The best PDA on the market these days, especially if you have a Mac on the desktop, is the iPod Touch; the best smartphone is the iPhone. Opinions may vary, of course, but 'PDAs' aren't dead, they've just been absorbed into other products, namely phones and MP3 players.

There's also netbooks, if you want something with a little more power but still portable (and Linux-able).

More like the courts are saying once and for all that the unfounded claims being made by people about vaccines causing autism have no basis in reality, which any good doctor could have told you.

Not just useless - in some cases, detrimental. Because of the visual impairment I have and the way my brain learned to deal with it, I don't have proper stereoscopic vision. My brain uses the picture from the dominant eye, and then fills in whatever's left with my other eye.

Aside from not having any depth perception, this also means that '3D' films are, at best, not 3D, and at worst, unwatchable and migraine-inducing. More 3D movies means less movies I can actually watch, and thus less money to the studios from myself and other people with visual impairments.

Only if you want to make a 20-year-old processor.

When I read the poster's question, I heard 'I'm an open-source geek, and I think everyone should use open-source software because it's inherently better. I just got a job at a university and I'm sure that if I tell them open-source is better enough times, they'll switch. I don't know anything about how universities or software licenses work, but that's probably not important. What do I do?'

There are a variety of reasons why this might not be a good idea. If everyone uses OpenOffice, switching to MS Office, with a different layout of features and a different interface, will confuse the hell out of them. After four years of OO, they'll be surprisingly sub-standard at mere document editing compared to their peers.

Not saying it's not a bad idea, but forcing a massive change in university could be detrimental to students down the road. There are far too many things to consider here for someone who isn't even in a position to know what's being paid, let alone influence what's being paid for.

Part of the issue I've always had with Mono is that, by its nature, it's playing catch-up.

Let's say Microsoft spends a year paying programmers full-time to develop and implement .Net 4.0. After they release it, the Mono developers then have to spend time figuring out what's new in 4.0 and how to implement it, then spend time implementing it, then test it against Microsoft's implementation.

They're always going to be at least (development time of new features) behind Microsoft, and that doesn't really appeal to me. It's interesting as a new platform, but they can only innovate too much without accomplishing the same cross-platform incompatibilities we criticize Microsoft for all the time.

Because, you know, no company ever files for a patent on something they come up with that they might want to use, but don't necessarily have plans to use.

With the number of patents Apple has and files for, I think it's more likely that this is a 'concept art' kind of patent, on an idea that they might pursue, or might not.

You phrase this in such a way as to imply an exclusion, when really both are often true. We've ported our PHP application to Rails (which provides a different, but workable, set of problems), and we've rid ourselves of the Zend engine in return for Ferret; I'm a proponent of replacing that with SOLR, but we've yet to go down that path.

Great, now all we need to do is find some way to prevent the gravitational forces of the black hole from gobbling everything up, and prevent the black hole from evaporating due to the release of Hawking radiation, and do this all with less than the power that we'd get out of a black hole, and get enough power that the danger and complexity is worthwhile, and we're golden.

RMS is enough of a revolutionary lunatic that he'd most likely destroy the country. Judging from his ideas, he'd make illegal software patents, as well as commercial software, since 'information wants to be free'.

RMS's intentions are great, but putting him in a position of power would be as ill-advised as doing the same for Theodore Kaczynski.

Wholly unlikely. What will hopefully happen is that HTM5's video element will be supported in major browsers, and then people can use (and download) whatever codecs they want. If someone wants to use Ogg and is willing to encourage people to download the codec before being able to watch movies or listen to audio, then fine.

More likely, everyone will use h.264, which provides great compression for a wide range of bitrates and filetypes, and which all major OSes natively support (as of Windows 7).

Chances are that either 1) those patents will never be enforced; 2) They were applied for before the relevant product came out; 3) They don't cover the examples given; or 4) if they were enfored, they would lose the patent.

Keep in mind that in the US, the general litigious environment means that you need to do everything you can to protect yourself. If Apple didn't have boatloads of patents, like every other major tech company, they would stand a real chance of infringing upon some other obscure, obvious-but-granted-anyway patent that some patent troll company had. I don't recall Apple suing Amazon over Mechanical Turk, but you can bet that patent trolls would definitely do so.

Apple protects its innovations; multi-touch isn't new, but no one else did anything with it. Apple brought it to market and has made millions because of it. Good for them. That's the whole point of capitalism.

If you don't like the current 'patent the obvious' environment in the US, I hope you don't buy at Amazon. Their absurd one-click patent could be argued to have started this preposterous mess in the first place.

Right, because Apple's been well-known lately to rest on its laurels.

The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation. I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out; all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface - unless, of course, no one else out there is up to the task of innovating.

Touchscreen devices are far older than 2001; the distinction here, I believe, is that it detects 'one or more' touches and applies heuristics to them (presumably to determine gestures such as pinch, twist, etc.), and then acts on the results of those heuristics.