I don't know if a QR code would be much better.

Recently I was at a music festival where they had some type of QR code hunt going on.
The codes were all behind the fences where drunk people couldn't reach and destroy them, and just that bit of distance made it quite difficult to read the codes, even outside on a cloudy day (the abundant difuse light should be perfect for this).

Granted the codes they were using were a lot denser than needed (they were embedding the clue to the next code in English and German in the code itself -- stupid since you were using the festival's app to read the code anyway, they could've embedded the text in the app itself), which made them harder to read than normal, but the code was also quite big.

I also tried to read a small (unrelated) QR code which was glued to a pole, and the distortion caused by the pole's circumference made the code impossible to read.

So reading a code from a billboard, even in perfect conditions... It'd have to be pretty fucking huge!

No it doesn't.

Upfront, sure, but I've yet to find a contract where after it runs out, you haven't paid more for the phone that if you'd bought it and the contract separately.

Just make it an US-only "update" and don't bring this bullshit to the rest or the world, where the patent system isn't (completely) torn to hell.

You have to pre-register.
After a while you'll get an email with an order code you can use on the website.
I did it when the Rpi was announced and got the email a few weeks later.

I was really busy at the time, so I ignored the email and forgot about it.
Until two weeks ago, when I decided to follow through with the order. They're expecting to send it "within 10 weeks", which frankly is a lot, but not unexpected.

I'm going to attach an external USB drive to it and set it up in a remote location to serve as a remote backup and a private proxy server (different country, could be useful).

Microsoft is also releasing a tablet.

It's unlikely that it's GSM related, since the Nexus 7 doesn't have cell data connectivity.
The complaint is pretty odd to me too.
Even if ASUS's existing licenses are not appliccable since they are selling the tablet under Google's brand, Google still owns the mobile branch of Motorola, and is hard to imagine that they don't have those patents.

Furthermore, all of the nexus devices up to now have had WiFi. Why complain only about the tablet?

Yes.
It's quite well hidden, but there are a few details give it away.

It actually explains a but the slugishness, and crappy user experience of the app as a whole.
It's especially bad when compared to the Google+ app.
-- Well, the old one. In the new version they put in so many flashy animations, it became ubearable to scroll. I thought the google guys were all on Galaxy Nexus (like me). How come nobody noticed this?
Perhaps it is usable on Jelly Bean. I guess I'll be finding out in two weeks.

Back when I was using Windows XP, this was SOP. System updates would recreate the icons I'd deleted for IE, WMP and Outlook, and often times would reset the defaults to use those programs.
I remember thinking how they were getting away with it, after their antitrust issues, so I remeber distinctly that there was no "shitstorm". Not even a shit-light-rain.

Anyway, I switched to Ubuntu some 5 years ago and never looked back, so I don't know what's happened since.

So if you remove the SD card from the phone, neither the phone or the card will work as expected?
How's that sensible?

Does that study take into account the productivity of a healthy worker versus that of someone who is permanently, or frequently ill?
Health isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It's not like you have an internal bool is_healthy which goes to false one day and you go to the doctor so he can set it back to true, and you go on your way.
The reality is that most people only visit the doctor when it gets really bad, and treatments can last very long times, especially if the patient keeps on doing whatever put him in the hospital in the first place (eating fat food and smoking).

I've also had to pick up VS2010 (for professional reasons) after a long time of using Eclipse, and the process has been painful.
More painful due to the fact that I'm also moving from Linux to Win7 at the same time.

Now, Win7 is nicer than XP, and VS2010 is nicer than the previous one I'd used some 6~8 years ago, but it's all the little details and annoying "features" in VS which make it so hard to pick up:
Document tabs now open on the left instead of the right. There's an option for that, but once the tabs overflow, their order becomes random.
No quick way to toggle code commentting (a-la eclipse's shift-ctrl-c). There's ctrl-k-c/u or something, but it's much less usable, it's much less intelligent in how it comments the code and it was crashing VS2010 so much I started just commenting manually.
Crappy automatic code formatting for c/c++.
Cryptic c/c++ error messages.
And others I can't remember now.

My theory is that they either designed it like this on purpose so that you can't easily jump to another IDE, or that it was designed in an echo chamber by past VS users who are (poorly) reinventing the wheel.

I agree with this.
I like to code listening to music (with headphones, my musical tastes aren't exactly "popular"), but I only do it when I'm coding away a pre-tought idea.
When I need to think about the architecture, or read documentation I pause the music, and when I know again what to do, I resume it.

This is a completely different situation from the one in the article the GP quoted. That's music you can't pause at will and it may not even be to your taste or mood (even in my own collection I find myself skipping some songs to ones which I feel more like hearing at that particular time).

As for the isolation thing in TFA I have no idea what they're going on about. I use headphones so I don't bother my work colleagues, and expect them to have the same courtesy with me.
I actually dislike the fact that headphones disconnect me from the office life. If there was a way to clearly mix music with office sounds in my headphones I would take it.
My office is pretty quiet, though. YMMV.

They will just stick them in the separation between the car's door and the chassis.
At least that's what a few of them started to do around these parts. I guess they figured out that it was annoying people (i.e. their possible customers) when it rains and the flier sticks to your window.

I'm still hoping that they come to the conclusion that putting trash in my car is always anoying, but like spam, that won't happen until it stops being effective (and I doubt it will).

But in that case they wouldn't be able to impersonate him.