Yeah, but when I installed Windows 7, my wireless network card, printer, 3D graphics, webcam, bluetooth dongle, external hard drive, dual displays, and Touch Diamond 2 mobile phone all connected and worked immediately.

Unless Windows 7 has changed radically how drivers work under Windows, those usually require user installation on drivers. So, in different words, you're bullshitting.

I've tried to get that all working (all hardware at least 18 months old now, except the phone) in Ubuntu since 6.x

Funny, on Ubuntu 9.04, all of those really do just work, with no driver installation or other kinds of user interaction.

Maybe you just got Windows and Ubuntu confused.

It can figure out that Little Tiffany is dangerous and deserved to die?

Sea slugs can learn under classical conditioning; it doesn't require consciousness or even a brain.

All the recent brouhaha about the "long tail" doesn't merely relate to the shape of the distribution (which has been known for a long time); it's about inferences people draw from that shape.

A lot of the inferences I have seen are unwarranted, and papers like this come to the same conclusion.

That song has been so overused in dystopic SF movies that it has taken on a rather menacing meaning.

It's the drivers' responsibility to maintain control of their vehicles and be cognizant of sudden dangers in the street.

It's everybody's responsibility to avoid accidents, not just the drivers of automobiles. Pedestrians and bicyclist can cause accidents, can be at fault in accidents, and can (and should) be held legally responsible for their actions just as much as everybody else. You don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card just because you choose one mode of transportation over another.

That is why Microsoft Visual Studios even with the abomination of .NET virtual machine garbage

I actully prefer the .NET virtual machine garbage to the Java virtual machine garbage, not because it's faster, but because it has features like pointers, structure return, and working templates.

Compiling Python to JavaScript running in a browser really is like putting lipstick on a dog.

I'm not misreading it; the sentence is ambiguous and poorly worded. Hence it doesn't support your assertion. If you want to support your reading, you really need to find a better source.

In general, in many European legal systems, even true statements may result in defamation claims under certain circumstances. There is no reason to believe that Britain would be any more lenient.

Filling the drive with helium should help; the speed of sound in helium is 3x higher than in air, and it offers less resistance.

(Hydrogen would be even better, but it has a tendency to interact with metals in unfortunate ways.)

Modern drives perform bad block replacement internally. By the time you actually see drive errors at the OS level, the drive has already experienced massive failures.

You left out an important part:

The publisher could prove the statement to be true, it could be fair comment - so long as the opinion is based on true facts, [and] is genuinely held and not influenced by malice - or it could be protected by privilege

That is, if your intent is malicious or if the information is "privileged", then even truth isn't a defense against libel under the British system anymore.

Which is as it should be - if I write "Darkness404 molests goats" then unless it is true why should I not compensate you for the resulting harm to your reputation?

Because that kind of law is harmful to democracy and freedom, as these cases show. People need to be able to say negative things about politicians, products, religions, and everything else even without being able to prove the truth of everything they say; without some leeway, reasonable public debate and dialog is impossible.

However, if the Court determines that there is a defamatory imputation on the face of the statement, then it is for the maker of the statement to justify it.

That's the way it works in the US as well. The question is what level of justification is required. Requiring the person who made the statement to prove that it is true is harmful to democracy and liberty. The US level of justification is about right: you merely have to prove that it was reasonable to assume that the statement was true, not that the statement is actually true.

The suggestion in the article that all of this is new and has journalists "running scared" is bogus (ahem) too. Essentially the same principles have applied for several hundred years.

<sarcasm>Yeah, and that's why the UK has been such a shining beacon of freedom and democracy in the world for several hundred years, right?</sarcasm>

If all knowledge is suspect, as you seem to indicate, then the whole exercise is pointless.

Not at all. In science and engineering, knowledge is always suspect. That means that you rely on it as if it were true until it is shown to be false (which usually happens sooner or later). It works quite well.

The alternative--assuming that some things are true--simply does not work. Very little of what we believed to be true 100 years ago is still true; most of it just turned out to be a useful heuristic or approximation, but it was ultimately false.

Touch and multitouch have been around for decades; the reason people aren't using them is because they simply aren't all that useful, outside maybe consumer phones and systems like ATMs. It's the same with 3D movies and interfaces; like flu epidemics, these dead ideas keep coming back every decade-and-a-half.