deals that conspire to block competition. All of which negatively effects their customers by driving up the cost of computing. No one should be paying $500 for Microsoft Office. It is insanely overpriced. Same with Windows. I paid $30 for Windows 7 because I am a grad student now, but that is all anyone should ever be expected to pay.

And when MS does come out with a crappy OS like Windows Vista it puts progress in computing on hold for two years while they get around to replacing it.

Yes, that is how evolution works.

But run this same study in other places and maybe you get a different result. It could be that in Framingham the people that want to reproduce the most happen to be shorter. Or maybe there is something about being a bit shorter that opens up more mating possibilities. And the heavier part needs a bit more investigation, because people that have a lot of kids usually don't lose all the weight after the pregnancy.

There is a very complicated cultural interplay that is part of human reproduction. Government policy, language differences, religious beliefs etc.

You use the worst possible examples to shore up your faulty arguments.

Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, which is one of the latest plants to be built in the US (completed in 1986), has a capacity of 1,244MW and sits on 900 acres much of which is just a buffer area that is left in a mostly natural state.

So comparing apples to apples, this wind farm uses 80 times more land area per megawatt. And if you are going to be dragging in mining into the equation, then you had better account for all the materials and energy required to manufacture those wind turbines. Not to mention the land area of the new power grid that it will take to transmit all this power from far off places. When you add it all up, a full roll out of wind and solar in the US would take up an area the size of Arizona and still wouldn't give you enough power on a cloudy or windless day.

Heck can you even run an industrial economy on wind power? How many wind turbines would it take to power the manufacture of a single turbine? All this talk of how many homes you can power, without considering manufacturing and business. Is the expectation that we are just going to keep outsourcing our industrial production to China where they will continue to use cheap coal power? The Chinese have done the math on this, have we? The last major foray into renewable energy in the US was with hydro-electric power and now many environmental groups want to see many rivers undammed to allow the ecosystem to recover. Do we really want to see our entire landscape covered with wind farms and transmission lines? What is the environmental impact of that?

Nuclear is a proven safe reliable technology that has the least environmental impact of any other technology including wind and solar.

I do, by the way, believe that wind and solar do have a place, but it is only going to get us about 5-10% of the way there.

It is a simple choice either Global Warming is a threat and we need to triple our nuclear capacity in the next 20 years or Global Warming isn't going to be so bad and we can play around with a little solar and wind power to assuage some political groups.

I agree that this isn't about coverage because everyone is already covered... this is about equity of who pays what. This bill screws over the middle class to pay for the poor and subsidize the rich. Give me a 2.5 percent tax on everyone, like Medicare and then give everyone the same basic 2 doctors visits a year and free emergency room care for actual life threatening emergencies. Don't screw over the middle class with health insurance that is cheap enough to buy, but has too high deductibles to actually use. Making people pay 5 to 10% of their incomes to high deductible health insurance, leaving them no money to actually pay out of pocket for their own health care, for something that has no value, is wrong.

I thought you were heading in the right direction when you said the bill is dishonest, but I disagree that it is heading towards socialism. This bill is just a corrupt abomination, not the product of a coherent policy of socialism or anything that cohesively rational. It is a giant give away to the insurance industry which allows them to continue to raise premiums beyond the breaking point. People in droves were deciding to decline health insurance because it was too expensive, a trend that was threatening insurance companies growth. People would be a lot better off with medical savings accounts (that actually carried over each year) even subsidized savings accounts would be better. But this way with mandated purchase of insurance, people won't have the option to save their money. And if you actually do get sick and can't afford the insurance anymore because you are out of work, then you get stuck on the public dime anyway because the insurance companies get to walk away with all the money that you gave them over the years and you get nothing to show for it.

Forget socialism, the US government is running a Ponzi scheme.

You mean that HR people would actually have to know how to screen someone? A degree is just a glorified reference from an institution rather than a particular person, actually it is a reference from a collection of people in the form of professors who give you grades.

The problem with too much education is that eventually it does mean that the burden of cost is actually too high for the economy to sustain if there is not an offsetting benefit. The fact that HR costs might go up doesn't consider the fact that costs have already gone up to pay people enough in salaries to pay off their student loans. But then there is the less tangible cost of people having less Freedom because they are stuck paying off loans for a big chunk of their productive lives.

Does it reasonably cost $5000 in man hours to retrieve 6 months worth of emails from one persons mailbox in Microsoft Exchange?

Actually, Chernobyl was an example of an experiment gone bad:

- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html

Chernobyl was more akin to America's nuclear experiments that released lots of radiation into the atmosphere. Hanford's "Green Run" purposefully released radioactive gases in order to test our ability to detect releases of radioactive material. And all those above ground nuclear tests didn't do us much good in terms of release of radiation.

Fact is that there has never been a release of significant amounts of radiation from a electricity generating nuclear plant unless people started screwing around with it on purpose. Far more radiation has been released from coal. And far more people have died in accidents relating to the production of oil. From a land use perspective, even solar and wind are more destructive to the environment than nuclear.