At the very heart of the DOJ case...M$ was accused of "locking-in" customers for their products. And now, fast forward to 2012... Apple is literally locking in consumers behind their gardened walls with a plethora of their own hardware and software, Google & FB literally collecting private details from its consumers. Playing the devil's advocate here, I wonder how come they are not scrutinised intensely?

Such behavior is illegal only if you have a sufficiently large share of a properly defined product market. MS apparently got terrible legal advice in the 1990s (or ignored good advice); someone should have been telling them that they were dominant enough in their principle market space (personal computer operating systems) that the rules were different. Apple holds less than 20% of the global market for smartphones, a distant second behind Samsung for the most recently finished quarter. That's not enough market share to get you in trouble. Google appears ready to settle their antitrust case in the EU, and the FTC announced several months ago an investigation of Google's business practices in the US. And it's difficult to define an applicable "market" where Facebook dominates, since they don't charge their users.

25 years is not that hard to do.

Absolutely. I've got boxes in the basement 40 years old with ball-point ink in cheap notebooks that are fine. At that age some of the newsprint is getting rather yellowed, but the ordinary paper and ink are okay. Carbon black pigment typical of monochrome laser printers on decent quality copy paper is probably good for at least a century if it's kept somewhere dark and dry.

My problems with digital media over the years has mostly been a matter of finding equipment that can read the media and then decoding the application-specific bits. If you have something that can handle the file system, flat ASCII or Unicode text will almost certainly be recoverable; open standards like PDF or Postscript are probably okay over 25 years; a proprietary format may not be recoverable at all. I've seen cases where recovering just the text from early Word documents is difficult, and that's only been a little longer than 25 years.

Will Office finally admit that basic 100-year-old typesetting functions such as floating displays should be supported?

Excel is more of a problem. For too much of the world, Excel is the default numerical computation platform because it can be assumed to be available. I'm not saying that Excel is a good platform, just that an enormous amount of the world uses it. And the Windows version has things that neither LibreOffice nor Office for Mac support consistently; eg, Solver and VBA. When Finance and the budget office say that their models and tracking tools require the Windows version of Excel, the decision about the company's standard spreadsheet and word processor has been made.

Some years back (circa 1990) the Phoenix airport shut down when the air temperature went above 120 degrees F, the maximum for which most jets had been certified (in terms of safe take-off weight) under US FAA rules. Several people from our company were stranded for a few hours until evening when the air temperature dropped back down. IIRC, Boeing took at least one model of all its jets to Saudi Arabia, along with the FAA-qualified measurement gear, and certified the planes to 125 degrees.

A few weeks earlier, the WSJ sparked a debate with its report that grammar gaffes have invaded the office in an age of informal e-mail....

You would think that the WSJ, being a leading business publication, would have made the point that once you get to court there's no such thing as informal e-mail. In that situation, it's not a hallway conversation, it's a discoverable document. And those messages can get you in serious trouble. For example, Microsoft's "cut off Netscape's air supply" enjoyed a prominent place in the judge's order (later overturned) to break up the company.

Can you turn your internal grammar checker on and off? Maybe it's because I'm getting to be an old fart, but I can't. And yeah, if I'm thinking in words, I think in grammatically correct sentences, or at least as close as I can come on the fly.

Too many people treat e-mail and text messages as if they were private conversations over the phone or in the hall. When someone sues you, though, the written words are discoverable documents. Statements that are ambiguous or easily misinterpreted can get you in real trouble. Microsoft almost paid dearly for the casual use of the phrase "cut off Netscape's air supply" in an e-mail. The trial judge used that quote to make a point in his order (later overturned) to break up the company.

From a grammar perspective, the last one, indicating a pause to suggest irony or a hidden meaning. Typographically, it depends on which style guide you use. The MLA's style guide, for example, insists on three dots with a full space separating the dots themselves and the text before and after. That's almost impossible to do in HTML, as most of the layout engines will strip out some of those spaces, even if you use the non-breaking space glyph. By the way, the plural is ellipses.

It's always a fun day when you arrive at work and the company lawyers have put yellow crime-scene tape across your doorway, along with a notice that they'll be spending the day going through your paper files and making a copy of your hard disk(s). There were two amusing incidents that day. They could copy the disk in the company-supplied Windows laptop without any problem; the headless Linux boxes in the little rack in the corner gave them fits. When they got to the locked file drawer where I kept stuff provided by potential vendors under NDA, I told them that they weren't on the list of people authorized to see those documents. The legal department spent all day resolving that one internally, and eventually decided to skip that drawer.

There are a couple of old stories told about the government's antitrust case against IBM (eventually dropped). In the first, the government subpoenaed a list of documents. IBM said they would comply, and a few weeks later three tractor-trailer rigs pulled up at the DOJ with copies of the documents, in boxes in random order. In the second, the DOJ decided that it needed to buy a document management system to organize all the documentation it received from IBM as part of the case. The only system available at that time that was big enough to handle the volume was sold by... IBM.

A bit faster at 15 fps would be better, but as you say, that's not a big jump.

When I was doing research on little video windows on computers 20 years ago, 13-15 fps was a critical speed because it was the rate at which people could determine if the audio and video were synced by watching lip movements. At 10-12 fps, the motion wasn't smooth enough to tell. For some applications, like some virtual classrooms where the video was a secondary medium -- the slides and the audio were the primary ones -- 15 fps video in a small window was adequate because what was important was the broad body language and overall facial expressions, not the fine detail.

Plastic Logic's website also describes work to allow them to incorporate a sensor layer along with the display. Heck with typing -- I'm willing to pay well for an electronic piece of paper that I can use to take math notes, sketch graphs, and so forth, at something approaching the size and resolution of paper and pen.

I've always emphasized to my calculus students that while calculus grew out of physics originally, from 1830-50 the mathematicians threw out that derivation and rebuilt it from the ground up... so it would be useful for things other than physics :^) Absent calculus, you can teach discrete probability; you can teach descriptive statistics for a sample; but you can't teach them continuous distributions and all that goes with that, other than cookbook approaches. OTOH, anyone who takes only one probability and statistics class is going to be dangerous, calculus or not: they're simply not going to be able to recognize all the things they don't know.

The results didnt seem too surprising, other than that under their questions, Visual Basic and Assembly ended up clustered together.

Odd things seem to happen when you change the number of clusters. There seem to be too many cases where you start with N clusters and pick a pair of languages. Then go to N+1 clusters and the pair is split between two clusters. Then go to N+2 clusters and the pair is back in the same cluster. While k-means is often the first tool one grabs for clustering analysis, it isn't the only tool and there are data sets where k-means doesn't give reasonable results.