You know what? You're mostly right. Lots of ads are really annoying. When websites run ads from multiple adservers such that getting ads takes more time than generating an entire dynamic page, there is something fundamentally obnoxious there, if not downright wrong.

However, your two quasi-moralistic, me-me-me emphasized arguments are incredibly flawed. First, yes, it is your computer the ads want to appear on... as part of the content that you requested. So far as I know, no one is preventing you from using these fascinating inventions: the stop, back, or close buttons in your browser. Second, seriously... bandwidth? You know what's more expensive than your bandwidth? The uplink on the medium traffic website you're enjoying the content of, for free, before pissing and moaning about a 24K static banner.

Look, I really don't care. AdBlock exists. NoScipt exists. We all hate ads, I get it. People will block ads however they want, it doesn't matter. If too many people do it, lots of websites will go for-pay, and if that happens, it happens. Whatever. What you should NOT do is wrap your complaints or technological subversions in some kind of ridiculous, absurdly selfish, holier-than-thou horse manure.

Star Trek TOS: 1966-1969
U-Matic: 1971
Betacam: 1982

Did they get betacam by slingshotting around the sun?

Naturally, the version set doesn't map the same way, but luckily, we have Microsoft's very own upgrade path to go by. I'd say that Vista requiring a clean install for anything less than Vista Business is sufficient evidence that Home editions should not be used for price comparisons.

This whole thread began with OS2 pricing discourse. Somebody said Vista is the same, being more expensive for the same general payoff. That remains true. You can't use Vista home prices to rebut, when not even Microsoft has an upgrade path from XP Pro. And as I said, people are exaggerating. In fact, I don't remember OS2 being $400 more either (though at that point, I was barely paying attention). The point remains that $200 more is far from insubstantial.

XP Professional can be had for about $100. Using prices of Vista Home {Basic|Premium}, it can be argued, is a disingenuous comparison. GP may have been exaggerating a little, but the argument remains apt.

Intending no offense, that strikes me as a sadly superficial analysis. I have been a member of the anti-war crowd since there was an anti-war crowd, and I would amazon preorder this... [do we really have to call it a] game. There are lots of reasons to. They range from taking part in what could well be the creation of a legitimate medium to simply learning about, for better or worse, a defining moment in our national history. Just because I am, and have been, staunchly opposed to this military action does not mean I would not love the opportunity to learn about the things these soldiers have gone through from their perspective.

That said, I would be horribly nervous. I'm imagining settling in for a quiet evening of serious introspection with my 360 until an achievement pops up for 30 headshots with a pistol (bonus for maximum damage with a fragmentation grenade!) The evening ends with my vomiting for half an hour before drinking alone, wondering when 4chan became my last bastion for finding some kind of ethical center for the human race.

Are you trolling or what?

They are saying it is pretty. The big red words floated on the left of the article (emphasis mine): "In short, Ubuntu is now as slick and beautiful as Mac OS X or Windows 7." And why would 'they' want people to think that? It's a cnet news editorial-style piece, not some official statement from Ubuntu or an article on LinuxInsider or something. In fact, the first sentence of the article begins: "Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04"

You may have heard the cliche "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It is absurd and pointless to make declarative statements on inherently subjective topics. Obviously, at least one person disagrees with you. So what?

I'm 27. I played the Fallouts (less Tactics) religiously, and both System Shocks before Bioshock. I still think Bioshock deserved the vast majority of the hype it got. (Some of the nonsense about the story being the best thing since sliced bread, I felt, was a little misplaced or over-exaggerated, but other than that...)

Why can't it just be good in its own right? Virtually everything is a rehash. You can't possibly expect every game to be Portal, and I don't think you can reasonably expect people to only get excited once every ten years when a Portal-class game comes out. Bioshock wasn't terribly original. It was beautiful, fun and engrossing. Better yet, it gave me another game to play in a similar environment to its aforementioned predecessors.

I'd rather studios continue to make good games rehashing those ideas than just let those environments and feelings die. I don't want to have to play Fallout YET AGAIN in a dos emulator on Linux 3.432.2 in thirty years to get that same feeling. So when a derivative comes out, and it's good, I'll continue to get almost as excited as when those old games I'm reminded of did... I can know the roots of the games I like without being shackled by them.

