The NYT had a pretty good commentary on the topic yesterday. (I know, I know. Gotta log in to see it. Sorry 'bout that.) There were a couple of excerpts that I found really fascinating. For example:

And this one:

That would be kind of tough because (according to the Wiki article the OP linked to) Erector Sets are actually rebadged Meccano sets built in France. :-)

As has been discussed pretty thoroughly at Groklaw, there are ways to overturn a jury verdict. One of the ways is to prove juror misconduct. The question at hand is whether the jury foreman is/was guilty of that or not. When you take all of the evidence into account (including, btw, that there was no such thing as a 10 year limit during the jury selection), I think it's pretty clear that this juror had an axe to grind and failed in his duty.

Don't believe me? How about the official record?

And, don't forget, reducing our dependency on fossil based energy sources to some degree. To me, that factor alone makes some level of subsidy for solar, wind, and water power worth it.

I'm amazed that such a beautiful piece of parody was modded into oblivion.

What eye witnesses? In most cases the only witnesses to a car crash are the participants. Everyone else is long gone by the time the cops show up to take statements.

Personally, I have a lot more faith that an impact analysis than either of the other two options. It's going to have a lot more basis in reality than a magic black box that has gone through 10 years plus of weather extremes with no maintenance check whatsoever or any (notoriously inaccurate) eye witness account.

So let me clarify a bit. My best friend, his wife, his sons are all lifetime members of the NRA. One uncle, two cousins, and I don't know how many neighbors when I was growing up were members. Most of us who weren't members of the NRA were either too cheap or too poor to join. We certainly were fully behind the NRA's agenda. And yet, many of us were and are fully behind the legalization of marijuana.

Another example: Take a look at the two states that have legalized pot first; Washington and Colorado. Both states have concealed carry permits available, which leads me to believe that both states have strong pro gun lobbies. And who leads those lobbies nationwide? Oh, yes, the NRA.

Your thesis just doesn't hold water. THAT's the point I was trying to make.

Well, that's the problem with stereotypes, isn't it? They have such little basis in reality.

While I'm not a member of the NRA, I've been around guns and owned guns all my life. My dad gave me my first shotgun when I was 12. Over the past 40-some years I've managed to collect a couple of pistols, 5 shotguns and 3 rifles without really thinking about it. I think I'm pretty typical of any guy who grew up in a rural area in a country with halfway sane gun laws.

I was also taught that the War on Drugs was a joke. My dad was a member of the Minnesota branch of the National Education Association (teacher's union for those outside the U.S.) and his district's perennial delegate to the annual state convention. He spoke in favor of a resolution backing the legalization of marijuana in the early or mid '70s. (The motion passed, by the way.)

He said then that the war on drugs (which was just heating up at the time) was a waste of resources. He didn't see the point in criminalizing an activity with such a demonstrably small impact on society. Instead, he advocated legalizing it and treating it the same as alcohol or tobacco.

His attitude was a fairly common one then, and I think still is up here in Upper Midwest. We like to party and we like our guns. Those of us who have been raised around guns know the two don't mix. ;-)

There is no doubt that e-readers have made carrying large quantities of documentation around with you much, MUCH easier. What is tougher to do is manage your library. Fortunately, someone has already made tremendous strides to resolve that issue.

calibre provides a great way to organize your library of e-books and online periodicals in conjunction with the tablet or e-reader of your choice. The website has a highlights video which does a good job of covering what calibre is capable of.
At this point, calibre provides automatic download scheduling for almost 1,400 online magazines. More are added by users of calibre all the time. A sampling that might be of interest to academics include "Journal of Hospital Medicine", "Journal of Nephrology", "Microwaves and RF", "Scientific American", etc.

Once you've added a book (or collection of books) to your library, calibre provides plenty of tools to categorize it by subject, author, publisher, and just about anything else you care to name.

So, once you've got your papers and periodicals organized in calibre, pulling them into your e-reader is simply a matter of plugging into a USB port on your desktop or laptop. If you want to grab something when you're away from your desk, there's a Web front end that's pretty serviceable, too.

calibre is licensed under GPLv3 and is supported under MS Windows, OS/X, and Linux. There's even a portable version for loading on a USB stick to make your library truly portable. :-)

BTW, the Grand Tour video was created when the current version of calibre was 0.8.0. Kovid Goyal has been conscientously providing updates every Friday for as long as I've been using his app. The current version is 0.9.8. I think he went from 0.8.0 to 0.8.78 before making the leap to 0.9.0. :-)

As to which e-reader to use? There are a huge number of tablets and dedicated devices out there these days, although even the dedicated ones have all pretty much morphed into tablets. My personal favorite is the Nook Color but I've found that it's underpowered to handle large PDFs with a lot of graphics. However, calibre provides a pretty decent conversion utility for PDF to EPUB. The Nook does a much better job of managing memory for the EPUB format, so the large PDFs aren't even that big a deal for me.

