And by extension, every government of each country in which they operate.

It's entirely disingenuous to just look at the exchange rate and figure we're paid twice what the US is. I bet I can afford less with my $37,000 a year than an American could buy with his $18,000.

Responsibility for backups should be handled by the Department of Redundancy Department.

Because vendor support on their forums amounts to "if you're getting curling, your platform isn't leveled correctly". There are various warranty-voiding mods people have made to the Up Mini to make it a passable machine, such as glass build plates, and variable resistors introduced on the thermal sensors so you can TRICK it into going to the temperature you actually want. It seemed like too much work to put into a printer billed as the ultimate solution for someone who just wants to plug it in and go.

I had the reverse problem. My Up Mini is virtually useless to me. Firstly, I'm not sure if the build plate is heating adequately, and I can't change that temperature. Secondly, I can't print in PLA to combat curling, since the PLA I can buy just burns in the nozzle and clogs it (and you can't adjust the extruder temperature, either. It has an ABS mode, calibrated for THEIR ABS, and a PLA mode, calibrated for THEIR PLA, which was not available. Both about 30 C higher than the competitors' filament). Thirdly, that damned nine point software levelling system is a pain, and if you get it slightly wrong, you lose your levelling the next time you go to tweak it. Some of my problems with curling and adhesion I can put down to humidity, because I see a lot of steam coming from my Up Mini, a puff of it every couple of seconds. I do live in the tropics, and have no control over the humidity in my house, so I'm resigned to that.

My Replicator 2, on the other hand, although I've only had it a week, I am amazed with it. Even on low quality, it outdoes the best I ever got out of my Up Mini in both speed and overall print quality. I noticed my platform wasn't quite level while I was printing (the raft was getting a little scuffed as the nozzle ran over it), so I tweaked the levelling knobs on the fly (probably shouldn't have, but it worked), twiddled the knobs at each level by feel until the faint tak-tak-tak of the extruder hitting plastic stopped, and the dragon came out fine at 0.2mm layer height. On the Up Mini, every time I screwed up the levelling, that involved cancelling the print, throwing out the wasted plastic, redoing the levelling from scratch, starting it again, and hoping the print sticks and doesn't curl this time. If I had the nozzle close enough to really get the plastic into the perfboard, it would scratch the previous layers on the next layer. If I had it at the right level, there was never enough adhesion on the platform. I just didn't have the patience for it.

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.