As a former KDE user (and current Microsoft employee), that drives me batty. Luckilly, there's freeware to the rescue: http://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wizmouse-makes-your-mouse-wheel-work-on-the-window-under-the-mouse/. Scrolling some windows without focus causes the taskbar icon to glow for a notification, but other than that, it works great.

If I'm trying to demo a WiFi connected cell phone, for example, how is ethernet going to help?

Well, Dillon Beresford apparently does, so yes :)

Curious: in what way is compiling the OpenJDK for ARM not full featured? Not supported by Oracle? Or are you referring to hardware support / Jazelle?

Unless it has changed in the past couple years since I've last looked, deploying code to your own iOS device requires a $99/year developer subscription. Which very much is preventing me from installing my apps on my devices. The free tools don't provide you with a certificate to deploy to real hardware, only the emulator.

Not necessarily. For many classes of problems, the answer is much easier to verify than it is to determine in the first place. If a giant mess of software is used to create an easily verifiable answer, that answer is no more suspect than if the software was perfectly simple and readable.

For example, if there is a mathematical proof that the best possible routing through a graph is n units long, and a giant mess of spaghetti code finds a path that is n units long, I would be perfectly happy accepting it as a valid answer. Even though finding the path may be incredibly complicated, it is easy to check when an answer. I'd be equally as happy with a correct answer drawn by a toddler, but the spaghetti code hopefully has a better chance of finding one.

No it shouldn't. There's always a tradeoff between security and usability. Security is all about mitigating risk, and if the effort to better secure a document to only those "who should have access" is greater than the harm the document being released would cause, it isn't worth it. The whole point of security classifications is to deal with this in a sane manner: this document is of great importance, it has to stay on the network behind an air gap and locked doors. This other one is useful to a lot of people and not very damaging, so put it on the non-secure internet-bridged network. And to better secure material you have to make it accessable to fewer people, so would you rather governments stop sharing information between agencies?

Copyrights are from the moment something is created, it doesn't have to be published. "Publication is not necessary for copyright protection." [Bam, citation: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html%5D. If you wrote a diary and never showed it to anyone, it would still be copyrighted.

And you do need to have seen the original to be in violation of a copyright. If we wrote the same diary, word for word, without having seen each other's, we theoretically would both have rights. [I don't have a public citation for this one.] This is unlike patents, which you can violate without ever knowing the patent existed.

I'm sure some part of the HDMI specification is covered by patents, and would therefore need to be licensed. It's not just the trademarks on the name and logos.

But you won't have any Google Experience apps, and users probably won't really like a phone without Maps, Gmail, and the Marketplace (although Amazon is helping there). The base OS may be open (except for Honeycomb), but that doesn't mean all of what people think of as Android is open. Oh, and you'll still have to go pay others for patent licenses or risk being sued.

Then what's an EEPROM? Just because it's an electrically erasable and programmable ROM doesn't mean it's not a ROM :)

Since when is the ISC an internet service provider?

"Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (ISC) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet—and the autonomy of its participants—by developing and maintaining core production quality software, protocols, and operations." Other than hosting a few Open Source projects, the ISC doesn't act as an ISP to the best of my knowledge.

I guess they mean something to do with the F-root server at ISC and redirecting DNS requests for the control servers? Color me confused, and TFA isn't helping.

Business vs consumer lines. The Dell computers sold under their business headings come with install disks (the one my college purchased three years ago had a Vista install disk, drivers, and the applications that came preloaded all on physical disks in the box), and generally have less crap and better support.

Huh? As it turns out, good products create fans. That's how having consistently good products works. My desktop has a Logitech keyboard/mouse combo, and my Anywhere MX for my laptop is the best mouse I've ever used. I really can't think of a single thing I'd improve about it. I'm sorry there's nothing significant I don't like about a product that I can tell you. But before you call me a shill for Logitech as well, consider that I'm a Microsoft employee.

Ah, that's helpful. I've interacted with LabVIEW a little over the past couple years in college, and haven't once heard the language referred to as "G".