First I wonder which Fortran you refer to; Fortran 66 is quite a different language from Fortran 95. I agree that all Fortran variants are pretty good languages for number crunching, but Fortran 77 and older lacked support for data structures, making it hard to teach students about them and advanced algorithms in general. (Yes, I've tried.) Fortran 90 and 95 are much better in those respects. On the other hand: C and C++ are not so far behind in speed to rule them out.

It is my opinion that learning two fundamentally different languages makes someone a better programmer. I see value in teaching both Fortran and (for example) Python, using Fortran for number crunching and Python for smarter algorithms.

From Wikipedia:

[China's] middle class population (defined as those with annual income of at least US$5,000) has now reached 80-150 million.

That is a market of considerable size for a $200 laptop. And many people that don't care about "using their old programs or data" because they never owned a computer before. For them Linux is perfect (they won't have to pirate MS Office.)

I would buy such a 9" smartbook and use it as ultraportable second laptop (as it can do OOo impress presentations it would be very useful too.) I can imagine other computer users in Europe and the US to buy such a machine as second (third) system. However, if the suppliers can keep prices under the $200, it will be an affordable system for "the masses" in China, India and South America that were unable to afford their own PC before. Somehow, prices for netbooks crept up with the addition of harddisks and Windows.

A judge can sanction a party or its lawyers for bringing frivolous arguments. The other party may start the procedure by filing a motion or the judge may start it. The lawyer usually gets the time to argue why the arguments are not frivolous; the judge will in the end decide what punishment is fit. In mild cases the lawyer or party will be forced to pay all costs induced by the frivolity, in serious cases a lawyer can be disbarred.

This request for censorship comes from the guys that sold malware infected CDs to unsuspecting customers. (And passed the blame to someone else.) I wonder how they avoided criminal prosecution...

That's bullshit. You may think this way, but as an attorney acting in your client's best interests, you will use all the legal means at your disposal to win the case. If this means 'inconveniencing' the defendant, so be it, specially when the defendant is happy to assist in hamstringing their own case.

You sound like a RIAA lawyer and don't seem to realise what agent of the court implies. Lawyers are expected to ensure that the trial is fair above presenting their client's case in the best light. This works both ways, a defendant has all right to defend itself against the plaintiff's allegations.

Going in a bit more detail, why did the RIAA lawyers push the jury instruction that caused the judge to declare a mistrial?

Professionals keep (at least) one off-site backup. You could rent a private locker in a bank or some other organization or make an online backup deal. I do use (two) USB disks for backups. They are pretty portable, fairly robust, plug in nearly every computer, have decent speed and good capacity.

You can license the developers, but when management pressures them to cut corners you still have shoddy software. It is a much better idea to make your suppliers responsible for delivering a quality product and put liability on them when they provide a shoddy one. The companies themselves will start thinking about testing, quality assurance and such; I am sure that looking at the education of the developers will be part of the list of measures considered.

Most EUropean countries have clauses in their laws that instruct the judge to take the price of the good into account when considering what would be a reasonable quality for a product. A corollary of that is when you give something away for free, the expected quality level is something like "not known harmful".
When you buy software, for example a Linux distribution, you may expect that the distributor has tested the packages and that the software mostly works. Because you pay more for MacOS, you may just expect MacOS to work better.

Off course there has to come jurisprudence on all this, but I don't think that finding just one bug will entitle you to your money back. However, when the software won't work at all for you, the supplier can not hide behind EULAs and could be forced to compensate your damages... It will be a case-by-case balancing of responsibilities.

A typical flash cell easily lasts 10.000 writes. Let's assume that every compile (or svn update) only touches 10% of your SSD space, that gives you 100.000 "cou" (compiles or updates). If you do 20 cou per day, the SDD will last 5000 working days, or 20 year.

Now find a hard disk that'll last that long.

You are right that they can start a new investigation, into the new servers (abroad) and they'll have to prove that these same guys are still involved... In that sense dropping the charges was a good strategic move as it prevents a negative judgement on the issues.

OTOH, prosecution will have to think about how to obtain evidence that the Pirate Bay tracker really is involved, in an environment where DHTs are used. It will take several man-years of investigation (again!) to make a new case.

So, it is only matter of time they are back later with stronger evidences?

At this stage of the process the prosecutor has to present the evidence he has gathered to the judge; the defence gets time to present rebuttal evidence. When all evidence is presented, it is time for legal interpretation (pleading). It is planned that the judges have all the information they need in three weeks, so that only gives prosecution a few days to bring up new evidence.

And because it is a criminal trial, prosecution can not come back with another case based on the same facts... so dropping the charges now has permanent impact.

For a memory device that operates near in a 335-340K (65 C) temperature range you need a power budget for heating...

On a second thought, if one taps into the excess CPUs and GPUs heat. Still a bad fit for a mobile device though

Now Microsoft is on the way down and Apple and Linux are moving up:

learn to write cross-platform applications

It isn't that hard, just pick a programming language that's available on both Linux and Windows and try to write programs that work on both Operating Systems. It can be done with some care!

There is two issues with websites: content and presentation. Let me say that the content of RIAAvsPeople is unique and worthy of a mention in "History of the Internet". The presentation is acceptable, as you work within some Blogspot limitations. If you spent a few 100 dollar on website design and your personal education (Ray, you are a very good amateur web-publisher), it would look better, more professional. I am not convinced that your message would hit harder; my philosophy is that, for websites like yours, design can distract from the message. Keep it simple, concentrate on the message! You have something to tell that is important.