Excellent summary; I sadly have no mod points to give you, only kudos in the form of a comment.

From my experience working at a Windows/Mac school district and messing with linux in my spare time, I would say that it's generally easier to get Mac or Linux boxes to integrate into an existing Windows environment, than to try to get Windows to cooperate with non-Microsoft tools. Just my two cents.

Safari, Chrome, and IE 9 (sorta) support AAC, as does Flash. (http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html)

That said, you bring up an excellent distinction that I'd missed; I was speaking more of formats in general as opposed to in web standards. With that in mind, I think you're probably right. Web standards do tend to have a way of just hanging around in the stone ages. I mean, look how long HTML4 has lasted. And look at the GIF format, still fairly popular after all these years.

Doesn't mean we can't be optimistic though and hope that in the coming years the web can start to adopt some new, better standards.

While this is definitely true, Google might just have enough force to push WebP into common use. Look at mp4's: mp3 was the de facto standard for a while because "everything supports it and it's good enough". Apple comes along with this iTunes music store and starts pushing their mp4-wares and support for the format actually started to increase.

I'm totally with you on the distinction between heights / falling. The Sears Tower (or whatever it's called these days) was fine, and a wonderful sightseeing opportunity. The steps on Quarter Dome (on the way to Half Dome in Yosemite), were absolutely terrifying. Even Half Dome wasn't as bad since there were hand rails (cables) to hold onto.

And this is exactly why MP4 is a good idea. Also, I may be mistaken, but I believe everything on YouTube is stored as MP4.

Actually it seems more likely to become standardized. I mean, since there's no weird connectors to deal with, the only real variable would appear to be to be the frequency, and maybe the power. And Inductive-charger-mat manufacturers are going to want that standardized so their mat will work with the maximum number of devices.

Also, for one device this is equally as easy. If I could put multiple devices on one mat, this is much more convenient than trying to fit a bunch of wall-warts onto a power strip to charge multiple devices.

It's almost certainly going to be less efficient though, I agree with you there.

I think generally for titles: "important" words are capitalized by convention, and non-important words are optionally capitalized. For Slashdot, it looks like the 'a' does not get capitalized, but 'To' does. Which is a little weird looking in stories like: Fun To Be Had With a 10 Foot Satellite Dish

Google Voice does indeed allow you to dial "traditional" phone numbers, as well a providing your account with a "traditional" phone number that people can reach you at.

I signed up for my highschool's laptop program (completely voluntary) back in 2000. All students were required to provide their own laptops, and since the school was "PC-only", that's what students were told to buy. I ended up being probably one of maybe two students in the program who did have a Mac. Never had any trouble completing any assignments, and actually had it a little easier since some of the "security" measures they tried to implement were only Windows compatible, so I wasn't bothered by it.

While I find it cool that a school has decided to be pro-Mac, I think it's unreasonable for the school to dictate exactly which computer students need to buy. I could understand if the school said "we only support Macintosh" and PC-laptopers had to troubleshoot their own problems. But there's no reason students shouldn't be able to use PC laptops at their own risk.

Point taken. When I'd initially read that quote, I had (falsely) assumed that the music they had been creating was something VERY simple, like just a combination of single-frequency sine waves. However after finally being able to connect to the site, and listening to the samples, they appear to have created... well, sound. Like you said.

It depends to what level of detail you want to look at, but there are some other waveforms that at least have their own names. I mean, to some extent these can still technically be represented by sine waves, but generally seem to have their own characteristics.

Guild wars has been mentioned a little above, but I feel like the character classes definitely offer some of this cross-class, cross-trinity action. While the warrior would seem like the obvious choice for a tank, there are build for the other classes (especially the monk) that make them viable tanks. Likewise, most of the classes have a few options available for different types of damage (direct, AoE, etc).

Part of what might be contributing to this though, is the dual-class nature of the game. Each character has a primary class, and a secondary class, and can pull from most of the skills from both classes.

Agreed. I think it was more sound than music. There's a certain musical quality to it, sure. Just like there's music in the breeze and the ocean. But in this case it's just a lot more annoying.