It's tangentially relevant, but this is "news for nerds": there was a contest for building realistic space fighters. The winners were clearly function over form, which was nice to see. (Space Volvos?)

I worry that people labelled as "the Brilliant Jerk" are sometimes "the guy smarter than me who doesn't go along with what I propose."

If I were any more surprised by this information, I would be awake.

I see two scenarios:
(a) Assange gains political asylum in Ecuador. He never stands before a judge in Sweden.
(b) Assange is extradited to Sweden, spends 12-24 hours in custody, and then he's extradited to USA, where he is "allocated" to Guantanamo Bay or some other oubliette. He never stands before a judge in Sweden.

Either way, the charges made against him by citizens of Sweden will never be pressed nor resolved. Either way, anyone who wants to call him out for "justice for his sex crimes" will not see justice done.

How is Netflix Canada operationally from Netflix USA? And what does the government of Canada have to do with it?

I'm guessing you're upset that Netflix Canada has fewer choices in the media catalogue offered. That is not due to the government of Canada nor even the government of your province instructing Netflix to restrict its catalogue -- that's due to the movie distribution companies (usually members of the MPAA) who own the rights to these movies telling Netflix "no u can not haz cheezbrgr."

Don't yell at the sales clerk if you bought a product that doesn't work as advertised, and don't yell at the landlord for the store you bought it from -- yell at the manufacturer. That means it's not Netflix, your internet provider and not the government of Canada that is keeping episodes of Adventure Time off Netflix -- it's Turner Broadcasting refusing to release it to Netflix Canada.

> why not vote for the third guy then?

Because their election system is First-Past-The-Post. Voting for the third guy means the option you like less will get more votes.

Example: Your feelings about how to run the country are pretty indigo, but the leading parties are orange and yellow. You're sick of voting yellow, so you decide to vote for the third candidate, who politically aquamarine. People who prefer their politics in the infra-red are going to continue to vote orange. Result: orange has a wider majority over both yellow and aquamarine, which gives them a larger mandate for their reddish politics, and to ignore your indigo ideals.

I'm reminded of the newspaper envelopes around actual newspapers that are made up to look like genuine journal reporting, but they're actually four full-page adverts attached to the outside of the newspaper you paid for.

My mother and I each visit the local library in our respective cities. They have movies, documentaries, and tv-series boxed sets.

I recently found James Burke's "Connections" at my library, and saw they had some of the old campy "Doctor Who" on DVD. My mother's been watching "Deadwood," and she's on the waiting list for more DVDs in the series.

The proper one would be in the 5xx range, since the client's request is correct but the server is unable to comply.

503 - Service Unavailable is the obvious choice.

If we want to be cheeky about it, we could respond 305 - Use Proxy to hint that the client making the request can't come through here and must use some other path.

There's an old story that hackers tell each other 'round the fire. Long time ago, when line-printers were being built, the engineers didn't have enough space for the hammerheads for a full typewriter set, and they had to decide to use upper- or lower-case letters. The engineers agreed that lowercase serif was best, because it was more readable than upper-case and had enough difference between letters to recognize mistakes faster. A manager stopped them, and said "no, we must use upper-case letters, because it would be disrespectful to output the name of our Lord Almighty in lower-case letters."

And interfaces since then have suffered because of one manager's insistence that religious observances are more important than useful function.

The article uses the word "hologram" over and over, and comparisons to Star Trek, but the PR video avoids the term 'hologram' and uses "projection" instead. Hologram technology is not used, and people expecting features found in any hologram (paralax viewing, different views from multiple simultaneous points) will be sorely disappointed.

If someone has created a new and useful car, don't call it "a street aeroplane just like the Wright Brothers!"

We've already had people get slapped for birdsong as copyrighted work. An acquaintance of mine is already wrestling with YouTube because he recorded classical music on his guitar, and he's getting slapped because someone else identified it as a copy of their recording, and YouTube has already jammed advertisements into his video to compensate the accuser, as if he already agreed to a plea-bargain.

Too many false positives, and it costs much less for the people who are already wealthy to make false claims than it does for private citizens to defend themselves against the false claims. This stinks to high heaven.

I am disappointed in this year's "Reader's Choice." It mentions "Gmail" as the best Linux app for instant messaging, "Google Docs" as the best Linux(?) app for collaboration, and the "reader's choice" for Linux games have been the same for the past eight years, despite eight years of new developments (Battle for Wesnoth? From 2003? When there's Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, 0 A.D., Heroes of Newerth, Minecraft, Braid, Darwinia, DEFCON, MegaGlest, Amnesia Dark Descent, Aquaria, Tiny & Big, OpenClonk, SpaceChem ... jeez.

I think the "Reader's" part of the "Reader's Choice" may be out-of-touch.

How many of you have forgotten? There have been three Doctor Who movies already.