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.

Given your mention of encryption-cracking clusters, I would be remiss not to post this XKCD comic in response.

There's a 50/50 chance that the last biological human will be born within the next 1000 years. AI research will allow us to upload our consciousness into Gleisner robot bodies, or into realms of pure software running in the virtual environments of the Polises.

And if, by then, you haven't read "Diaspora" by Greg Egan, shame on you.

- Lower noise figures at various resolutions/speeds.
- Better performance in low light (i.e. indoors without flash, to avoid that overexposed-lightbulb-head look in so many of my snaps).
- Longer exposures

How long till the "pentawater" people seize on this as "proof" of their unfounded claims about their bottled magic-water?

(Slightly related - UK slashdotters can sign a petition to protest OfQuack (aka CNHC) certifying unproven Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine procedures.)

When I was young and knew no better, I used to read Perry Rhodan books. These were translated from the original Dutch for the English-speaking (i.e. American) market and were full of nonsensical conversions like this:

"The spatial distortion wrenched at the small fighter, as the enemy mothership surfaced from hyperspace less than 1000 kilometers (621.37 miles) away."

Everything, of course, would have been fine if they had materialized 621.38 miles away...