Did they talk about the object-oriented version of COBOL? It's named ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.

The sheer amount of 5-4 decisions on the court should indicate that the court makes political decisions, and not merely informed, unbiased interpretations of law.

Not really. It just suggests that cases where the law is clear (and thus would have larger majorities) don't tend to make it to the Supreme Court.

I think I may not have been clear in my meaning. I didn't mean that deaf people are in some kind of gang or think they're better than anyone else.

What I meant was that a disability such as deafness can have a profound impact on someone's life and can become part of someone's internal identity. Being deaf is part of what makes them who they are. As previously stated I think that defining yourself this way is as silly as letting other people define you that way, but that doesn't change the fact that people do it.

When you start talking about curing things that define a person, especially things which a person uses to define themselves, you start treading into a certain amount of ethical gray area.

In changing that identifying feature, you change the person, you in a sense eliminate the person who was and replace them with an entirely new individual. A rather vocal portion of people with certain kinds of disabilities seem to hold this view. I don't particularly agree with it, but it's the core of a lot of these "ethical questions" and "normalizing the population" arguments.

My overall point was that colour blindness doesn't seem to be of sufficient impact on peoples lives that they define themselves internally with respect to it and so there's likely very few ethical problems with it and mostly of the "slippery slope" variety.

"80 gigs for $224 ain't bad..."

I beg to differ. That's more than I paid for my entire netbook, and I got twice the storage.

Well if you want to be cheap, just go for the 7200. With those platforms you're paying for the hardware forwarding, not for the ability to route the full Internet. Ok, the RSP720CXL is marginally more expensive than the RSP720C, but that really is in the noise. (And the ASR-1000 is technically a software router, it's just damn fast.)

I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin for 6 years, during which I was able to work with Guri Sohi as his teaching assistant, in addition to having many stimulating technical discussions.

WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, warf.org) helps faculty and students patent their ideas and protect the patents. Remember, a patent is only as good as the lawyers who are willing to go to court to defend it--as this WARF v. Intel situation has shown.

WARF was established in 1925, and helped the University of Wisconsin become one of the first academic institutions to take advantage of the patent system. The patent for including vitamin D in milk was the first big money winner for WARF and the university.

The system is driven by the inventor. If a faculty member or student has an idea they want to patent, WARF covers the expenses, provides help with prior-art, etc. efforts, and pledges to defend the patent. For this, WARF gets 80% of the patent revenues, which it puts back into research funding for the university. The inventor(s) receive 20% of the revenues. From what I have heard, this is a larger percentage than that given to the inventor at many other institutions.

-Todd

Build the cells? Hell, that's just assembling molecules.

Come back when he achieves energy to mass conversion. THAT would be news worthy.

They worked for me, because I accepted them as establishing alternate history versions of scenes from our own culture, clichéd though they may be.

Um, what? You can be sure that the blind are not a substantial portion of the sales of audiobooks. Many, many people use them to listen to books during their commute to and from work. Fact is, an audiobook is more expensive to produce: it's a superset of the creative effort that goes into writing a book. In most cases voice talent must be hired (and compensated) and, even if it's the author reading the book, studio space must be used and many hours of work must be spent reading per hour of finished work.

"People just liked it better that way."

Yes, you really aren't a Doctor Who fan.

Over the years, Doctor Who was able to support some very, deathly serious stories and high quality drama with some pretty poor special effects.

It's called imagination.

A great storyline will not be able to support sub-par special effects, and vice versa.

Not a Doctor Who fan, I see.

Playlists. So I have this fancy scroll-wheel navigation but am not allowed to create playlists on the player? What were they thinking?

You can, check out On-the-go playlists.

A trademark of what? Godzilla is a fabricated mythical creature. It isn't a product. It doesn't endorse products. They have made some products based on Godzilla, but The Godzilla is as trademarkable as Grendel.

More like, as trademarkable as Mickey Mouse. Read the link. It discusses the fact that Disney characters are trademarked as well as copyrighted.