IE is shit, It also makes them no money and offers little advantage. It was considered necessary in the 90's to counter a possible threat to the desktop (mainly java and Netscape).

By making their browser free they killed netscape and limited the browser as a platform for their competitors. It also removed any incentive MS had to innovate in the area.

It took Mozilla, a very odd organisation, a NFP organisation based around software that uses Open-Source as a way to reduce the limitations that traditional software houses encounter (I.E. making money) to break the stagnation.

The world has moved on, ways to compete with free have emerged and the desktop market has cemented, mobile platforms are a big stake and MS has a very minor piece of it.

MS should take chromium, add their own stuff (MS accounts, Bing, Outlook.com and other "value added" stuff) and ship it with windows. It works for Google. it would likely slow (perhaps stop) the migration to chrome .

Come to think of it, they should do the same thing with android too.

Anna Karenina is easily the best book I've read. It's fairly dense though. The book is the epitome of realist fiction (basically the characters sweat if it's hot) and on each reading you get something different from it.

Tolstoy was an interesting and thoughtful man and wrote a lot of good stuff.

Also, on a side note, don't read if you don't enjoy it. There's nothing particularly beneficial about reading. Historically literacy was a sign of education and the association has remained. Reading is a very slow activity and requires full attention - If you can extract a story or info from another (more forgiving) medium, why not?

The reason they can't just drop the charges and offer regret is mainly political.

Turing was in violation of the law at the time. The law was definitely unjust, but he was in violation of it.

Dropping the charges or showing remorse would open up a can of worms regarding liability. Doing so would create precedent and a mechanism for descendants to air grievances over historical wrong doings - it will never end and may be costly.

Practically, this is the best they will ever dare do.

I'm sure he still maintains some interest in KDE and reads the tech news..chances are he saw the initial brouhaha regarding his absence and ignored it.

Way to embarrass him...this whole adventure, from beginning to end, reeks of a serious lack of basic communication and social skills.

Stating something "looks Chinese" is not racist in any way. It's what you extrapolated in your mind that's racist.

I'm not sure if it's me projecting things but do those rockets and robots _look_ Chinese to anyone else? How it that possible?

Society is probably better off teaching kids first order logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic

Not only will it help them sharpen their analytically skills (Making it easier for them to do, well, anything) it will also sharpen their BS-metre making them better citizens.

Schools should just teach math better, an intermediate high-school senior level maths course is much more challenging than most programming tasks. HS maths should incorporate a programming module in their algebra lessons, exposing teens to the basic control flows found in any language (and how to manipulate numbers and expressions with them) will make it easier for a student to learn a certain type of programming _if_ they need to.

I'm not impressed with these online programming classes, everything is placed in wrappers and the student just plugs things in.

Old people (and non-techie people) are not stupid. I used to make the mistake of thinking i had to simplify everything to just "one big button" for them as well.

Often times when you try to simplify GUIs you end up adding layers that make things more complicated when they break or the user wants to perform an atypical task.

Buy an ipad, it's intuitive, it's what everyone has - other people can help him with it.

Although Ironically, It literally has "one big button".

What kind of upgrade path is their from FTTN to FTTH? After some googling, all the articles/discussion I've seen about this are marred with political ideology.

If paying for FTTN and then FTTH is individually cheaper then going straight to FTTH (even if the total is more expensive) it may be easier for a future government to sell as prudent policy.

Government finances work differently to normal finances, when you're guaranteed a certain level of tax income, two smaller payment (over a period of time) that sum up to be larger than one big payment can be regarded as easier on the budget and easier to sell politically - most people care about short term costs.

Another reason for keeping xp is that they very likely have the xp code audited and custom patched to their liking.

Correction: ...Artists will never say they have enough money, and people will never stop saying they want to support artists...

So what are the alternatives? They can pull their music out of these services and get $0. If Spotify (and the like) give them more, we pay more. I don't think people are willing to pay more than roughly $10.00 a month for these things.

Artists will never say they have enough money, and people will never say they want to support artists - that is until they have to put their money where their mouth is. If spotify doubles their fees how many people will stop subscribing? Spotify already pays 70% to artists/their Representatives.

Content producers don't control their distribution medium anymore and people are used to free (or cheap) content. How much is Art worth? Should a good album make musicians millions? Why? The days of $20.00 albums are over - were they ever justifiable?

Perhaps Artists should lower their expectations - Artists should be grateful to services like Pandora/Spotify the alternatives aren't great.

In Australia we have an government initiative called VAST (Viewer Access Satellite Television). Essentially, If you live in a rural area and have trouble getting OTA signals, they'll subsidize the cost of a satellite dish+decoder.

All the OTA channels are put up on the Optus C1 satellite and depending on your location they'll unlock the channels you're meant to get in your area.

I see no reason why this can't be extended to non-rural areas on a house-by-house basis.

The trick (i use) to getting an edit in Wikipedia is to state my intent on the Talk page, something like "If no-one objects,..." wait a day, then post. Either someone will respond and a discussion will ensue or no one will respond at all. I've never had an edit reverted when i do this.

I have no idea about the internal mechanisms behind this though, i only edit/add a few lines at a time - i might just be lucky.

As i'm on a students budget, if i can build something i will:

> a used 20Mhz Oscilloscope
>a +/- 15V 1A Power supply i built with lm335s
>A signal generator i build with an XR2206 (going to replace with a bunch of op amps)
> A few multimeters of varying quality
> A few arduino clones (works great) and a generic PIC programmer (it's cheap and shit).
> enough antennas on my roof to make the neighbours complain. I'm looking to build a transceiver soon.
> A raspberry pi and a bunch of sensors.

I don't feel particularly limited with any of that stuff. I'll eventually replace it with proper certified test gear as i reach their limits.

As for how often i'm using the oscilloscope: When i need to use it, i use it. It's useful when it is useful, if i don't always use it it doesn't mean it's not worth having.

Strangely enough a logic analyser is one of the few bits of gear I've never wanted..