Maybe this sounds rational to some people, but who says the U.S. spends 20% of the budget to prevent 3,000 terror deaths? Who are the 100,000 who would be saved in hospitals

This was written by someone who is absolutely certain that he will not be one of the 3,000 -- if indeed the terrorists who ever they may be are shooting for 3,000.

We should only talk about desktops in the home, for routine use, maybe home office. Because big business is a different thing. If their IT departments could figure out from getting out from under MS, they would save cash and aggravation, but that's another story. I don't think any big company has an IT department that is willing or able to cope with change. And then, games at home are a different thing. So, the 1% or 2% is in fact a little larger than the gross numbers make out.

But Linux still has a problem. It's not grandma and usability (whatever that is) as such but it's with software licensing and formats -- lawyer stuff.

I tried for two years to like the Mac. I bought a Mini and tried living with. Apple. It's not great. The hardware isn't so durable to be worth the premium they charge. The system is only perfect for Mac zealots, and impossible to alter for anyone else. The X-windows setup is awful.

But it does play mp3s and commercial dvds, and Safari opens 99.9% of all the web pages I've wanted to see. I just got tired of having my sound break with every other kernel update, and I know how to fix it. I can imagine that Linux is useless otherwise.

Still I went back to Linux on a new Desktop, but keep the Mini for music and movies via VNC -- the setup is probably not for everyone, but it works.

Exactly!

That's why I am preparing my $107 million lawsuit against BellSouth and my $384 million against GoDaddy for blocking my users' emails from time to time -- actually every time I've changed IP numbers. You know, guilty until proven innocent.

Valuation of damages are proportional to the time and trouble it took to get unblocked.

Years ago, I played poker and I found it was much easier to win when you were way ahead of everybody. You could outlast anyone. You can do all sorts of things when the others are at the brink.

I can't believe how these great publishers, billionaires at the top of the social heap, are so dumb that the strongest of them are so anxious to risk it all. Aren't they captains of industry? Don't they want to squeeze out the competition?

I believe that Murdoch and the NY Times (which will do this in a few months) will fail miserably and ruin their franchises. In the unlikely event that they succeed, they will just be leading the way for all the little guys, and their industry will be able to resume its slow fade.

What they do isn't worth £1 a day, or £2 a week, to many people. There's too much competition in news. Aggregators didn't invent copying -- newspapers did it first and continue to rewrite each other with abandon. But that does not mean they can be replaced by bloggers. It's too bad.

This was not a test of anything, since the local newspaper is owned by the local cable company and the cable company gives away a subscription to the online paper to every cable customer.

But still the mind reels at the thought the collective intelligence of top management who paid $4m to go fishing for a handful of nonreaders -- i.e. people without cable and without a habit of reading the physical paper product.

The businesses who see the Internet as a profit-making venture brought us much more than the ads.

They are turning the Internet into a giant shopping mall.

Microsoft and Apple and Intel and all those assemblers build commodities that are friendly to users and wide open to businesses that want to probe, prod and promote stuff to those happy consumer-users. Of course, they'd like to do something about the criminals who use the same techniques, but not if it gets in the way of their digital rights.

Condé Nast owns Ars; this is a company that would like to sell Vogue-like content to everyone. I get along with it. I'll get along without Ars Technica if it's necessary for them to make me watch gyrating office girls selling no-money-down mortgages and worthless college degrees.

On my own, my health insurance choice is a limited $1,500 a month plan and an average $2,500. Those are different companies, and the only ones selling insurance in my state (in the U.S.). I'd say Germany's plan looks OK to me.

Luckily there is a group for freelancers in my state, but keep in mind:

• You have to be relatively successfully every year in order to qualify.
• You have to do one of several types of job.

If you have no income (say 10% in the U.S.) or low income, you are screwed.

It's not a political problem here because 70% or so of the people are covered by employer plans that more or less support the entire wasteful system.

Again, the 30% are screwed.

Vocalizing a sound is a mechanical activity directed by your brain.

Deciphering those directions to your vocal mechanics is a long way from deciphering the underlying representational system which you used to decide what to communicate. No one has a clue about that system or its logic.

So, you're dreams are safe.

