Because "queen" when referring to ants has a completely different meaning than "queen" when referring to the ruler of a country? Not all people in the UK are biological children hatched from eggs laid by Queen Elizabeth, although it's been a while since I've cracked open a biology textbook.

Too soon!

I'm guessing the reason they didn't mutate to their environment is that their spread across the globe was assisted by humans accidentally, and thus happened much faster than their evolution would allow. They've only been that widespread fairly recently, in the grand scheme of things (like in the past few hundred years), like humans of any particular widespread ethnicity, they can recognize each other as being similar.

Now, if the different supercolonies across the globe manage to all get along and work together, the ants are ahead of us for sure.

Agreed, and my apologies about the correlation/causation argument; I kinda figured I'm on slashdot and that's one of those /. phrases.

What we really have to protect against is the witch hunt state, where the rules for what's a warning sign and what's protected expression become too arbitrary. It's important when suspicious behaviour is out in the open to recognize it and take note but people's privacy has to be respected. Though I hardly consider myself a threat to the state who's to say the stuff I read mightn't be suspicious to someone who didn't know me?

I dunno I just worry is all.

No Government has enough storage space and enough bandwidth to log this entire country's internet traffic. Besides that, how to enforce it?

While this is true, correlation is not causation and just as there are a lot more ordinary people in this country than terrorists (unless you believe the Bushite propaganda), there's probably a lot more ordinary people who dig the Constitution than domestic terrorists.

I don't keep a pocket copy of it on me or anything but I do firmly believe that a well thought out understanding of the Constitution is essential for being a citizen (that goes for other countries, too, with their respective government-establishing documents). It's important to know your rights as well as to know what's expected of you where you live. Your taxes pay for the government, so it's handy to know a little about it.

The real thing that I take issue with here is that mere possession of /any/ readily-available document could be grounds for suspicion. Implicit in our first amendment rights is the right also to consume whatever speech or press we wish. Like the Patriot Act's provision that libraries could spy on what you read. If a book is in a public library, it should be understood that I can pick it up and read it without suspicion.

It may take a little longer than four years to dismantle all the horribly horribly wrong things that have been done in the name of national security in this country.

It's not just incumbents that introduce bad legislation. It's not as though all the junior senators out there are doing nothing.

Of course now is where I would point out poorly thought out legislation a junior senator has proposed but as I really should be working right now I have none. It can't just be the old guys though.

If you're on a laptop either put down two fingers on the trackpad or hold down ctrl then click. If on a desktop just click the right sid of the mouse. Seriously why is this still a reason people make fun of macs for?!

What about a review site that just so happens to have links to the torrents being reviewed? The very notion that it might be open to such a stupid loophole is a good indication that the assisting making available charge is just a little ludicrous.

That's why it's not defined at birth. In most US jurisdictions life is defined to begin when a fetus can survive by itself outside the womb (roughly six months into a pregnancy).

You would have a really good point if all the different linux distros were intended for the same crowd of people, but they're not. A great many of them are meant for niche markets where there are few options. In the grand scheme of things people who are thinking of a transition to linux might have heard of 2-3 distros, which is a manageable number of choices. It's not like you're going to see many ordinary folk trying to choose between some embedded linux and Ubuntu. I do agree with you that it behooves the linux community to have a minimum of distros trying to go mainstream at any given time.

And besides, unlike different distros of linux which oftentimes come with very different goals and processes to create them, the different "versions" of Win 7 are really just different features users might be willing to give up to get a better price.

Really this is what's the most baffling to me. I feel like Microsoft makes a product and then proliferates multiple stripped-down versions of it, whereas it would be so much better for everybody if they just made one single well-rounded product or perhaps two (home and pro) and no more. Kudos to them for only marketing a couple of them but there are still way too many flavours. Is it really necessary to have a media centre version and a tablet pc version? Why not just have drivers or separate software for those things and keep the experience consistent?

Cheap programmers are great for throwaway or non-mission critical software, but make sure you have at least some good programmers around who have the computer science background underlying their software engineering abilities to deal with the tough/complex stuff.

This is a really important point. There's nothing wrong with having inexperienced programmers around if you have a couple of more capable guys to guide them. I would say a programmer is only truly useless if they lack not only the proper background but also the ability to accept direction from more experienced programmers.

If you have a team of cheap programmers and no one to guide them or they're more lone wolf types who don't like direction, no amount of hardware will ever guarantee success.

That's 11lbs in addition to whatever you carry normally. I'm a strong guy and also in the target market (creative professional), but I don't think it makes me any less strong when I say this would be a major pain. I usually carry a sketchbook, pens and pencils, and a couple of small notebooks. I just don't have the capacity and if I'm on the road I don't need a second LCD. Soooooo I'm still wondering how well this thing will sell. Guess we'll see.

Burning hot pants sounds kinda sexy. Sign me up!

Let me start by saying that I'm just as unenthusiastic about Vista as the next guy. If your computer has 1Gb of free RAM then that 1Gb is wasted. It could be used for cacheing frequently used applications and/or documents. If you have all of your RAM being used but enough of it kept volatile so that it can be thrown out quickly, you are fully utilizing the resources given to you.

Okay that being said I still think it's pathetic if Windows Vista can't handle file copying with a bunch of applications open. Which makes me wonder if it's worth fully utilizing RAM if it can't do so responsibly.