People used to say the iPod would bomb, it's done well. People said the iPhone would bomb, it's done well. People used to say the iPad... well, you get the point.

No, not really.

When the iPod was launched mp3 players were already tiny and popular. The innovation was that iPod had a tiny hard drive (and it wasn't the first to do that). No one said iPod would bomb.

Then the iPod touch came out and everyone said what an awesome phone it could be; no one said the iPhone would bomb. In fact the hype was so strong at the time, Apple could have made almost any phone and it would have been popular.

Before the iPad came out, everyone said it would be awesome. Steve Jobs was the only one saying that they had tried large scale touch UI but it "didn't work".

If Apple is saying that the Galaxy Tab looks too similar to the iPad then they really should find some new designers because there is nothing visually innovative about the iPad since the iPod touch.

There's no point getting irate about freedom of speech. The whole point of domain names is to make money. The only reason .xxx was introduced was to "offer a new product", i.e. another TLD that could be subdivided and sold. Who would have thought it, people would pay money for the equivalent of a memorable telephone number.

Paul Mockapetris, inventor of DNS, said that "The DNS was built to be simple and predictable" so why is it handled by an organisational committee who make political decisions ? If it was only about ease of use then .xxx would have been decided years ago. And why do you have to pay more than a nominal admin fee to have your details entered into the DNS database ? It's all about money.

WP7 gives them a ready to go, high-end OS

By "ready to go" I take it you mean "economical in functionality but with glossy social networking stuff" and for "high-end" you mean "without multitasking" ?

What makes you think partnering with Microsoft will remove delays ? Are you thinking of another company named Microsoft ?

Think of the children - they might see a nipple and then they would have serious psychological issues. For life. Thanks for the link, tuomasb.

Now I feel like YouTube is evil. I hate advertising masquerading as normal content. It seems like YouTube is party to this; maybe this was their Faustian pact, put up with this crap or we'll sue you for every violation we ever find. People who *try* to make a "viral" video are the epitome of uncool. Especially the fake ones; cellphones cooking popcorn, etc etc. I thought marketing departments were supposed to "get" people. Overpaid idiots.

The problem can be simply stated as that the camera is 4D, because it is a 2D array of 2D cameras, while the image is 3D.

You cannot simply add the dimensions, it depends on how you integrate the image data together. Us people who don't know very much call this integration 3D reconstruction. "The image is 3D" - do you mean the real world is 3D ? The image, as you put it, is a projection from 3D onto a 2D plane and is most definitely 2D.

Humans possess a stereoscopic vision system, each eye is capturing a 2D image at any moment in time. I expect you would call that a 4D vision system ?

SOLUTIONS: All solutions rely on making the camera 3D instead of 4D. 1. Take a short movie while changing focus on a 2D camera.

So now you add a third dimension - time. And the concept of Depth from Focus is not your idea at all, it has been around for a very long time.

Your other idea involving "somehow" doing something cannot be considered prior art. In the grand scheme of things an invention has to be realisable.

I also consider it to be evidence that I am better at this stuff than almost all 3D camera engineers.

If I could see a smiley on the above line I wouldn't think you are an idiot.

What licence is this ? http://www.bipp.com/Default.aspx?tabid=203&search=licence produces zero hits.

I regularly take high resolution photos, HD video, etc in London and I have never been stopped by anyone.

Every time I am in London I see tourists carrying DSLRs but I have never seen anyone being harrassed by the police.

Don't get your hopes up. This is regarding some action being taken by a watchdog body. We don't know what the outcome is yet, we don't know if they will take any action or how strong any reprimand, if any, will be given. Furthermore, this won't be enshrined in law or necessarily have any relevance to future cases. I believe there is a very high chance they will get a light slap on the wrists and a don't do it again.

The Falklands War is quite interesting here, not because it demonstrated some lingering imperial might, in fact the opposite - the UK depended heavily on the USA.

The most interesting part, IMO, is that the RAF wanted to use the base at Ascension Island (a British territory) for refuelling of long distance missions prior to the main fleet arrival. Apparently the Americans who had been using the base for a nominal $1 a year fee said no, we couldn't use it.

I think the relationship between Britain and the US was immediately redefined at that point. Note the wikipedia article "Only after Mrs Thatcher intervened with Ronald Reagan did the Americans reluctantly concede."

Britain should know better than to ask for such an idiotic thing in the first place.

Well, no actually. You're assuming that British people study the US constitution - they don't. Secondly, it is up to the American people to determine how to interpret the US constitution. There is nothing idiotic about that.

If a friend and ally makes a request, you can certainly consider it (before you say no). Constitution or not, quite possibly the specific videos in question might infringe some law or regulation, so there could be reasons to take down these videos if you look hard enough.

Time to set up a spam server. Let the ISPs and police try to monitor my email when it is interleaved with a billion emails per day.

I think it's a massive simplification that you are going to join a project to "fix up stuff". You need to know what needs fixing, what is important to fix, what desperately needs to be fixed. Otherwise you are just going to be tweaking hardly used, unimportant, soon to be deprecated code. Your contribution will be welcome but irrelevant.

If you like Boost: download it. Use it. You absolutely must be using it. Read the mailing list. Find out where the real problems are for yourself. Then discuss making fixes with the other devs.

1. You expected people who came up with OpenOffice.org as a name to come up with a "good" name ?
2. You're a xenophobic idiot. There are many other countries outside your own one, not all of them speak English
3. No one in the US will care anyway. They'll autoupdate to the next version and barely notice that the name changed. It will still be free and arguably better than MS.

... but after skimming through the code, I'm not terribly surprised to hear that it has issues, because there are virtually no comments or design docs.

And they used the old coversheet for their TPS reports.

Seriously though, how can you expect them to have design documents ? Four guys putting together a prototype version of something they have no idea what will come out in the end. Once interested parties have had a chance to play with it and see what can be done with it, then a serious attempt can be made at defining exactly how it is supposed to work.