> Isn't this the same type of stuff we accused Microsoft of doing years ago?

Until Google starts strong-arming OEMs into refusing to carry their competitors' products, the answer is no.

Now, that said, the worst aspect of the show was the main character. Tetsuwan Atomu ("Mighty Atom") or Astro Boy was pretty darn one dimensional. Maybe this is great for children, I got real tired of it.

This is intentional. Astro Boy is a proxy for the viewer (or reader); the neutrality of his personality serves as a blank slate for you to project onto. Other examples: Tintin, Fone Bone, and most of the major "superheroes" in Western comics (Superman, Peter Parker, etc.).

> What else has he done to seriously promote world peace?

He has killed the F-22, the next-generation nuclear warhead program, and the Eastern European missile program. Relations with Brazil and the rest of Latin America, and with Europe, are much improved (just think about the state of those relations a year ago). The nuclear disarmament process is now, arguably, no longer moribund. And there is now a much reduced possibility of armed conflict with Iran.

I don't know whether the prize should have been awarded to him at this point in time (it would have been better to give it to, say, the Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels for their successful peace process). But I also think that it's easy to overlook the difference Obama has made.

Peace is a bumpy process. Those you named did make serious contributions towards peace, which in no way negates later setbacks. Aung San Suu Kyi has not brought about a democratic Burma, and the Dalai Lama has not brought a peaceful co-existence between Tibet and China.

Kissinger is rightly vilified for brutal American tactics in Vietnam, but he did begin the troop drawdown that eventually led to the end of the Vietnam war (which is exactly what the anti-war movement is demanding for Iraq and Afghanistan today). And Arafat did make serious efforts towards a peace deal during the 90s, even though it eventually fell through (as did his co-recipients Peres and Rabin, who equally deserve the recognition for the effort and the blame for its eventual failure).

So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and be a contrarian: in the past year, I don't think anyone has done more to advance the cause of peace than Barack Obama. So, politically problematic though it may be, I think the prize is warranted on its merits.

Read the technical discussion from the Nobel committee. It was Kao who showed that purified glass fibers had the required properties for replacing and eventually replacing coaxial fibers. He didn't invent the concept of glass fibers or fiber waveguides (that actually goes back more than a hundred years); but before his work, few believed that they would ever be practical for telecommunications.

Kirby did get shafted, but these claims about how "Jack did 90% of the work", casting Stan Lee as some kind of pointy-haired boss slash con artist, don't really stand up to scrutiny.

For instance, Kirby played no role in the creation of Spider-man, Marvel's most iconic character. Yes, you could say that Stan Lee found someone else to rip off that one time, i.e. Steve Ditko. But the Spider-man comic's "canonical" period actually occurred after Ditko left (the Stan Lee/John Romita Sr era). So at some point you're left arguing that Stan Lee was incredibly lucky to find talent after talent after talent to rip off. It seems rather more likely that he made his own luck.

That was Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

The HTC Hero is landing on Sprint in October.

I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers.

Without numbers or letters, how does your calendar represent the date? Does it draw, say, the 3rd of August as three pictures of Augustus Caesar, or can it only show you the current season (i.e., what you can see from looking out the window), or what? No sarcasm, I'm actually curious.

There's also the point by Debian's vim maintainer, who switched to Emacs earlier this year: that Emacs makes it very easy to interact with more specialized tools, such as ispell. Contrast with vim, which implemented its own spell checker. Now, let's see... which approach is more consistent with the Unix philosophy?

Actually, it might. For instance, Emacs 23 includes support for SVG, and SVG code consists of human-readable text. So if you need to change some parameters in an SVG image, such as its width or height, you can open it in Emacs, type C-c C-c to switch to text representation, perform your edits, and type C-c C-c again to instantly view the result.

1. M-x visual-line-mode RET (or Options->Line Wrapping->Word Wrap)
2. Live happily ever after.

The point is that a graphical Emacs session can now connect to a client on a tty. (And in answer to your question: yes, Emacs can now be started in daemon mode.)

Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text. Plans consist of text. So are emails and newsgroup contents. Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs, directory listings, version control messages, compilation messages, are all text.

The behavior of Emacs seems reasonable. When the SIGCHLD handler is called, Emacs tries to read from the child's PTY, and when it receives EAGAIN, it assumes that there's no further data incoming (because the child is dead!). I'd be surprised if there weren't other applications that behave similarly.