In my experience, their business products are well-designed (in the sense of being robust and convenient to work with) and moderately reliable, certainly more so overall than any of the smaller, generic manufacturers we've tried over the years. We have had some bad batches from Dell. But I'm not sure how much competition they've got; HP is the only one I can think of at the moment, and I don't think they can offer us comparable pricing. But I don't work in purchasing so I'm not really up to date with this stuff.

Note also that the product in question is one sold almost exclusively to, you guessed it, large companies. So I guess it was impossible for anyone to order this by mistake, so there's no problem, right?

Did it need to be? Why would you check the box if you don't know what Firefox is? Is there any evidence at all that *anyone* ordered this by mistake?

> "Accidents" don't happen in large tech companies.

Large tech companies don't make mistakes? Ever?

... since when?

I don't think the reporter was at all confused, just looking for a story. YMMV.

You seem to be imaging that someone at Dell said to themselves "how can we trick people into giving us extra money". It's much more likely that some important client phoned up and asked Dell, "Please put Firefox on the computers we're about to buy from you." From what I've gathered of Dell's procedures - and I'm not dealing with them directly here, so I could be wrong, but FWIW - they can't sell you a special option without putting it into their purchasing system first. From there it could easily wind up on the web site, either accidentally or just because someone thought to themselves, "Well, this client wanted it, maybe other clients will too." That's probably why it was only on this one model. That was the one the original client was buying.

That's not distribution! By that definition, every time you moved house, you'd be "distributing" all of the software installed on your computer.

The TOS don't actually say that. They talk about "distribution" but it isn't at all clear that installing software is the same thing as distributing it. No, let me put that another way: installing software is *not* the same thing as distributing it. If the law doesn't recognize the difference, it should.

Pardon? Dell is installing Firefox on a customer's machine before shipping it to them. How is that any different from my installing it on a customer's machine *after* it's shipped to them? What if the customer ships their machine to me, I install Firefox, and then ship it back?

This clause is pretty bizarre, though: "As a civil ceremony is non religious in all aspects, all readings and music must be of a secular nature."

So ... you've either got a choice of an all-out religious marriage, with a celebrant belonging to a recognized religion, or a marriage with no religious elements whatsoever, not even a favorite hymn? Does "here comes the bride" count as religious music? :-)

The fact that the location of the civil marriage has to be approved by the local council is also a bit dodgy, IMO. Are chapels routinely approved for civil ceremonies?

Which is fine for an embedded system, but not for a general-purpose computer.

For those not interested in the fine detail, there's a very simple explanation as to why there isn't any real paradox involved.

Let's start with a quote from the article (looks like the paper is a bit more subtle, but the upshot is the same): "Now imagine how things look from a "moving frame of reference" in which the charge and magnet both glide by at a steady speed. Thanks to the weird effects of relativity, the magnet appears to have more positive charge on one side and more negative charge on the other."

Now, it's true that there's an electric field, and for many purposes it is convenient to imagine that this is due to charges on either side of the magnet. But these charges are fictitious. They aren't really there, as can be easily shown by observing that charge is a scalar, and hence the charge distribution in the magnet cannot be dependent on the frame of reference. Since they aren't there, it's hardly surprising that the external electric field doesn't apply a force to them.

So, basically, a fiction that happens to be convenient in electric engineering is incompatible with relativity; or, if you prefer, in order to make fictitious charges compatible with relativity you also have to have fictitious angular momentum. I'm not sure whether this is a big deal for electrical engineering or not but it certainly isn't any sort of deal as far as fundamental physics is concerned.

Has anybody seen confirmation that Samsung will be repairing affected user's machines under warranty? Definitely a design fault, it should be impossible for software to brick hardware.

Indeed, Amazon should be able to use statistical methods to work out, within some reasonable margin of error, just what percentage of people did come back and which went to buy elsewhere. It would be interesting to see that figure, though I don't suppose they'll release it.

Isn't that kind of the point? I'm not familiar with the incident you're referring to, so perhaps I've misunderstood you, but it seems to me that it is the "permission culture" that made those contributors feel that they were being exploited. If public domain or BSD-like licensing was the default approach, and considered normal, the average programmer would expect that others, including commercial entities, might use his or her work; it wouldn't have come as a nasty surprise.

IMO, this would be a good thing. GPL and similar licenses makes it necessary for work to be repeated. Society as a whole benefits when work does not need to be repeated, because the engineers can instead do something productive.

I'm thinking some of these factors (particularly the shortage in experience) may be specific to the US? I don't think our roundabouts typically take up much more space than lit intersections, although this may be because only the busiest, most important intersections are lit. We have more roundabouts than traffic lights, so I assumed the former were cheaper, but I don't really know. I'll see if the city council can tell me. :-)