Radio jamming in Libya is nothing new. As a kid, I lived in Tripoli for a couple of years. We came home to the UK in 1977. At the time, they were jamming an Egyptian radio station by transmitting from a radio ship in Tripoli harbour. It was actually quite welcome for us expats, as what they were transmitting was the output from one of the pirate radio stations off the UK coast, so we got to hear the music from home :)

>>>Government spending is not trying to reinflate a bubble. It is ensuring that the economy returns to producing somewhere near its capacity.
>>>

In other words it's trying to reinflate the bubble (a level higher than the economy truly supports).

Avant browser is nothing more than a front-end for IE.
It's basically a window surrounding an embedded Internet Explorer object.
I personally think its ridiculous that MS offers it as an 'alternative browser'

Y

What's amazing here is that an American city outside Utah acquiesced to demands that a piece of public infrastructure be degraded, on the basis of someone's religious objections to women who are not covered. It was a boneheaded decision to enforce values of a single religious group upon the public at large.

Why is it amazing? That's the way the U.S. is set up to work - to strike a balance allowing geographical differences in local community standards to coexist with larger scale government standards. The founders never wanted the entire country to be a homogeneous mass with everything being the same everywhere. They wanted some wider principles and and guidelines for the entire country, but the flexibility for local regions (initially States) to do things differrently they way they wanted. So anything not covered by Federal laws are subject to State laws. Anything not covered by State laws are subject to county ordinances. Anything not covered by county ordinances are subject to city ordinances. Anything not covered by city ordinances are subject to smaller official community organizations (e.g. school boards).

If there are no federal, state, county, or city regulations requiring that bike lanes be present, the local community is free to decide, based on the social standards of the majority of the local residents, whether or not their streets should have bike lanes. If a community is largely comprised of Hasidic Jews who don't want bike lanes, then as long as a higher layer of government doesn't require bike lanes, they are free to do with their community as they wish. That their reason is based on their religion is irrelevant. As long as it doesn't violate a law or ordinance, people can make decisions for their community based on science, religion, Oprah, phase of the moon, or the voices they hear in their head. If someone feels the majority has gone too far and is violating the rights of the minority, they bring it up in court.

This is what allows right-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. no nudie bars). And allows left-wing communities to have ordinances which they are more comfortable with (e.g. mandatory recycling pickup). The legal environment set up by these local norms live and die based on people voting - both at the ballot and with their feet (moving into or out of the community). Laws at the local level which don't work get filtered out, with a lesson learned not to try it at a higher level. Laws which do work at the local level get noticed as a good idea, and get tried out at a higher level.

This is the kind of thinking that creates unbearable to use UI's.
"You're a user, you annoy me with your presence, so you must be punished and ridiculed!"

Don't forget that you're making a UI for the user to like. Not so they'll leave you the fuck alone.

Not so fast. Hearing aid sales in the United States aone are around 2 million. Add international sales (no need for language localized version :), the relatively slow product cycle, etc. and the prices are hard to defend. The hearing aid is not an obscure device, and many millions of people will need one. It is also relatively recession-proof. It appears that the industry both suffers from a lot of regulation but also is, frankly, crooked. See this Wall Street Journal article.

>Uh, do car accidents have nuclear weapons? No? Didn't think so.

Nope, but they have been, and will continue to be, far more deadly to Americans than terrorists. You can keep begging for big brother to keep you safe by occupying unrelated countries when that is what actually makes those people want to attack us. No, it's not because they hate our freedoms - it's because of our actions.

The difference is that the repository model used by popular GNU/Linux operating environments is intended for use with free software or at least freely redistributable software. Distros like Fedora and Ubuntu currently lack anything like Steam, a repository of non-free commercial software.

It's true that there is no way to purchase software using the package manager. However, there is no reason that you couldn't integrate the package manager into a purchasing system such as steam.

One way you could do it is by shipping a debian file with the binaries only. When the debian file is installing you can call a script to enter a license key or make it call a DRM server for online activation. I think there are lots of things you could do using the underlying systems on linux which would be more difficult to do on windows if you were writing everything from scratch.

All your steam app would have to worry about is providing a list deb files to only logged in users and not unauthorised users.

Is amazing how many times "not just now" turns into "never" in practice. There will be always an emergency, something with more priority at the eyes of the public opinion or at least that will be what the mass media will say... put a precedent, and the people expending the money will manage to find another priority every time.

How we could expend on space if we have to save the banks, sustain the war on iraq? stop terrorists, or maintain peace on middle east, stop communism and so on till you get even before the invention of airplanes,

Probably we will realize how essential would have been doing something on this when is already too late. For once, "think on the children" would be the appropiate reason.