And the first grafts for aneurysm repair were hand-sewn by DeBakey's wife, but in the intervening fifty years the process has changed. You want to tell old stories, heard secondhand, go right ahead - but tell them that way, not as "current practice".

Beg away. I'm an anesthesiologist, I watch surgeons work five days a week. What do you do?

The procedural parts of medicine are among the most automatably difficult tasks imaginable - people do not have standard sizes or shapes, they do not always have the particular problem that you wish they had, and improvisation is the name of the game. The Turing Test is many orders of magnitude easier than even the simplest surgical operation.

I'm not sure how this got modded up, but that was standard practice in the 1920s... not today. We have standardized procedures for damned near everything you can think of.

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

how i can disable MMS. In the whole last 9 years when the phones i used supported MMS, i think i used the feature 3 times:
* one time for test
* two times to receive a train ticket (now they switched to internet+app)

I have no clue why i should use MMS. I use SMS a lot (since it works with all phones).

no need for this feature.

My first gen iMac boots from external CDROM on USB just fine, thank you.

Hold the Alt key at startup to get the boot device menu, plug in your cdrom if need be and press alt again to update the device list, and click on the big giant CD icon.

Both OS X and YellowDog Linux boot fine this way, and I've installed and reinstalled both more than once.

Firmware hasn't ever been manually upgraded either, so unless some patch came with OS X 10.1 or something, the firmware hasn't been upgraded beyond factory as well.

I've not tried the "C" key shortcut on it, as I didn't learn about that one until later sometime around/after I had my i7 macbook.

But even today I prefer the alt key method of selecting a boot device from the list over the "C" key that can't confirm the cd media is even bootable before skipping past it on to the HD.
Too many cdrw discs having boot sector problems with various older cdrom drives I guess.

Well given that on his news website he says:

In fact if you go right to stallman.org it's current front and center at the top.

How is that not easy to do?

"[Man] Kids, get in the house."

Now only one person remains in danger of a drone falling on him, zero people are in danger of the shotgun pellets coming down, and as the one main remaining is also the land owner, you clearly have the land owners permission to act as well as already accepting the risk of damage to their own property.

Easy Peasy

I have to bring that statement into question.

If you really did use computers back in the day before Windows, you would already know that key - called Super - has existed since the 80s and was first removed on the IBM 8800 computer, which it remained missing until Microsoft requested keyboard manufacturers to put the Super key back and stick their logo on it.

Unix systems used and still use Super as an extra modifier similar to Hyper, Meta, Alt, AltGr, and Control.
The classic Macs used it as the "open apple" / command key, which was used for keyboard shortcuts leaving Control free to insert control characters as originally intended.
Sun had a dedicated key on the left-hand function keys.

LISP programmers have said they can't live without Meta.
Even emacs remaps the keycode back in for command shortcuts.

Personally when the key REappeared I was quite happy, as any cheap-o $10 keyboard would have similar functionality to any 104-key keyboard in the past, and no longer commanded higher prices to get.

Right click is pretty popular on most every desktop OS out there.

What shocks me the most is they didn't report mouse buttons 3, 4, and 5 as least used.
Button 3 is pretty well used by power users, but 4/5 require an external mouse, so macbooks don't have those two buttons built in as hardware.

I'm still waiting on Windows to actually add in support for buttons 4 and 5 instead of faking it and mapping them to browser forward/back.

The most used desktop OS (Windows) still to this day doesn't support as many mouse buttons as younger OSes like OS X and Linux, it's simply amazing.

Time and time again I see news articles that seem to herald the idea that users are willing to sacrifice something like privacy for the use of software. Take Facebook for an example. You get a robust and snappy storage and website for communication at the cost of control over your life and privacy. And as I try to explain to people the tradeoffs most of them seem to be complacent. Even I myself use GMail, there's just no better mail service. Even if there were, I'd have to run the server from my home to be sure that I'm in control in it and it's truly free (by your definition). So given that much of the populace isn't even prepared technologically to harness truly free software, don't you think they have slowly accepted the trade offs and that the pros of your arguments -- though sound -- are only possibly realized by those skilled enough to edit source code or host their own mail server from their home?

I found your piece on selling free software to be pretty logical on paper. However, has it ever worked in the wild? Can you name companies or revenues that currently operate on this idea (and I'm not talking about services or support of the software)? I simply can't come up with a widely used monetized piece of software licensed under the GNU GPL whereby the original software was sold at a single price and shipped with the source code -- free for the original purchaser to distribute by the license's clauses. Can you list any revenue generation from that? I must admit I'm not exactly enamored with paying for free software (as in your definition of free) before it's written yet I cannot think of any other way this would fairly compensate the developer.

I see no mention in the newegg blog about the patent being declared invalid, only that newegg was declared not infringing upon it.

While I'm sure this ruling will help anyone else in the future who is simply using SSL on their web server, it doesn't really help anyone else the troll sues who they feel is using SSL/RC4 differently.

They only really need a new worthless patent to go after the same targets they already sued or planned to sue for the same reason.
They get to keep using this same worthless patent still however, just against a different group of targets.

This. This needs to be made illegal. Patent licensing fees should be returned (minus reasonable administrative fees) if the patent is overturned. Force the burden of proving the patent is indeed valid back upon the patent holder. Don't force the purported violator to prove the patent is invalid.

If the USPTO could control the patents it gives out so the rate they're overturned upon challenge is low, then it makes sense to force violators to prove the patent is invalid. But because they're seemingly willing to give out patents for anything and the rate they're overturned, it makes more sense to shift the burden onto the patent applicant to take reasonable steps to make sure his patent is ironclad and will not be overturned. If the patent applicant's confidence in his own patent is so low he isn't sure it won't be overturned upon a detailed review, then that's a pretty good indication the idea isn't really worthy of a patent in the first place.

This also has the effect of making pure IP companies a high-risk business. If all you do is license patents and one of your main patents gets overturned, it could bankrupt you. But if you're actually using the patent to make stuff, then you'll have an alternate revenue stream which will allow you to survive having to pay back the licensing fees.

There is a drawback in that companies may be more willing to license specious patents, in hopes that someone else will go through the expense of fighting it. If someone else fights it and wins, you get your money back, so why should you fight it? On the patent's holder's side, this creates a multi-year potential liability in the accounting books even if you have a valid patent. A sunset period of a few years after which you can't recover licensing fees (or a graduated return period, so after say 3 years you have to pay back 50%, after 5 years 25%, after 7 years you can keep it all) would address both problems.

You're making assumptions. Rather than run a desktop OS like Windows XP Professional, it's more likely running Windows XP Embedded, which is intended for this type of use.

It may be intended for this type of use, but is highly inappropriate. The reason companies use XP Embedded (arguably the only reason XP Embedded ever managed to gain any market share in embedded systems) is because you can write software for it using the Windows API. In other words, you can tap into the millions of software developers out there who know how to write Windows programs, instead of the few tens of thousands proficient in more robust embedded OSes like VxWorks. Larger supply = lower prices, so you can hire your programmers for cheaper.

The problem of course is that you're highly likely to hire a programmer who doesn't know squat about writing software for an embedded system. i.e. Something which will never get system updates or bug fixes. Their coding will be sloppier, they won't think about all the possible issues and corner cases like a skilled embedded software developer will, and the emphasis will be on getting the job done quickly and cheaply. So while it's not a desktop OS, its use allows (and in fact encourages) management to cut costs by hiring pimple-faced programmers whose only experience is in writing desktop software. Which appears to be the case here (the vulnerability is in the software running atop the OS).