That's the problem with Apple. You don't buy an Apple device. You buy the right to USE one of THEIR devices. It has always been so, and the reason I was never tempted to buy anything Apple.

Seriously, how does using MS Office not result in performance impairment frustration and aggravation. Most of my students issues stem directly from use of MS Office. That's all they know, but it's still their main source of aggravation and frustration. From very poor iteration procedures (seriously, you can't force recalculation of cells past a certain point once Excel has decided that it's just done, however many times you try to recalculate), to handling in Word of figures, arbitrary variables (for template automation) to little things like an actually usable mail-merge, or compatibility with older .doc formats MS Office just sucks. The article is disengenuous at best. MS Office has nothing (useful) that OpenOffice doesn't have, and lots of things that it's missing.

Tube Babies coming soon to a lab near you.

This is my second "Sci-Fi tech could become reality in the none too distant future" of the last 20 minutes. (The first one being Sundiveresque http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-11/uoi-plt111312.php). If I keep reading, I might find out someone about to make a working version of a warp drive.

Good Times!

[forgot to login in my prev. post]

And air pressure storage is notoriously inefficient. How does it compare to fuel cells though?

Now THAT would be bold. Laser cooled, laser propulsion manned solar exploration vehicle. Until they can match David Brin's dream, nothing about solar exploration will feel "bold" to me. Sigh. I'm spoiled.

EEEPC reincarnation

I agree. That's why I ended up loving Gnome 3. I screamed and bitched as much as the next guy when it was introduced. But I decided to give it a trial time of 2 weeks befroe moving on. It turns out, productivity was significantly increased with the new workflow. It's hard to break old habits. But it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done once in a while. Unity is terrible, taking the worst aspects of GNOME 3 without its really revolutionary aspects. I love the dynamic allocation of desktops. I cannot go back to a desktop that doesn't have it anymore. Managine multiple tasks is much easier.

I do miss the custom shortcuts, but again, probably with the size of computer and available applications, the search instead of categorize approach might be faster. And it's still easy to add shortcuts to favourites. And the fact that you just move the mouse to the corner to get the menu makes it fast and easy to reach even on a desktop. No need to think hard. The reflex comes quickly. The main pet peeve Ihave left is "why do I need to press ALT to be able to poweroff". That does seem like a gratuitous limitation, and not intuitively figured out, and therefore it's bad. Everything else in the new layout is intuitive, once you accept that your old habits are useless.

While it was easier to customize everything before, there is blessedly little left to customize now. Anyways, I did find my productivity increasing pretty fast after the initial decline. Now I wouldn't go back to earlier types of desktops. They feel like more work to get most things done.

How can he practice law elsewhere? Law is not engineering. It is specific to each country. Some countries, others like france have a "civil code". Basically all that you've learned to practice in your country is meaningless to practice in another. While he might provide advice, I don't see how he could be a lawyer anywhere else but Spain. I haven't read TFA, so I'm not sure what he's going to actually do, but it cannot be actual representation in court.

actually 1 tonne = 1000 kg
1 ton = 2000 lb

Logos are not protected by copyright but trademarks, right? As long as you use it as a trademark, you can have a clain on it. Of course IANAL

Actually, pharmaceutical patents would do well to disappear. Promising drugs get ditched because they can't recoup the investment. All they produce are "treatments". There is no monetary interest in finding cures even if cures were possible through medication. A patient who never heals but can survive many long years is more profitable than one who cures. Governments would save money to finance research in those areas instead of financing the purchasing of patented drugs.

So I would think that the 5 year period would be justified on this basis only.

Actually, the original work seems to be stemming from what is now the Bundler project. A fork (so to speak) became phototourism and photosynth. But Slashdotters probably prefer Bundler

http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/

What's wrong with the name? Does it have some significance in the English language? (not a native speaker, so the only think that Gimp evokes for me is a graphics software)

Same thing here. I used to follow the Olympics minute by minute. But I didn't even bother watching a single minute of the last winter Olympics (being canadian and all). The magic is gone (it really hasn't helped that they started showing off the "professional" teams. You don't get the same involvement from those guys. It certainly doesn't feel like it's the most important competition to them, and just got me bored.

I wasn't planning to watch the Olympics anyways, but I'm certainly not moved to changed my mind by these rulings.