I had forgotten about Neverending Story 3. Thanks a lot, asshole!

It's awfully close to the estimated world population.

In decimal, the number is 6,830,770,643. According to Wikipedia, the United States Census Bureau estimates the world population to be 6,872,800,000.

Reading the USPTO article today I realised that this actually already happens with genetically modified seed, so nevermind! Apparently the legal base for us not being able to resell our cars is already there.

Think outside the box a little. Imagine if the next car you bought licensed to you the right to use the patents the car uses.

It's hardly spam or even a tactic. It's just a query string.

Not to mention that there are all sorts of searches on all sorts of sites that turn up in Google search results. It's annoying and generally useless. I wish Google would so something to fix it.

I never made it past the kicking and screaming part :-).

I think focus stealing is the single biggest vulnerability in any OS I've used.

I still haven't sent my password over IM, but I can't count the number of times I've started typing my password into a window that just stole focus, including IM.

I know, what the fuck??

After reading the first sentence my first guess was one of Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, or irritable bowel syndrome, leaning towards Crohn's because of the apparent severity.

How can this not have been diagnosed?

Hey, either way you should give him a break. At least he actually quoted it right... well, except the fungus part.

I don't disagree that Microsoft has cleaned up their act or that they're products have fewer vulnerabilities, but I wanted to clarify something.

The numbers you are quoting are discovered vulnerabilities, not vulnerabilities.

One could argue that the Firefox team, for example, are simply better at finding vulnerabilities or that because Firefox is open source it allows for more vulnerabilities to be discovered.

My old Tripod password was hkyxxt, but they deleted my account about 10 years ago :-(

Yeah, I found the relation to German "arbeit" interesting.

I wish I would have took some linguistic and phonology classes while I was in university. I took a class on words with Greek and Latin roots and a few entry level language classes, but that's it.

Interesting. Here's what etymonline.com has to say. Apologies for those that don't read etymology definitions often... they can be somewhat confusing sometimes. This one isn't too bad.

1923, from Eng. translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "slave," from robota "forced labor, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave" (see orphan), from a Slavic stem related to Ger. Arbeit "work" (O.H.G. arabeit). According to Rawson the word was popularized by Karel Capek's play, "but was coined by his brother Josef (the two often collaborated), who used it initially in a short story." Robotics coined 1941 in a science fiction context by Isaac Asimov, who proposed the "Three Laws of Robotics" in 1968.

I like to mod those posts up so people start to wonder if the story is actually true.

It's my own little April Fools joke.