Yep, Mexico wanted a buffer to the north, because the Comanches and Lipan Apaches would raid deep into Mexico and steal horses and such. The thought was that if they could get enough American settlers to settle in Texas, the Comanches would raid the settlers, and not bother going all the way down into Mexico.

In general, the settlers in Texas were happy to be "Texicans". It wasn't until Santa Ana took power and revoked the Mexican constitution of 1824, and then started trampling the settlers' rights, that the people began to become upset. The Texas Revolution of 1836 was fought for the same reasons as the American Revolution of 1776...taxation without representation, etc.

Not really.

Most of the Founders identified themselves first as Englishmen, and then when their English rights were trampled, by the location of their newly independent States - Virginian, Pennsylvanian, Massachusettsian, and so on. In fact Vermont remained an independent Republic for quite a few years before finally joining the new Union of States.

They viewed themselves the way Member States of the EU view themselves today - first citizens of the State, second of the union.

Yeah man! I feel ya...

And like, how can a person *own* the land, right? It's like, the land man....and it's old and you can't own it!

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Seriously?

You don't understand why we have IP laws? It takes a lot of time, effort and money to produce certain things. Without the ability to receive credit and resources from that work - people won't do it.

You go and raise a few billion dollars of your own money and develop a new drug to fight some disease. Spend the next 15-20 years doing research, getting it approved, demonstrating that your idea works, your formula work. Then ask yourself why Company B shouldn't be able to produce the exact same drug - without having spent 4 billion dollars and 15 years developing it.

Then ask yourself if you'd ever want to produce another drug....as your company folds under the financial burden of that debt while Company B - sells the same thing for the same price; but without 4 billion in debt.

Well... in part because the open source world had embraced and promoted it for a long time. Corporations buying up open source projects and using them as a base platform for their commercial products is a problem. Or is it not? I'm not sure I understood exactly what happened with Xen and open source.

They dumb down the rest of the nation, and they are also probably largely responsible for most of the failed mortgages.

I would suggest that those "probably largely responsible for most of the failed mortgages" would be the US Government. By forcing banks and lenders to loan money to people without the ability to pay it back or face stiff penalties.

(sarcasm) YAY trying to legislation equal results! (/sarcasm)

copying isn't even actionable here.

Nor is receiving a copy.

Only when distributing a copy are you infringing.

Hello, pot; it's me, kettle!

With respect, I'm not sure either of these issues are the fault of the software.

For instance, the default Apache httpd.conf reads:

# Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding
# what they do. They're here only as hints or reminders. If you are unsure
# consult the online docs. You have been warned.

I suspect that a similar warning may have been missing from the init.el that was being passed around.

Of course, emacs-lisp doesn't look much like C (or a language whose syntax derived from C), so there's certainly some getting over the parenthesis and function-first syntax. After that hurdle (and a bit of understanding what a symbol is and how to quote a list), it's just a matter of looking up unfamiliar functions (online, with C-h f), isn't it?

Imagine two fleas running away from each other on a balloon as you blow it up. They're running at a fixed speed, and you're increasing the distance between them. Over a distance, their motion relative to each other will far exceed their possible maximum speed, because the distance between them is expanding while they run. Replace the fleas with galaxies and the balloon with the universe, and it's simple enough to see how while a body can't have speed faster than light, it can still be moved faster than light relative to another body by virtue of the space between them expanding constantly.

Any galaxy with a redshift of around 1.4 is moving away from us faster than the speed of light (the redshift is caused itself by the expansion of space between the time the light was emitted to when it hits us) since the velocity that any galaxy is moving away from the earth is proportional to its distance from us.

Couldn't this also be true of Android phones?

Every day I read about a new Android phone that has better specs and features than anything previously released.

I don't see how this thought is relevant.

I've been doing this for years in Windows and OSX for the same reasons Shuttleworth has stated it: widescreen monitors Glad to see a system embrace this concept and see where it would go logically if done by default and per design (instead of just an alternate option).

By "a phone like these" do you mean the iPhone, or smart phones in general?

More to the point, how well does Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation work on 2G speeds? Here it works like a charm on 3G, even with the fancy satellite view enabled, but I cringe at the idea of trying that on 2G.

The formatting issue is my biggest complaint. I've yet to see an employer request a resume in "Google Doc" format.

Quick access to content is nice, but because of the formatting involved with most of my documents, I carry my most important docs on my Google G1 for quick retrieval. It's just as secure as a USB stick, and since I always have a USB cable with me as well, just as portable.

Errr, refresh my memory, when did small town Texas become a left-wing haven?

Trying to make a partisan issue out of a nonpartisan one only muddies the water.

I would rather have to code in Objective-C than wait for and have to buy a new version of Adobe Flash, just to get the capabilities made available by Apple's Xcode.
Which is why you can code on Obj-C and not depend on Flash. Now, what about the people who don't care about using the latest (but world-changing, no doubt) feature and who don't want to learn Obj-C?

Nobody ever died from having too much choices (I think).