from the first paragraph of chapter 12 of HHGTTG:

"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."

Or they can keep the original 9 month schedule, but pool their efforts to create one super-huge baby.

And that, folks, is what happens when you cross the streams. Never cross the streams!

Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

given that most Microsoft software is designed to deliver a bulleted list of features (regardless of how well those features actually work in real use) I don't think that it should be surprising that for the feature "randomly ordered ballot for browser selection" they managed to deliver "browser selection ballot whose choices are not always in the same order."

That they have opened the company to a couple more rounds of expensive and pointless litigation (wasting millions of dollars/euros/whatever for both Microsoft and for EU tax payers) in order to save several thousand dollars of programmer time shouldn't come as any surprise, either.

Yeah, the boys in Redmond sure are geniuses.

A device that costs twice as much, doesn't work half the time (did anyone watch the videos?) and has a bizarre collection of user interface metaphors to cover the jury-rigged hodge-podge of processors and operating systems.

When it is first undocked from the main body, you can see that it appears completely unresponsive to touch from the user. Oddly, after a few swipes with the finger go unregistered by the device, the video abruptly comes to an end. Later on, in the next video down the page, we can see that the device is sluggish and crude (it doesn't seem to support any of the obvious multi-touch gestures, using a drag control to resize images rather than pinch or stretch gestures) and the voice over claims that this is because it keeps dropping it's 3G connection (so that they can't show us the Really Cool[TM] demo that would have knocked our socks off, put the iPad to shame, and justified the $2000 price tag).

Sure, the iPad may not be the second coming, but, with competition like this, Apple has nothing to worry about.

What a joke.

Good point! It should be "ungoodware" (or, maybe, "double plus ungoodware")

The main reason to patent publicly funded work is to prevent anybody from restricting access to that work. I'm not saying that this patent is supposed to be used for that purpose, but other work has been patented specifically to ensure that anyone can use the technology without restriction (as the dedication on the referenced patent indicates).

it appears that nobody, including the submitter, read the actual source article (I know: I must be new here).

In fact, there are 10 screws that hold the bottom plate on the machine, not 13 as indicated in the summary, then three screws that hold hold the battery in place.

Yes, the three screws that hold the battery in place are weird, tamper-resistant screws, but you can easily make a driver for them by filing down three points on a torx driver of the appropriate size (I did this about 15 years ago in order to open my first Gameboy, which used similar tamper resistant screws).

If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.

Jeff Atwood is a living example of Sturgeon's Law.

cromar wrote:

I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence

The ID/Creationism folks can't ever produce such a thing because they don't believe that there are any examples of things that were not intelligently designed! They literally believe that everything that exists was created intentionally by an intelligent being, even apparently random processes that we can contemporaneously observe (as opposed to apparently random processes whose existence we only infer from a preponderance of evidence) are actually processes directed by the will of the intelligent designer.

Creationists/ID proponents, even when they claim otherwise, are inherently anti-scientific and anti-intellectual; they are driven purely and absolutely by unquestioning faith and an unquenchable drive to cram that faith down the throats of every other living person on the planet. They aren't even interested in the truth or falsity of their claims; the real issue, for them, are the moral and political implications of scientific discoveries. Creationists/ID proponents claim that anything that undermines the faith in a deity (and in the institutions that claim to represent that deity) leads directly to immoral behavior, because they believe that nobody would obey principles of morality unless there were a cruel and vengeful deity waiting to punish us for any immoral behavior after we die (probably because most Creationists/ID proponents are, in fact, immoral sociopaths who only observe the minimum requirements of civilized behavior out of fear themselves).

To call Creationism/Intelligent Design morally and intellectually bankrupt implies, incorrectly, that it's proponents ever had any moral or intellectual capital to squander.