Unless you twitter them away.

A moral lesson for the deregulated.

I'll bet there were a lot of smug phone company executives who thought at the time of the breakup of old Ma Bell that there will never be anyone willing to lay down enough wire to seriously challenge them.

Then they got cable TV and wireless phones, but a lot of the data moving business is still in the hands of the Baby Bells.

This ought to cut them down a notch.

But then we'll need a new search engine. I won't search where my bandwidth comes from!

I'm sure your ISP is recording every move you make, and Google is recording half the stuff that moves on the web. A Google ISP brings the two together and will be a privacy nightmare.

The sad thing about office politics is that the people who are best at it often rise to the highest levels.

The trouble is inherent in the bureaucracy of big organizations. The company, government agency or whatever, is too big to be managed by one person, so the big boss has to rely on little bosses, and the little bosses who sound the best at meetings always win.

You, the little guy who hasn't risen to your level of incompetence cannot be caught making your little boss, or some other little boss on her way up, bad. They'll get even with you, and you'll never know how.

Complaints like this always bring legions of pompous schoolmarms out the woodwork with conflicting sets of rules and a copious amount of handwringing and finger-pointing.

The school-kid grammatical rules that everyone is complaining about here are a poor representation of the underlying mechanism we have in our brains that allows us to communicate. Those rules and intelligence do not form an equivalence class.

The ability to learn a couple of hundred of rules does not make a fluent speaker of a language, much less an intelligent speaker of a language. Every native speaker of English understands the meaning of every one of the mistakes people are citing here, and adult learners of English continue to struggle with comprehension of both standard and idiomatic English as they hang on to the leaky life raft of the rules they were taught in a school room.

Try an exercise. Read a few pages of Shakespeare without the footnotes, and report back on what it says. Then pick out of few pages of the King James Bible and diagram a few sentences. Tell us what you have learned about sentence structure.

If that seems too academic, try diagramming all the sentences in the 600 comments here.

In some fields, there are more and more conferences, and more and more papers. In mine, the quality varies a great deal. One friend loves to argue that paper selection is random. Success does follow from the patience and energy to keep submitting the same thing to different conferences. Some people have publications lists so long, you'd need a couple years to read all of them carefully and a couple lifetimes to duplicate the results. (I know grad students do the work.) Every moderately clever idea begets five or six nearly identical papers. It's a bigger problem that whose list is longest.

A long list of papers help people get academic appointments and grants, but then there are so many more grad students floating around ... maybe it's a good thing.

In any numbers game, China's got a pretty good advantage, with India close behind, at three- or four-fold over the U.S., where by the way a lot of students stay away from the sciences because there is easier money to be made elsewhere.

So I won't be annoyed if you are gunned down in a robbery, killed by a drunken driver, poisoned by an untested pharmaceutical, buried in the collapse of a building erected without permits ... or if you are done in by any number of crimes, not only terrorism. These are events of no importance to me and are no reason for society to restrict your freedom.

This thread is obscene. It is a perversion of statistics.

Please note this is not a comment on the efficacy of specific TSA rules, just the fact they in general might be a good idea.

Maybe all the studies about the danger of driving and cell phones could be used. You have to argue/show that listening in on a conversation is almost as bad as participating. I think it is. For a few years, I shared an office with someone who talked on the phone a lot. The only way to concentrate was music on headphones.

I think that human conversation is the most distracting thing around, and if other people talk as part of their jobs, earphones make you much more productive.

But bosses who issue edicts like that are idiots. And someone already suggested a new job.

The beauty of the web was that everything was available to everyone. It was free, as in speech and beer. But this is going fast. Google's effort to personalize search is only the lastest from the big corporations to turn the web into one long seemless commercial, and to turn the users into commodities.

I'd like to think that I can control my searching by altering my search terms. Google and Microsoft and many others would like to identify me and give me what sells best no matter what I ask for.

Their way of doing this is to find a way to describe me through my web history. I doubt that this is any more possible than the phrenology of a century ago, but I can't decide whether it's worse for them to keep trying and failing, or for them to actually figure out how the system work accurately. Either way, my search is poorer for being limited by their manipulations.