I'm a senior developer and I've worked with "open standards" and many systems which implement these standards. I've always been somewhat amused by the endless bitchings about one vendor or another not following a standard (as intepreted by someone else). A standard is just a specification. Every developer knows when handed a specification, once implemented, the resulting application is unlikely to behave exactly the same as another app developed by another developer who was handed the same specification. No matter how small, there's always going to be some margin of deviation. The fact of the matter a "standard" only works when the same binaries or at least source code are used. This is why Flash and Silverlight work, its why WebKit is pretty much the only way html will ever work. I think software systems are just like highlander, in a world where everything is interconnected and seamless, there can really only be one.

I said "millenia" not "millisecond"

> It's moving East, not South.

Hmmm.... *BRAIN STRAIN*.... ummm... wouldn't any direction from the north pole be south?

Aaaah... This is one of these unfunny geeky jokes that I'm not quite geeky enough to get.

OK OK I fell for it... jokes on me.

I feel like such a jock now?

This article covers it...

http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/02/is_the_earths_magnetic_field_a.php

I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.

Fox news is obviously biased. People see it for what it is. The biggest threats to democracy are not obvious ones.

The path to tyranny is one which involves the elimination of jobs for ordinary working people whilst at the same time handing over more control and power to those who control the game. For would be dictators journalists are of course #1 on their hit list.

To quote Goethe, "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free". This whole thread of discussion, cheering on the downfall of the traditional journalistic business model is a graphic display of that sort of stupidity.

In the case of news.google.com, I actually think Rupert has a point. What I don't think you get, is that news.google.com does significantly more than link to sites. I believe in this case rather than supplying supplemental, they are in fact offering an alternative to the front page of every major news corporation's web site, making them a direct competitor to a news corporation. I would also bet google's news page in terms of hits is scoring very well against most equivalent pages Rupert pays to produce. The only difference between news.google.com and the home page of most news web sites, is that google didn't pay for their content. I think Rupert is entitled to be mildly pissed in a situation, where he is being beaten by a competitor, who is using content he owns to compete against him. I don't know about you, but when I use news.google.com, I rarely click on any of the links, I skim the headlines, read the blurbs and more often than not just close the page without going further unless there is an article which really grabs my eye. Whilst Google may be driving traffic to their articles, they are stealing traffic from their front page. Haven't you ever watched Superman? The front page is the most important! Without news.google.com, you would go to an equivalent page... www.nytimes.com www.smh.com.au etc. Personally I think in the case of investigative news journalism, paid content is a good thing, we want content that is worth paying for. The biggest danger to democracy I believe is the news feed, mindless aggregators which do not review, check or scrutinize news stories. The demise of investigative journalism is a threat to our freedoms. I believe the right thing for google to do would be to pay for aggregated content, just as every other news corp does with an equivalent page. That way there'll be dosh going round to pay journalists, who can call bullshit on propaganda.

Do you understand Microsoft actually helped Mono be created?

Do you know that the .NET CLI has been submitted and passed as a ECMA standard ?

Mono is very clearly a fully ligitimate, independent implementation of the open .NET 1.0 CLI standard. Microsoft can't change this standard its already out there. They can submit a new standard as they did for .NET 2.0.

There's simply no logic to anything you're saying. It's pure stupidity/FUD.

What a crock.

Mono is a independent open source project. Microsoft has no real control over this code.

*IF* Microsoft tried to hijack or close down Mono, it would need to do so through the courts, when was the last time Microsoft won a case like that?

I think if Microsoft ever tried to do such a thing, the Mono community would simply do the same thing that Microsoft did to Sun's Java platform (the true origins of C#). When Sun tried to dictate control over their platform Microsoft simply stopped shipping the JVM on their OS and soon after started shipping the .NET runtime. The Mono crew would simply do the same, by simply forking and become something that is not .NET compliant,

This is simply sensless anti-MS zealotry. Applications written on Mono are no more of a risk than those written on any other platofrm

It makes perfect sense to me. Go to google switch off safe search, go to image search, a lot of pretty innocuous searches come up with stuff you probably dont want children seeing....

e.g...

http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=cream&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=

http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=yummy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=

http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=pussy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=

http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=doggy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=

;P

I rest my case. I mean lets get real here, what sort of job would they be doing to let kids access that stuff?

I think any software product like this would be totally ineffectual without search engine integration.