6' 5" : Pray tell - you aren't related to Douglas Adams, are you?

There is remarkably poor phone service in the middle of the ocean, or in countries with poor infrastructure. Think Katrina or some other natural catastrophe where a cell phone site could be remotely connected through a satellite using a simple flat antenna.

I like how you have put perspective into this conversation. Most software engineers build up their design time skills - documentation, proposals, test plans - or the management side of software development. Take a good technical writing course is what I would recommend across the spectrum. Follow that up with a Dale Carnigie (sp?) public speaking program. The better you communicate with others, the more in demand you will be. It really isn't having "mad skillz" that ensures our sucess; we've proven ourselves countless times before!
 

Impact has the best chance, in that a large number of "small" mass missles can travel at a high velocity and timed to impact for best effect. A jackhammer effect, or convert rotational energy in a manner to nudge the asteriod into a different orbit. Think COMSAT maneuver.

Forgive my ignorance, but how can somebody patent an idea that Adobe delivers with their developer's toolkit?

Lost: The TV Series was meant to lead to Lost: The Board Game and then Lost: The DVD. Put your favorite characters' life in proper order. Amaze your friends, be a leading cause of Biker Bar fights, or as a source for WWF personalities.

That giant sucking sound was all the viewers getting amped for the final episodes.

Crazy, you sly dog!

"Protect the Children" isn't about treating rapists harsher because children are involved, but to punish those whom attack the young before they can develop a functional point-of-view. Interrupting child development with rape is an especially heinous crime, deserving my special attention and hopefully yours as well. The survivors of childhood rape must live with the event AND TRY to progress through the toughest part of life, dependent on adults who weren't there to protect them in the first place. "It take a village" is another phrase to take note.

Rape a child, expect a lot of prison time.
Rape a child and claim mental disease, become the prison's interior decorator.
But punishment time must be used to demonstrate to the child survivor that adults WILL TAKE ACTION in their defense.

Warehousing non-rape offenders indefinitely on the expectation they (the offenders) might progress to child rape is not what I believe to be Constitutional. That falls too close to the categories "Minority Report" and "Star Chamber".

Forget "Clippy", popups and CAPTCHAs. COBOL would have forced the trader to type out "BILLION" or "BILLIONS" instead of "MIL...".

Skip that, never mind, I'm an imbecile.

I'm not a fan of Flash after dealing for the past several years with a 400MHz (yeah, MHz) PPC G4 and what I believe to be USB 1.0. Up until the latest OS upgrade, Apple supported their old product line and I was happy - unless I was reading the local newspaper's website with its plethora of flash animations. Scrolling became a Herculean task with killing the browser its only outcome. So I'm not happy with any software implementation that acts AS IF it uses spinlocks for cross-platform timing.

Steve Jobs did his job: made an executive's decision and holding the entire company AND - THEIR - CUSTOMERS to that decision. Flash or Battery Life? Flash or Responsiveness? Apple got spanked in the 90's for selling monitors with one inch less viewable area than what was advertised clearly as monitor dimension. Apple learned its lesson to deliver hardware that meet its specifications.

Adobe really needs to look into offloading much of their flash implementation into the most energy efficient component of mobile devices - its FPGA, not software. Keep the processor free to perform the collect-and-forward tasks of data streaming. Adobe, if they are really serious, would provide a reference design and Altera/Lattice/Xilinx firmware libraries (Cores). Apple should investigate making FPGA space available to their developers & downloads for their customers just as if it were code space.

Now that would be truly visionary.

How did you get rated as +3 Insightful?
I would rather say +5 Obvious.

Where to start?

#1: The default font should be pushed into their printers, not email system, and printers protected against unauthorized configuration. Unspecified font types would then save serious money.

#2: Arial is better for numerical formatting. Who does accounting with Century Gothic?

#3: No HTML formatted emails should be allowed through their email filters - ever! This was not the point of the article, but worthy to repeat ad Infinitum.

#4: Others say use Laser, not Inkjet. True! Real easy to justify pawning off most of those costly Color printers for monochromatic B&W, and get cartridges with superior shelf life and faster print times.

I agree - these patent applicants weren't that unique. Freescale/Honeywell/Others had software to test these MEMS devices in one-and-more axis, with one-and-more motional references. Just-how-could-they-publish-their-specifications? And how can they perform product QA? By your analogy, the person who perfected the wheel rolled it along the ground, and somebody else took the credit.

Everyone should review the slashdot story on faxed Patent Submissions. Seems they are getting so many submissions they can't spend time to reorient upside-down applications. ALOT of postings were hillarious; the simplest fix is to rotate all pages 90 degrees in the fax machine. The Patent Office, by their rule, has to take them.

Got to wonder how aggressively the people like Analog Devices, Honeywell, Motorola (Freescale) will do to invalidate this patent, since they own the manufacturing process. I sincerely hope they look not just to invalidate this patent, but all other patents "owned" by these applicants as payback. What the [Obscene Gerund] were the Patent Office reviewers thinking?