How about this for a distinction: I can't imagine trying to talk into a device with a 7" screen.

Indeed, using a spreadsheet app is mostly a futility on WM6. I can speak from experience on that. Why? Because putting a spreadsheet on a 3" screen is ridiculous. Not because of anything else. My phone has multiple TIMES the processing power and memory of the first computer I used a spreadsheet app on. If I had a VGA output and a mouse input on my phone, there is no reason it couldn't run a port of Excel 97.

I had a good friend in college (2-3 years ago) who ran around with a 233 Mhz PII, just because he could. It worked fine. He kept some data from our projects on it, even. By comparison to this android device, what would you say it is now? An underpowered netbook? A sub-netbook? A glorified phone? It certainly wouldn't run any modern desktop software either. If it changed categories at some point during its what... 9 year life, when was it? When did it become a netbook? When did it drop to glorified phone?

Labels are a convenience, so people can talk about roughly the same thing. Sometimes they can be used in arguments for fun or flamebait. They are irrelevant. A device is what it is and is defined by what it is intended to do, nothing else. Arguing about it like it's super important with strict, yet still inherently arbitrary, definitions is an exercise in futility... much like running a spreadsheet app in WM6.

In these arguments about copyright terms, I am always stricken by two things: the general assumption that all copyrights should be identical and that copyright is binary.

We could have different copyright terms on different creations... entertainment software could be 5 years, serious commercial trade software like CAD/CAM or 3DS Max could be 15. Reference materials like your guide on N.A. bird species could be the life of the author or 25 years for the publisher. Textbooks similar. Movies 10 years. Etc.

Further, copyright doesn't have to be absolute. As in my above example, after 3 years, all entertainment software could go id-style where the engine is pretty much free and mod-able, but the art remains under control for the duration of the 5 years. Another case that comes to mind were the lawsuits over Harry Potter guides. Say Harry Potter's copyright is 12 years, but after 6, all of this control over derivative works goes away.

I'm not really asserting that this is the right way to go or anything, but it seems obvious to me that a lot of these problems are the result of lumping all copyrightable material into one set of rules. Should flash animation be legally the same as a mural in this context? I don't ever see anybody really asking these questions directly.

Yes, of course. That doesn't really argue against my point, though. If I have to take a laptop home to work on it just for a weekend, why import a library into some monstrous media player I'll have to install or configure when I already have nice, neat file management? I have more than one hardware media player for different purposes. I could use all of their proprietary softwares independently to manage their playlists and such, but again... why, when I already have nice, neat file management? My point was simply this: if you use lots of computers (especially if it's not necessarily even a static set) and/or have multiple media players, file management (especially if you have even a basic grasp of regex) is a much easier solution than relying on metadata. I'm only talking about management here: playlists and relative uniformity across machines and devices.

First, my directory structures have as much or more data than an iPod displays. Artist -> Year - Album Title -> Track # - Title. Do the full sized ipods display album information? I honestly don't recall, but I want to say they even do album covers... My girlfriend's iPod nano certainly does not. Second, I'm not losing anything. I can still use metadata. I get all that extra information just like everybody else, in the software players I use that support it. I just don't rely on it to manage, because in my circumstances it absolutely cannot do it effectively. That's all I was saying.

PS. I know about this internet thing. I even used cddb-tool in a ripping script (yet again, I lose nothing and gain complete portability). Still, your last sentence genuinely had me laughing.

I'm sorry, but that is a completely impractical solution. I don't listen to music on one computer on one operating system, or out of one media player. With varying versions of RHEL at work, I have to use either Rhythmbox (and different versions of it!) or Amarok depending on the individual machine. If I'm spending the day in the server room, I may only have a CLI player option when I forget my hardware media player. At home I dual boot XP and LFS. At my girlfriend's place, I'm in a mostly mac zone.

