could we ever have really conceived that this would have been one of the unintended consequences of an implementation of computer science? I know it's somewhat facile, but really, expressing oneself in a virtual digital media would result in persecution and possible incarceration? Is there a way to to fix this? Or is this kind of thing just an inevitable consequence of technology allowing us to express ourselves such that a state can exploit and use that freedom of expression against us? How many degrees of separation is it, I wonder, from Kevin Bacon, to an extended jail term in Thailand?

Who needs another operating system? RIM had a great run. Even if QNX is the best OS ever (until the next best OS ever), it doesn't change the fact that RIM's infrastructure is proven-ably unscalable and has not evolved. It's too bad, but that's the reality. Who knows what the the next quarter will bring, but I bet that the playbook will be resigned to the dust bin of technology. There is no way, no way, that RIM can supplant the iPad or the Android tablets.

You will be missed amongst the technocrati. You leave an indelible mark upon the technical and cultural landscape, one that the rest of us no doubt will take for granted.

There are serious licensing issues involved with using cygwin - anything that links to the cygwin1.dll is tainted by the GPL and it's source must be released. You can by a license from RedHat, but it is very expensive. MKS had a competitive product that didn't have the licensing issue (although you had to buy runtimes for each machine or machine instance you wanted to run you app on. Will cygwin even work under Windows 8?

You saw every keystroke that other people were typing in real time. I think there are real advantages, because you anticipate what someone is abou to type and interrupt them in realtime. I think that can save time in some conversations. However, the typos, and the backspaces did become tedious.

It seems obvious to me, that after many comments, that there is no consensus to this question. The art in deciding what is the best technological solution in terms of streaming video to the living room remains unevolved. Everyone has their opinion. I use a dlink 323 that talks to my xbox 360, but it sucks - requiring time consuming transcoding and the all too familiar experience of a data file that for all intents and purposes should play, simply doesn't. I know in my heart of hearts that there ought to be an inexpensive open hardware solution that can stream content from either an internal or network based source video and dts audio to my TV but it simply doesn't today. At least there doesn't seem be to a definitive, universally accepted as the best way to do this, at least at cost of less than $400. I think this community can do better. We should be able to define a hareware platform / software configuration that is both open and reliable to do this simple task.

I think a better question to have asked would be, have you ever NOT had to insert something into code as a deadline approached, that you knew in your heart of hearts was nothing less than the worst possible hack imaginable.

Don't do it - it rarely works out. Come up with a new business name.

Can we not agree that if a mathematical proof is postulated and proved - that it must be by definition, have always been true? Can we agree that the techniques through which we 'discover' these pre-existing mathematical proofs, are indeed, created by men and women?