Indeed... and that's why the public access computers I support run Windows, and why the Library Management System uses IE as a client, because Firefox can't support all required functionality and Chrome can sort-of but too much trouble to support; if you want less crap in your support day MS is a nobrainer... while at the same time you know you ought to join the guerillas...

Twin ? Clone ? Rubbish : similar but unrelated is more like it.

Years ago I got tired of all the hassle trying to get FOSS drivers to work reliably with Nvidia cards. It was a nobrainer to go with the proprietary drivers and still is. Current example : FlightGear flight simulator : Segmentation fault. I switched to Linux for reliability and security reasons rather than for any moral/ethical/economic reason, and my criteria are still : would I trust this OS with a mission-critical application. And to me, I can't really trust code that is put together as a workaround without direct access to all relevant technical information, and/or without cooperation of the hardware designers or even with the opposition of same, no matter the brilliance and dedication of the developers. The sad reality is that Nvidia, AMD etc are in a far better position to deliver drivers I can trust critical applications to.

The Supreme Leader has declared nuclear weapons sinful and un-Islamic, hence not to be developed or used. He comes across as a decent honest and serious man, more credible than many of the devious jerks leading Western countries - I would accept his word before that of Blair, Cameron, Bush, Obama or Sarkozy. Further - what he says goes in Iran, Ahmadinejad is just the frontman. Conclusion : Iran's enrichment program is for peaceful power-generation purposes, until we have evidence to the contrary.

This is rich, coming from the continent that exploited. killed and plundered across the entire planet for hundreds of years. Time to get on the new program, Europe.

Neither is it true for me... I have run for some time under SUSE : multiple virtual Windows servers, RHEL server, Windows 7, various appliances, on a multi-homed box using bridged network adapters... running IIS, SQLServer, etc... never a glitch or unexpected outcome.

Indeed - law enforcement needs to be able to monitor digital communications, anonymously, without identifyinjg individuals, to detect probabilities of mass instant social aggregation, and to respond accordingly. I.e. if the stats look like a riot forming, they have grounds for listening in. Police also need to be able to use the same technology themselves to respond quicker. I understand that you need police permission the form a large orderly demonstration - hence if social media traffic predicts a large gathering forming rapidly, then police are within their right to act... Dixon of Dock Green meets cyberwarfare.

The real question is, what does this say about the impact of online social media in modern society - this is a technology forum, not a social justice opinion shop. Reports say they're using BlackBerries - are they true ? Should social media be regulated ? If the folks running the zoo want to keep running it they always need to be better equipped than, and a step ahead of, the animals, and always used to be. Looks to me like the zookeepers here need to be able to detect, plan, aggregate and deploy before the animals get serious. To do that they need to have a computer system than monitors suspicious communications and predicts trouble before it starts. This may well be an infringement of current liberties and the British find that sort of thing distasteful. You can't very well enact laws that say vendors of communications devices must sell them with a proviso that they can't be used to plan illegal activities, any more than you could ban people using the telephone for illegal activities. But this to me looks similar to the ban on using the internet to host illegal porn - you can only start prceedings once there is evidence that illegal content has been posted online, you can't filter every ftp upload. Likewise Twitter etc... but you can do anonymous statistical analysis of message volume by area, and at a certain point enough would be available to warrant a human to listen in...but it would be open to charges of abuse, and the thresholds levels for human intervention are arbitrary and debateable. My guess is just that police need to be able to aggregate and deploy quicker, using social media themselves, to prevent these angry kids doing things they may well regret next day in court.

Let me guess - he then decided you were the poor fucking timewaster and ignored you from then on ?

I think you missed my point, which is that there is no absolute truth, just competing points of view. Usually there is a rough correlation between the point of view of the smartest & most experienced members of a community and "truth" or "reality", but there is no guarantee. Human nature is for folks to compete to advance their view of "truth"... it's far simpler to live with the reality of approximations than it is to go nuts searching for absolute truth.