I am responsible for directing technology decisions for a large hospital system and Oracle will get no business recommendations from me for any of their technologies. Last week an Oracle rep called and wanted to talk about database directions and I stopped him, mid-sentence, to tell him that I wasn't interested in hearing anything. He asked why. I told him I don't like patent trolls and Oracle's latest salvo at Google over Android and Java was trolling. He was stupified that I wouldn't want to do business with them because of that. I told him ethics drive my decisions and Oracle failed the test and he should pass it up the line. I doubt he did but I don't care. Don't care about this either, Oracle was always a rotten company to deal with and nothing has changed. I hope Larry's latest blows up in his face.

They're gonna feel like fools when the doom and gloom prophesies don't pan out.

I've always "placed doubt in the legitimacy of your[my] elected officials"

They're all almost always liars, cheats, hypocrites, scammers, lawyers (evil onpar with pedophiles), or general scum. I don't trust any system where the representation is from a ruling elite, made up of monied families and friends, bought and paid by corporations and unions. Personally, anyone that places any trust in the current system is delusional.

eVoting is just another scam foisted on America that will result in less representative democracy. Any politician in favor of it should be summarily executed.

The nice thing about the Kindle, is that I can buy books pretty much I don't have to clutter up my Kindle with useless stuff due to very significant restrictions in how I use my device. Sure, Amazon has DRM but it's easy to get around and readily done. I can dump PDF, mobi, and text on there just fine and guess what, I can read those items for 10 or 12 days in a row between charges AND in full sunlight. The iPad, well, its an awesome device and the whole touch model represents a serious change in human-computer interaction, not seen since the change from DOS to Windows 20 years ago but for reading, I'll stick with my Kindle (or another e-Ink device).

Well, not really. Apple's legal team made sure they were the 'only innovator' in the early GUI days, but that was it for that period. They capitalized on the music biz with their MP3 player at the right time and in a slick way.

But they abandoned the PDA right when it was becoming a big market, and it remained a rather rich market for a decade without them.

Their cellphone just doesn't matter. It's got lots of hype behind it, but it's one of the crowd.

I was just about to mod this "funny" when I noticed the "informative" mod. I'm still laughing so hard at that that I'm all teared up.

Really, are these health professionals truly upset or is some journalist making a story? 3 hours of games is a huge reduction for most kids, let alone ones that would go to this camp. And they've got at least 8 hours for other activities...beavers beware!

So you're saying that you'd rather be a product than a customer?

I'd like to look at it from another perspective. I assume an IT department in an Hospital your dealing with general desktop apps as well as Patient data for insurance claims and employee data of some description. The thought that confidential patient data might be replicated on someones 'personal' machine quite frankly chills me. If I was Emperor if the IT department, I'd ban and make a sack-able offense plugging your personal machine into the hospital network. In my mind, I'd forgo any ability of employees to check their email from home. In fact I'd actively discourage it unless you were currently on-call for a specific reason and that on-call person would be issued work equipment for the task. If patient data was leaked and the media got hold of the story any argument for using personal machines and not locking down the network and securing the machines connected to it would be fuel for that media frenzy.

So instead of 51% taking away the rights of the other 49%, you now have some tiny percentage doing it with stuff like PATRIOT and DMCA. And if you submit a "bug report" the tiny percentage with "commit access" will think to themselves: "WORKSFORME"... ;).

Anyway, I don't think the more direct democracy is working so well in California either - people are voting for stuff with the best title without actually examining how it'll actually work (or whether it will actually work).

But democracy is still better than a dictatorship on average. Only once in a while you'd get a dictator who does far more good than harm, and does better than a democracy.

And some players do not have an update to make this work. Even better will be when they discontinue an old player and you can't play new films on it. Just wait it will happen.

How about... Stop being tools for political parties? I hate movies that preach to me and it seems that hollywood has decided that science fiction can be interpreted as alarmist fiction and is using it as a vehicle to push an agenda.

I haven't run anti-virus on my main machine ever (over 15 years, mainly Mac). The only thing I've ever gotten were Word macro-viruses. I stopped using MCSFT products about 5 years ago and not a single incident since. (btw, I try out all kinds of different software all the time, surf all over, etc. It's certainly not for lack of exposure.) Before anyone gets all fanboi on me -- I use windows. For gaming. Never gotten a virus from a purchased title (yes, it could happen, it just hasn't).

My dog is most definately sapient. Wisdom can be defined in many ways and most, if not all of the dogs I have ever met are generally more wise than most of the people I have met.

I'd say it seems like pretty god business, though still blatantly unfair.

NASA's main interest, and the purpose for funding such competitions, is in fostering private research into rocketry and space travel. This decision makes sense for several reasons: firstly, it allowed an extra device to be successfully tested, providing important data for the project developers, aiding them in improving their technologies. Secondly, it enabled them to give the lions share of funding to the more impoverished of the two projects (as Carmack himself said, Armadillo needed the money less so than Masten), helping to keep them afloat.

Sure it's rotten, but NASA made a decision that's right for NASA.

Works absolutely flawlessly on this here R600 (64-bit version). It feels faster than XP on the same machine. I was particularly pleased as past versions of Ubuntu have had bad reports on this model (it's full of stupidly proprietary crap and the Windows version needs about a zillion added drivers if you don't just use the Toshiba factory install).