The Personal System glasses from "Norbert and the System", a short story by Timons Esaias from 1993, may anticipate some of the features of this system. I haven't read the patent, but the overlay of contextual social information sounds a lot like what the original poster describes.

(Here's a link: http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/Esaias-Norbert.pdf)

The Professor Jameson series by Neil R Jones. Clunky but fun.
Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. How they translated all the wordplay from Polish I will never know.
Not forgotten, exactly, but all of Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, especially "Protector".
Dragon's Egg and Flight of the Dragonfly by Robert L Forward.

(I just had a look at my bookshelf. Half the space is by authors beginning with "B" - Banks, Baxter, Bear, Benford, Bester, Bova, Brin, Bradbury, Brunner, Bulmer. Weird.)

No, the real reason was what happens if you walk into a hospital and say you are there for an NMR (say it out loud, quickly).

I have deliberately not purchased any Sony products since the Rootkit fiasco of 2005. Up until then, Sony was a trusted, quality brand for me and I had quite a few Sony gadgets around the place. No longer.

So I'm going to "sit out" instead.

Not from Muppet Labs, but from ExTechOp (a subsidiary of SHIELD) in the Elektra graphic novel. His work on the revivification of Arthur Perry was incredible, even if ultimately flawed.

I've seen a lot of knee jerk MS-is-evil stuff (this is Slashdot after all) but what are the actual facts of the case? Just because we don't like someone doesn't mean that they can't be right occasionally.

We're supposed to be geeks here - rational, logical, all that jazz. Let's base the arguments on the facts.

It seems to me that this is an editor problem. And a lot of the blame for the parlous state of editors at the moment can be laid at the feet of Cpp, the C preprocessor.

"In retrospect, maybe the worst aspect of Cpp is that it has stifled the development of programming environments for C. The anarchic and character-level operation of Cpp makes nontrivial tools for C and C++ larger, slower, less elegant, and less effective than one would have thought possible." - Stroustrup, Design and Evolution of C++.

We should have a much better view of a program than a bunch of files containing characters.

The official investigation concluded that they were spores from local algae, and that the initial DNA tests were flawed. Wikipedia has the details, as usual.

To go from "our test found no DNA" to "there is no DNA" to "they must be extraterrestrial" to "they look like the dust clouds in Monocerous" is a series of leaps that go wayyy ahead of the available evidence, in my view.

It would be very interesting to be proven wrong, however.

...his proof of the Turing-Lovecraft theorem: "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning"

Why not assembly language?

Build up from the very bottom. ARM assembly (disclaimer - I work for ARM) is ubiquitous and pretty close to an idealised assembler. Dev kits are available for cheap.

Then you build up through structured assembly, C-like languages (PASCAL?), and so on. Otherwise, it's like trying to build houses without understanding what bricks are.

That's the way I did it, except being as how I'm old and crusty the assembly language I started with was SC/MP, and we also had a load of BASIC thrown into the mix.

It will be very difficult for SCO to spin this one in a positive direction. Darl McBride isn't at SCO any more, which is a shame. It would have been good to see him go down with the ship.

Roll on the IBM case.

I'm skeptical (as usual), but if true, bring it on, Larry Niven style.

Now our addictive types get toasted on wall current instead of having to steal and carjack their way to their next fix? That seems like a step forward to me.

Legalize it so we don't get a load of back-street ecstasy peddlers giving everyone deep bone infections.

And then treat it as a public health issue, and let those susceptible to its lure breed themselves out of the population. It's just evolution in action.

I thought that that was discovered and patented by Gogrilla Mincefriend.