I think one of the infinite monkeys has escaped and is filing the patents he accidentally wrote!

[citation needed]

While it's a shame he missed it, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower is still on for a few days, and it's one of the best, so natually they picked an interesting time to have Stargazing Live (although they aren't of course stars!), so keep looking and you'll probably see another.

Yes it's a shame he missed it, but as so many others have said, it's not really his fault. The only reason for his being sheepish was he'd turned to complain about lack of visibility, so yes, he probably feels a little silly, wouldn't you? I would.

Hopefully we'll have some decent meteor showers this year that arent completely obscured by days of clouds. I've been very disappointed not to see the sun and moon in days, not to mention missing out on the Quadrantids, my local Astronomical Society has a public viewing tomorrow night (8th), so I'm crossing my fingers the skies clear up some!

Astronomy is a fascinating subject and has come on massively in the last couple of decades, less than 100 years ago people really believed in canals on Mars (signs of life!), water and volcanoes on the Moon, and Venus was just like Earth, possibly covered with life!

Mod the parent up if you have any points, working in software is not as simple as most people seem to think, I keep reading "Blizz QA is rubbish because my x is not working" type comments, yet if you worked in software you would realise how hard it is to track down and fix these issues. Cut the guys some slack, after making some really significant changes I'm really surprised how well it is coming, they can't read every bug reported (whined about) on /. or other "popular" forums, and judging by 1/2 the comments in their support forums being "suggestions" etc... I'd work there at the drop of a hat, the turnaround is actually pretty good.

Aww, I really want to mod you up, but they wont give me points since I don't buy Apple products,

Probably by the same people that use all their points modding up amusing posts rather than interesting or insightful, or down rate anything against Apple.

Personally I'd love to see people use up all their mod points for every +Funny mod they make.

/off-topic

When I was growing up we had several cats, one of the cats (called Pirate) wouldn't tolerate the others, and used to hiss and attempt to attack them if they got too near.

After reading the reports I can clearly see how clearly video games were affecting Pirate, if only we would have known sooner (she's now dead)! All along I thought it was just something harlmess like ADD, instead it must have been caused by those hours asleep on the foot of my bed, while I was playing video games and programming her unconsious feline thoughts towards savagery.

I think this is maybe more telling about the people you know, than the people that play WoW. Most of the people I have met have jobs or are students.

As opposed to watching tv, reading a book, going to the movies, sorting your stamp collection (do people still have those?), or whatever you do to pass your free time? People see gaming as "wasted time", however it's no worse than most other leisure time. After all isn't *all* leisure time wasted? How does posting comments on /. in your free time benefit the planet and society?

He will no doubt allow (even optimise for, like many other pay to view sites) the Google bots access to his content (if he doesn't already) to ensure decent search engine rankings though.

kinda: I'll do my best to get a good ranking, but don't send me traffic unless it pays for my stuff. Most other businesses are happy to pay for that privilege.

IMO, Google should penalise sites that allow their bots access to content, but serve different content to regular users, since this is *not* what people will be getting it is very misleading.

Also, there is another chance, one that the coin disappears entirely, since atoms can just *disappear*, there is a possibility that all the atoms in the coin just vanish at the same time. The possibility of the coin being stolen mid air also rises the closer you get to a beach, as pesky seagulls see you flipping a coin, who would blame them for mistaking it for a thin shiny chip? Then the outcome would be N/A.

I think he meant "We're whalers on the Moon, we carry a harpoon. But there aint no whales so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune." http://theinfosphere.org/The_Series_Has_Landed

Anti SPAM measures are totally needed, personally I'm glad filtering out 90% of the crap, and having the remaining marked as "SPAM" in the subject, I can then go through them manually and sort the actual spam from the regular mailings I get, I don't think seeing a regular mailshot marked "SPAM" in any way would reflect my opinion of that company.

For example I get emails from Overclockers.co.uk and Play.com regularly marked as potential spam, yet I'm perfectly happy with their services and will most certainly use them in future! Does being identified as a potential spammer harm them? Not as far as I am concerned.

Being *incorrectly* identified as a spammer harms nobody enough to care, being *correctly* identified as a spammer does.

Why is the above marked a Troll? Are all ./ mod points now just spent marking anything that's not funny a Troll? I have an Android phone with 480*320 resolution and it doesn't seem overly pixellated at ~1 foot, maybe (definitely) not as smooth as the new Apple displays though. Seems that anything *not* sucking off Apple gets a "Troll" status nowadays. Lets see this get rated down too... (clearly correct marking would be "offtopic")

Steve wants to own his cake and eat it too

Steve Jobs wants to own the cake, the plate, the silver cake fork, the restaurants, and approve all the recipes of cake you can have, personally. Also once you've purchased cake, they can at a moments notice add or remove your filling without being asked. (He is ok with the raw ingredients being made in Chinese sweatshops though).

Google on the other hand have a damn good recipe book, and a franchise on every corner where you can eat any flavour of cake you like for a reasonable price.