other then to protect lucrative package deals and squeeze out every last drop of profit?

Prof. Stephen Pollock considers the question of "what if there is no Higgs boson" in some detail in his course "Particle Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos" ( http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/Course_Detail.aspx?cid=1247 ). Lecture 19 is specifically about the Higgs, but I'd recommend the course in its entirety. It's fascinating stuff. Regarding the question, to keep it short, in his view even if there is no such thing as the Higgs boson, the Standard Model is not in any danger of getting obsolete. Should the Higgs prove non-existing (little side question: how do you prove something doesn't exists?), parts of the model dealing with the Weak Force ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_Force ) might need to be revisited and perhaps expanded upon. However, for the most part there is a huge amount of experimental evidence of its correctness, which has been accumulated in decades long of research.

I don't think that AMD is that big of a motherboard vendor, so such a statement wouldn't make much sense. "Coreboot support for AMD chipsets" would have sounded less confusing to me as well. Anyway, I think this is great news... at least if as a consequence of AMD's support for Coreboot we'd actually starting to see the old BIOS being replaced on large volume mainboards. Btw... The blog creates the impression that AMD is quite committed to Coreboot... Was there any actual contribution from AMD to Coreboot or is this more related to PR and throwing off the competition? Perhaps someone from the Coreboot devs could provide some details? What does AMD's support actually mean?

Please note that this stack is only used on SLE10 nowadays. SLE11 and openSUSE 11+ relies on ZYpp ( http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Libzypp or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zypp ), which is a quite different story.

if "RIAA/MPAA: the Greatest Threat To Tech Innovation" then I'm sure the outdated (broken?) patent system is a close second.

> it uses Samsung's proprietary charging cable and > doesn't have USB or HDMI ports Who's brilliant idea was this? Android is about being open, and they leave out these bits? Besides that, didn't they heard that in the EU we've a standardized charger plug?

I wonder... if the UNIX copyrights are of any good to damage Linux or Open Source, why would have other big companies involved in and benefiting from Linux and Open Source taken any risks by allowing for these assets to end up in unfriendly hands? On the other hand, if the UNIX copyrights can potentially be harmful when misused, what would a.o. IBM and Google have for an apology for letting it happen? This is of course under the assumption that the "certain intellectual property assets" did contain Novell's UNIX related IP...

Very informative and balanced article. Thanks.