I think they should have just listed the plans on Amazon. Almost everyone already knows how to buy stuff from them and their servers would have handled it.

The code red worm was a specific problem with SQL Server and was pretty nasty, but not a reason to cause installers to stop listening on the network altogether by default. I guess in the open source world they just assume your app and database will always be located on the same server. Other vendors like Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, etc know that databases usually get placed on dedicated servers which means the network should work by default.

I guess I just dislike getting application support calls because people couldn't get the app to connect to its back end database automatically. Having to ask them if they made all the cryptic changes to cryptic configuration files they don't understand or should never have had to look at in the first place is a pain in the neck. Things should just work out of the box AND still be safe.

The network connections one has some merit. The normal install of PostgreSQL last time I checked does not enable the TCP listener and you have to edit the conf file to allow network access and the startup scripts to add the comand line option for it.

This is a major pain if you're trying to tell a customer of your application how to do the install. You don't have to do this kind of extra configuration with any other database system just to get your app to connect.

Maybe patent troll is the wrong term. We need to use a word that the government understands. They are patent terrorists! They use the fear of litigation and fines to extort people or companies into wasting their money in lengthy lawsuits or giving up their businesses outright. All to destroy competition, not to foster innovation.

I think we need one simple fix. Patents should not be transferable and if you are not actively creating and selling the item you have a patent for, the patent is cancelled immediately.

Did they fix Vine video playback without us resorting to hacking around in about:config or downgrading our systems to XP? Apparently it worked in v21 and earlier but then they changed something in how they interpreted the media tag or something. Vine's play in all other browsers just fine.

I agree. I don't think that science fiction needs to be about any specific time period or level of technology. It simply needs to provide a "what if" like an alternate type of society or culture and explore it, or how we would interact with it. We might split that into smaller sub-genre's like space, fantasy, super-heroes, etc but it's all still sci-fi in some sense. What if it was 400 years from now? What if the world had magic? What if we just had a global war? What if everyone contracted some rabies like disease? Etc.

Some of the best episodes of Star Trek I've seen had nothing to do with the tech or special effects used but simply how we interact with other societies other cultures, or even ourselves. For example, the TNG episode where everyone dies at 60 years of age voluntarily, or in ST-VOY where the doctor is on a planet for a thousand years (planet time) and watches their people progress from caves to the stars because they saw Voyager in the sky. And to me, B5 was more about how different races and cultures learned about each other and different views on how people should advance (cooperation vs conflict) - not the space battles themselves.

The shows that are just about tech and special effects and don't ask a question might as well just be action flicks.

Last time I tried typing the name for something in the instant search, I started running an uninstall program. Much safer to use the mouse to select.

The U.S. is a small country to fly across. Try flying across Canada! From the edge of Yukon to edge of Newfoundland. About twice the distance, and probably a lot less light to use power due to the higher latitude. This solar plane needs to be tested in all sorts of environments and I'm sure we can provide some. From cold, snowy, rainy, humid, and even hot on some days.

Point your students at VirtualBox's download page and give them a pre-created image for your lab. Let them learn how to setup the software, configure the image, etc. It would be a good lesson for them in visualization and your work would be minimal.

You could pre-setup the security in the image with a generic user, firewall access as needed, maybe a home folder on NFS. If they have problems, they can just start the image over again.

Not exactly. The plates in this case are input to the machine, not the machine itself. The machine is the device that takes the input and produces the output. Different printing processes may use that input in completely different mechanical ways to produce the paper output and those may be patentable.

In a computer's case, they believe the software is the machine because it takes input data and produces some output data that has been processed in some way. It fits their definition of a machine as far as patents go. But this is horrible in the software world because you could then argue that every formula you use in an Excel worksheet is a machine by that definition and that's absurd.

I agree that media might play into our Canadian perceptions of the U.S. in that we have the benefit of getting news from non-US sources. Granted they're mainly Canadian, but they're not so tied to Democrat or Republican parties so they are less biased in either direction and give use fuller coverage.

We can see how people are unaware of facts on either side of debates because the news they watch is biased and never gives opposing view points or opposing facts. We can see how religion is trying to push itself into your government, laws, and education even though your constitution specifically tried to separate it. We see how you screw the poor in your country by denying minimum wages for people who end up having to work 20 hours a day just to survive. And we can see the stupidity of how much money America wastes on things like the military given that no other 15 countries in the world could possibly be a threat! And we see how you're constantly involving yourself in other countries politics in order to push your interests which causes them to dislike you.

And now, your U.S. Senate just passed a bill preventing the signing of a NATO international gun control treaty because it could prevent U.S. citizens from selling weapons to your own enemies! The only other countries that didn't sign were Iran, N Korea, and Syria which makes you just as bad as them. How can we NOT consider that stupid??

I'm not saying we don't have our own issues and have the same problems seeing them in our media, but it's usually internal to our country and doesn't affect the entire world.

I have a Dyson Ball vacuum... Does that count as a sphere? Though, I must admit that if I had any fruit flies in my vacuum, I'd probably throw them out instead of take pictures of them.

Next year, they'll be so panicked they'll just have us all run it at home on our treadmills.

Don't they realize that you could use one of these items to make the other into a big spear?

So, apparently you're allowed to collect and share all this information about your children, but God forbid they collect a single detail about your guns! Or maybe you just need a private marketing company to do it since Congress made laws that prevents the government from doing it themselves.

That said, we tried gun registration in Canada and it failed miserably due to the cost.