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Comment Re:First to repeat it in this story (Score 1) 238

Now, if you're happy using the binary blob GPU driver to play movies from a USB drive

Please learn the difference between firmware and drivers.

Even very trivial computer hardware has some sort of microprocessor doing something in it, most likely with propriatary code. Your mouse has one. Some more complex hardware, especially GPUs, does not store it's own firmware, instead having the driver load it from the system's persistant storage at startup.

Claiming that a driver that can send the manufacturer's firmware blob to a chip is a closed driver is like claiming that the USB HID driver for linux is closed because you don't have the designs for the Logitech chip at the other end of the USB link.

Comment Re:HEY! (Score 4, Insightful) 569

It's pretty clear that Guarasil kills people,

No it isn't, and your source kind of sucks.

"I know it was the Gardasil," Tarsell said, although the official cause of death was undetermined.

This reads like the autism fraud news stories.

Here is the CDC's page on the whole issue. Excerpt (my emphasis):

Concerns have been raised about reports of deaths occurring in individuals after receiving Gardasil. As of June 30, 2008, 20 deaths had been reported to VAERS. There was not a common pattern to the deaths that would suggest they were caused by the vaccine. In cases where autopsy, death certificate and medical records were available, the cause of death was explained by factors other than the vaccine.

People get vaccinated and die. People brush their teeth and die too. Statistics.

Comment Re:Enlighten me (Score 2) 219

Writing Dart-only websites is obviously a bad idea. Writing stuff that will work an order of magnitude slower on JS browsers could seem like a sensible lazy solution to many, especially if Chrome continues to gain market-share.

In the worst case, this could lead to everybody having to implement Dart, and the new de-facto standard scripting language being controlled by Google, who, running several of the world's most popular websites, can hardly be considered neutral.

Comment Are they talking binary compatibility or APIs? (Score 1) 413

Are they saying they won't provide some sort of x86 emulation (like Apple's PPC emulation), and software manufacturers will need to recompile stuff for ARM (reasonable enough; good for performance), or are they actually saying that there will be no Win32 API compatibility? If it's the latter, it's kind of stupid.

Comment Re:How so? (Score 1) 285

I think you misunderstood. Half a pound of explosives will suffice to destroy a plane (Youtube link: pressurised 747 is intentionally destroyed with 200g of semtex to test something or other).

The purpose of smuggling large quantities past security would be to distribute it to accomplices who have already passed through security normally, and destroy every plane at the terminal.

Comment Re:Mass Production (Score 3, Interesting) 68

Or maybe building the entire airframe out of it is a gimmick intended to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology, but laser sintering will make sense as just another manufacturing technique, used for those parts it applies best to. For example, the press release claims that eliptical wings are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, so perhaps it would be economical to attach printed wings to an otherwise conventionally-built aircraft.

Comment Re:Each major release is taking longer (Score 1) 212

Multiple desktop have worked since the beginning. If I recall correctly, having different wallpapers on each desktop requires that you have a different "activity" on each desktop (i.e. different widgets).

Locking applications to specific desktops is easily done with window-specific kwin settings, in pretty much the same way as in 3.5. Right click the window title bar, select Advanced > Special application settings. Who modded this up?

Konqueror is still around, still maintained and improved, and still works fine for file browsing. Many improvements to Dolphin apply to Konqueror too, since they use the same kparts to view directories. I absolutely prefer Konqueror, but must reluctantly agree that users that can't manage to change a single file-type association should probably be using Dolphin.

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