Considering the Nokia N810 and N900, and the Atom netbook they recently launched, there is potential that Nokia might come up with an ARM based cheap netbook one day. Dell is also a potential contender, they have made moves towards both Linux and ARM, but maybe they are still too wedded to Intel & WIndows to make a push to a new market.

Doctors, lawyers, engineers and even construction workers get paid for doing their work once, as a service, for someone who needs expertise on their specific problem. They don't wait around to get paid in perpetuity for work they did once a long time ago, as is the custom in considerable parts of the software industry. Is it so unbelievable that the same model as used by other professionals could also work for software development?

You'll also notice that lawyers, who are uniquely qualified to lobby for new kinds of government regulation, are quite happy with the status quo. In particular, they could lobby for patents for legal strategies, or stronger copyrights for legal opinions. On the contrary, what lawyers do is much closer to open source software in that they share common arguments and legal strategies with no compensation whatsoever for the original inventor.

I wonder if the increasingly contrived ways of explaining Ripley's appearances aren't somehow connected to Ripley's believe it or not...

There may only be three bits in a SHA-3 key, but those bits are extremely hard to guess.

I really have a hard time understanding this idea that investing a lot of effort into making a good reproduction should give the copier rights over the work. Why should the legal status of the end result depend on how it was created?

In all fields of endeavour, what takes little effort for one person can take enormous effort for another, and can even be entirely out of the reach of others of lesser skill, yet the end results are treated the same, legally. And surely the mere presence of effort cannot justify protection, unless the end result is something that is worthy of protection in itself?

How do you cope with the usability problems the GP poster mentioned? Is it just that you don't mind waiting seconds for the display to refresh, or have you developed some tricks to make flipping through pages more effective?

Interestingly, Acrobat Reader v9 contains an option to reflow the PDF text for easier reading. (Of course standard PDF doesn't contain enough information to do a good job: the one time I tried it on a LaTeX-generated PDF, it mixed up the lines from two columns, and even missed a lot of inter-word spaces. Maybe it works better on simpler one-column PDFs, or maybe it needs some new extensions to the PDF standard to work properly.)

The Fujitsu SPARC64 VIIfx does look interesting, but does anyone know when it is actually supposed to be released?

I thought the star would say "Run, Coward, Run!"

A would-be enterpreneur with a realistic view of his prospects is far less likely to take the leap and start a company than someone who thinks he is smarter and more business-savvy than anyone else around. And god knows there is no shortage of the latter sort of people, especially in the blogging circles.

Consider Phlebas would probably make a good action film, and Use of Weapons has the potential to be made into a terrific film, or an absolute stinker.

Hey, if your buddy needs your help, you kill them. It's the right thing to do, no need to bring the government into it.

Well, way back when even terminal connections could be implemented in multiple incompatible ways and you had to configure each end properly to get the text interface to work without glitches. If you got some setting wrong, pressing backspace could result in the letters ^H appearing on screen, instead of deleting the previous character. That's what the inside joke is about. In a 1990 usenet discussion you could actually expect everyone involved to have at one time or another encountered problems like that, so the joke didn't need explaining.

Concatenating messages is actually a standard GSM SMS feature and has been for a decade now: you write a message longer than 160 characters, the phone sends it as multiple messages and the recipient's phone assembles the messages back together. The only point where you notice something odd going on is at the receiving end, when there can be a couple of seconds delay before you can read more than the first 160 characters. Is the problem that they don't support this on US carriers?

So... what you're saying is that P2P aka non-commercial copyright infringement is not piracy, it's privateering?