For starters: This is not a clever approach to deal with the European commision. Oracle could sell MySQL and there would be no problem at all. But no, ol' Larry decided to get confrontational.

Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.

Thanks for trying, but no cigar for you senator dudes.

That is true and pretty much proven. The lack of natural light in winter can contribute to deficiencies of serotonine. The higher up North you go, the worse it gets (at least for the Northern hemisphere).

You can try light therapy, which I did with good success. It takes half an hour a day and Philips, probably among others, sell special lamps to do just that (search for "Philips Energy Light").

There's an important disclaimer to make, when you suffer from depression (seasonal or otherwise). Get professional help. Just because a dude on the internet claims that light therapy does it for him, this may not be the case for you. Depression is a very serious illness that can kill you.

No question. However, changing the schema became pretty straight forward with the introduction of relational databases.

I'm not claiming that alternative storage and rerieval technologies don't have a place (see Googles Map Reduce), but what I read from proponents of such schemes usually indicates that a lot of them don't really have a clue what they're talking about.

Alas, NoSQL certainly sounds like a cool, new buzzword

Thank you very much for this comment, you put it far more eloquently then my venting, I just wanted to grace this thread with. The real kicker though is

This statement is just so full of shit. And the real larff riot, for me at least, is when people or shops employing MySQL (for heavens sake!) make such statements.

Ej, folks: Rigid schema design is an asset, not a liability!

My 9300 (Symbian under S80, sadly discarded) has another SMS killer feature: You can schedule SMSes and I haven't seen that anywhere else.

This phone crippling crap is performed by US carriers mostly in order to maximize their profits and there are no technical reasons whatsoever to restrict any capabilities of a certified GSM phone.

Like it or not: A phone, which is crippled by design, like the iPhone, is defective by design.

It's sure better then handing the key to our nutrition to the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta, which is the primary reason I'm rather violently opposed to genetically engineered food.

Monsantos new, improved image campaign (feed the world with less resources and irrigation lie) makes me really want to barf, when you consider that 85% of the crop they sell is enginnered so that they can tolerate more pesticides (conveniently also sold by Monsanto) thus poisoning our environment even more.

You don't necessarily have to be a lefty weirdo or a fanatical greeny to deplore the tactics of those truly evil corporations.

(since I have Kharma to blow, what the heck)

And then maybe add some gushing comments on sites like this along the lines:

When my 19 year old Apple IIC broke they didn't only fix it for free, but had it personally delivered by Megan Fox, who supplied me with a blowjob.

And it doesn't really matter if it's the FT. The Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal, for example, is pretty much a congregation of neocon rightwing wackos.

Ah, a technical wizzard. I can tell by this really sharp analysis.

But then please explain why my Symbian based Nokia 9300 allows to install whatever the fark I wish, multitasks 3rd party apps just fine, requires a reboot maybe twice a year and lives on a (n exchangable) battery load for about a week?

Sheesh! Fanbois...

Where exactly did he say that?

You sir, are a contender for the bad strawman of the day award.

I'm not claiming that all Americans are delusional. Let's just say that a few main protagonists of the FGOP and (Former Grand Ol' Party) definitely show signs of delusion. Just think of the ex "we don't torture" veep (reminds me more and more of an ugly version of the ex-Iraqi information minister), who suddenly came crawling out of the bunker, which he never left during his presidency. Or the curerent ideological leaders of the FGOP. Here we have Mr. Limbaugh, a thrithe divorced drug addict and Miss Coulter, an anorexic bimbo with nothing really to say, which she compensates by screeching. Oh, and let's not forget "hockey mom goes clothes shopping for 150k" Governor Palin. I would call those folks pretty delusional (let alone hypocritical).

I don't disagree with your assessment about WW2, btw, just wanted to point out why it may have been a tad harder to run over the Brits.

Uhh, I live in one of France's neighbouring countries and have to say that I rather have a bunch of cheese eating (especially since they have excellent cheese, but I digress) surrender monkeys then a congregation of war mongering torturers with dellusional tendencies as neighbors.

But your mileage may vary, of course.

So Valve Software has an absolute monoloy on all computer games in the entire universe?

Dude, look up Strawman before spouting rubbish in public.

From an audiophiles perspective you may be right. Nevertheles I'm pretty happy with the Bose in-ear headphones. While not cheap they are reasonably priced at 100EUR and the sound is not comparable with those cheapo 29cent buds that come with an iPod and which, to my amazement, so few people are actually replacing.