Just the idea that there are some people that use the word homosexual as a form of abuse...

And the fact that the author refers to being called homosexual as a form of abuse without inserting a caveat that he himself did not found it abusive...

Yes, there is sexism. And homophobia, that is for sure. :(

It is a myth that TeX is more used in science than Word. It depends on what branch of science that you are talking about: sure, most Math, Physics, EE, CS uses TeX. But Word has a much bigger quota in Biology, Medicine and (probably) Chemistry.

Disclaimer: I am a LaTeX/Linux user (I officially hate Word), started on a CS department, then onwards to a Biology department, now on a Medicine school. Colaborations with Chemistry and Maths.

Somewhere in the middle AMD will be grossly more competitive (or people will stop buying computers at the same rate in case no competition appears and prices sky rocket - as the need to have "brand new" is fading because computer power is "enough" for many years).

The world is a bit more complex that the relationship between a company and a state: there is external competition, there are costumers (who can stop buying). "externalities" matter more than this single issue. It is because of these externalities that your reasoning is 150% unrealistic.

Fortunately the money does not disappear. It will be used for something, as an example:

Yesterday I had my "socialist" surgery done to me by less than 50 euros all costs included (x-rays, blood samples, surgery, medication, ...). While taxes can be a good thing, it is even better when the money for state operations (I know, this case it is EU, not national states) come from fines (as one is not taxing productive behavior).

So all in all, just good things: Intel is fined, Intel will need to increase costs to the user (indirectly increasing competition in a market that was going the way of a monopoly - always a bad thing in the long run). We get more more market and more competition! And the fine money will serve a purpose somewhere (hopefully not the bailout of banksters, something we see going on everywhere on the planet: But that is actually a good example of corporations getting to much power and everybody suffering from it).

Now can we break MS in a OS division and a Office division please?

This is the reaction of the Portuguese culture minister (another EU country):

I hope this thing won't take root in the EU. Furthermore lets see what the European Human Rights court (if somebody takes this there) says.

This is a true story: Once a coleague (a test engineer in the case) asked me to give an afternoon explanation on how Java Servlets work. I sit with the guy for a couple of hours, give a general overview of the architecture, show some code... His last move after that couple of hours: ammend his CV in order to put "experience with Java Server Side Testing".

It depends on what you want to do. Note that existing methods also have problems of this kind.

I remember listening to a world wide specialist on the issue (with papers and software published on handling errors in genetic datasets) where he talked about error rates of 10% in some cases (mostly human introduced: like reading protein gels wrongly or just plain typos on spreadsheets).

I have tested myself the HapMap project (sequencing of human SNPs in several populations) and the error rate, while very low, doesn't allow for studies of mutations from parents to offspring (the noise - error - is orders of magnitude bigger than the signal - very low mutation rates from parent to offspring).

I would say 28 out of 4000 is quite good. Although it would be great if it was random (like you could repeat the experiment and get a different set of errors). This would allow to go lower (at the expense of more experiences).