The only reasonable solution here, is to manage by filenames. Also, it is not "practically insane" it's very easy. I could just as easily tell you to get over your useless obsession and learn to use regular expressions on your files (I promise, it even takes a lot less time than manually going through ID3 tags or whichever metadata you use). If metadata works for you, and you want iTunes or something like it to handle your file management transparently, that's great. I just suggest that you consider that not everyone uses the same computers the same ways before calling people's "obsessions" useless, when there may actually be practical usability issues that necessitate different thinking.

Right. Sorry, I was probably thinking of the various weird state legislatures. (Though, for the record, I.3 still didn't dictate *how* the state legislatures decided. In fact, I'll have to look up how that normally happened per state prior to 1913.)

If I could elaborate on whistlingtony's post... The CXOs can be thought of as [often unofficial] cabinet members. Much like there are different commissions like the FCC, FTC or Department of Agriculture that operate under executive power, it's really just delegation of the president's responsibilities. They have power in that they generally operate under executive authority. They have no power in that the president can pretty much hire/fire them at will and reverse their decisions and such in the instance that he disagrees after the fact. They just handle banal things for the president that he: doesn't want to, doesn't have time for, or doesn't have the necessary expertise in.

Also, if I read your post correctly, you have a slight misunderstanding of US government. Both of our parliamentary bodies are elected by the people. The US Constitution doesn't exactly dictate how states choose senators, so it is theoretically possible that the first parliamentary body could elect the second. However, to my knowledge, all states choose senators based on some variation, at least, of a popular vote.

While his post was insightful and deserves some moderation to that effect, I am going to have to disagree. Lawyers and politicians absolutely should be legislating technology because legislation is their job. I couldn't do it. I think our problem has been that they are doing it wrong, for a variety of reasons.

I find a great deal of irony in your original post and this reply, because while you are obviously a lawyer, your original post demonstrates *exactly* the behaviors I believe are the full requirements I would expect from a great tech executive or politician.

First, you obviously read a tech article on your own, in your free time, displaying interest. Second, you formed an opinion. Third, you reformed your opinion based on a respected expert. Fourth, and most importantly, you went to a large community of experts (to varying degrees) in order to modify your opinion with the input of people with a greater professional interest in the subject than your own.

In all seriousness, Mr. Beckerman, despite being a lawyer and not a professional technologist, you would make a better CTO (or politician) than the vast majority of the rest of us. I would even venture to say that technologists shouldn't be forming large policies for as diverse and large an organization as the federal government. They are more likely to have biases and pay less attention to technologies they are less familiar with through professional experience.

As a side note, if you could chair the FCC or hop on in some tech position at the FTC, I would really appreciate it.

If I might throw out my opinion, I believe you are over-simplifying science. Science does have to follow the scientific method. The scientific method can only be used to show correlations and disprove hypotheses. Those are both true. However, boiling science down to only that would be inaccurate, and I believe this is where the other person was going with your 'definition' of science.

I would define science as a field devoted to explaining the natural world in human terms through models that reflect truth of how things really work. If you stop the definition at 'disproving things,' there would be no need for theories. Rather, the scientific method is the tool used to construct said models in the way that they most accurately reflect said truth.

To relate this to the current topic of religion and creationism. First, though I am an atheist, I have no problem with religious people in science. After all, science is only concerned with the natural world. If theistic scientists want to phrase their questions internally to determine "how" God did something, I have no concern. In that context, the context where religion stays supernatural and doesn't infringe on the turf of science with disprovable, antiquated and in some cases ridiculous dogmatic notions about the natural world, there is no mutual exclusivity. I believe the fundamental problem most scientists have with creationism (other than that it's pretty ridiculous at this point) is that it doesn't ask "how" God did something, it declares "what" God did.

Another corrollary about creationism: it is scientifically useless. It is easiest to declare it unscientific just because it fails the basic scientific method test, but more importantly (in my opinion), it fails to come to the table with a useful model about the natural universe. As someone else touched on, the possibility that things can be explained in terms of "because God wanted it that way" or "it's all part of God's plan-that-we-can't-understand-because-we're-mere-humans" is completely and utterly unscientific... by any definition.

If I have offended you or anyone else, I sincerely apologize.