"Can't they find an indigenous turd-eating worm?"

Yes, but he's already got a job...

"90 minute suck-fests"? If *only* ...

Sitting through 90 minute suck-fests can be an enjoyable way of spending an afternoon out at the movies, or a lazy night in front of the TV. But it's almost impossible to do these days - all they seem to make is 210 minute suck-fests...

"Is this just Linus being Linus? Or does such outspokenness on non-technical matters reflect poorly on the Linux community that Torvalds leads?"

It's a natural result of spending too much time programming in C. You used boolean operators all the time, but forget it has no logical XOR...

Fair enough - I should've probably said "people", not "you" specifically.

But from an engineering viewpoint, Apple's pentalobe screw seems to have quite a few features - shallow tool head depth, maximum tool contact surface, no sharp corners (weak spots), fairly large tool self-centreing zone, and less likely to be damaged from cam-out - which are advantageous for tiny machine-inserted screws.

When they started appearing on the iPhone 4, my first thought was "that's quite an elegant design solution to the typical problems of small screws" (e.g. heads large enough to be strong but that also require a fairly large recess / countersink; )

No one else uses it. Most likely because it isn't any better. It only serves to sell new tools, or have some people that would otherwise have done their own repairs to take it to an authorized repair shop. The tamper resistant torx would have done the same.

The original Torx design was invented & patented in the late 60's; the patent ran out in the mid-90's (they tried to separately patent Torx TR but couldn't). In between, people said exactly the same thing about it.

Funny how "evil" becomes "good" as soon as you can buy a screwdriver for it. Would you be complaining about Apple's Evil Screws if they'd used Torx Plus, which are still patented?

The parent is largely right, but from a pessimistic viewpoint.

1) The species concept, as taught in high school, of "a group of individuals that can interbreed & produce viable offspring", is a gross oversimplification.
2) Individual organisms lie along a continuum. Humans draw boundary lines on that continuum and define a "species" as the individuals that lie between two adjacent boundary lines.
3) Why? Because (a) that's what we like to do, and (b) it's often useful.
4) Why (b)? Because if groups of organisms are morphologically & functionally equivalent down to the smallest detail that we care about, you may as well bundle them together & treat them the same (i.e. as the same species).
5) Why is the concept of "species" seemingly so flexible? Because we keep discovering more & moving the goalposts established in Point 4

Because there's at least 2 1/2 billion of them, and only 300 million Americans?

One day soon, your country is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...

And who are they?

India. Africa. South America. Places where people have already "innovated" their own money exchanges, payment transfer, & order fulfillment systems based on nothing more than plain ol' text messaging.

You want to see what they can come up with in the way of improved ad-hoc decentralised systems like that, & the software to support it? Wait until they get their hands on a cheap phone with smartphone-like features.

(That said, the article is bullshit; nothing more than the usual 'Mozilla is a dynamic organisation identifying horizontally-integrated market opportunities!" fluff that comes up everytime anything with a different browser in is launched...)

can we at least get pleistocene park?

We can't even manage Holocene Park properly - the dominant animal at the top of the food chain runs rampant, destroying everything in its sight, and is starting to escape its confines and invade neighbouring locations - and you want to start on Pleistocene Park?

Well, yeah, what did you expect? It's an Apple article on /., so the title is almost guaranteed to be a lie.

Or are you pining for the imaginary mythical non-trolling /. of days past? If so, I've got 8 words for you:

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Posting to undo "+1, Insightful" mod - I thought your .sig was your comment ;-)

It means you want to provide something for nothing. You want to run a website that costs money to operate, but you do not want to pay for it.

It's not stealing. It's not a crime. But it is childish and hypocritical.

"But I want them to see my content." waa, waa. The grown up, principled thing to do would be to stop expecting people to pay for your wants.

That's okay though. Everybody wants someone else to pay. But the old "I can't afford it" or "I'm providing a benefit, I shouldn't have to pay" or "my content is important, and a little ad or 2 saves having to restrict it to people who will pay me directly" is just unprincipled crap. Just admit you want to don't want to pay for your actions rather than coming up with ridiculous rationalizations.

How is News Corp. a foreign company?

Incorporated in Delaware; headquartered in NYC; its primary listing is on the NASDAQ; the chairman/CEO (Murdoch), president/COO (Carey), CFO (DeVoe), and about 1/2 the rest of the board are US citizens; its primary listing is on the NASDAQ ...

How much more "American" do you want it to be?

Or you could just look at the top of this screen...

"Here is a breakdown of R, Octave and Python ..."

No there isn't - that's there is not much more than a shitty 'feature' table, too high level to be anything other than facile, which is "Based on [the author's] own user experience and research".

As an student user of all 3 I would have been interested in reading a good comparative review or explanation aimed at outsiders. This ain't it; it's just more slashvertising.