The "printer thing" is actually a red herring. The act that started RMS on his path was a lot simpler - all his coworkers at the MIT AI lab left. Stallman had finally found a place where he was comfortable, then thay all left to try and make a little money. RMS threw a hissy fit and set about taking all their original ideas and releasing them as free software. His stated goal was to drive them out of business - either to punish them for leaving or maybe to force them back to the lab. The printer story developed later, in an effort to make it seem not nearly so petty.

You're only a sceptic if you can be convinced (by reasonable evidence) that the original claim is true. Otherwise, you're a denier, and discussing the issue with you is a waste of everyone's time. There are some classic signs that indicate you are a denier, not merely a skeptic. A general pattern is someone from completely outside the field making extraordinary claims that everyone else is doing it wrong. There's usually a conspiracy from the "experts" to shut them out. It's a constantly evolving theory, where the conclusions never change, but the reasoning always does. And, of course, there's usually a lot of funding from an organization with a vested interest in opposing the the original science. Watt is really no different from the Intellegent Design folks or Jenny Macarthy and the vaccine-autism folks, and he's only a short step from the Time-cube guy.

WoW was never a "hard" game. It took over the market because it was the easy, casual-friendly alternative. That's always been Blizzard's mo - take a solid concept, polish out all the pain points and then take over a market. They make good products, but "genuinely hard" almost never applies.

Actually, the NLRB was very specific. The entire point of the meme was to inform companies that their overly broad scial media policies would make a reasonable person believe they could not discuss their salary or working conditions. That's specifically against the law - a law he repeatedly sites in the memo. The easy way around the issue is to include repeated disclaimers that no part of this policy will in any way restrict the employee's rights to discuss their salary or work conditions. But they don't want to point out those rights, for fear their employees would use them. So they whine that the NLRB didn't give them a template for exactly how far they can push the rule and obscure their employee's legal rights.

Because there were several other paths they could have chosen to work with secure boot, but this was the most efficient? Because Microsoft is making a whole $99 to handle verification and signing for them? Seriously, this is sad. Microsoft will sign a boot loader for them for basically no money. This isn't a "Microsoft tax" situation - Microsoft will undoubtedly lose money on the arrangement, even if it's $99 every time Red Hat wants to update their "pre-grub" bootloader, and not the one-time registration fee the article implies that it is.

Actually, she was quite the success. While we're not building ships exactly like her, radar stealth has been a significant concern of the Navy, and current ships are designed to minimize their radar cross section. Reduced crew manning has also been a really big push, as had improved roll stability. About the only major design feature not in use is the catamaran hull. and really, figuring out something is a bad idea is still a successful experiment.

It's a 30 year old ship that was never really designed for extended operations. It has a max crew of 12, and they're roughing it. It's slow, with no weapons. Please describe exactly how you think this ship would be useful to the border patrol. Not "worth the cost to maintain an old, one-of-a-kind vessel", just useful.

It wasn't developed in competition with anything. It wasn't a warship, or really a working ship at all. It was a test platform for a bunch of different technologies. And, since the technologies being tested have since been incorporated into actual navy ships, I'd say it was a successful test ship. Calling it a failure is nearly as stupid as calling the Norton Sound a failure. After all, they didn't build any more of her, either.

The reason we didn't send a manned mission back is that there's really no point - a realization they came to on the first trip. The people in the sub can't directly interact with the environment in any way. They have to look at the world through cameras, and all work is carried out by robotic arms. Essentially, all you've done is take the control room for a remote vehicle and send it down with the robot. It's a lot of engineering work and no small danger for basically zero gain.

Why am I not suprised that you managed not to mention the actual sponsor, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Rep Maloney is the other sponsor, but the bill was introduced by Rep. Issa. For reference, this is Rep. Issa's third bite at this particular apple - he was a cosponser on a similar bill in 2008 and 2009. Rep Maloney was also a cosponser in 2009.

This is all much ado about nothing. There are no real changes to current law here - the computer professional exemption has been a part of the FLSA for years at least - probably decades. See the Department of Labor fact sheet - http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17e_computer.htm The proposed amendment has 2 purposes. 1) It provides a more detailed definition of computer professional. 2) It cleans up the weekly salary requirement by linking it to the standard salary requirements, instead of existing seperately. The hourly number is the same in both versions. So there's essentially nothing new here. This is a cleanup/clarification of existing law, with almost nonexistant changes.

The top 10% of the population has more than 70% of the wealth in the country. The top 1% has almost 40% of the wealth. The bottom 40% has .2% of the wealth. Like it or not, the rich are going to get soaked to pay the debt, because over the last 30 years they took most of the money from the rest of us.

And you are a perfect example of the problem. He didn't "just" release his birth certificate. He released it in June 2008. The State of Hawaii, ini the person of Dr. Fukino, director of the Department of Health, personally verified the certificate was on file and stated so on the record in 2008. If you had done even the most cursory of checks, you'd have known all this. But you found a story that fed your preconceptions, and that was enough for you. And that's the problem, in a nutshell.

Um, shells on a ballistic arc from over the horizon are irrelevant to naval battles. Simply put, when both platforms are constantly moving, it's practically impossible for ships to hit each other at range. The only way to achieve hits are to seperately disable the other ship's propulsion and steering, or get extremely close (i.e. inside LoS). You simply can't hit a ship from over the horizon with a ballistic projectile.

There was a day-long gun duel at range in WW2 where neither side managed a hit. There's a reason all the gun ships went away, and we depend on planes and missiles now. Guns simply don't work anymore.

Actually, there's a much bigger problem with releasing real data. It tells your opponents what data you collect, and therefore what data you miss. That makes it easier to spoof or avoid detection. The data isn't classified because we want to hide the position of enemy ships, it's classified becasue we don't want to reveal the exact capibilities of the system.