With all these companies suing each other out of doing business, exactly what is the impact on the economy? Can a weakened economy afford this kind of nonsense?

Of course, the law firms on laughing to the bank.

The internet is all about communication, be it with other individuals, corporations, etc.

Would you let a 7 or 8 year old talk to random people from around the world without supervision? No?

Then you may want to consider just making sure that there's a human with your children while they're using the thing, until they're at an age where you choose to trust them on their own for a bit. You'll be there to explain the odd random thing that happens.

You can have a task with an extension if you really want one.

That said, you really have to try the overview-style. Whack the windows-key, and you very quickly have almost the entire screen used to select windows, meaning you can see which one you're interested very easily and go to it. It takes some getting used to.... but the added bonus of the zoom-out view being live updates means you get the ability to monitor many windows simultaneously for interesting updates, without needing to throw in a different user-interface to clutter things up.

Try it.

Where does the quote "better than most of what is being reported" come from? It's not in Gosling's report, and if anything, what he reports is quite a bit worse than what the media is reporting.

Confirm/deny? I know 3.x won't upgrade to 4, but 4 should upgrade to 5 automatically, since it's a security release, yes?

Doesn't mean replaying it would get you anything, if it's cryptographically sound.

That was my first reading too.

I would assume you'd just go to "apple". Hypothetically:

nickuj@work:~$ host apple
apple has address 17.149.160.49
apple has address 17.172.224.47
apple mail is handled by 10 mail-in14.apple.
apple mail is handled by 20 mail-in2.apple.
apple mail is handled by 20 mail-in6.apple.
apple mail is handled by 100 mail-in3.apple.
apple mail is handled by 10 mail-in11.apple.
apple mail is handled by 10 mail-in12.apple.
apple mail is handled by 10 mail-in13.apple.

Let's do the math.

Assume 5% inflation per year.

Every year, the dollar is worth 95% of what it was worth the previous year. That's 0.95*(value of previous year).

After 100 years, the value of a dollar is equal to (original price)*0.95^100. 1*0.95^100 = 0.00592052922, or about 0.6% of what it was worth originally.

It's funny how exponential trends work, and how counterintuitive the results are. But inflation really is the opposite of the classic "double the amount of rice on every square of the chessboard" analogy. Yes, "mild" inflation CAN mean you lose over 99% of your value in 100 years.

I wonder if it would be feasible to cache these results.... by definition these sprites don't change appearance very often. If you could detect that sprite A is being drawn at point X,Y, and just draw the cached and pre-generated high-res vector art in the right location, would that be any more practical for real-time rendering?

1) Here's the thing: Gnome 3 has been largely redesigned. A lot of features went away, because the developers don't want to bother supporting them. If someone wants to develop that feature, nobody's stopping them: All you have to do is do a gnome-shell extension. Then you can do icons and launchers and window-lists and whatever you want. Extra panels, drawers, crazy applets, whatever you want. But the onus is on the extension developer to maintain it, not the Gnome 3 devs who are focused on making the core desktop experience work well. If you come up with something that genuinely improves the experience, they might pull it into mainline, but that doesn't effect whether or not it's useful for you.

2) OpenGL is a problem? It better not be. If it is, your hardware providers are screwing you over. That's pretty crappy. Open-source radeon and intel support's generally worked well for me. Keep in mind they're not doing ooooOOo 3D effects. They're just relying on the drivers providing some basic acceleration primitives. If your drivers can't even do that, your options for running modern maintained software are going to keep getting narrower and narrower, regardless of your desktop environment.

As I understand it: Because they were mapping out GPS locations of WIFI access points people were advertising, and the tool they used to do so records packets by default.

This is the one that bugs me as a Canadian. We can keep up the metric for a lot of things, but being this close on a hard good means using their crappy paper size. You have no idea how much I wish could use metric paper.

This is all good and fine, assuming your video drivers and wifi drivers work. That's still a big assumption.

Precedent says that's not necessarily good enough. MP3.com had a huge library of music, that was only available if you proved you owned the CD already. They were shut down quite dramatically.