No, Joss Whedon is the same as George Lucas: they both work well with supervision. Compare the Firefly comics with the series, so many things are just out of character and wrong in the comics, because Joss was unsupervised.

Compare the old trilogy to the new: When George Lucas was doing the old trilogy, he was a young upstart with a niche artsy film to his name (American Graffiti). He was surrounded by people who weren't afraid to say "No, George, that's a stupid idea". Flash forward to the turn of the century, and you have George Lucas surrounded by sycophants saying "Yes, Mr. Lucas, sir! You're a visionary!"

Joss Whedon's Star Wars would be a bigger disaster than three episodes about Jar Jar.

The solution, of course, will be to buy Macafee's Android security offerings.

ASIC is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The SEC is The Securities and Exchanges Commission.

Unfortunately, this has only agitated people who already were against automated copyright filtering and DRM. It's like telling eskimos snow is cold. No, we'll have to wait until the MTV music awards are knocked offline by copyright bots before anybody who didn't already know about them gets wind of it.

Everything that made the first iPhone look distinctive, like the silver borders, prominent home button, the large screen, and the rounded edges, someone else had done first, in the days before prominent touch screens. All of the stylistic similarities of JUST THE HARDWARE between the original Samsung Galaxy S, and the iPhone 3GS were very common Samsung design decisions prior to the release of the iPhone. Everything that made the Samsung Galaxy look like an iPhone, Samsung did before there was an iPhone. About the only thing Samsung did to make the UI more iPhone-like was put more vibrant colours in the icons. The default Google ones were all washed out blue-grey tones.

If you deny this, you are a moron that lacks basic rational facilities, or perhaps never owned a phone before 2007.

To construct this, I built it the way you would the rules of a game, or the rules text on, say, a Magic: the Gathering card. Sometimes i think game designers should write the law, because their job is to ensure everything interacts predictably.

The way I would have the patent system work, were I in a position to change it, is thus:

A patent application would grant five years of exclusivity prior to implementation. If the company implemented the patented idea before the five years expired, this period would end.

The next phase would be a further five years of market protection. No company would be permitted to sell a product or service using this patent for a further five years from market launch of the patentor's idea, without paying appropriate royalties or licensing fees.

If the first period expires without a marketable product being released, nobody gets the market protection. This cuts down on patent-trolls who just store up patents for later weaponisation, and encourages constant innovation and development. Five years is a huge lead time to have on your competition in the market, huge, and to try and snag this five year lead, developers will always want to be the one to launch the next big thing.

A farmer might protect his cattle herd, doesn't mean he isn't going to eat them.

I think, also, those with very high Karma can sometimes get a story early for free. I've posted on red-header stories, before, and I'm not a subscriber.

If I were in charge of Samsung, I'd have had "supply difficulties" long ago, around about the time of each new lawsuit. It would be hard to prove a deliberate malicious reduction in supply, and furthermore, hard to say if that's in fact, illegal. Nobody is forcing Apple to use parts made by their primary competitor.

Aside from the machines I personally use, that is my work PC running Windows XP, and my two laptops at home running Windows 7 and Mint, each, my Android phone and my Android tablet (Gingerbread and ICS, respectively), I also use a lot of bootable tools at work (I repair computers).

Indeed, when I was selling phones, I found it easier to give customers something close to what they wanted, because there was a lot of variety. Selling computers, I have to think "Well what do you want from me? The ones over here run Windows 7 Home Premium, these ones over here run Pro, both sets are split about 50/50 for mediocre and high power machines, and the only differentiating features are really whether or not it has bluray or an SSD on board!"

Full disclosure, I sell these where I work, but the Toshiba Tecra series ticks all the boxes you mentioned. There is an SSD model, fairly standard GPU, Core i5 processors, and optical drives. Battery life is a bit better, too, being as you're not wasting power spinning metal platters.

Also worth noting, Gundam Wing and Gundam 00 both made it plain how positively evil an unmanned army can be. Gundam Wing with the Mobile Dolls, unmanned mobile suits with one guy at the button, and Gundam 00 with the Automatons, little hyper-aggressive R2D2 like things, loaded up with guns, they seem to have two modes, exterminate, and off. They get dropped on civilian and military targets alike, one guy pushes a button, nobody feels anything when thousands die.

People are fond of the phrase, here "1984 was not an instruction manual", I personally favour saying "The bad guys in Gundam are not a positive role model for governments!"

Thanks for the clarification :) I was just being a smartarse (someone being a smartarse on the internet? NEVER!) Using Greek prefixes would also get tricky when you move outside of the solar system...