I'll bet the Linux based offerings are priced far below Office 365. I've seen the prices for the latter and a smattering of the former. Microsoft's prices were much higher. Personally, I think their pricing model is going to come back to bite them.

Unfortunately, I can't cite any specifics because the firewalls at work block all gaming related stuff. (Gee, I wonder why? ;-) )

Still, it isn't too hard to use your Google-fu to find plenty of copies of the list of games that will be available at launch. The last list that I saw said 50. That was up from 36 two weeks earlier, and 24 two weeks before that.

Valve reps have said on several occasions that many publishers, both large and small, have at least inquired as to the feasibility of porting their games to Linux. Apparently, some number of them have moved beyond simply asking to actively working to make their catalog of games viable on Linux.

Realistically, I think it's safe to say that the initial implementations will be all over the map in terms of code quality because cross platform development is foreign territory for many of these companies. It'll be interesting to see (1) how well they execute, and (2) if they stay the course for the long haul.

There's a very persuasive argument to be made that the Compaq acquisition is what really finished HP as an engineering company. Apparently there was some ferocious in-fighting after it. Sadly, the Compaq guys won for the most part and took the company to an almost entirely sales and marketing based strategy.

Those of us who cut our teeth on HP test equipment, early HP/UX workstations and servers, HP LaserJet printers, and HP calculators still mourn the death of Bill and Dave's dream. :-(

The fact that Ballmer is still CEO is baffling to me. By the time he is done he might go down as the worst CEO ever.

Tomi Ahonen makes a very persuasive case that the title for worst CEO of all time should probably go to one of Ballmer's protoges, Stephen Elop.

The College Republicans regret the controversy surrounding our planned lecture featuring Ann Coulter. The size and severity of opposition to this event have caught us by surprise and caused us to question our decision to welcome her to Rose Hill. Looking at the concerns raised about Ms. Coulter, many of them reasonable, we have determined that some of her comments do not represent the ideals of the College Republicans and are inconsistent with both our organizationâ(TM)s mission and the Universityâ(TM)s. We regret that we failed to thoroughly research her before announcing; that is our error and we do not excuse ourselves for it. Consistent with our strong disagreement with certain comments by Ms. Coulter, we have chosen to cancel the event and rescind Ms. Coulterâ(TM)s invitation to speak at Fordham. We made this choice freely before Father McShaneâ(TM)s email was sent out and we became aware of his feelings â" had the President simply reached out to us before releasing his statement, he would have learned that the event was being cancelled. We hope the University community will forgive the College Republicans for our error and continue to allow us to serve as its main voice of the sensible, compassionate, and conservative political movement that we strive to be. We fell short of that standard this time, and we offer our sincere apologies.

Ted Conrad, President

Emily Harman, Vice President

Joe Campagna, Treasurer

John Mantia, Secretary

(emphasis added)

IOW, some kids made a mistake, realized it, owned up to it, and dealt with it appropriately in a mature fashion. In the meantime, a spiteful, mean woman was told exactly what she was. THAT's the real story here.

(Looks around the cube farm at all the gray and white hair in one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S.) Wow, looks like we gotta fire a whole bunch of people with 30+ years of experience then.

Clearly, this clown has never had to maintain a complex application with 4 or 5 9s uptime requirements. Nor has this idiot ever had to keep said application in compliance with a dozen different regulatory regimes. Or tried to figure out how he was going to interface his brand new, spiffy mobile Web 3.0 application with other complex applications that may have been written before he was born!

Trust me. There isn't a large bank anywhere in the world that doesn't value its experienced people. When you have to protect your customers' life savings, you absolutely do NOT want a team of nothing but young hard chargers. You need us old timers to look out for the pot-holes we stepped in a long time ago so you don't see your company's name splashed all over the 5:30 national news.

You also need us old timers around to teach the youngsters that working 60+ hours a week needs to be the exception, not the rule. It's been shown time and again that at that point, you're beyond the point of diminishing returns. The mistakes made when people are exhausted from overwork will require so much re-work that the pace simply isn't worth it at least 80% of the time.