>Dude, necrophilia is wrong.

Tell that to the windows users.

>Why do entertainment providers think that huge budgets are going to impress us? Or is it, as I suppose, a matter of them looking to excuse their having to keep raising prices and using draconian copyright protection measures?

Sitting on your throne of 'good taste' most be lonely when the rest of the world is busy going to the huge budget films you don't seem to like.

US all time box office hits:

1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824
2. The Dark Knight (2008) $533,316,061
3. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665
4. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036
5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459
6. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) $423,032,628
8. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375
9. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Only big budget movies in the top 100 and absolutely no 'indie' films. You were saying?

As always when discussing patents most people get one small vital detail wrong. It is not the fluffy stuff in the patent abstract that is patented, it is the things enumerated in the claims that specify the patent. For example, in this case the claims say that the patent is for a system where you view two pictures of a person where they have changed one single thing and you then vote for the best picture. So any existing system which instead uses one picture is NOT prior art. Neither is any system with two pictures where two items of clothes changed prior art. A system with two pictures of a person with a single thing changed between the pictures but where you give a rating for the pictures is not prior art.

Please, please remember this so we will not have to endure any more stories about patents with prior art. Yes the patents are often trivial and should absolutely not be approved but they often don't have prior art since the claims normally are very specific.

>UNIX isn't exactly an elixir from the Gods

I absolutely beg to differ. Although the general unix design isn't bleeding edge in any form it is a very good design that has survived for forty years and is still going strong. That IS a mark of excellence. I say Unix, C, emacs and latex has the same qualities together with ethernet and tcp/ip which are the all time greats in computing. Any good programmer can design something that works now. It takes a really great programmer to design something that can work for FOUR DECADES.

We stand on the shoulders of giants and we owe it to them to preserve our common first footsteps in the sand.

This just in. Another pointless application for cellphones and a university professors clueless search for grant money.

Read my lips. Just because something is technologically possible doesn't mean anyone is interested in it.

Please. Stop.

Gosh yes I would like my pilot to be a handsome, square jawed silverback with war medals all over his broad manly chest but in the end it turns out that he/she is a normal human being with all these god damn bugs that is inherant in that design. Reminds me of the Aeroflot Flight 593 where the pilot thought it was a good idea to let a kid sit at the controls, and he managed to disable parts of the autopilot. All aboard died.

Then again people are also designing the software to control the planes... So damn if this once again is a problem that isn't just black and white and has an easy solution.

Cue the 'Oh the poor poor children will cry themselves to sleep if we actually expect something more than attendance in school.' estrogen-high soccer moms.

The Jobs presentation back in 2007 was of course utter PR bullshit, but that is as expected. The article pointed to here was sad oh-isn't-Steve-cute wanking. The Zrop submission was the most pitiful piece of steaming manure ever, I mean 'the iPhone will change the world'... And that Taco guy is apparently also buying into the hype with his 'super real world pointer' fawning.

I feel it's like kicking on a chromosome-impaired kid lying on the ground looking for his coke-bottle glasses to comment on slashdots inability to write a good article. Especially when the overpriced fruit is concerned. So I wont. Seriously.

Also interesting to compare bus versus car. Figure 3 in the report shows, for example, that a normal gasoline car with five people is better in most respects, for energy consumption and emissions, than a bus filled to about 75%. Only when a bus is 100% full does it get better numbers than a full car, and then only by a small margin.

But of course that doesn't matter for the environmental fundamentalist filling my town with those damn buses. Never mind that here the buses are mostly full of students who would walk or ride a bicycle around this small 100K town if there were no buses.

No, once they are over 30 something clicks and they become more interested in preserving their own wealth than in idealism, so they become conservatives.

Or they just grow up and realize that idealism is just what it is, fantasies for those that doesn't actually have to work for a living.

In short: there's *nothing wrong with using resources at your disposal*.

Of course not, as long as you are sure that everyone during the lifespan of the software uses a machine which is as fast or faster than yours, and that they are running it on a machine with the same or less load than you are, and you are sure that any future expansions to the software or the evironment in which the software runs will not make it slower because you were lazy in the beginning and made it 'just good enough'.

A good programmer makes no such assumptions.

Interesting how often the morals of single persons doesn't apply anymore when said persons work together in a company. If you are given a gift, or borrow something from a friend, don't you give something back in some form? You don't have to but you do it. Then it should be the same thing for a company. Amazingly simple.
But then again, If you don't have any moral problems with illegally downloading movies, music and games then you will probably apply the same (lack of) morals to this situation.
And working in a company that benefits greatly from open source, my morals demand that we pay back, and we do. Both with money and code. Anything else would be really uncomfortable for me.

I don't know if they changed computing in general but by God my life would be different, and worse, if it wasn't for gcc, perl, emacs and X (as in X11). I have been happily coding for a couple of decades with those and will probably be using them for a couple more.

Still got an Atari Pong game that our family got for christmas 1975, and a ti57 and a ti59 calculator from around 1977. And I had a pdp-11/23 cirka 1979 in my dorm room a decade ago. And I generally don't even like old stuff. Go figure.