• 1. There is the good old solder-it-yourself scene, ham radio style, hardware with a hard H.
• 2. There is a lively FPGA scene, with the complication of mostly closed-source synthesis tools (like compilers). I don't regard this as a huge problem, as long as I can make hardware do what I want. If you're new to the scene, I recommend fpga4fun.

You swine!

Damn it /. - I logged in to post that message. WTF?!

The only job of a ceo is, besides getting rich, rally the troopsand use his/connections.

How well a Canadian can really American troops and how useful would be a foreigner's connections?

Maybe you should watch it again. Forward the video to 2:54, where it narrates the following quotation:

As the quote is read, it shows an Appe II, then a Macbook. Immediately afterwards, it shows an iPad and an iPhone.

If I were to write in a paper in medicine and try to get it published in one of the various medical journals that are out there that have a reasonably good reputation, I would be rejected so quickly if I were to try a "Algorithm for using instruments in surgery, nurse hands over knives handle first" journal article. But the equivalent of this level of obviousness make it through the patent office all the time. Software I have worked on has gotten patents more than once. In all cases, I thought the patents obvious to the point of silliness.

When I was younger, I naively believed that patents demonstrated that the inventor was truly clever and original -- the lightbulb, invention of jet engine, silicon chip, and so on. Now, what I see is a world filled with patents that are a waste of everybody's time and those few who actually truly invent something new are no longer getting the positive rep that used to come with filing a patent.

The solution is simple. You make the patent filer pay a few thousand dollars, you use that money to pay "world class experts in the field" and then you ask the experts, is the invention truly original and of significant value -- so much so that keeping the details of the invention secret would actively harm mankind?

If the patent isn't worth paying a few thousand dollars to file, then why should we even be considering it.

Obligatory

1. Donald Knuth called, he wants his joke back.

2. Kernel versions are integer vectors. You may have noticed, after 3.8 and 3.9 we didn't have 4.0, but 3.10, which is "greater than" 3.1 despite the apparent decimal equality.

I'm currently doing my daily emerge (update \in Gentoo) on a Powerbook, so obviously my testicles are larger.

FTFY.

It makes sense when you watch it with Dutch subtitles, especially the part "I am your father".

While that's true, most military night vision (which the article discusses repeatedly) is near-IR. Nearly all of the "bulky goggles" are of that type - including the one in the photo in the article, if I'm not mistaken.

Being a robot is great, but we don't have emotions, and sometimes that makes me sad. (B. B. Rodriguez)

It's rough, it's tough, and takes no shit.

I understand that may apply to Wayland or Mir, but not filesystems, unless you refer to XFS :D

Also, I understand that ZFS is not just a filesystem, as it also covers the functionalities of volume management, kitchen sink, life, the universe, everything, and emacs. Btrfs is a filesystem in the unix philosophy (unless the name refers to 'butterflysystem', in which case it covers all aforementioned functionalities and then some).

..we wouldn't be depressed in the first place.