I wish I had the source to quote, but I saw recently that as many as 1 million people are expected to try to go to the area for the final launch.

"The entire point of the patent system", as you put it, is to encourage the creation of inventions which are (a) New, (b) Useful, and (c) Non-obvious to someone with knowledge in the industry.

I haven't read the patent, but from reading the Apple letter, it doesn't exactly sound like it passes the "non-obvious test", at the least, and probably not even the "new" part. The problem is that, to fight this, you must either spend thousands of dollars in a lawsuit or pay the license fee.

I don't care how small the amount is, it IS unreasonable to ask for someone to pay for a patent which shouldn't be valid.

If the patent really was "new" and "non-obvious" at the time it was filed, then they are absolutely entitled to payment. I'm just typically skeptical when it comes to software patents.

• Download anything that is available electronically and shred the dead-tree equivalent if it is mailed to me
• Scan anything that isn't available for download
• All files are named "yyyy-mm-dd name of document.pdf" (or jpg). This allows easy sorting and automatic folderization
• File any account specific items to ../records/yyyy/accounts/accountname (e.g. ../records/2011/accounts/verizon)
• Dump the rest into ../records and let Directory Opus autosort them into folders such as ../records/2011/2011-03
• Keep any paper receipts which are still good for return until they expire and then trash them
• Automatic backups locally and to the cloud. Cost per gigabyte for cloud storage is low enough now that it makes sense to keep essential records (and even some non-essentials) offsite.

Count yourself lucky or blessed, depending on your viewpoint. The tornado that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham continued at or near ground level for another 4 hours after Birmingham, crossing into Georgia on the ground in Cave Springs, heading into Tennessee another 90 minutes or so after that, and then (I believe - I was finally asleep at that point) into North Carolina from there. All told, the path of destruction from that one supercell raked at least 300 miles over the course of 7 hours or more. My eyes didn't leave the Weather Channel for most of that time, and while that supercell weakened a few times here and there, it regained strength and remained incredibly destructive for longer than I can ever recall seeing.

Are you speaking of a moral right or a legal one? A moral right can be debated either way. However, in the United States at least, the legal right doesn't exist. That, as you probably know, was removed by the DMCA.

Why you aren't getting modded up, I have no idea, except maybe it's Windows ...

But seriously, you're almost spot on. Why push this OP, admittedly computer handicapped, to a more complex solution? Windows Vista and 7 alone provide:

• Parental Controls on/off per user
• Allowed usage times, including forced log-off
• Block/allow specific programs

Add Microsoft's Windows Live Family Safety (free) to get:

• Web content filtering at the IP level (works with any browser), per user
• Activity Reports for both website visits and application use, per user

and Microsoft Security Essentials (also free) for virus and malware scanning.

There's probably an easy and free solution for most of the other items on the list as well, but they seem more "wish-list" than essential.

This makes sense, though, from a business perspective. NASA isn't exactly a "reliable" customer, so if they want a new capability and won't guarantee future use of it, why shouldn't NASA be the one to pay for it?

Tell you what... Go to a car dealer, tell them you want a custom model built to your exact specifications from scratch and that you won't pay a dime until it's delivered. Tell me how far you get with that...

Bullsh. He's talking about basic text formatting options that are buggy or in some cases, broken. He's dead right about that. Issues abound in Gmail, too... like how signature text and body text are treated differently when composing an email, and often that can bug out and leave you unable to edit the body text because GMail things it's all one big signature. Dumb.

Mind you, similar criticism can be applied to Word, too, it's less buggy than GDocs, but still has problems. Adding a page break then wondering why your new Heading 1 line is also changing the spacing on the previous page... or why you can't seem to move beyond the end of a table at the end of your document to start a new line. Stuff like that.

GDocs has some way to go in terms of usability, even for basic corporate documentation.

What we need is a bytecode-based platform like Java or .NET

The second all browsers support that, the web as we know it will cease to exist.
Imagine each web page being like a flash applet. Great for the designers, but don't try to copy even a snippet of text, since they will have disabled it.

I went to see Avatar at the local IMAX in 3D, and had to leave the movie halfway through with a massive headache. My eyesight is basically okay, but I just couldn't relax and watch the focal point the director insisted you watch - rather my cognition is rather pan and scan, I was constantly looking around the scene and kept on hitting things that I couldn't focus on and strained my eyes trying to compensate.

Once you buy and install Windows, and turn on the automatic updates, you're essentially done maintaining it.

Installing additional software is generally as simple as letting it install itself.

Every version of Linux, however, including Ubuntu, requires some expertise in configuration and management of the OS. It's not nearly as hands-off a system.

It's nice to have the source code to mess with, or to enhance. But if I have to compile a new piece of software just to install it properly the first time, that's when *nixen completely fail the end user.

Thinking Ubuntu is better because a copy of it costs less is a classic case of penny wise, pound foolish.