MIT has a long history (decade) of offering their entire courseware online for free:

http://ocw.mit.edu/about/next-decade/

Patents prevent others from manufacturing something that includes some IP. Open sourcing the software is not an issue for the users of the open source software unless they want to monetize it. You can use any patented device or process for personal use; you only butt heads with lawyers when you try to sell it. The only argument I can think of is that providing a software implementation of the IP is "selling it" for $0.00.

Maybe they meant mW.

They sent one kind of particle and another kind arrived, according to TFA. They sent a Ford Pinto and a Testarossa arrived. Of course it arrived sooner than expected. Duh.

Regardless of what /.ers think of the partnership, the tweets had to be embarrassing to MS with respect to Nokia. Confidentiality is crucial in such partnerships, so the sacking is not surprising.

It's for storing images from Nikon's new "Petapixel Pro" D7000000 camera

In the print era, the few big-media outlets and the scientific journals filtered the idea space "for us." What they liked, we heard about; what they flushed, we didn't hear about. Now, anyone with ten bucks per month to spare can have a world wide stage. The published idea space has mushroomed. The author of TFA failed to have a Big Idea about how to effectively filter the present embarrassment of riches of ideas, to find the Big Ones.

Fools! It was Planet X what dunnit.

What did TFA say? I can't figure out IE's zoom feature and I forgot my glasses this morning.

This is Darwinism at work. Let the expired drive-by tweeters and texters be declared, en masse, the next Darwin Awards winners.

Think about the project rather than the language. For example, a simple off-the-shelf robot kit with an embedded high-level programming environment may capture a newbie's imagination. Raise/lower the arm once. Then five times. Then with a five-second pause in between. Then when it's sound sensor kicks off...etc.

A suitable kit would have a fairly abstract library (and likely a language like C or Basic).

Because it can snowball, fast. This happened to me twice on a gmail account. If the person making a mistake sends messages to a group, then everyone in that group now has your email address; I'd get a long conversation via the reply-alls of his correspondents. I emailed one of his correspondents and explained, since I wasn't sure of the correct email address. That one recurs now and then since I'm in so many group mail lists of his friend and biz associates.
And I started getting lots of please-please-come-back messages from a service he stopped subscribing too, which had no way to talk to a human.

The other major fiasco was getting on a busy senatorial re-election mailing list. I wasn't even in the same state. That wasn't too difficult; the would-be senator's home page had an opt-out...but you had to look hard for it.

In both of these cases, ignoring it would've been more annoying than going to the trouble of ending it.

They should consult with more photographers. One thing is obvious: the most-memorable pictures have a central point of focus...something to grab your interest. The least memorable images in the TFA have nothing to grab your attention. That applies to a mixture of subject matter as well as a single subject, such as landscapes.

The TFA gave short shrift to aesthetics, too--where in the photo the central point of focus most favorably may be placed, such as the Rule of Thirds and Golden Sections. These go back to Da Vinci...not new ideas.

Their computer rentals are (probably) their only product with a means of disablement for non-payment, other than repossession. Their living room furniture doesn't automatically eject the customer from the seat for non-payment. It seems specious to add spyware to one and only one of their products just because they can and may.

Helloooooo....SpaceX. Or were you thinking of outsourcing it to China?