..."and a soup opera generator"...

Would that be veggie or chicken soup? ;P

I'm pretty sure thats an Emu, not an Ostrich. Though technically I suppose they're both from 'down under' as the Ostrich is native to South Africa.

Ok. True. You'll always get assholes who'll band together under any convenient banner, be it religion or something else, and decide to either convert or failing that, wipe out everyone else who deviates. Thinking a little about it this weekend I've decided that maybe I just have issues about religion in general. That said, maybe this should be my last post in this thread.

Peace.

Oracle had JDeveloper, which, once upon a time used to be JBuilder. They liscenced the code and continued developing their own fork.

Oops, I left out the witch hunts of the dark ages. Paganism was and is a perfectly valid religion, all but wiped out by... Christians.. "Shock!, horror! we never did anything like that." ... right, think again.

As long as all certain religions have that elitist "we're right, you're wrong, and you're going to hell" attitude, there's always going to be extreme friction.

And besides, the world has always had organise religion of sorts. And I dare say that we used to be even more bloody back then. Sacrifices anyone? How about an inquisition. Um, maybe a crusade or two. Ugh.. people have been killing in the name of some deity or other since the beginning of [our] time. It just doesn't cut it.

Are you remembering to include the runat="server" attribute? in the asp:Button tag?

"What if its based on the US's prominence as world police?"

Um. No thanks. Maybe when you guys have a different president.

Simple. Abolish organised religion. If Christians, Jews and Muslims aren't going to take their blinkers off and realise just how much their religions actually have in common, (as apposed to killing each other over the [relatively] minor differences), then I reckon that the whole damn thing should be scrapped. Come on. After thousands of years we're still at this point. Makes me sick.

"My own guess is that MS will make sure .NET for Windows is always superior to any other platform's implementation." Sure, maybe. But remember that Microsoft isn't responsible for the "other" implementations. They released the specifications for Mono and friends to implement themselves. And I strongly suspect that Miguel and company are plenty up to the task. Also remember that they're trying to create a standard. Such a task requires responsibility and consistency; pulling a "Java" on us now would just be silly. :-D