Open data, open API. What more do you want?

1. R is free (as in beer and as in speech).
2. R is far more extensible than SAS or SPSS. When what you're modelling doesn't fit in with the predefined options, you can deal with that by extending R in whatever way you wish.
Those are the major advantages of R for statisticians.

I don't think that's what the GP was referring to necessarily. Certainly good ideas should never be kicked to the curb, but on the other hand, if the main team doesn't have the time or resources to work on those good ideas, and it's not felt that the potential new contributor will fit within the team, then kicking to the curb may be appropriate. Being able to work with the rest of the developers on the team is a key part of any contributor that has commit privs.

Some folk don't necessarily fit that mold. In the case of a large refactor project, forking may well be the better way to go. I'm sure if the fork is successful then the changes will be considered by the parent project. If not, they definitely have a problem.

Bullshit. I do a great deal of C/C++, R, C# development on XP and very, very rarely need to run anything as administrator. I can't even remember the last time I had to runas Admin other than installing software.

So step up instead of whining about it. What is stopping you? I'm sure they'd welcome the assistance. Instead you're just gonna whine about it though, right?

The reason is that the 80Hz 12dB/octave rolloff is additive with the 12dB/octave rolloff at the same frequency that is sent to the mains with any THX certified receiver. This matches the 24dB/octave lowpass sent to the sub. Thus, you get seamless sound. If you don't have a sub, make sure you don't have the highpass enabled on the receiver. Low bass requires the movement of lots of air, ported or not. A small-ish sub (eg 400mm cube) can easily push much, much more air than most floorstanders, simply as the drivers used can pump much more air linearly (large Xmax) and because the power fed to the sub is much, much higher.

Who says you have to use all the pieces? You'd also need include all the other sizes that one could produce with few pieces (and then the selection of that subset of pieces...

Given that the mother project (XBMC) also switched to DirectX on win32 this is no surprise. It makes sense too - on Windows, you get much easier hardware acceleration of videos if you're using DirectX (i.e. you can get a DirectX surface out easier) You also tend to get better hardware support. It appears the Boxee gues worked with the XBMC team on this - kudos. Let's hope the boxee box is open enough to get XBMC on there.

Just use XBMC - plays back from multi-RARs or multi-ZIPs, assuming they're stored. Even if they're compressed (which would be silly) it'll uncompress and play 'em for ya. Any format that VLC does, it'll do (i.e. it uses FFMpeg as well). Why multi-part rars? Obvious reason is distribution is easier through multiple channels, and it contains it's own checksum. A better reason is: Why not?

Ignoring the fact that this "news" is just blog-generated rubbish, personally I'd be quite happy to pay for a streaming service, under the assumption that we had the connection speeds to give suitable content. 720p h264 at 6Mbit (maybe 5Mbit if they really have to stretch it) with AC3 sound, and an open protocol, and that'll be just fine. You need a pretty damn good connection to ensure you get it without problems. The current stuff they have is ridiculously rubbish quality in comparison. Given that the net connections aren't at that level yet, and likely won't be for a while, I'd also be quite happy with downloads - 6Mbit for 720p or 12Mbit for 1080p. Allow me to download in an open container (mkv is fine) and I'll be quite happy to pay the current going rate for Bluray pricing per season (even without all the extras), for the convenience of not having to rip it myself.

Actually, I'd wager _more_ than half of the population fall below the mean intelligence level. Intelligence certainly appears to be skewed to the right after all.

The Boxee client for the most part is opensource (being based on the GPL'd XBMC http://xbmc.org/, it has to be). However, the part of Boxee that handles Hulu, Netflix and the like is NOT open source. Instead, the Boxee client loads a proprietary, closed-source executable that then loads the Firefox flash or silverlight plugins. Encourage Boxee to open things up - it's clear that they're not gaining anything by having this stuff closed off.