figures they would come up with such a horribly flawed plan. i remmeber the chief geo at a place i worked trying to explain to me how geologists weren't trained to think in uni, and how that's a good thing...

If you're handy with a soldering iron the you should build this nifty Seismic Reflector. From the website...

This project has two strands, a software and a hardware component. The aim is to build a device which responds to earthquakes being reported in near-real time via the USGS RSS feeds. The device responds by illustrating the magnitude of the reported earthquake via two fairly chunky vibration motors of the kind used in video game controllers. The device is connected to a PC via a virtual com port over USB (thanks to an on board Arduino). On the PC, an application sits there checking the RSS feed periodically and when a new event it posted to the RSS feed, the desktop app parses the data out of it and presents the magnitude of the quake to the Arduino which interpreters this as rate at which to activate the vibration motors.

Seriously. This is the sort of thing twitter is really good at.

It's not knowing what Britney is eating for breakfast. Or how much a SKANK Malinda next door is. Or how much a bastard Billy is, oh but he's such a hunk. Or what color Aston K's turds are.

Thank goodness twitter popularity is dying.

2^84 atoms? That's only 32 moles! Did you mean 10^84 atoms?

Ah. I work for a shop with 25-30 people, so our independent contractors really are independent.

Why would they promote a device with a receiver in it that provides a service they may sell

Oh the US providers would LOVE it provided that they could lock it out and charge extra to use it.

Are you ok with having a We can revoke this license at any time for any or no reason clause like Steam has?

...because I prefer the convenience of electronic purchasing (vs. going to the store or ordering on line and waiting for delivery) and reading (my books are on my iPhone and always with me). I have never pirated a book either electronically or with a copy machine. If authors wish to sell to me they had better have their books in electronic format. I suspect I am not alone.

They are indeed a monopoly and stiffle business. Sure they create jobs but it takes fewer people to write one zip program for Windows that goes and kills off numerous companies and jobs. Their built-in firewall, virus protection and media player have and or will do the same.

The fact they were initially going to stop with IE6 on XP just goes to show what state they put browser software in. They didn't feel the need to compete any longer.

They do generate a lot of money for the local economy and create jobs but they also crush companies making people jobless and continue to send jobs over seas and threaten to send more over there if they're made to pay tax they've been avoiding.

If they get their way and kill of Java then it will only get worse.

WTF? So creating a platform in the top 5 of the most popular development platforms (Java, C/C++ and PHP being the only that compete with .NET's popularity) is somehow a failure?