Naw, I'm a white Arkansawyer. I don't know if racism is among the many forms of evil routinely practiced by AT&T - it is possibly the only one they have missed.

You can imagine lots of things. Many of them are stupid or wrong. Govt involvement in monopolistic telecoms seems to be a given. So the debate is about how and how much. I think an REA model ought to be explored, if only for the reason that it seems to be a sustainable success (80+ years now).

Wish I could get DSL. Been begging AT&T for fifteen years to install it here in this rural area. So whining about having "only" DSL seems like a first world problem.

8080 ASM But of course I only wrote software on paper as it would be several years before I could get a machine to actually, you know, run it.

QuickBooks. Lots of small businesses could possibly be moved to Linux if they could keep QuickBooks.

Most scientists at elite universities don't actively oppose religion. But almost every "modded up" post on slashdot strongly opposes and is actively hostile to religion. I wonder what that says about the slashdot crowd?

...Goldman Sachs executives and members of the US Congress roam free.

Can someone comment on the development environment for this item? Thanks.

Google has the cart before the horse. We don't need a replacement for the O/S nearly as bad as we need a replacement for the browser. We need a new "browser" that is designed from the ground up to be an applications platform. AJAX/HTML/Javascript/CSS is just awful - both for the developer and the user. It's a bigger house of cards than the Windows registry. I doubt even Bjarne Stroustrup could design anything as bad. So get us a decent browser platform designed for apps and then cloud computing can take off. The O/S will then be replaceable and Google can own the friggin universe since they're the King of the Cloud. And then we'll have finally reached that state of nirvana where the O/S is essentially irrelevant and therefore immune to monopolies. Google ... get us something to replace the browser. You may be the only one that could do it. Please, pretty please.

No, I didn't. I just scanned it. A "potential impact trajectory" is far different than knowing that something will, for certain, dead center us and that we can apply a fraction of a ounce of tugboat force for the next 18 months to steer it off by a fraction of a degree. Exactly how much certainty do you think they would attach to the projected trajectory of something some 872 years out. Space isn't empty. Calculating it to endless decimal points doesn't help when there are a whole host of unknown variables (gravity of other objects, particles and matter in space, em effects, etc.)