and can now find a better link to it for future reference. I'd use the parent message, but somehow an Anonymous Coward doesn't inspire confidence...

What Picasso (and Jobs) meant by "Great artists steal" was that:

* mediocre people copy designs without understanding them or improving them
* great artists take designs and add enough to them that everybody forgets about the original

Apple is clearly in the second category - 0.1% of the public remembers the Xerox Star, almost no one bought Windows tablets, etc.

I would have to put Samsung in the first category. Look at their 2010 iPhone analysis where most of its recommendations boil down to "iPhone does this better - we should copy it".

Android's category is debatable.

And I say this as a mostly-libertarian guy. The networks are not solely the property of the telecom companies - they have a lot of quasi-monopoly deals with local governments which are limiting competition.

In a perfect world, non-neutral ISPs would be hurt in a competitive marketplace. In our current US world, not so much.

Granted, the big telecom companies and their regulatory agencies are a classic case of regulatory capture - that just means we the people have to be twice as vigilant.

You'll fart around and waste time on the internet with a tablet.

At least, that's what I'd probably do...

See here for details. Or read any real history of the time - ignore self-serving crap from Gates.

Xerox was probably stupid to give Apple a license, and the actual researchers at PARC were livid, but they weren't the owners. Apple legally used Xerox IP. Note that Xerox did not take Apple to court over any of this,

Microsoft, on the other hand, was concerned about legal action from Apple on this subject, even as late as Jobs' return. One of the things exchanged between Microsoft and Apple at that time was Apple dropping the windows-copying lawsuits, which were still in the courts at the time, and would have been a world of hurt for Microsoft if any of them had succeeded.

Often there's a separate piece of hardware with an hours-to-days timer that is reset periodically by a heartbeat task in the main control code.

If that timer is ever allowed to expire, it smacks the main control processor over the head, makes it reset everything and then wait for ground commands, in what's called "safe mode". This makes it very unlikely that the probe will go completely out to lunch, short of both the main control processors failing.

At least, that is typically how near-earth science probes work.

The most useful language of any class of languages you can learn is your SECOND one.

This follows from the observation that there are only three numbers of interest in computer science:

        0
        1
arbitrarily large

Any program designed around numbers other than those three probably won't scale.

Thus, moving past your first language implies the possibility of learning them all.

... who said this while reporting on the first landing of space shuttle Columbia.

Messing with the human genome, in a way that could very likely propagate? OK, then.

Hypocrites (assuming Greenpeace isn't protesting this advance).

Consider PL/I, which had no reserved words.

Not saying that was a good idea, mind you...

But we'll drop AT&T like a hot rock the moment they cancel our grandfathered $30/month data plan.

Was Apple really the first to place the keys at the top of the open clamshell, and the pointing device on the lower half under your thumbs? I used a couple of PC notebooks before getting access to a Powerbook, and remember thinking "now this makes *&^%$#@! sense".

... for ages.

It is rare for a heat wave in the US to be blamed for more than 20 deaths. The worst one that turned up in a casual Google search was 1936, where 5000+ people died. That was before the wide availability of air conditioning.

In 2003, a heat wave in Europe killed 70,000.

Europeans can complain about US infrastructure when theirs gets within an order of magnitude of ours at preserving citizens' lives.

So employers must do one of two things:
1. Pay more.
2. Train more.

Training and paying market-plus wages have to both be considered a long-term investment in the employee. Businesses are reluctant to train because a trained employee can leave and take that training to the competition; the way to stop that is to compensate trained, valuable employees well enough that they don't want to leave.