Just thought I'd ask, 'cuz right now that's the biggest threat to my personal privacy. Roscoe P. Coletrain and his sidekick Cletus (a.k.a., local police forces) just love toys like this.

Everything that's happening now is happening now?

Research into HIV and AIDS has occurred at a time when research on genetics is making discoveries at a breakneck pace. Combining these events has resulted in the discovery or creation of techniques in virology, immunology and epidemiology. Even if I knew nobody with HIV or AIDS, and even if those who had the infection were completely isolated from me I should consider myself the beneficiary of the knowledge and technology we've gained by working on vaccines, treatments and cures for this disease.

Yeah . . . the wing goes in a circle, but it's still a wing.

Apple? After all, Samsung didn't invent rounded corners either.

Actually, it is. A heavier-than-air machine or device which capable of sustained flight by generating a constant wind over carefully configured flight surfaces. I'll admit, I'd feel better flying in Boeing's product (and the amenities are way better), but if the folks at AIrbus try to actually patent their heavier-than-air flying machine as such, they're likely to run into a lot of prior art, preexisting patent claims, etc.

There was this sergeant when I was in the Army . . . among his nicknames was "greenteeth".

I'm sure he has cause for suit against Rembrandt IP.

Al, is that you?

Microsoft essentially killed OS/2 by architecting Windows to be incompatible and refusing to share the secret sauce. Trust me, IBM hasn't forgiven M$ for that. Instead of competing with M$ for desktop share (which IBM didn't believe was worth the trouble back then), they picked up their marbles and left the game. Big mistake on their part IMHO - but there it is. IBM decided that they'd always own the desktop terminal market and didn't believe businesses would pay to put a pretty point-'n'-click interface and Solitaire on their workers' desktops.

You're obviously not "old school" enough - we truly old ones remember working on mainframes and minicomputers - not x86 commodity-grade hardware. "Old ones" such as myself remember platforms which could withstand a disk, memory . . . even a processor failure without any service interruptions. I personally have worked on minis and mainframes with over ten year uptimes despite multiple hardware failures. The x86 stack can't even come close to that kind of reliability. This is a first step (possibly the last step - it may just be impossible to make microcomputers as hardware fault tolerant as real computers).

They never had me use a POWER workstation. Always Intel hardware . . . although they did finally manage to lose their addiction to M$-Windoze. Employees now are issued laptops with a rebranded version of RHEL installed.

I would expect Oracle to follow a similar pathway, sticking with Intel hardware for its employees. I would not expect them to ditch M$-Windoze; unlike IBM, Oracle doesn't have a long acrimonious love-hate history going with M$.

. . . then the only planets with rings will be gas giants!

Ask a WASP.

Yippee!

You're right. That explains why M$'s client sucks so hard.