While it may officially be an "underbone", I've never until now heard of this word (and I've been riding for 8 years). 40mph top speed, 70cc utilitarian-looking motorized bikes are called scooters over here (North America).

There may be other words that match what law and wiki writers would like you to use, but this thing is definitely a scooter, slightly reminiscent of the Honda ruckus, which is sold here.

What if the "something" that became publicly available had absolutely no direct bearing on the career of the person (ie sex scandal)? Could this not be a reason for why the U.S has so many seemingly perfect, dull, boring politicians that are good at playing the game, but bring no dynamicism to the political arena?

I'm the type that understands that sometimes backroom deals are best left in the backroom, and that people should stop interfering and meddling in personal affairs. Context is everything, and your black vs white argument might be right in some situations, but very wrong in others.

I agree that wikileaks needs to exist, and it gives freedom to those of us with less power and connections. Still, the power it has can be wielded wrongly, turning people like you into those that you're railing against. Your argument makes it sound like you would like power more than you would fairness.

Any real php-driven website uses opcode pre-compiling that speeds the execution of a program to such a degree that the stats given on the site you link to are simply way off. Version 5.3 has sped things up even more than their listed 5.2.9, and on a quick check of one of the PHP program examples, there is a blatant misuse of passing by reference, making it look like PHP4 code. Finally, almost none of the examples are based on real-world web development program needs.

One program on that link that might make sense is the regex, where for 4x the code in C++, you get a program 1/3 as fast (again, compared to unoptimized and old version PHP code).
C++ code example
PHP code example

This is a perfect example of PHP making C++ look like a fools language -- for web development.

The answer is: How good are your developers?

Facebook has improved the php memcache extension specifically to get the most out of caching requests (and given the improvements back to the community), and since caching is their main method of reducing server load, I'd assume they're pretty good at it.

I agree with your comments, and would add that almost any professional PHP website with any complexity at all, uses one of the many optimizers (pre-compilers) available, which themselves are written in C. PHP can be used for easy development AND quick response times, if it's set up properly.

Further, in terms of overall servers, thousands of Facebook's servers are sitting there with gobs of memory running memcached for caching responses. PHP executes a C library for access to it, and to toss out my own ratio, I'd say that far less than 1/10 requests to Facebook's servers require anything more than a cache lookup.

PHP is quick to develop with, efficient when coded by professional developers (as one would expect Facebook's to be), and only as a result of its success, is responsible for some sort of environmental impact. Need a component to run faster? Write a C-extension for it, but PHP is fine as the primary language.

C++ is not ideal for website development, other than in the most extreme of cases, and though it's open-source, there aren't exactly many (any?) successful web projects using it, so I don't understand why /. articles like this one even suggest it.

Unfortunately, this isn't a solution for the question at hand (not that I've got one to offer).

The challenge of web development brings a database and its changes together with that of code. A database's structure will change with the evolution of a code base, and subversion doesn't help deal with that. It also makes it awkward, for me at least, to deal with dev and live environments. Maybe it's an inherent problem that comes with using relational databases, but I've yet to see any solid open-source, cross-framework tool to help with versioning of both database and code in a user-friendly way.

If one existed that could also manage both a live and dev environment, each with different data in a possibly differently structured database, it would be a very valuable application.

Then you must be in one of those areas of the business world where there are no expenses, and it costs you no time or materials to make a product/service. Hmmm, sounds like you must be a patent troll.

Since you disregarded the parent, I'll explain a little clearer for you that time is money, and in this case that money is expense, which comes off that 5%. His 5% is equal to his gross revenue, from which expenses are deducted to arrive at profit. Or more likely, loss.

While I'd question the value in responding to trolls like this one, I do feel the need to congratulate you on the use of the phrase "ideologotardic nonsense". I don't think Webster's could have said it better!

It may be true that a droid wrote it for him, or maybe not. I've been using 7 for half a year, through a few versions and it's better than Vista in several subtle ways, but the biggest way that it's better is that it's not called "Vista". Given that he cares about sales and marketing, that's a very big positive.

And besides, Vista on proper hardware has always been better than XP for security, stability, and several usability features (especially the file explorer) -- it's just that the perception of it, due much to bad press and late availability of drivers made it appear terrible and far worse than it actually is.

You're completely right that Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 (though with very good touchscreen capabilities), but in the land of marketing and corporate sales, the name means a lot. XP is relative garbage unless you're running 5 year old hardware, so I mean really, what is false about Dell saying that Windows 7 will bring a big positive spin to PCs?

...
I've read a lot of posts here, but not one including the immediate parent has actually explained why Windows 7 wouldn't make (a non-biased) you love PCs. That's an open invitation, because I'd love to hear the answer.

Your choice A should really be written as, "Give those moneys to any company or rich corp," as this is what would happen with publishing. IANAL, but wouldn't publishing establish prior art, which would mean anyone can profit, not just rich companies that might profit by patenting ideas that are neither published nor previously patented because it was too much trouble?

In this case, if the submitter didn't want to go through the hassle and risk of dealing with lawyers when it comes to patenting, he would at least be ensuring that no "rich corp" seizes on the idea with their team of patent trolls (lawyers) and proceeds to profit from the monopoly that goes along with it.

So the formation of the Higgs comes back from the future to stop its own creation...

If only the destruction of these physicist's careers could have come back from the future and saved themselves from it.

Well, you're definitely not a programmer are you?

"bridge must withstand x pounds and last y years" is a pretty straightforward requirement for a bridge. "Don't go bang and burn down a house" is similarly so for a gadget. Software, however has a multitude of requirements -- and of different kinds, be it speed, usability, security, interoperability, and on and on. And that's not even to mention that software is usually expected to do a number of actual tasks for the user. In the end, an OS has likely millions of requirements and in the case of this article, one of them is, "don't delete the administrator's data when a crash happens while logged into the guest account." Yep, this is a horrible, awful bug of the worst degree, but hey, it's not like the fanbois won't buy macs because of it. Not quite the same as a life and death issue, especially since you can back up data, but not your car once its gone over the edge.

But, back to the bridge for a second: most poorly designed roads and bridges are torn down before they fall on their own, and well after they're built. The individual engineers generally get off scot free for doing bad work that only comes to light years after it was built.

A simple and straightforward rebuttal:
a) "validate the activation online, years before it can even be practically implemented" -- exactly why it is an obvious application. He patented something because the technology was coming around -- the novel aspect was the technology, not the straightforward application of it to replace older mail/phone in technology.

b) have a look around at other posts here: locking to the hardware platform was nothing new.

You, and others are trying to argue that theorists who put an old idea with new technology together, are creating something novel and non-obvious. I'll disagree wholeheartedly, and say there was nothing that wasn't obvious about this patent. Regardless of the most thought-out timeline you can put forward, the technology behind the patent came with time and technology, not a novel idea.

It is a big deal (300Million+), and is not fair to everyone (you, me, and all software buyers) who needs to deal with a greedy person that knows how to work the system.

I mean, really! How do you possibly consider replacing "registration via phone/mail" with "registration online" an "invention"? With a username referring to the 80's, you should know that there is nothing new with this patent.

So what?

A new technology invented by the sum of many people's efforts comes to town (the Internet), and thus the next 'obvious' step was to apply this technology to an older method for registering software. To me, this defines the worst of the patent trolls -- they take something that exists and use other's innovations to put 1+1 together and voila! a patent.

Given that this same kind of patent trolling is/will be affecting many slashdotters, shouldn't we suck it up and congratulate MS on this one? If it manages to serve as a precedence to future similar judgments, they might even deserve a "thanks".