Not my experience at all. We never had any trouble with Oracle support. Sure, the online portal sucks donkey balls but getting them to reply to us within the contracted time has never been a problem. If it happened to you, you should make a stink with your account representative.

Because sometimes it can cost a lot of money to run and maintain a storage system. It doesn't stop with capital costs. There is maintenance fees and labor costs. It can be a lot cheaper to outsource these things.

I am curious (and a bit too lazy right now to look it up) but doesn't the money we deposit with credit unions still end up in the "evil banks"' hands? Isn't all so much interwoven that you will never be able to avoid giving your indirect support to the big players in the financial industry?

The article linked to also says "half billion" and "500,000". I assume it's 500,000,000.

I would love to support your point but that graph really only shows that Apple is the defendant in most of the cases. NTP, Inc. seems to be the bad guys suing the most.

I don't know what I should make out of these findings but couldn't it be that kids coming from a "richer" background are fed more nutritiously than maybe a "poor" kid? Couldn't that have an impact on the "appearance" of the genetic material? DNA and life style are such different things that I am not convinced that a correlation between these two are any meaningful at this point.

Technically, the yolk is part of the "egg cell". The white and everything else within (besides the yolk) and including the shell is not. The only thing that is special about the yolk is that it does not partake in cell division if the egg is fertilized. There are no other cells within an egg. The white and the shell are not made from cells. All that said, I doubt, though, that the yolk of an ostrich egg is bigger than 20cm.

I am also in the camp that TV can help your child's mental development but it really depends on each individual child. It never is a necessity nor a requirement for raising smart children. It just doesn't hurt as the AAP, for example, is trying to tell us.

By after school activities of their own choosing (dance and swimming) and some that we as parents want them to do (mostly religious education). The rest of the time is taken up by homework and of course downtime. TV usually stays off all day on school days mostly because nobody is missing it.

Agreed. It is up to you as a parent what you feel comfortable with. If you believe too much TV is detrimental your child's development you restrict it. As long as we don't judge each other what we do with our own children that's perfectly fine by me. I just think (my very own personal opinion) that the AAP has always been way too conservative when it comes to things what's good and what's not good for our children. They do have an agenda they follow which I don't agree with.

The AAP has always been extremely conservative when it comes to children and TV. No surprise about the new findings here. As always, you have to take these findings with a huge grain of salt. Apply common sense and your kids will be fine. I know that mine are even though they watched a boat-load of TV when they were still toddlers (what kid would not appreciate a bit of Sesame Street or The Wiggles?). Now they are in elementary school and way too busy to watch anything and they are a-okay with that.

No, I do not think they changed that part. As you quoted they talk about a LIST PRICE of $0.00. The $0 Amazon charges for the app of the day is a promotional price. IMHO, the more relevant piece that justifies $0 payment is the next sentence: "A Royalty is due only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of an end user." Since the end user is not charged anything there are no royalties to be paid. This language has been in the agreement since the beginning, I think.

I think the main point of the developer is to clear up a misconception about Amazon's app store (which I also had until I saw this story). Many people assumed that Amazon would still pay the devs 20% of list even if it the free app of the day. Now that I know the nitty-gritty how it actually works I understand why it's actually 0%. If Amazon reduced the price w/o the dev's agreement, he would get 20%. In this case, though, the dev was asked if he wanted to see his app as free app of the day, i.e. you had to opt in. 0% revenue for that is a fair price since in return you get a lot of free exposure, that you, as a dev, have to know and understand how to make the most of it.

This phone may still be able to make calls but would anybody in his/her right mind say the phone "survived" the fall? Look at it. Also, one snippet from the linked article: That's especially amazing since the iPhone 4 can suffer from cell reception issues. When the Apple smartphone debuted in 2010, a saga the tech media called Antennagate followed. Consumer watchdogs claimed a design flaw on the phone's antenna caused it to drop calls unexpectedly. Apple gave out free phone cases to address the issue. Whoever wrote this garbage did not know what he was writing about. Why is this on slashdot again?