It seems that microsoft is not the only company to photoshop people of colour in or out of their sites.

for instance, this polish university has a more "diverse" photo for the english version of their site than that of the polish counterpart.

polish - http://www.umlub.pl/index.html
english - http://www.umlub.pl/index2.html

but just like many people have already mentioned i would chalk this off to marketing demographics rather than any form of racism.

sorry, i forgot to add russia to the list. the problem is that this is somewhat of an endless cycle. russia is not going to disarm until they see that evil capitalist america has done so, and visa versa. but obviously someone needs to take the first step.

this technology, if successful, can be put to a lot of good use in other fields. but what bugs me is that america's first idea is: "let's use it to power our war machines".

i'm not saying america (and all countries) should get rid of their armies completely, but instead, they should divert most of their army's funds to research of this kind, for the "right" reasons (whatever "right" might be).

and seriously, does the us really need jets for fighting the pirates and/or genecide in africa? that just seems like overkill to me. and should they actually be the so called "police" of world? don't they have enough problems of their own back in the us?

... some how i think the application of this technology is a little misguided.

in this day and age, why are we still making war machines? most countries have all signed peace treaties and the only ones that are still actively pointing their heads into other peoples business is america, the uk and some of their allies.

as cool as it would be to have jets that run on sea water, i think they should rather be looking at other, more peaceful, applications.

Only on /. can you find two threads side by side containing the following:
- a thread on data management where the data mainly consists of ripped videos and tv shows, and
- a thread on the legality of cable companies storing said tv shows for the later use by their customers and the MPAA getting on their case.

And anyway, with the internet being as fast as it is these days, why would you want to keep any movie/tv show data at home when you can just download it again?

I'd hazard a guess that downloading the data when you need it might actually be *more* convenient then any other data storage system (unless it is always on and connected to your machine)

Hate to nit-pick...

no you dont. if you did, you wouldn't be nit-picking :P