All true, but paying actual money for a licence key at an unusually low price from an unlikely source is like paying five bucks for a 60" 4K TV off the back of a lorry. If you're the recipient of stolen goods, however unwitting, the law in most places will leave you empty-handed if the goods are identified and returned to their original owner, unless you can find and take legal action against whoever sold you the goods.

I'm not saying the situation doesn't suck for the innocent party, and I'm certainly not supporting Ubisoft's generally aggressive use of DRM, but in this case it does seem that the situation is exactly analogous on-line to how the law has worked in the real world for a long time.

More importantly, Microsoft seems hell bent on discarding the years of research IBM put into the Common User Access guide on which Windows was originally based. A lot of the "new" metaphors *were* tried out during that research, and users hated it as much back then as they do now.

Everywhere I worked in those days, there was Win98 on desktops throughout the corporations. Only the engineers and developers ran NT anywhere I worked.

Of course we're talking a period where "networking" meant file and printer sharing and nothing more.

Stop setting up cash-cow speed traps. :P

Admittedly, Roswell barely qualifies as 1990s, because it began in 1999, but it was one of the better sci-fi shows I've seen. Among other things, it turned the genre on its head by being told from the perspective of aliens, in the present day, on Earth. It had a lot of things going against it, of course, with network politics being the big one, and season two strayed awfully far into X-Files territory, but it had good writing, good acting, and much like Stargate, it didn't take itself too seriously, somehow managing just the right blend of humor, romance, dramatic tension, etc. And in spite of the main characters being teenagers, it managed to almost entirely avoid the usual teen drama that you'd expect to clog up such a series.

My favorite funny moment had to be when Jonathan Frakes (playing himself) told one of the alien teenagers that he just didn't make a believable alien. And my favorite episode was the Christmas special; it was almost pure character development, did nothing to drive the plot, but it was a breathtaking tear-jerker that gave a lot of insight into the main characters' personalities.

If you haven't seen Roswell, it's worth a look.

OTOH, air pressure at sea level is a variable which can change significantly in even a short period of time. Still, dramatic changes don't happen, but it's better to measure it in .... sorry, I should be metric, but I only think in PSI (pounds / square inch).

Well....sort of. The CMB is modified by galaxies that are too faint to see, though I don't know by how much. It's filtered by intervening dust clouds moving WRT both us and the "origin of the signals". Etc. I normally assume that this is taken account of as best we can, but it's not unmodified signal. If you look at the raw (uncorrected) observations, I don't know how much noise is present, but clearly that are signals too weak to be recognized even though detected.

OTOH, I am not a cosmologist. But I do recognize that error bars are important, and that they tend to get left out of popular articles.

Nonsense. The cat does not hate the mouse, the cat LOVES the mouse. It's delicious.

Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

For once, this troll is on topic. It demonstrates why voice recognition needs to improve. After all, it's hard to wreck a nice beach.

Correction: Even the China Mobile iPhone 6 and 6 Plus aren't truly carrier-neutral, because they don't support CDMA. So you can either have LTE support in China or you can have CDMA support in the U.S., but not both.

The iPhone 5 had LTE. And it was not carrier-neutral. Each came in multiple models, none of which supported all the LTE bands. AFAIK, even the current iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are not fully carrier-neutral unless you buy the model designed for China Mobile.

Yes. There are numerous reasons to "not fight city hall". But that doesn't mean you can't do it for a good enough reason. E.g., I use tab spacing at the start of Python lines. This causes formatting problems if I use idle, but to me its worth the cost. And I've occasionally had reasons to use a length terminated string in C...though I usually also zero terminate it. (IIRC the reason was that I needed to include 0 valued bytes in the string.)

Similarly you can use zero delimited strings in Pascal, but you need to write the support routines that you would need, and since current Pascal has a string type that isn't limited to 255 chars it they would appear to be rarely needed.

But do realize, that was an outlier and is atypical of what Apple does.

No, it isn't atypical, at least for early-generation Apple products. The average support period for Apple is about three years, and there are a fair number of products that got less than that (mostly early models). For example, here's the time between the release date and last supported update of some other first-generation and second-generation Apple iOS devices:

• Original Apple TV: 3 years, 1 month, and 1 day
• Original iPhone: 2 years, 7 months, and 4 days
• iPhone 3G: two years, four months, 11 days

The support period tends to vary based in part on how many of the devices are out there in active use, and in part on how badly underpowered the hardware was to begin with. So later products in a given line are likely to have longer support periods than earlier products.

No.
Python is an open source project. Ruby is an open source project. Squeak is an open source project. D is an open source project. Racket (scheme) is an open source project. ALL have decent language documentation. And that was just a list off the top of my head. Being an open source project is not an excuse for lousy documentation.

It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.

Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)