Do we need to explicitly spell things out for Slashdotters who seem to have a chronic inability to get the point?

No, you come up with theories, and then you attempt to demonstrate their validity, or disprove them.

The place we're ultimately going to learn about dark matter is likely to be a combination of specialized detectors, but also terrestrial particle accelerators. Dark matter, whatever it is, may suggest the physics beyond the Standard Model that physicists so hunger to finally get some evidence of.

Your invocation of the word "proof" suggests you know fuck all about science.

Ah yes, all those super-rich climatologists picking on poor impoverished Big Oil.

No kidding. "Heartland Institute cherry picks data... news at 11"

My understanding is that in the old days of 20mb hard drives, storage densities were sufficiently low that even after one pass someone might be able to recover the data with at least some degree of fidelity. Once we entered the world of gigabyte drives, densities are so high that it's all but impossible to recover any data after even a single pass wipe

Well a lot of money was spent to no particular effect. That's kind of like change.

Meanwhile some of us actually want to develop multiplatform software.

The issue, in the long term, is does it really matter? Microsoft still had a big chunk of the enterprise workstation and groupware market, but in many other ways they're becoming irrelevant. Despite throwing boatloads of money at the search and tablet markets, they're not moving those products. To make up for that they're hiking the prices of the very enterprise offerings they need to survive. Volume licensing, Server, Exchange, SQL Server and the like have Alli been jacket up to fund their failures. The last batch of Server licenses I bought may very well be the last.

Let's be blunt. Microsoft is all but irrelevant in the mobile and tablet markets. About the only thing they have going for them is the scam patent tax they have on Android devices.

I think we can sum up the whole letter with "We're going to keep imitating Google and Apple."

OOXML is a great example of a standad, and of how to move a standard through an international standards committee.

(This is irony, for those who may be impaired in its recognition)

X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.

At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.

Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.

My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.