I would label it Taiwan. It is an objective fact that there is an independent government there. Just because someone else doesn't like a fact, doesn't make it go away.

We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view.

Sorry, but no. The map can be neutral. It's the people with a point of view.

It looks like OpenJDK now runs on MacOSX:

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/

Can you really blame them for not believing that "normal" Britons go around looking at planes on military bases and keeping track of the call letters in their little books? While on vacation to Greece?

I certainly think the British government should have applied more pressure to get them out of jail sooner. But you have to admit their behavior was suspicious.

Anything with words in can be accused of having racist and/or sexist biases. Just for one extreme fictional example, imagine something like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/question/mathtest.asp -- but it doesn't have to be ridiculous like that. It could just be the race and sex composition of the smiling faces on the cover.

Anything written by people can be tainted by other works by those people, or by private comments they have made. Anything published by a company can be tainted by other books they've published, how they treat their employees, where they get their supplies, etc.

So I can understand why you think math isn't polarizing, but in a poisoned political environment like California, anything can be politicized.

Just as in ancient times, librarians are working on these problems.

Failing hard drives are only a problem if you foolishly store data on only one drive, or on only one system. Most of the people I know store multiple copies locally, and as many copies remotely as they can. For example, the system I work with every day has data at three main sites: one in my library's server room, one in another place on campus, and a third in another part of the state. Each of these sites has redundant drives, tape backups, etc.

Formats that nobody can read is a larger problem, but mainly for access systems (as opposed to preservation systems). The images most people can use are low res, low quality and in formats that change every few years. When the format changes, you throw them away. The images that are stored long-term are in lossless, open, well-documented formats, like TIFF and PDF.

Accidental deletes can be a problem, depending on who has access to what data. Multiple sites help if there are problems. Rigorous checking of the files periodically (like checking the md5sums), helps find problems too.

There are a lot of people thinking very hard about how to make this stuff last as long as possible. Libraries typically don't have huge budgets, and digitizing and preserving materials is very costly compared to what we usually do. So there's a lot of focus on doing things right the first time, learning from other people's mistakes, etc.

We've all seen that "fixing the spam problem is impossible" form letter. In fact, I think I've even posted it here on slashdot and probably on usenet back in the day.

But I think parent is basically correct: the only practical way to end spam is to make it unprofitable. Ending the rewards for spamming is truly impossible. Criminalizing it is possible, but ineffective. Filtering hides the problem but doesn't fix it. Technical solutions will at best result in an arms race, because there is so much money at stake. Increasing the cost of sending spam is the only way.

The the problem is figuring out how to make spammers pay without destroying email as a communications tool in the process.

Having every email cost a cent (given to the recipient) will go a long way. Micropayments won't be needed because the transactions are already intermediated by ISPs, so they can handle the payment differences amongst themselves in bulk, and then charge their customers accordingly.

Most senders of email will send and receive roughly the same amount of email, so they will not be affected much. They will get a quota from their ISPs, and if they send a lot more than they receive, they will have to pay for it. In an ideal world, people would be cut off after they hit their quota, so if they were zombied, they wouldn't rack up thousands of dollars in email sending fees. I would hope that getting cut off from sending email for the rest of the month would help motivate people to clean up their PCs, too.

Bulk emailers (newsletters, confirmation emails, etc.) will need a separate system. Some of them can simply pay for it (I'm sure Amazon can simply charge you an extra five cents to pay for the confirmation emails they send you). Maybe others can require return confirmation, or even pre-confirmation. If they don't get an email from you, you don't get emailed your newsletter, etc.

let's call it phoenix, so it can rise from the ashes of firefox?

I switched from a completely non-technical position to a being programmer. Though it took me about two years and several small steps. Basically, I kept learning relevant skills, and when there were gaps (because of people quitting, or new stuff that I found that needed doing), I was there and able to do the work. My first transition was from general office work to being the "computer guy" at a small company. I got this job because I knew the most about Linux, so when the old computer guy left, I was the most qualified. I got another job doing documentation and tech support for a small project. I taught myself enough Perl to do some simple CGIs, and found some simple apps that I could do. This got me noticed and officially licensed to do some programming in addition to my other duties. Then I took some night classes in Java and got promoted to a full-time developer. Since you already know how to code, I'd suggest finding people in your company who need help. I knew a lot of people who were doing really mind-numbing repetitive work in Excel or by hand to do statistics or reports. So I wrote some Perl scripts to automate some of that, or setup Excel files better to automate the statistics generation. I found it really helpful to have people who would vouch for me along the lines of "I used to spend hours doing that, and he wrote a program that would do it in 5 minutes". That obviously helps a lot more if you can move to a developer position in your company.

99% of people will be fine with just knowing that someone doesn't work the company any more. The HR people need to know he's fired, because it might affect final pay, benefits, etc. Very few people need to know why someone was fired. And there's a big difference between saying "Joe was fired" and "Joe was fired for not following our reimbursement regulations, so don't forget to follow the rules" and "Joe was fired because he couldn't follow our reimbursement regulations about alcohol". That's where the malice test comes in.

I think employees suing their employers is a special case, because the employer has a lot of private info on the employee. So they can take things out of context and ruin somebody's reputation, make it hard for them to get another job, etc.

I'm not sure libel is the best way to handle this problem. But there need to be limits on what employers can say about their employees and former employees because the company is in a position to abuse the private info they have.

As a developer, I find my self doing this far more than I'd like. I've used proxies that dump headers and firefox extensions to view the headers and all that. But they all screw up other stuff or fail to work sometimes. So there's something really nice about $ telnet server 80 Connected to server. Escape character is '^]' HEAD /foo/bar?baz=quux HTTP/1.0 etc.

What I would really like to see is movie theaters and the like being able to broadcast a signal that would automatically force phones into silent mode. Because I really don't care if the guy on the other side of the theater is texting or talking. But the ringing and beeping carries through the whole theater. I would find this a useful service, too, since I sometimes forget to put my phone in silent mode. Or, more often, forget to take it out of silent mode when the movie's over and miss a call because I don't hear it. This seems like a much more reasonable balance to me. Considerate people can still take important calls discreetly. Assholes who talk and annoy people around them (whether a phone is involved or not) should be booted.

The original looks bad because it's a low-res version, and the altered version looks better because it's a hi-res version from AP. The bad photoshopping is how completely synthetic the flag looks. It doesn't even look passably real. A decent photoshop would at least use a real picture of a flag with similar lighting to the original photo, so the contrast between the subject and background is so jarring it's obviously been altered.