Simple solution... Apple gets rights to motorola patents, Googorola gets all its partners and android device manufacturers rights to whatever patents apple thinks they are infringing on and keep suing everyone for. Everybody pays less court and licensing costs, scumbag lawyers lose their biggest clients, consumers get the devices they want, everybody wins.

Now maybe my Molycorp stock will go back up! :D

Additionally... getting him something older and smaller and weaker would, in the future, provide you a lot of opportunity to teach him about building the thing. Upgrading components, and such.

I think what youre looking for is something that has a simple enough interface for him to just putz around and play, but that has the underlying system capable of supporting a great deal of tinkering when the time comes. That said, I would avoid Windows. Although it is great for the average users that want to just get stuff done and dont care to tinker, and although it DOES actually provide a pretty decent amount of guts to play with, it has a tendency to dumb people down in the end. I think what you might be looking for, which I'm sure somebody mentioned, is something like Ubuntu. Simple easy to use interface for now, with a powerful back end for later, and he will learn a LOT more on this platform than any other. There are a decent amount of games and such for linux, and with a little help from daddy and WINE most windows games can be played as well. Not to mention that it is free. The hardware that you put this on is more or less irrelevant at this point, as most games for younger kids are not too intense, later down the line if he gets more into more complex gaming you can upgrade. If I could go back to when my son was that age, I would have done the same thing.

I would say, "hell no you're not putting that shit in my drink!" and chug it really quick!

They should put this on kick starter or something? I for one would be more than willing to donate to a US based facility. Granted its would prob only provide a small portion of their funding but would at least show the government that the people are more interested in furthering our understanding of science than we are in killing terrorists and spying on our own citizens. Just sayin.

Same here. build a 1055T rig with 16gb of ram, on a vertex 3 SSD for under $1000 bucks about a year ago, with a Radeon 7950 it plows through every single game I have thrown at it in pretty much max resolution with all the goodies turned on. I have yet to see a reason to "upgrade" to an i7 yet. And probably wont even bother until this thing dies.

This doesn't really sound like a good thing. I understand the desire to want to regulate unproven stem cell therapies. However, if history has shown us anything it is not regulation that they seek, but to stifle the industry entirely. Likely so the large pharma stock holders can hold on to their dividends. Maybe I am understanding this wrong? Anybody with more understanding of the matter, feel free to enlighten me.

Agreed. 2012 total military spending: $1.030–$1.415 trillion! Just a small fraction of that reallocated to research for something that would benefit all of humanity would make a HUGE difference. Hell while they're at it they should toss a couple billion towards this countries waning educational system.

Totally off topic, but I was just reading that article about Michael Crichton... I found it strangely amusing that Crowley found it "worse" that he might be branded as a pharma profiteer, rather than a child rapist. O_o

So how do they expect people to find the programs they want to pin to the task bar in the first place? Browse through C:\Program Files??

All of those things are at features or at least possible to do in windows 7 currently, so why upgrade? I would like to see REAL reasons! New file system? Better security model? Whatever. Otherwise its completely pointless. Regarding the simple UI model, well obviously that's a model of perspective. It wouldn't be difficult to develop an app that would look exactly the same on any existing system. In my opinion, its the Metro UI not the OS itself that is going to prevent enterprises from adopting w8. Sure it makes sense with a touch screen but the fact of the matter is, it is not efficient with a mouse and keyboard, even the desktop view is crippled. Like the author said, give the user the choice, and stop trying to force this metro UI garbage down every bodies throat. UI design is NOT a once size fits all endeavor!

I like how everybody likes to blame their problems on "weak design" on the part of the developers. That may very well be true, but who is to say what is weak design and what isn't? As a developer, I often find that when beginning a project that has some characteristics that I have never worked with before, that it is almost impossible to find solid established information as to what actually is "strong design." And by that I mean good patterns and practices for a specific applications that really aren't very common. Sure there are a few good basic/general practices to adhere to, but for the most part its each coder for their own. So I wonder, what the hell the FDA things they are going to contribute to a world of code that they likely cant even comprehend? You can sit on the outside and say something like; I require 6 9's of up time, and such and such SLA, and this square brick fits into this hole; but what is done to make that happen will vary infinitely behind the scenes.

If they really want to improve the stability and reliability of the code that supports these systems the need to open up the architecture to the entire community instead of keeping everything closed off for patent reasons or whatever. Obviously the companies that make this stuff are more concerned about their profit margin than they are about the safety of the patients that their equipment is treating. That's my opinion on the matter at least.

Religion is belief,and as such nothing more than the opinion of the believer, and we all know what they say about opinions. You cannot legislate, dictate or control the moral compass of mankind. They can sit around and talk about it all day, but they will never get any further than where they started. As the previous poster mentioned however, I do find it rather ironic that the convention was sponsored by a software company, clearly in an attempt to promote their product. I guess money is a bigger motivator than morality.