I'm reminded of a story about a company that made soda vending machines. The company had a new vending machine they were marketing to amusement parks which would raise prices when the temperature got above, say, 80 degrees. A lot of amusement parks liked the idea and started buying the new machines, but the word got out to the public and there was a huge backlash of people complaining about deceptive pricing and basically cheating the customers. In order to save themselves, the vending machine company explained to the public that their machines were really lowering the price of their sodas when the temperature dropped below 80 degrees. Somehow that just sounded better to the general public. This thing with fast and slow lanes sounds a lot like the vending machine company. Allowing fast lanes and allowing slow lanes are the same thing, just worded differently.

I remember shortly after the Navy had their problem with the Yorktown, an admiral was quoted as saying, "A lot of people claim Windows NT is unstable, but we've found that not to be the case. Our Windows machines have an average uptime of around 95%" A 95% uptime works out to an hour and 12 minutes of downtime per day. Without realizing it, he made the point of just how bad NT4 really was. Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows stability has improved dramatically since those days.

And for the do-it-yourselfer:

XBMC

It would be nice if there were a way to limit the number of patents a company or individual was allowed to own. If companies couldn't stockpile their patents then they would be forced to limit their patents to the higher quality ones. Of course any such law would have to be written carefully to avoid the obvious loopholes companies would surely exploit.

A sodium atom and a potassium atom are walking down the street when suddenly the sodium atom stops with a concerned look. "I just lost an electron" he said. "Are you sure?" asked the potassium atom. The sodium atom replied with, "Yeah, I'm positive."

I wish I had mod points for you. This is something I've realized for a while and is, at least in my mind, the number one reason that self driving cars won't become a reality for a very long time.

Depending on your definition of "deliver", I think cron may be in violation of this patent.

E17 should be out in a few days. But even so, E17 runs on top of X11 rather than running as a replacement. Maybe if Wayland takes off, Enlightenment can be ported to run there instead of X11, but we'll have to wait to see where things go from here.

Running high speed lines across the nation is expensive — to the tune of $100 billion dollars a year.

Isn't that about what we pay to China every year just to cover the interest on the money our country has borrowed from them? At least all that interest money is being put to good use.

Given that the scientist's last name is Morita, I figured they call it Moratorium, although with a name like that it might be a while before he discovers another one.

What I'd much prefer is if you could allow or deny individually

If you can root your phone and install Cyanogenmod then you will gain this ability.

What Apple does is a little different. They make their own hardware, so (at least in my opinion) they are justified in locking down that hardware. In Microsoft's case, they ony make the software, but are trying to dictate to every other hardware manufacturer how their hardware should be built. If Microsoft made their own hardware, I would have no problem with them locking it down. It's them acting like they own all the hardware companies out there that really irritates me.

This kind of tracking is easy to avoid. Just do like me and never post on discussion forums like this one.

My understanding is that what he meant to say was "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". That one little extra word makes the phrase make a lot more sense.