Kind of like those annual antivirus program licences that many people who thought about it for half a second stopped paying for, and installed a freeware program instead.

Maybe it would work for Windows, if they found the right price point for a licence fee, but it might also backfire and encourage people to look at Mac or Linux options.

That would require getting up.

If I really cared there are ways around limitations on downloading by country, specifically IP identification.

Don't bet on it. The iTunes store for Canada sucks (for video, anyway). Choices are severely limited from major American networks. It's almost enough to make a guy get off the computer and go outside.

Hooray for copyright laws, and protectionist governments that bow to every whim of the entertainment industry! Soon to be celebrated for helping make Canadians the most fit of all G8 nation citizens!

I read a lot of PDF files on my Mac and work and it has been my experience that the "native" PDF plugin (which really isn't, in older versions of the OS it was called the "SchubertIT" plugin) is inferior to Acrobat's reader (I believe I am using version 7-8, not at work so can't check.) Also using X 10.4 so maybe it's better in 10.5.

On my iMac (one of the last PowerPC models shipped) the Adobe version is faster, renders text and documents more accurately and more quickly, and is more accurate when selecting text.

I'm not a fanboi or anything, and would be interested in a Mac PDF reader that's better than either of the above options.

It's not just nationalism. It's hubris. That has been a part of Russia's collective psyche for at least the past 100 years. They're not going to let anyone tell them what to do, and they balk at receiving help from anyone - it's a sign of weakness. They have a strong "us and them" mentality which has not faded away one bit since the end of Communism.

I can't really fault Russians or Putin for that, other countries are loud and proud of themselves and can also be a bit protectionist from time to time. But in Putin's case, it could be incredibly self-destructive, although I would bet that his people will support him even if it means economic disaster.

I'll probably get modded troll for that second paragraph, but just remember, in post-Soviet Russia, troll mods YOU.

Perhaps those of you in this thread who hate journalists so much should make efforts to give scientists some media training so that when they are interviewed, they speak in clear language, not jargon.

Yes, it's the journalist's job to be clear and accurate, but it's pretty damn difficult when the interview subject spews out line after line of technobabble only meaningful to another scientist.

Also, don't blame journalists for trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to spice things up and present scientific stories to a broader audience. Only slashdot readers are going to get excited when they see "We report teleportation of quantum information between atomic quantum memories separated by about 1 meter" and the thrilling "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits" headline (the word "teleportation" is used in the abstract, so don't blame the journalist.)

At the very least, people interested in the topic can go look up the referenced abstract and read it for themselves. Granted, it requires some critical thinking skills and some initiative to do that, which might be expecting a lot from people. But without the hated journalist's efforts they wouldn't even know about the story.

This is the only article I could find cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 filled with "citation needed" tags.

I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.

Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."

Why is anyone surprised? This happens all the time. Anonymous reviews on the Internet + unscrupulous company + morally-gray bloggers looking for a bit of easy cash = cheap, positive publicity.

So... yeah, my blog is in my profile and, uh, I'm willing to sell a bit of my soul if any companies reading this are interested...

Now, they would just have to spin it right ("Pro-biotic! No artificial whiteners! Organic ingredients!") and they could make millions.

The pragmatic age is coming, when people realize they are in debt up to their eyeballs and bring back those 70-inch TVs they bought on credit.

And you're kind of making a Reductio ad absurdum argument. No need to be combative, I agree 100 per cent with your premise.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe we would have other technological advancements, we don't have the ability to peer into alternative universes to compare.

Fair comment, but I didn't ignore it, I just didn't think of that.

I still think the prime motivator for space exploration was cold war expansionism, and that's how governments sold it to people - 'we've got to get up there before the Reds!' There's no "sales campaign" today with that kind of appeal to convince people of the value of space exploration.

Thank you for picking up on my poorly-worded sentence. Your input is truly valued, even if it's delivered in an asinine, trolling manner.

What I should have said was "if the public could be persuaded of the long-term value of this program."

And no, I won't persuade you. That's the job of the space agency in whatever country you're from.

I was going to flame you but then I re-read your post and I somewhat agree with you.

But I don't think it's fair to lump parents into two categories - those close-minded fundamentalists who shelter their children, and open-minded free thinkers who teach their children to make their own decisions. That's stereotypical nonsense.

Violence is part of life. Animals eat other animals, and even my three-year-old daughter is starting to understand that. But gratuitous violence which we watch for our enjoyment and amusement is not part of life and I think kids deserve to be sheltered from as much unnecessary violence as possible. We put too much emphasis on our right to be entertained, and justifying our appetite for violence in our entertainment by mocking anyone who disagrees with us (not that you are doing that) but I think a kid's right to an innocent, happy childhood should take precedence.

For the record, I have enjoyed violent FPS games since Wolfenstein 3D but when I'm playing STALKER I don't let my daughter watch because I don't want to fill her mind with violent images. She used to sit on my lap while I would play Half-Life 2 but when she started trying to tell me which gun to use I realized that maybe it would be more appropriate to shut down the game and go play soccer with her outside.

I'll save the "appreciation of violent art" discussion for when she's in her teens, when her reasoning skills really start to develop.

That was kind of a long-winded way of saying I'm glad the team put a no-blood option in the game. That actually could broaden their audience. My wife played and loved the first two Fallout games because there was a violence filter. We passed on Fallout 3 because as far as I can tell there is no such filter (at least, when I contacted the company directly to ask this question I received a useless generic form letter which did not answer the question).